Thomas Aquinas, of course, had no place for that thought. But he did devote considerable attention to crime--in his parlance, "sin," since the deepest source of the laws broken in wrongdoing was divine. "The first principle in practical reason is founded upon the meaning of good," he wrote, "Good is what all things pursue" (Summa Theologiae). Beginning from Aristotle's remark that "Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim" ( Nicomachean Ethics, 1094a 1-3), Aquinas argues that the good has the character of an end. He uses this thought to illuminate good and evil alike, actually.

	Glossary
	Practical Reason and Practical Good Practical reason is reason in or toward sound action or policy. I follow Aquinas in taking it that practical reason aims at practical good, even in cases where the action or policy in question is in some respects evil. Aquinas sorts practical good into three categories-- good in the sense pleasant, good in the sense useful, and good in the sense fitting. [more]

For Aquinas, there is a single last end for people given by our place in God's plan. Consideration of the last end lends deep unity to Thomistic thought about practical reason and ethics. Where we are meant to wind up is in Paradise, occupied in everlasting contemplation of God. The pleasures of the wicked may explain and show the point or good of some of what the wicked seek, but pale in comparison with Paradise. The prospects of short-term gain might attract our interest and show the good in doing some of the bad that we do, but because our long-run is very long indeed, there could not be a sound way of discounting the future in favor of the temporally proximate (where temporal proximity might involve the whole of worldliness). The life of the virtuous on Earth might be rough-going, but, by God's grace, beatitude is virtue's ultimate reward, so virtue remains useful and fitting, even when it looks as though acting from it will bring disaster to one's mortal life. Roughly, the formal account of practical reason is calculative, and the irrationality of anyone in possession of revealed truth determining himself to an unethical life is clear.

What I hope will strike the non-Catholic student of Aquinas's practical system isn't the image of so many cogs and wheels set fortuitously spinning in a single direction by the hand of a foreign, pre-modern God, but rather how difficult it will be to motivate any such satisfying unity without the theology. What unifies his account of reasons for acting, hence the good in action, hence practical good, is the ultimate end.

Candace Vogler discusses Aquinas's arguments on intention, action and practical good. (0:53 min)

Acting well and faring well
Traditionally, the difficulty in giving a unified account of good in action lies in understanding the relation between acting well (acting from and for the sake of ethically sound practical considerations) and faring well (pursuing private advantage or pleasure). It is relatively straightforward to get things going if moral reasons turn out to be inextricably linked with mean-end reasons for acting. Then the distinction between acting well (acting for and from morality or virtue) and faring well (successfully acting in order to attain one's ends) are tied together closely enough to show acting well to be in one's (long-term) interest. (In effect, Aquinas takes this route.) Similarly, if you deposit in some agents a practical orientation that favors acting well (e.g., virtue), and treat both the ends that arise from this orientation (e.g., virtuous ends) and the constraint these agents show in their other pursuits as the normal outcome of the good practical orientation, then your agents will tend to act well even in pursuit of private gain. A less subtle strategy involves crediting agents with an inclination toward acting well, such that they will be unhappy with ill-gotten gains, and hence won't be able to fare well unless they act well. Variants of all three are around these days.

The Hundred Greatest Men (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1885)

Immanuel Kant.

But without faith, given that we are necessarily interested in faring well and know full well that Nature does not reward us for virtue or morality, we have no reason even to hope that a virtuous or dutiful life will be a happy one. You can't set your sights on faring well in proportion to acting well (i.e., you can't will it) if you have no reason even to hope that a virtuous and dutiful life will have some measure of happiness in it. Neither virtue nor morally fitting conduct is any insurance against getting struck by lightning, or falling rocks, or stray bullets or bombs. Any natural or manmade disaster that befalls you can wipe out your happiness for a long time, should you survive. Practical faith is faith that acting well and faring well will not come apart entirely. Getting these two to work in concert is a task even Kant thinks requires faith in a divine order of justice, although this bit of Kant has received very little contemporary attention outside the circles of Kant scholars.

Immoral acts
But things look even worse than these remarks suggest if we press the topic in a different direction than Kant did. The trouble becomes most acute if we think carefully about individual immoral acts and vice (with special emphasis on capital vice--vices that ordinarily operate as the ends of various other vices).

Candace Vogler reviews contemporary virtue theory and its treatment of vice. (3:03 min)

Armed with an account of the good things in life and revealed doctrine about the last end, Aquinas theorizes not only ethically sound intentional action, but also ethically deplorable intentional action. Both revolve around pursuit of as such desirable things. Both display practical reason, that is, reason in action. And Aquinas's account of culpable wickedness provides unflinching treatment of the reasons for and sources of first-rate and lesser varieties of human badness. We have neither a modern nor an ancient equivalent for this work among the standard sources for contemporary secular moral philosophy. One half suspects that faith gave Aquinas the courage to do it. I mean, once you appreciate the power of the work on viciousness, and if you are committed to secular ethics, it really does seem that all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put reason and ethics together again in a way that shows individual wickedness to be necessarily irrational, or even unfit.

	Discussion
	Many arguments surrounding the bioethical debate on human cloning are based on the assumption that human cloning is unethical and immoral. Drawing from what you have learned about good in action, how might you argue that human cloning is virtuous or vicious?

Viciousness
It is depressing to have to pay attention to viciousness. Contemporary secular ethicists don't, as a rule. But some of what people deliberately do is very unethical, and blinding ourselves to what can be said on behalf of what people in fact deliberately do is blinding ourselves to what they are up to in action, to the nature of their purposes. This is no minor limitation for a theory of practical reason. It is something more on the order of willful refusal to look at our chosen topic from the aspects it presents to us. The aspects in question are aspects in light of which a pursuit presents itself as desirable in the eyes of the pursuer and in terms that make sense (even a veritable witches' brew of vice is heated by the flames of incentives to pursue genuine goods).

Candace Vogler talks about vice and classifying evil. (1:45 min)

Capital vices take genuine goods as their objects. Worse, capital vice is cultivated--one habituates oneself to it rather than being afflicted by it. It shows strength of will, not weakness of will. That is why it is possible to treat the reason in viciousness systematically, both substantively and formally. Aquinas points out:

Now that one sin be directed to another can occur in two ways: in one way on the part of the sinner himself, whose will is more inclined to the objective of one sin than of another; but this is accidental to the sins themselves [i.e., however statistically widespread among people, the link between kinds of wrongdoing is idiosyncratic rather than calculatively sound], hence no vices are called capital according to this; in another way, from the very relationship of ends, one of which has a certain affinity with another, in such a way that for the most part it is ordered to that other, for example, deception which is the end or aim of fraud is ordered to amassing money which is the end of avarice; and in this way the capital vices are to be taken. Therefore those vices are called capital which have ends principally desirable in themselves in such a way that other vices are ordered to them. (On Evil, q. 8, a. 1, p. 312)

• Pride
• Avarice
• Gluttony
• Lust
• Anger
• Acedia
• Envy

	Acedia vs. Sloth
	I use acedia rather than sloth on purpose. Most of us have come to associate sloth with plain laziness. Acedia is more interesting. In acedia apprehension of some spiritual good becomes painful to the agent. Sometimes this is because he does not want to leave off doing things he otherwise wants to do for the sake of helping to realize the spiritual good, and, while this version involves laziness in spiritual matters, our "lazy" man can be very, very busy with his own affairs. Sometimes it is that he is unwilling to allow himself to hope and work for a spiritually better circumstance in his life or the life of his community. And here, it is much more akin to an important form of depression and carries some of the underlying anger that one associates with depression, tinged with an anxiety that he is on the verge of despair. Here, he may be practically paralyzed, but not because he is in any ordinary sense lazy.

This is not to say that there aren't genuine human goods that become inaccessible to the deeply vicious. It is merely to notice that the very habits that place these good things out of the vicious person's reach tend also to suppress her inclinations to pursue them. The envious person, for instance, who is inclined to see in others' well-being a painful reminder of all that she lacks and an outright impediment to her enjoyment of what she has, will not be much moved by an argument that our collective well-being demands that we jointly seek justice (and, hence, that she ought to support justice), even though collective well-being almost certainly demands some measure of justice. Rather, relations of justice established for the sake of widespread well-being hold out the prospect of infinitely multiplied sites of pain for an envious person.

Others' misery soothes the envious like few other things can. This is why the envious are not merely unhappy, but toxic. It will not do, here, to insist that happy anticipation of her own increased well-being ought to carry an envious person over the hump. As Aquinas points out, capital vice is corrosive. The vice that erodes the envious person's ability to enjoy what she already has produces so acute an awareness of the inadequacy of what life brings that even a decided improvement in her fortunes is lost on her. And it is not that her failure to be moved by our arguments is rooted in imperfect reason. If we seek to show her that justice is in her interest, we must take into account her understanding of what is in her interest. As she understands it, collective well-being is not in her interest. If justice will produce collective well-being, then justice is not in her interest either.

Notice that there will be no such straightforward link between ethical conduct and a claim about how it befits every one of us to live if it is implausible to credit the vicious individual with having an end that might be served by virtue. If we are strict about "ascribing" ends to people, if, rather than supposing that the envious person has proper ends about which he is in a muddle, we notice that some of his ends are unethical, then we are not going to get this sort of account of the irrationality of acting from envy. The Thomistic account of why it does not befit a man to act from capital vice depends upon the character of the last end. Lose the last end, and you lose the moral science. Lose the moral science, and, in light of the theory of vice (which has, I take it, independent plausibility), you lose the claim that practical good is singularly unified. Given the theory of vice, minus the theological frame, individual immorality need not be rash, weak-willed or ignorant. That is, none of the usual secular modern philosophical accounts of bad action need apply.

Aquinas thought that there were normal weaknesses in human nature, points of common moral vulnerability involving inordinate (i.e., contrary to God's law) attachment to worldly goods. What vice aims at is, after all, control of worldly goods. There are some general things one can say about ubiquitous possibilities of individual evil on this view. Nevertheless, there are infinitely many ways in which individual tendencies to wrongdoing can show themselves. As in the emergency room, an abiding sense of terrible novelty attends the account. Goods are many. Appropriate paths of their pursuit are few. We are creative.