ONLINE FIRST
published on May 15, 2025
John A. Cuddeback
https://doi.org/10.5840/acpq2025513311
The Natural Place of Work in the Household According to Thomas Aquinas
Despite the obvious moral implications of how we pursue wealth, Aquinas¡¯s treatment of oeconomia (the art or science of household management) and its relation to the arts of wealth-getting or production has been widely set aside as an historically conditioned anomaly in his moral thinking. Modern socio-economic structures make it difficult to conceptualize Aquinas¡¯s understanding of the household in its ¡°economic¡± identity. For Aristotle and Aquinas, the work of wealth-getting has a natural and so intrinsic connection to the household precisely because the household is the context most conducive to pursuing wealth well, i.e., as ordered to the true flourishing of persons. That nature intends such a healthy arrangement, one at once conducive to the fulfillment of needs in the home and the cultivation of good moral dispositions in householders, is in accord with the principle, ¡°But nature neither leaves anything incomplete nor does anything in vain.¡±