CHAPTER ONE
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND OF STUDY
Man has been identified and defined as a rational animal, apart from rationality, which distinguishes him from other animals, he would just be a beast in behaviour and man in physical structure. In this regard, G. Buffen, said that there is an infinite distance between man and animals, and the essential cause of this is that man is one without reason.
In the same vain, Aristotle maintained that reason, which is the highest faculty of the soul, is what sets man apart from sub-human nature. The question now is, why and how is man rational and in what aspects of his life is he different from other animals and what factor is behind these? It has been noticed that man is exclusively marked out from other animals as regard social, cultural and intellectual forms of behaviour. It is only man that has an articulated speech, inventive capability, knowledge of arts, beauty, politics, religion, morality and other forms of knowledge that can be associated with reason.
So man is, as a result of this rationality marked out from other animals, it is not contestable then to associate or attribute the above enumerated characteristics to his rationality.
As this work centers on morality and reason as that which assures us of the best moral life, we shall answer such questions as: has reason any influence or part to play in morality? Or put simply, is reason necessarily required for man to be moral? If yes, should reason be the sole factor for morality? But if no, what then? It is undebatable that man solely has the knowledge of good and evil (morality) and this type of knowledge can be possessed only by rational beings. In fact, God made man rational enough to see that he (man) should do what is right.
Having known that man surpasses all the other animals by the possession of reason, and the only animal that has knowledge of morality, the question now is, is man moral because of reason or because of some other physiological factors? If it is because of the latter, one can rightly pose this question: Why is it that other animals are ignorant of morality or are not moral?
Aquinas, on whom this work is based, has propounded a popular dictum regarding man and reason. It is “Bonum omins est, Secundum rationem esse”, that is, (The good of man in life according to reason). As we shall see, this statement does not rule out the fact that human life can be controlled by other factors like the will, habit, passions, emotion etc, but it affirms that man has a good life according to reason. One outstanding feature about Aquinas moral theory is it’s intellectualism. This will be gradually unfolding as we penetrate into this work.
In this four chapter work, we are going to see how morality should be guided by reason.