This book reconstructs the most fundamental ways in which Thomas Aquinas connects the big-picture elements of his ethics: happiness, law, virtue, and grace. It is clear that Aquinas thinks these key elements form a sort of interconnected whole.Footnote ¹ However, in discussing them, Aquinas spends the vast majority of his time on nitty-gritty questions and seldom steps back to help his reader see how these different elements actually fit together. As a result, the sort of work I undertake here is crucial for understanding Aquinas more deeply.

In trying to capture the big-picture connections between these parts of Aquinas’s ethics, the place to begin is with happiness, both individual happiness and common happiness (or, in other words, the happiness of our communities).Footnote ² As Aquinas thinks of them, all the other parts of ethics order us in one way or another to individual happiness and, ultimately, to common happiness.Footnote ³ Individual happiness and common happiness are deeply interrelated, most especially because common happiness is in large part a matter of the people in a given community being happy as individuals. That is why I spend Part I of this book trying to get clear on how exactly Aquinas thinks about individual happiness. I argue that, despite its outstanding importance, Aquinas’s account of individual happiness has still not been fully understood. And so I develop a novel interpretation of Aquinas’s account of individual happiness that is more adequate from a historical point of view and, it turns out, remarkably interesting from a philosophical point of view. That is the first step in a broader bottom-up reconsideration of Aquinas’s ethics. I then start Part II by offering an account of common happiness that builds on that novel account of individual happiness. With individual happiness and common happiness on the table, it becomes clearer how happiness can play the unifying role that Aquinas thinks it does. And so, in the remainder of Part II, I discuss the other three big-picture elements of Aquinas’s ethical system: law, virtue, and grace. I show how all three – each in unique and manifold ways – direct us toward individual happiness and, ultimately, toward common happiness. What results is a new understanding of key aspects of Aquinas’s ethics and a unique form of eudaimonism, which I call Holistic Eudaimonism.Footnote ⁴ It will turn out that Holistic Eudaimonism offers a compelling vision of what it is to live a good and happy human life, which integrates well-being, connection to others, and a morality of rules and virtues. All told, then, this study offers a clear picture of Aquinas’s distinctive and appealing ethics of happiness.Footnote ⁵

I.1 Putting the Pieces Back Together

Imagine an empty sailboat being drawn by the tide onto an island, watched closely by the island’s non-seafaring people.Footnote ⁶ The excitement is palpable as a few waders pull it onto the shore. The work of understanding it begins and, soon thereafter, the work of trying to figure out how to improve it. Taking it apart seems like a natural way to make progress, and so the work of disassembling soon becomes a top priority. Eventually, the pieces are distributed and specialists emerge, with some focusing on the mast, others the keel, others the sails, and so on. These specialists pass on their knowledge to the next generation and on to the next. With generations of work behind them, the parts taken in isolation often seem quite well understood. However, the details about where each fits in the whole become ever fuzzier, and, in that way, important details about the parts themselves become obscured. Eventually, even the most erudite specialists struggle to believe that all the original parts of the boat had ever fit together in the first place, or at least fit together well.

As unflattering as it may be, from Aquinas’s perspective, we are much like these specialists who have forgotten how the pieces fit together – in our case, the pieces of ethics. Perhaps Aquinas is wrong about this. But, if he is right, it might make us feel better to hear that the blame is shared. This began long before our own day, before the days of Sidgwick, Mill, and Kant and before even the days of Locke, Hobbes, and Descartes. Within a generation of Aquinas (1224/5–1274), the Franciscan philosopher-theologian John Duns Scotus (c. 1267–1308) raised a variety of plausible and potentially serious problems for Aquinas’s understanding of ethics, which led Scotus to construct an importantly different sort of ethical system.Footnote ⁷ Crucially, Scotus’s reflections and arguments led him to separate earthly happiness and morality.Footnote ⁸ Now, even for people who revere Aquinas, it is hard to imagine how they could possibly have fit together in the first place.Footnote ⁹

But that was only the beginning. The process of dismantling has now been going on for centuries. And, from Aquinas’s perspective, at least, that is why ethics now seems more like a loose bundle of topics than a unified whole. What is it to be good? What is it to act rightly? What is virtue? What is it to fare well as a human being? What is happiness? Does life have a meaning and, if it does, what is it? And so on. Today, we tend to think that, although the answers to some of these questions may be connected, many of these questions have little or nothing to do with each other. Virtue, for example, seems to have very little to do with happiness to the average person today. The pieces of ethics no longer seem to fit together into any sort of genuine, coherent whole.

The present study is an attempt to show how these pieces might be put together. Or, more precisely, it is an attempt to show how these pieces looked in Aquinas’s ethical system before they were taken apart in the first place.Footnote ¹⁰ As Aquinas thinks of them, moral rules, civil laws, virtue, grace, individual happiness, and common happiness form an interconnected whole. Again, the unified view that results is quite a compelling vision of what it is to live a good and happy human life, which integrates well-being, connection to others, and a morality of rules and virtues.

According to Aquinas, an important theoretical consequence of this unified view is that a proper understanding of each of these components requires a proper understanding of the others. And, according to Aquinas, we get the framework for understanding the other parts by first understanding happiness.Footnote ¹¹ Happiness allows us to see how all the parts of ethics fit together. As a result, when it comes to understanding Aquinas, without a proper grasp of happiness, we are liable to misunderstand his views on virtue, law, and grace. So the stakes are extremely high when it comes to reconstructing Aquinas’s account of happiness, since, in a sense, Aquinas’s whole ethical system is built around that account, to say nothing of his moral psychology, which takes happiness as its foundation.Footnote ¹²

I expect skepticism from some over whether reunifying ethics in this way is even possible, and from others over whether it is at all necessary. This study as a whole attempts to show that ethics both can and should be reunified. I leave it to the reader to determine whether the attempt is ultimately successful. But even if one takes Aquinas to fail or rejects his unifying impulse for other reasons, it seems to me that there are lessons to be learned here about how the parts of ethics do or at least might be thought to relate, and why treating them as interconnected is so compelling.

Now, it is worth pointing out at this juncture something that must be borne in mind as we evaluate whether Aquinas’s unifying impulse could, at least in principle, be satisfied. In particular, we must keep in mind that it’s built into Aquinas’s understanding of ethics that separating these elements distorts their very natures. So, for example, if Aquinas is right, in divorcing right action from happiness we obscure something important about each. As a result, say, an objection of the form, “But Aquinas’s account of happiness is a non-starter because ‘Hitler was happy when he captured Poland’ doesn’t sound odd,” and other similarly facile objections miss the mark. We mustn’t forget that, if Aquinas is right about the interrelatedness of these parts in the unified whole that is ethics and thus right about the damage done by removing them from that whole, we should expect that those parts will not always be identical to their modern counterparts, at least as some philosophers today think of those counterparts.

That is not to say, however, that how Aquinas thinks about these parts of ethics is far removed from how we think of them today. Indeed, in certain respects Aquinas’s views are aligned with important contemporary views in philosophy. For example, his account of individual happiness has great affinity with a family of views according to which well-being is a matter of enjoying the good, versions of which are defended by the likes of Shelly Kagan and Robert Adams.Footnote ¹³ In explaining how these various parts of ethics fit together, then, Aquinas is not talking about matters far removed from what we’re talking about today. The parts will be recognizable, even when not identical.

At this point, it is worth putting to rest one potential worry about how Aquinas achieves this unity in ethics, namely, that it is achieved by appeal to God.Footnote ¹⁴ Such a worry is understandable, since Aquinas – a thirteenth-century Dominican – writes primarily as an extraordinarily philosophically astute Christian theologian and not just as a philosopher. However, this worry is ungrounded. God does not serve as the supernatural glue that holds the parts of Aquinas’s ethics together. Now, it is certainly true that God is inextricable from Aquinas’s complete understanding of the world and even from his complete ethical theory. However, Aquinas is committed to preserving two very roughly isomorphic orders in his ethical theory: a natural order and a supernatural one. The isomorphism is only rough because the supernatural order integrates and transforms the natural order rather than starting from scratch. Even on the wholly natural level, without any intervention from God, Aquinas preserves a vision of what it is to live a good and happy human life, which integrates well-being, connection to others, and a morality of rules and virtues. To be sure, as Aquinas thinks of it, from the perspective afforded by faith, that happy earthly life – desirable and wonderful though it may be – is scarcely a shadow of what is possible for us with God’s help in grace. But the unity of these parts in a life apart from God’s grace does not depend in any special way on God. So Aquinas’s views could, at least in principle, be put to use to show how these various parts of ethics fit together in an atheistic universe.Footnote ¹⁵

I.2 The Basic Framework for Putting the Pieces Back Together: Individual Happiness, Common Happiness, and Holistic Eudaimonism

Despite its obvious centrality in Aquinas’s work, I do not believe that we have yet fully grasped what is fundamental in his account of individual happiness. This is certainly not to deny that commentators over the centuries have gotten many things right. But, still, because we have failed to grasp fully what is fundamental in Aquinas’s account of individual happiness, we need what amounts to a systematic rethinking of that account. Until we have such a rethinking at hand, our ability to understand his ethics as a whole will be hindered, including – crucially – our ability to understand how the parts of his ethical system fit together. Or so I will argue.

As we will see in some detail in Chapter 1, the three current general sorts of views about what is fundamental in Aquinas’s account of individual happiness emphasize the roles of basic human goods, human actualization, and contemplation, respectively. Despite what they have going for them as philosophical views and as readings of Aquinas, I think that all of these views are ultimately inadequate as interpretations of Aquinas’s account of individual happiness. As I read him, Aquinas draws heavily on one strand of Aristotle’s account of happiness, a strand emphasized by Aquinas’s teacher, Albert the Great: that happiness is an activity with certain characteristics.Footnote ¹⁶ Aquinas extracts this strand from Aristotle’s theory and, by taking it even more seriously than Aristotle, radically transforms Aristotle’s theory.

The result is a unique broadly Aristotelian theory of happiness that holds a noteworthy place in the history of happiness. The ancient Greek tradition widely held that, whatever precisely happiness may be, it has three features. First, happiness is primarily a trait of a whole human life; in other words, it is not the sort of thing that comes and goes in episodes of your life but rather something that must characterize your life as a whole.Footnote ¹⁷ Second, happiness consists “in what matters most, what is most valuable”; on this way of thinking, then, a happy life involves attaining something genuinely valuable or genuinely good.Footnote ¹⁸ Finally, happiness requires having some sort of positive feelings toward one’s life; the happy life must be attractive in some way to the one living it.Footnote ¹⁹

Today, the most common way of thinking about happiness involves the rejection of the first two of these features. Most people today tend to think that happiness is just a matter of having the right sorts of positive feelings, perhaps pleasure, enjoyment, being in a good mood, desire satisfaction, or some combination of these.Footnote ²⁰ And most people tend to think that a person is happy whenever they have the right sorts of positive feelings, even if those feelings occur only rarely in a person’s life.

Aquinas occupies a noteworthy place in the history of happiness because his view is sandwiched between this ancient sort of understanding of happiness and this contemporary conception. Because Aquinas thinks that happiness is exclusively an activity with certain traits, he rejects the ancient idea that happiness is primarily a feature of a whole life. Because activities are episodic, so too is happiness. Like us, then, he thinks that happiness is the sort of thing that can come and go in one’s life. This is a deep and crucial conceptual difference between Aquinas’s account of happiness and the ancient view advanced, for example, by Aristotle. But unlike most of us, Aquinas thinks that, whatever happiness is, it is both something that involves having the right sorts of positive feelings or attitudes and something that involves what is genuinely valuable or genuinely good. And so, Aquinas retains two features of the ancient Greek view, whereas we tend to retain only one. We have in Aquinas, then, a distinctive variety of Aristotelianism about happiness, which importantly contrasts with its ancient sources and with how we tend to think about happiness today.

At its heart, Aquinas’s account of individual happiness holds that happiness is exclusively a matter of engaging in and enjoying a genuinely good activity. This new interpretation of Aquinas’s account of individual happiness is a key aspect of the framework for everything else in this study. And it will turn out that, so understood, happiness can help bring together a wide variety of ethics’ parts. It does so, perhaps most fundamentally, by opening up a way for Aquinas to change the focus of eudaimonistic ethics from the individual to the community.

Eudaimonistic accounts of ethics are those that take happiness (eudaimonia) as their primary or fundamental focus and, at least characteristically, treat other important ethical concepts, such as moral rules and virtues, as importantly related to happiness.Footnote ²¹ On a standard picture, eudaimonism involves at least three elements.Footnote ²² First, there is a descriptive psychological claim connecting human agency to happiness: All intentional human actions are ultimately motivated at some level by a person’s desire for their own happiness, which is their ultimate end.Footnote ²³ Second, moral norms are connected to happiness: a person’s moral obligations are fundamentally determined by facts about which norms must be followed in order to realize their own happiness.Footnote ²⁴ Third, virtues are connected to happiness: A character trait is a virtue of character, or, in other words, a moral virtue, fundamentally because it enables a person to realize their own happiness (perhaps with a little luck).Footnote ²⁵ It should be noted that, on the standard picture, at least many moral norms and virtues of character are also thought to help the individual relate in the right way to others and play their part in achieving the common good of their communities. However, on this way of thinking, moral norms are what they are fundamentally because they direct a person to what is required for their own happiness or their own flourishing and the virtues are what they are fundamentally because they enable a person to realize their own happiness or their own flourishing. On this picture, the fundamental reason many moral norms and virtues are about relating in the right way to other people is that being happy or flourishing as an individual human being involves relating in the right way to other people.

This standard picture of eudaimonism is also the standard reading of Aquinas. It is nearly universally held that “Aquinas holds that human beings always act for the sake of an ultimate end, which is happiness.”Footnote ²⁶ It is also very widely held that, according to Aquinas, moral norms and moral virtues are fundamentally determined by their relationship to individual happiness.Footnote ²⁷ For example, it is claimed that “[f]or Aquinas the norms of morality are defined in terms of their relationship to human happiness,” and that “[i]n many of his ethical discussions [Aquinas] identifies happiness as the ultimate end of moral norms and virtues.”Footnote ²⁸

As I read him, Aquinas rejects this standard variety of eudaimonism ascribed to him. He removes individual happiness from the core of eudaimonism and puts common happiness in its place. He thereby changes the focus of eudaimonistic ethics from the happiness of the individual to the happiness of the whole community of which the individual is a part. The result is Holistic Eudaimonism. It too has three elements. First, all intentional human actions are ultimately motivated at some level by a person’s desire for common happiness, which is the true ultimate end of every human being. Second, a person’s moral obligations are fundamentally determined by facts about which norms must be followed in order to realize common happiness. Finally, 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.

What exactly is this so-called common happiness? One might suppose that this can only be a figurative way of speaking. After all, one might think that only people can truly be happy, not communities. I do not believe that, for Aquinas, common happiness is meant figuratively. And this is where Aquinas’s exclusively activity-based account of happiness turns out to be crucial. Treating happiness in every case as an activity makes it possible to treat common happiness as a genuine kind of happiness, just like individual happiness. In particular, one can treat common happiness as a common or shared activity or an activity – in some sense – done with others. That, I believe, is how Aquinas thinks of it. More precisely, he holds that common happiness is constituted by a community’s members engaging in and enjoying genuinely good activities that are consistent with, partially constitutive of, and motivated at some level by the individual happinesses of a community’s members as well as justice, peace, and well-coordinated community action. So understood, common happiness involves two deeply related aspects. The first is the individual happinesses – that is, the genuinely good enjoyed activities – of those who make up the relevant complete community. The second is the profound sort of justice, peace, and well-coordinated action that exists among those individuals in that relevant community, which captures at least the minimal sense in which they are engaged in a common or shared activity.

So understood, individual happiness, common happiness, and Holistic Eudaimonism provide the basic framework for putting the pieces of ethics back together.

I.3 The Nature of the Present Study

The big picture in Aquinas is shot through with philosophy and theology. This is truer nowhere than in his ethics. As a result, there is simply no way to understand the sorts of big-picture issues that I’m dealing with here without taking seriously both philosophical issues and theological issues.Footnote ²⁹ There is no hope of understanding Aquinas’s big-picture ethical views without treating everything from Aristotelian accounts of happiness to the many ways that God’s grace is thought to help human beings. Properly understanding Aquinas’s ethics depends on this sort of wide-ranging treatment in part because Aquinas sometimes fills out what we might regard as vital pieces of the philosophical picture in treating theological issues. For example, it is in Aquinas’s treatment of the gifts that God gives a soul upon its arrival in heaven that we learn important details about how virtue relates to happiness. And it is a proper understanding of heavenly happiness that unlocks a proper understanding of ordinary earthly happiness. Any attempt to filter out the theology would filter out much of what is most philosophically important and most philosophically interesting. And, let me be clear: There is much of philosophical interest here, so much so that Terence Irwin, who may well be in the best position to know, holds that, of everyone who has ever worked in the Aristotelian tradition, “Aquinas offers the best statement of the Aristotelian approach to moral philosophy.”Footnote ³⁰ And so much so that an ethicist as eminent as Philippa Foot can say, “It is my opinion that [Aquinas’s] Summa Theologica is one of the best sources we have for moral philosophy, and moreover that St. Thomas’s ethical writings are as useful to the atheist as to the Catholic or other Christian believer.”Footnote ³¹ (Still, to the reader entirely uninterested in theology, who wants to make their way through the book with as little theology as possible, one could get the gist of Aquinas’s views – although certainly not everything of historical or philosophical value – by reading Chapters 1, 2, 4, 6–8, and the Conclusion.)

The aim of understanding the big picture in Aquinas’s ethics and, in particular, how he fits the pieces of ethics together shapes this study in other ways as well. It leads to an almost exclusive focus on Aquinas’s ideas and Aquinas’s arguments in their favor. What you have before you, then, is an analytic reconstruction of the general contours of how Aquinas fits together law (including its moral rules), virtue, and grace, ultimately through his activity-based account of happiness. This focus leaves a number of interesting and worthwhile things unsaid in these pages. For example, I do relatively little to explain how in these domains Aquinas departs from, advances, changes, or criticizes the views of his predecessors and contemporaries.Footnote ³² I also little discuss Aquinas’s life, the vibrant and tumultuous times that contributed to his work, or the institutions and arrangements that made it possible.Footnote ³³ When these elements do appear, they are in service to getting clearer on how to understand Aquinas’s big-picture ethical views. The reconstruction of Aquinas’s ethics takes precedence.

Another important feature of the study is that I draw from the whole of Aquinas’s corpus in trying to make sense of the big picture in his ethics – everything from his early commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences to his best-known later treatises to his commentaries on philosophical works and the Christian Bible.Footnote ³⁴ This helps to give a well-rounded reading of Aquinas’s ethics as a whole and of his account of happiness in particular.Footnote ³⁵ I am at liberty to do so without giving up on my systematic ambitions because, when it comes to the elements on which I focus at the level of generality at which I focus on them, it seems to me that the essentials remain constant. There is a core set of ideas about happiness, for example, that is there from the beginning, which never changes. That core is refined and developed, of course, and, indeed, some non-core element is even occasionally rejected entirely. But one finds the essentials in Aquinas’s reflections on individual happiness from beginning to end, and it is those essentials that matter most in this study.Footnote ³⁶ That said, I will draw attention to some of the most obvious changes along the way, but, as with the background of Aquinas’s views, I will do so in the service of better understanding Aquinas’s ideas, rather than as part of the worthwhile project of mapping the ways in which Aquinas’s views about, say, happiness or law or grace develop.Footnote ³⁷ Ultimately, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. So I hope it becomes clear over the course of this study that, when it comes to happiness and how the various other elements of Aquinas’s ethics come together with his account of happiness, the essentials remain more or less constant in Aquinas’s thought over the course of his academic life. Of course, I also hope that it becomes apparent how focusing on such a wide array of works provides a richer portrait of Aquinas’s ethics than would otherwise be possible.

I.4 The Structure of the Present Study

The study is broken into two main parts: one on individual happiness, the other on how the other parts of Aquinas’s ethics are bound together through individual happiness and, ultimately, through common happiness.

In approaching any account of individual happiness in the late medieval period in the Latin West, the natural place to begin is with perfectionism. After all, as is widely recognized, in the period, happiness was widely thought of as a kind of human perfection.Footnote ³⁸ What is less widely recognized is that there are importantly different varieties of perfectionism about human happiness. In Chapter 1, I focus on three. After briefly explaining each, I show how interpreters of Aquinas have placed Aquinas in each of those three different perfectionistic camps. In discussing these other interpretations of Aquinas on happiness, I explain both some of the lessons I take from them in developing my own reading and some of the places I believe them to be inaccurate or incomplete.

Once I have made it clear which general variety of perfectionism about happiness I believe Aquinas endorses, in Chapter 2, I begin to delve into the particulars of his version of that general variety of perfectionism. In particular, I lay out and unpack my reading of Aquinas, according to which happiness is exclusively a matter of engaging in and enjoying genuinely good activities. I suggest that this heart of happiness – in a sense, more Aristotelian than Aristotle – is what makes each and every kind of individual happiness that Aquinas identifies a kind of happiness in the first place.

The only possible adequate defense for this or any reading concerning what binds together Aquinas’s wildly different kinds of individual happiness involves treating each of those varieties in depth. And so, in the three subsequent chapters, I explain how Aquinas understands the various particular kinds of individual happiness he identifies. Due to its outstanding importance, I begin with perfect happiness, which is only possible in heaven and serves as a kind of exemplar in his thinking about happiness (Chapter 3). I then turn to natural imperfect happiness, which is the sort of happiness that is possible for ordinary human beings here on earth without any special divine help (Chapter 4). I close Part I with a discussion of graced imperfect happiness, which is a kind of earthly happiness only possible for those who have received special grace from God (Chapter 5). In these chapters, I show how the heart of happiness I’ve identified underlies all of these different kinds of individual happiness as well as how each of these kinds of happiness sheds light on how we should think about all manner of aspects of Aquinas’s general understanding of individual happiness.

With a deep understanding of individual happiness in hand, Part II begins with an examination of common happiness, which, as should now be clear, I believe plays an absolutely crucial role in Aquinas’s ethics, even though it has almost entirely been ignored by commentators (Chapter 6). As I have said, it makes good sense, however, to focus on individual happiness first, since truly understanding common happiness requires getting clear on the nature of individual happiness. This is so because common happiness has as one of its two deeply interrelated aspects the individual happinesses of those who make up the relevant community. The other aspect is the profound sort of justice, peace, and well-coordinated action that exists among those individuals. I close Chapter 6 by arguing for what may be the unprecedented claim that Aquinas is committed to the view that the true ultimate end of human beings is the common happiness of heaven. And with that I establish the first element of Aquinas’s Holistic Eudaimonism.

I then put individual and common happiness to work by showing how they form an interconnected whole with law, virtue, and grace in Aquinas’s ethical system. Chapter 7 addresses the ways in which Aquinas achieves unity between law and happiness. It turns out that, in manifold ways, laws of varying kinds order us in the first place to common happiness and thereby to our own individual happiness, whether the law in question is, for example, a moral law or an ordinary civil law. In particular, moral laws order us to common happiness by outlining universal and absolute rules that must be followed if we are to fully realize common happiness, whenever and wherever we happen to live. It will turn out, then, that our moral obligations are fundamentally determined by facts about which norms must be followed in order to realize common happiness. The second element of Aquinas’s Holistic Eudaimonism is thereby established. On the other hand, civil laws order us to common happiness by outlining additional local and potentially flexible rules that are supposed to give some particular community its best chance of realizing common happiness in the here and now. But they are rules that, in principle, need not be instituted and followed in order to fully realize common happiness. With respect to civil laws, then, Aquinas advocates a kind of top-down, restricted rule-consequentialism with common happiness as its goal.

Chapter 8 explains how virtue, building on law, makes it actually possible for us to secure both individual happiness and common happiness. It does so by ordering us in the first place to common happiness. Indeed, I will argue that 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; that is the third element of Aquinas’s Holistic Eudaimonism. Still, by ordering us to common happiness, virtue makes our own individual happiness possible by enabling us to engage in and enjoy genuinely good activities that ultimately aim at the common happiness of the community.

Because grace spills over into every other facet of Aquinas’s ethics, to avoid unnecessary repetition, it is treated in a number of places rather than in a standalone chapter. In particular, Chapters 3, 5, and 8 address the role of grace in enabling human beings to enjoy perfect happiness, graced imperfect happiness, and the most perfect conceivable variety of common happiness as a part of the heavenly community.

After concisely recapping how Aquinas unifies ethics, I conclude the book by highlighting three distinctive and appealing features of Aquinas’s ethics of happiness. In particular, I focus on Aquinas’s understanding of the nature of happiness, the way Aquinas connects the right and the good, and the role that virtue plays for Aquinas in ethics and in life. In the end, I hope it is clear how Aquinas put these pieces of ethics together in the first place and how and why they might be put back together again.