So, making sense of one’s life is crucial to living a characteristically human life. To have reflective awareness of one’s life is essential to being human. Thus, intellectual fidelity is essential to making sense of one’s life. One cannot believe whatever one wishes about matters pertaining to ends and still be said to have an end. Taking up an end or ends that are capable of structuring a course of action through time is essential to having a plan, and having a plan is crucial to making sense of one’s life, both prospectively and retrospectively. By ‘having a life’ I mean having a coherent structured story about the actions and happenings that compose an account of one’s life.

Instead, intellectual fidelity to our ends enables us to ‘have a life’. Unlike the moral virtues, fidelity does not directly dispose us to morally good actions. As I shall use the term, ‘fidelity’ requires that a person be intellectually true to what is properly cared about, a morally permissible end. That is, fidelity does not require us to transcend our human nature, and so does not require grace, and it is not oriented toward bringing about the beatific vision of God.Īlthough not a theological virtue, intellectual fidelity is distinct from the moral virtues. On my view, the intellectual fidelity required to avoid blasphemy does not exhibit the characteristics of a theological virtue. Also, the virtue corresponding to the vice of infidelity, faith or fidelity, is not for me a theological virtue. Most significantly, I depart from Aquinas in that my analysis of infidelity is not predicated on the truth of Christianity. My view, however, differs considerably from Aquinas’s. In my view, following Aquinas, infidelity is an intellectual vice that disposes us to believe falsehoods about ends. I follow Thomas Aquinas in naming the vice that disposes an agent to blaspheme ‘infidelity’ or ‘disbelief’.

Someone blasphemes when they treat ends and matters related to our ends as trivial, which often occurs by attributing demeaning falsehoods to them. Specifically, blasphemous actions are characteristic of vicious agents’ responses to matters of great importance, our highest ends. Someone who blasphemes exhibits a certain vice. I will argue that blasphemy is wrong because it is the action of a vicious agent. ‘Blasphemy’, as I understand it, applies to actions and derivatively to the utterances, writings, visual depictions, and other works that are the product of blasphemous actions. I do not intend to provide any argument for virtue ethics itself. In this paper I intend to argue for the moral gravity of blasphemy from the perspective of virtue ethics.

Exposito blasphemous