Thomas: Chapter 7 and 8

In these chapters Thomas's goal is to argue that those who have a morally good character are more likely to live well (i.e. living a good life, reaching contentment, flourish, be happy). He does not want to say, like Plato, that every person with a morally good character is happier in virtue of having a morally good character than a person who is without it.

For Thomas, flourishing requires (among other things) a proper regard for oneself which is to be concerned with oneself and one's interactions with others, friends and loved one's in particular. Proper regard for oneself amounts to self-love which is the belief that one ought to be treated morally and the desire to flourish (there is nothing necessarily egoistic about this as one can still at times prefer the interests of others over his own). In terms of one's friends and loved ones, it is clear that a person could not be happy without these social relationships and that one can not truly be said to be a friend of another if he does not (or is not willing to) contribute substantially to the well-being and interests of the other person. Moreover, with regard to strangers and people who one does not know well, he should realize that if he desires to be treated morally (and that moral treatment is required for flourishing in that one who is unjustly hindered at all times could never flourish) then other people will desire the same and have the same right to be so treated as he has.

Thomas also makes the claim that psychic harmony is very important to one's well being and that the person with a morally good character is more likely to achieve psychic harmony. Psychic harmony is to be understood as our knowledge of our reasons for acting. As it is the case the person of moral character will not have to feign his true feelings, the reasons that he gives for doing things are the reasons that he actually has. The same is not so for the immoral person. He must give very different reasons for acting than the one's he actually has for otherwise he would be suspected and hindered by other people. (Roughly, the idea is that it is extremely psychologically taxing to keep all your lies straight and so on.) Moreover, Thomas wants to say that the immoral person is essentially insincere. A promise from him does not mean the same thing as it does from a moral person and even to those who he truly loves and cares about his word can never be as solid as the truly honest man. The immoral person in virtue of being immoral lives a life of insincerity and, what is more, it may well turn out that after a time he himself has trouble distinguishing between sincere and insincere feelings, motives, etc. It is in this sense that Thomas means that he is lacking in self-knowledge (i.e. knowledge of his motivations) whereas the moral person is not lacking this knowledge. [argument for this p. 216-232] Furthermore, [p.229-230 "John and Peter"] even when the immoral person is dealing with those whom he loves and cares about his reasons for acting in the way he does toward them could be, as a result of his typical immoral way of dealing with and reasoning about his interactions with people, not out of actual care for them but out of his self-interested desire to maintain them as friends. And this it would seem would be quite distressing to the genuinely immoral person because he truly does care about his people and wants that to be his reason for acting as he does. This sort of thing can not happen to the moral person as he is not a master of insincerity and thus is not as readily able to act in this way. [I did not give this argument much credit the first time I looked at it, but at a second glance I like it a lot more.]