Aquinas and the precepts of natural law

Overview

Recall questions on telos in Aristotle and Aquinas, eudaimonia and the human end, why natural law is both teleological and deontological, the eternal, divine, natural and human tiers of law, the key precept, the five primary and the secondary precepts, and interior and exterior acts.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What does the word telos mean, and why is it the starting point for natural law?

   Model answer

   Telos means the end, goal or purpose that something is directed towards. Natural law begins from the claim that everything, including human beings, has a built-in purpose, and that an action is good when it moves a thing towards that purpose and bad when it frustrates it. Morality therefore becomes a question about fulfilling human nature rather than about obeying arbitrary commands.

2. 2

   How did Aristotle use the idea of telos in his account of nature and the good life?

   Model answer

   Aristotle argued that to explain anything fully you must state its final cause, the end it exists for. An acorn is directed towards becoming an oak, and an eye towards seeing — ends belonging to the things themselves rather than assigned to them by a maker. He applied this to humans: our distinctive capacity is rational activity, so the human telos is eudaimonia, a flourishing life lived in accordance with reason and virtue. Goodness is thus measured against a purpose written into nature.

3. 3

   How did Aquinas take Aristotle's idea of telos and give it a religious development?

   Model answer

   Aquinas, writing as a Christian theologian, kept Aristotle's claim that human beings have a natural purpose but placed that purpose within a created order. On his account, God is the author of nature, so the purposes we discover in ourselves are God's design. He also extended the goal beyond this life: our final end is not just earthly flourishing but the beatific vision, perfect union with God, which reason alone cannot deliver.

4. 4

   What is the difference between Aristotle's eudaimonia and Aquinas' account of the human end?

   Model answer

   Aristotle's eudaimonia is a this-worldly flourishing achieved through the exercise of reason and virtue over a complete life, and it needs no God to make sense of it. Aquinas accepted that as the natural end but held that it is incomplete. For him the supernatural end, seeing God, lies beyond natural human powers and requires grace and revelation, which is why divine law is needed alongside natural law.

5. 5

   Why is natural law sometimes called both teleological and deontological?

   Model answer

   It is teleological because the whole framework rests on purpose: acts are assessed by whether they serve the human telos. It is deontological in practice because the precepts derived from that purpose function as binding rules that hold regardless of the outcome in a particular case. This is why natural law can look absolutist at the level of the primary precepts while still being grounded in an argument about ends.

6. 6

   Name the four tiers of law in Aquinas' scheme, in order from highest to lowest.

   Model answer

   Eternal law, divine law, natural law and human law. They form a descending chain: the eternal is God's own ordering of reality, divine law is what God has disclosed in scripture, natural law is the share in that ordering which human reason can work out, and human law is the concrete legislation of particular states.

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