3x Test Review Flashcards
(11 cards)
Name and describe the Cardinal Virtues.
1) Prudence: Good judgement, which perfects practical reason.
2) Justice: Right relationship, such that you render to others what is their due
3) Temperance: Rightly ordered desire, such that you desire that which is worthy of desire, with the appropriate intensity.
4) Fortitude: Rightly ordered anger, such that you oppose obstacles worthy of opposition, with the appropriate intensity.
Explain Plato’s metaphor of the Soul as a Chariot.
- Plato’s metaphor of the Soul as a Chariot, the driver is reason, he can decide which way to go.Out of the two horses, one is appetitive power (desire) and the other is intensive power (anger).
For Plato, what is the fundamental moral task? What is the essence of moral disorder?
- Reason has to be in control. Anger and desire help care out the task. Moral disorder is if reason loses control, if anger and desire take over and make the decisions.
Compare and contrast the concepts Freedom of Indifference and Freedom for Excellence.
- Freedom of Indifference is doing whatever your want, no direction to itself. Freedom for Excellence is oriented towards human excellence, cultivates their capacities, that person has made a more free choice, more productive of freedom.
Explain Aristotle’s principle of the Golden Mean.
- Virtue is always found in a power between excess and deficiency. For example: with the virtue of Anger
- excess: rath
- defect:sloth
- in between: courage
Explain the distinction between Natural and Supernatural Virtue.
- Natural and Supernatural Virtues were both created by St. Thomas Aquinas. Natural Virtue (also known as Acquired Virtues) can be attained exclusively through human effort and practice and are oriented towards a good that can be known simply through human reason. Supernatural Virtue (also known as Infused Virtues) can only be attained through a gift of Grace and are oriented towards God in a fullness that can only be apprehended through Divine Revelation.
Summarize the role of motive in Catholic morality. Exact wording is important! What does the maxim cited above mean?
- The role of motive in Catholic morality is for an act to be moral, the agent must act out of a motive. An objectively good deed made out of a native motive is not morally meritorious.”A good motive is a necessary but insufficient condition for a good act.” This pretty much means that good motives are essential but never enough.
In the Thomistic analysis of an act, what is the object of an act?
What is the import of the object of an act in the moral analysis of an act?
- Have to consider motive, circumstance and outcome. Remove all these factors, you get what you did. Even if no one got hurt, you created a great evil. Take away everything from the act, except of the act itself.
- Most determining factor, if an object is bad, the whole act is bad.
Explain the role of circumstance in the Catholic moral analysis of an act.
- Some actions, when considered in the abstract, are neither good nor evil, but neutral. These actions their moral quality from their circumstances. NOTA BENE: No actual concrete act is ever neutral. Every concrete act always has a moral quality.
Explain the Principle of Double Effect.
The Principle of Double Effect has two distinct objects, one object is good & the other evil. For the act to be permissible, all three of the conditions must be fulfilled.
1) The object must be inseparable. There is no way to perform one without the other.
2) The objects must be simultaneous. It is not a case of doing an evil act to achieve a subsequent good result.
3) Only the good is intended.
Give two examples of the Principle of Double Effect, with contrasting examples that fail to satisfy it.
Killing in Self defense & pulling out a gun and kill a person on a random day which you see down the street at night (object aren’t). Topic Pregnancy (procedure can save a women’s life, the baby is going to die; women knows within days, the good is intended; not an act to kill the baby) & Cholestasis: she is pregnant then she will have an abortion to better her life, fails all three. (Not simultaneous because it is a later side affect)
