Aquinas recognizes a number of wildly different kinds of individual happiness. What fundamentally unifies these various kinds of happiness so that they all count as varieties of happiness to begin with? This chapter gives a novel answer to this question and thereby identifies a new heart of happiness in Aquinas, which the author calls the Enjoying Good Activities Reading. On that reading, in every case, happiness is exclusively constituted by engaging in and enjoying a genuinely good activity. After giving a brief textual case in favor of reading Aquinas this way, the bulk of this chapter explains Aquinas’s understanding of enjoyment and his account of what it takes for an activity to be genuinely good. This makes clearer what this new reading amounts to and reveals something of its philosophical interest.

The introduction explains the nature of the study, its motivation, its basic structure, and its organization. It draws special attention to the way the book offers a novel interpretation of Aquinas’s account of individual happiness that is remarkably interesting philosophically. It also emphasizes the roles of individual happiness, common happiness, and Holistic Eudaimonism in Aquinas’s efforts to produce a unified ethical system in which law, virtue, and grace also have an important place.

This chapter examines the sort of happiness Aquinas thinks we can have on earth without any special divine help, namely, natural imperfect happiness. After establishing the varieties of natural imperfect happiness Aquinas accepts, it argues that, according to Aquinas, happiness is constituted exclusively by engaging in and enjoying those genuinely good activities that are made possible through the purely natural development of one’s powers. This is the Enjoying Good Activities Reading as applied to ordinary earthly happiness. The chapter then explains the various roles that everyday goods play in happiness so understood. Because of the role those goods play, it turns out that this sort of happiness is somewhat fragile. After giving an account of just how fragile it is, the chapter ends by considering Aquinas’s understanding of degrees of natural imperfect happiness.

Because the full reconstruction emerges piecemeal over the course of the study, this chapter starts by summarizing the most fundamental ways in which Aquinas connects the big-picture elements of his ethics through his understanding of happiness, both individual and common. The chapter then offers reasons for thinking that Aquinas’s ethics of happiness is still worth taking seriously today. In particular, it focuses on three illustrative aspects that make Aquinas’s ethical views distinctive and appealing. The first is Aquinas’s account of the nature of happiness and how that account fits into his broader understanding of well-being. The second is Aquinas’s account of the relationship between the right and the good. The third is Aquinas’s account of the most comprehensive role that virtue plays in ethics and human life.

Aquinas recognizes a number of wildly different kinds of individual happiness. What fundamentally unifies these various kinds of happiness so that they all count as varieties of happiness to begin with? This chapter starts to answer this question and thereby starts to home in on the true heart of happiness in Aquinas. Because perfectionism was predominant in Aquinas’s time, the chapter starts by laying out three importantly different varieties of perfectionism about happiness. It turns out that different commentators have treated each of those three varieties of perfectionism as the version that Aquinas endorses. So this chapter predominately explains and evaluates each of these three readings of Aquinas, while also drawing out lessons to be incorporated into any adequate novel account of the heart of happiness in Aquinas.

This chapter examines the sort of happiness Aquinas thinks we can have on earth with the help of God’s grace, namely, graced imperfect happiness. In keeping with the Enjoying Good Activities Reading, it argues that, according to Aquinas, happiness is constituted exclusively by engaging in and enjoying some suboptimal genuinely good activity, animated by God’s grace. After introducing Aquinas’s understanding of grace, the chapter works through Aquinas’s reflections on the Fruit of the Holy Spirit and the Beatitudes. From those reflections, it becomes clear both how Aquinas thinks about graced imperfect happiness generally and how he thinks about its basic varieties. The chapter closes by reflecting on graced imperfect happiness’s place between the perfect happiness of heaven and the natural imperfect happiness of those on earth living apart from God’s grace.

This chapter explains the many ways in which individual happiness and common happiness are related to Aquinas’s account of virtue. It begins by arguing that virtue is strictly necessary in order for an individual to be happy, but still virtue is not a constitutive part of that happiness. Rather, it is strictly necessary because virtue alone enables the individual to engage in and enjoy genuinely good activities. The chapter then argues that, still, according to Aquinas, virtue is more deeply related to common happiness than individual happiness inasmuch as a character trait is a virtue of character fundamentally because it enables a person to play their part in realizing the common happiness of their community, not their own individual happiness. The chapter thereby establishes the third element of Aquinas’s Holistic Eudaimonism. The remainder of the chapter shows how the master virtues of general justice and charity as well as a whole host of other particular virtues concern aiming at and securing common happiness for the community.

This chapter explains the many ways in which individual happiness and common happiness are related to Aquinas’s account of law, both generally and with respect to some particular laws. The chapter begins by arguing that, by its very nature, every genuine law orders the things under it to the common happiness of some community or other. It then argues that, according to Aquinas, moral laws order us to common happiness by outlining universal and absolute rules that must be followed in order to fully realize common happiness. Unlike many have thought, then, Aquinas holds that our moral obligations are fundamentally determined by facts about which norms must be followed in order to realize common happiness, not individual happiness. That is the second element of his Holistic Eudaimonism. On the other hand, when it comes to civil laws, the chapter argues that Aquinas advocates a kind of top-down, restricted rule-consequentialism with common happiness as its goal.

This chapter starts by arguing that, for Aquinas, common happiness is a fundamental and crucial notion, despite the fact that he very seldom discusses it and it has largely been ignored by commentators. It then sets out Aquinas’s understanding of the nature of common happiness with special attention to two models of common happiness, namely, the community of heaven and true friendship. The chapter then argues for the perhaps unprecedented claim that Aquinas is committed to the idea that common happiness is the true ultimate end of each human being. It thereby establishes the first element of Aquinas’s Holistic Eudaimonism.

This chapter argues for a fairly radical rethinking of Aquinas’s account of perfect happiness. In particular, it argues that, according to Aquinas, perfect happiness just is the fruitio of God, understood as a complex activity involving both the vision of God and maximal enjoyment of God. This fits very well with the Enjoying Good Activities Reading laid out in Chapter 2, since perfect happiness so understood clearly involves engaging in and enjoying a genuinely good activity. From there, the chapter explains what makes that perfect happiness so special, in part by comparing that happiness to God’s own happiness. After explaining the relationship between the fruitio of God and other heavenly goods, the chapter closes by showing how Aquinas makes sense of the idea that perfect happiness comes in degrees and how it is that resurrected bodies and other people are supposed to make us happier in heaven.

Hume’s and Bentham’s criticisms of natural law theory are direct and even mocking. By contrast, Kant’s approach in the Feyerabend lectures is far more restrained. Having adopted for his course an author explicitly committed to natural law premises, Kant largely avoids open conflict with those premises, choosing instead to develop his claims about right without making any direct critique (or defense) of the appeal to natural law. What accounts for this difference? After briefly reviewing the history of natural law theory in the modern period, I turn to a close reading of Kant’s brief but pointed criticisms of Achenwall in the opening sections of the Feyerabend lectures. I argue that Kant understands a theory of natural law not as opposed to but as irrelevant to a theory of right. Once we appreciate this claim, we can better understand Kant’s equally important contribution to the decline of natural law theory in the tradition of liberal political theory.

This chapter studies the elements of an interest-based natural property right. To acquire a prima facie right in a resource, the claimant must use it productively and claim exclusivity to its use in terms others will understand. But the prima facie right may be overridden by either of two provisos. The sufficiency proviso limits property rights when a proprietor’s use of a resource does not leave others sufficient access to the same type of resource for their own needs. The necessity proviso limits natural rights when someone who does not hold property in a resource needs access to it to repel some serious threat to life or property. This chapter illustrates legal doctrines for capturing animals and other articles of personal property, occupying unowned land, and appropriating water flow by use. This chapter contrasts productive use with Locke’s treatments of labor, waste, and spoliation, and it contrasts claim communication with Pufendorf and Grotius’s treatments of possession. This chapter also considers familiar criticisms of rights-based property theories, involving hypotheticals with radioactive tomato juice or ham sandwiches embedded in cement.

This chapter begins the constructive heart of the book, retrieving concepts from the Christian theological tradition to thematize the meaning of conflict as a feature of creaturely life. An initial exploration into Thomas Aquinas’s theological metaphysics of creation shows the importance of attending to the specific features of human being and action that distinguish human relation from divine relation. I then analyze three central components of human creaturehood – namely, finitude, contingency, and embodiment – and show how each gives rise to conflict as an aspect of creaturely goodness. Conflict, I argue, arises simply when embodied persons pursue their diverse desires, goods, and courses of action in a finite and contingent world shared with others. I conclude the chapter with a reflection on an instance of profoundly ordinary conflict, showing how the kinds of human relationships we tend to prize most are animated by the negotiation of conflict, as well as how personal, relational, and social maturity come by way of these negotiations.