Philosophy of Human Ethics

Philosophy of Human Ethics is the second semester of the Human Anthropology course and is based on Aristotle’s and Saint Thomas Aquinas’s treatment of human acts as ordered toward happiness and the means by which human beings pursue that end.

Students follow the order of study prescribed in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. The course begins with the overarching question, “Why study ethics?” Students initially respond from their own background knowledge and then deepen their understanding through close readings of philosophical texts. The course proceeds with an examination of the proper end of ethics, followed by a threefold treatment of happiness. Students then study the nature of moral law and freedom, the role of conscience, the ordering of the intellect to truth, and the nature and limitations of voluntary acts. The course concludes with a study of virtue and vice, regarded as the capstone of the ethics curriculum, emphasizing how virtue orders the will toward happiness and how vice disrupts it. Throughout the course, students engage in rigorous reading, Socratic discussion, and written analysis