HAPPINESS AS THE END OF HUMAN ACTION IN THOMAS AQUINAS MORAL PHILOSOPHY

Abstract

It is being increasingly recognized that virtue ethics is central to Aquinas’s moral thought and to his consideration of the characteristic capacities and achievements of human nature. Aquinas sees ethics as having two principal topics: first, the ultimate goal of human existence, and second, how that goal is to be won, or lost. Aquinas maintains that happiness doesn’t lie in riches, honors, fame and glory, power, bodily endowment, pleasures any endowment of soul, and any created good. For him, however, the essential respect in which God constitutes our blessedness is in direct vision of the divine nature. Happy is he who has whatever he desires, and desires nothing amiss. Happiness is the attainment of the last end. The essence of happiness consists in an act of the intellect; happiness is joy in truth. Aquinas maintains that the ultimate end of human beings, their perfected happiness, cannot be any finite or created good, since no finite or created good could finally and completely satisfy human desire. Only God could be that good, the God whose existence and goodness can be known through philosophical inquiry. Thus, this work through the method of hermeneutics reads Aquinas’ Summa Theologica and unveils man’s capacity for self-determination by free choices as the springboard through which Aquinas’ doctrine of happiness is anchored and concludes that happiness lies in the service to humanity, that is, the internal tranquility one gets through the services rendered to alleviates mankind.