ABSTRACT
A longstanding complaint against Aristotelian virtue ethics is that it is a form of egoism. This essay addresses this old charge in a new way, not by looking to virtue and good action in Aristotle, but to vice and sin in Aquinas. On Aquinas’s view, sin prevents us from attaining the goal of human life—happiness—and vice is a settled disposition to sin whose source is a disordered will. Aquinas diagnoses this disorder as “inordinate self-love,” which he understands as love of one’s own private good to the neglect of love of the universal common good. Vice is a practical orientation of thought, feeling, and action that focuses one on private and competitive goods rather than common, universal, and participatory goods. Aquinas argues that the vicious person attempts to privatize happiness; to do this, however, is to act against human nature and right reason, since man is a political animal whose happiness can only be achieved as something held in common with others. The essay concludes that virtue ethics can more easily avoid the charge of egoism insofar as it can recover the notion of common, universal, participatory goods.
