Citation

McEvoy J, Rosemann PW. FORUM - Trends in Experimental and Clinical Medicine 1993; 3(5): 553-561.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1993)

DOI

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PMID

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Abstract

The contemporary interest of Thomistic ethics is due to the fact that Aquinas's moral philosophy covers all three fundamental aspects of human liberty and, hence, of morality: namely, necessity, rational autonomy, and finality. For human actions are at once rooted in the ineluctable physical, psychological, and social conditions of life; they transcend these conditions by virtue of the rational power of self-determination; and they are ordered towards objective goals. How Aquinas reconciled these aspects in a synthesis of unsurpassed intellectual equilibrium can best be shown from an analysis of what is probably the most central notion of his ethical thought, viz., his concept of the natural law. Some more practical applications of Thomistic ethics are then discussed upon the basis of Thomas's view of the body and, in particular, his treatment of the problem of suicide. It turns out that, in contrast to a widespread misinterpretation, the Thomistic attitude towards the body is extremely positive, though it remains markedly distinct from the 'desacralised' conception of the human body which dominates large parts of modern culture.

Language: en

Keywords

ethics; article; history of medicine