Role of Moral Character in Responsibility in Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas

Aristotle’s theory of moral responsibility, as a pioneer theory of ethics of virtue, presents a new approach to responsibility because of its particular attention to moral conduct. Aquinas, a follower of Aristotle, has provided a new interpretation of moral responsibility with an emphasis on character and a focus on completely voluntary human acts and the role of apriori reflection on act. In the views of these two philosophers, moral agent is an agent who possesses knowledge, personality vice, and the ability to perform completely voluntary acts. Accordingly, children and animals are never subjected to moral evaluations because they lack such moral capacities and characters. Aristotle and Aquinas believe that the realm of moral agents, in addition to evil and virtuous people, includes restrained and non-restrained ones. Following a descriptive-analytic method, the present paper investigates the conditions under which the acts of moral agents are subjected to ethical evaluations in the views of Aristotle and Aquinas. Based on the findings of this study, those acts that become the subjects of moral responsibility must be done voluntarily based on the moral character of the agent as a non-accidental stimulus for act, even if they do not originate in deliberation and are not based on prior decision making. This is because sudden acts also originate in certain sources and function as clear references for moral evaluations.