The Fred Martinez Report

The Aquinas/De Koninck conception of human dignity differs from the post-war conception in three crucial ways.  First, the post-war conception was designed to secure agreement between people holding various different modern moral and political views, whereas Aquinas’s account is deeply at odds with those views.  Second, for Aquinas, individuals can and do lose their dignity, whereas for the post-war conception, no one ever loses it.  Third, the post-war conception holds that we have dignity simply by virtue of being human, whereas for Aquinas, it is not what we  are  that gives us dignity, but rather what we  should became  that gives it to us. Does this mean that we do not owe such sinful human beings justice and charity?  MacIntyre says that that does not follow.  However, he notes that any appeal to justice necessarily presupposes a shared account of what it is to be a member of a flourishing social order (family, ...