F
fakename
Guest
(1) I’m essentially looking for a syllogistic demonstration that whose conclusion supports taking one action over another. Such a demonstration is required because such a demonstration produces knowledge which must be universal and essential and therefore unchanging and therefore certain. Now what is good for a thing is conducive to the nature of that thing, and the good for man is the ethical good and the nature of man is reason. But reason is most fully expressed in the certain knowledge of which I speak. So the perfect good which is ethical must not endanger this certainty. That is why I seek certainty as a necessary condition for moral acts. Plus, certainty of something is required in order for their to be an essential distinction between negligence and diligence. But there is such a distinction so there must be certainty.
(2) I suppose that your answer is correct but it still doesn’t seem to satisfy the yearning of our natures for certitude. If we can acquire certainty in things that are not as instrumental to human happiness like math and science, then it seems that nature has erred in making us less able to provide for our own happiness (by veiling the mysteries of ethics from us) then it has with other animals or with our ability to gain that which makes us imperfectly happy. But this would be rather odd unless some other fact can be adduced to nullify that objection (the darkening of our intellect by original sin perhaps?). Still even with that fact established, the very words of Church philosophers seems to go against that explanation.