How Much Should We Sacrifice for Others? Thomas Aquinas on Duties to Assist People in Need
Abstract
The subject of this paper is the scope and nature of duties to help others which Thomas Aquinas believes to belong to the subclass of acts of beneficence he calls eleemosyna. I consider to what extent and under which circumstances, according to his account, aid lent to people in need of support is obligatory, merely praiseworthy or even improper. In particular, I try to establish how much of our personal resources (possessions, well-being, or free time), on Aquinas’s view, we should sacrifice for others, provided they need our support.
References
Finnis, John. 2020. „Aquinas’ Moral, Political, and Legal Philosophy”. W: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition), red. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/aquinas-moral-political.
Miller, Richard W. 2004. „Beneficence, Duty, and Distance”. Philosophy and Public Affairs 32:357–83.
Murphy, Liam B. 1993. „The Demands of Beneficence”. Philosophy and Public Affairs 22:267–92.
Scanlon, Thomas. 1998. What We Owe to Each Other. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Singer, Peter. 1972. „Famine, Affluence, and Morality”. Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (3): 229–43.
Smith, Patricia. 1990. „The Duty to Rescue and the Slippery Slope Problem”. Social Theory and Practice 16 (1): 19–41.
Copyright (c) 2022 Roczniki Filozoficzne
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
