Recently in Virtue Category

St. Anselm believes that the least of our sins puts us in an infinite debt to God and is infinitely bad. Anselm's own argument for this thesis is uses some implicit premises. Here is my best reconstruction:

1. (Premise) To sin is to oppose the will of God.
2. (Premise) If it is not permissible to do A in order to preserve a good G, then A is at least as bad as the loss of G.
3. (Premise) It is not permissible to oppose the will of God "even to preserve the whole of creation", even "if there were more worlds as full of beings as this", and even if "they increased to an infinite extent".
4. (Premise) The badness of the loss of the whole of creation if the whole of creation consisted of planets as full of beings as Earth and increased to an infinite extent would be infinite.
5. (Premise) If something is at least as bad as an infinite bad, then it's infinitely bad.
6. To oppose the will of God is at least as bad as something infinitely bad. (2, 3 and 4)
7. To oppose the will of God is infinitely bad. (5 and 6)
8. Every sin is infinitely bad. (1 and 7)
9. (Premise) To do something infinitely bad puts us in infinite debt.
10. Every sin sin is infinitely bad and puts us in infinite debt. (8 and 9)

I'm afraid that the answer to my question might be obvious; if so, then it'll be answered quickly!

I come from a Christian background which told me that God has forgiven all of my sins, past, present, and future. I also come from a background which tells me that I should ask God for forgiveness. I also have the background belief that it's not the case that you should ask for what you already have. These beliefs seem to me to conflict. Let's be more precise.

In Revelation, we learn that the angels are singing "Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God almighty!" We speak of "holy men" and there might be a "holy moment". We strive for "personal holiness".

I've always had difficulty getting a grasp of this concept. Sometimes, it seems that "holiness" is used synonymously with "moral purity" or "sinlessness". I've also heard "being holy" equated with "being wholly other or set apart or different", but what's that supposed to mean?

As a first approximation, x is holy iff x is really, really morally good. But this feels like its lacking. Any ideas?

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy added another philosophy of religion entry this week: John Hare's contribution on Religion and Morality. It's a lot more historical than I expected, and it has a lot less detail on the contemporary issues, with only one paragraph of eleven sentences on the issues in contemporary analytic philosophy. But it seems like a good historical guide to a number of issues too often ignored in many historical introductions to ethics.

One of my projects for this summer is to prepare a new (for me) course: Virtues and Vices. I'm taking a largely historical approach to the course. The three major texts that I'm using are Aquinas' The Cardinal Virtues, Stephen Pope (ed.) The Ethics of Aquinas and Dante's Purgatorio. I have found reading this material and preparing for the course to be fascinating and stimulating. It has raised a number of questions. For instance, why would Aquinas say "since human beings cannot use reason apart from sense powers, which need bodily organs, human beings need to sustain their bodies in order to use their reason"? This seems to contradict what he says elsewhere about the possibltiy of disembodied human intellect and will. But the question I want to ask about today concerns how Aquinas and Dante rank the virtues and their corresponding vices.

More below the fold.