Aquinas on God-Sanctioned Stealing
A serious challenge to religious believers in the Abrahamic traditions is that the God of the Old Testament seems to command immoral actions. Thomas Aquinas addresses this objection using the biblical story of God ordering the Israelites to plunder the Egyptians, which threatens to create an inconsi...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
|
| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Philosophy Documentation Center
[2018]
|
| In: |
American catholic philosophical quarterly
Year: 2018, Volume: 92, Issue: 2, Pages: 277-293 |
| Further subjects: | B
Ten Commandments
B BIBLICAL teaching on gods B Bible. Old Testament B ABRAHAM (Biblical patriarch) B THOMAS, Aquinas, Saint, ca. 1225-1274 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | A serious challenge to religious believers in the Abrahamic traditions is that the God of the Old Testament seems to command immoral actions. Thomas Aquinas addresses this objection using the biblical story of God ordering the Israelites to plunder the Egyptians, which threatens to create an inconsistency among four of Aquinas's views: (1) God did indeed command this action; (2) God is perfectly good and cannot command any evil actions; (3) the objective moral goodness or badness of actions is not based on arbitrary divine commands; and (4) the prohibition of theft is an immutable principle of the natural moral law. I examine Aquinas's views on metaethics, stealing, justice, property, and collective responsibility to show that there is not a genuine inconsistency in his position, and that his strategy provides a helpful model for responding to the objection from divinely-sanctioned evil. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 2153-8441 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: American catholic philosophical quarterly
|
| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.5840/acpq201831146 |