Natural Law. To achieve the final cause in life, Aquinas set out cardinal virtues. These virtues were made by the Stoics and they reflect moral life, they are as followed; prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance.

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To achieve the ‘final cause’ in life, Aquinas set out cardinal virtues. These virtues were made by the Stoics and they reflect moral life, they are as followed; prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance.

A final strength is that to follow this key principle, both exterior and interior acts have to be good. A good exterior act is when you act in a good way for the wrong reasons, an example of this is giving money to charity, (good exterior act), to impress someone (bad interior act). When both exterior and interior acts are used for a good nature, it shows that this key principle too the theory is very important for it to be a successful theory. If everyone obeyed this rule it would make it very easy to follow as everyone would have the right intentions. Aquinas also believed that everyone had either intrinsically good or bad actions because it humans act with their ultimate power, god is glorified. This also links with Kant’s theory on Deontology. He believed that justice was an absolute; this meant that only intrinsically good or bad. Kant said that only good will is a good so if someone acts out of good will, their exterior and interior acts will be good.

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  1. On the other hand, people argue that Natural Law fails to be a practical ethical theory.

A major weakness to this theory is the primary precept of worship God. The main weakness to this is not everyone believes in God so how can they worship God if they don’t believe in him. It is not a practical theory if some people can obey God as it is their religions and others cannot put the theory into practise as they don’t believe in a religion. Another point is that people worship different Gods so they may ask which the ...

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