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The purpose of the essay is to recover a correct conception of natural law and goodness in the ethics of Saint Thomas Aquinas. It suggests that the dominant interpretation of Thomism known by legal philosophers—that of John Finnis—is importantly at variance with Aquinas’s true account. Against the dominant interpretation, a true account of natural law must (i) differentiate between natural law and ethics in the full sense (moral theology), and (ii) interpret references to human good as references to virtuous goodness rather than non-moral goodness. The main body of the essay explores the place of these concepts in Aquinas’s account of ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In his most practical work, the Laws, Plato combines a frank statement of the radical Socratic thesis that virtue is knowledge and vice involuntary with a prudential acceptance of the political community's need for retributive punishment. This paper examines the Laws' statements of principle regarding responsibility and punishment and compares these with the actual criminal code proposed in Book 9. The result is to show how a radical philosophic insight can be adapted to make ordinary citizens more gentle, thoughtful, and humane without sapping their moral commitments. Lessons are drawn from the Laws for the contemporary restorative justice movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]