[I got distracted on a Saturday morning after doing the Lidl shop based on some lines in a book describing Aquinas and some of his moral concepts. The result was a long rambling conversation with GPT 5.6 that then became the article below. I agreed with some of ChatGPT’s points, disagreed with others. The following is cybotic – me plus AI.]
Aquinas, suffering and how human beings construct the good
Aquinas distinguishes between:
- synderesis – the disposition through which we apprehend the first principles of practical reason; and
- conscientia – the act of applying those principles to particular situations.
There is an obvious temptation to translate this into modern psychological language:
- intuition followed by reflection;
- subconscious appraisal followed by conscious reasoning;
- “thinking fast” followed by “thinking slow”.
The correspondence is not exact, and I do not mean to collapse Aquinas into contemporary cognitive science. But the comparison opens up an interesting question.
Where do our moral judgements actually come from?
Aquinas treats synderesis as inherently directed towards truth. Error enters when we reason from general principles to particular judgements: we misunderstand the circumstances, pursue an apparent good instead of a real one, or allow passion and corrupt habits to distort the application.
I find part of this plausible. Our conscious interpretation of intuition is certainly one place where error enters. A feeling that something is wrong arrives before we can explain it. We then assign that feeling to linguistic categories, infer causes and construct a story. That process can go badly wrong.
But error does not enter only through reflection. The intuition itself can be miscalibrated.
A threat response may arise because a present situation genuinely resembles a past danger. But it may also arise because the nervous system has overgeneralised from previous experience, because ambiguous information has been given excessive threat weight, or because bodily arousal has been interpreted as evidence of an external threat. Attention may amplify confirming signals while contradictory information is barely registered.
The resulting reaction is not simply “irrational”. It may be mechanistically intelligible, adaptive in origin and internally coherent given the organism’s implicit model of the situation. If the model were accurate, the response might make perfect sense. But that does not mean that the model accurately represents the present world, or that the response now benefits the person experiencing it.
This distinction matters particularly when thinking about trauma, mental illness and cognitive variation. A person’s body may be responding coherently to something it has detected or represented at a low sensory, emotional or associative level. That “something” need not correspond neatly to any of the persons, objects or causal stories through which conscious thought models the world.
What Aquinas calls synderesis might therefore be compared (not equated) with a pre-reflective evaluative architecture. Human beings continuously integrate sensory, bodily, emotional, social and learned information. Before we can state our reasons, this architecture produces orientations such as approach, avoidance, concern, trust, suspicion, fairness and wrongness.
These responses are neither arbitrary nor infallible. They are compressed, probabilistic evaluations of the world as the organism currently models it.
Conscious reasoning then converts them into explicit concepts, causes and narratives. Error can arise in the original modelling, in the conceptual interpretation or in the deductions that follow. Reflection can compound the error by inventing a persuasive but false explanation. It can also expose and correct it.
This gives us a more reciprocal relationship between intuition and reasoning than a simple truthful spark followed by fallible application.
The problem of the “real good”
Aquinas’s position nevertheless raises a deeper question.
The distinction between an apparent good and a real good assumes that there are objectively correct “goods” against which human judgement can be measured. We may mistakenly treat domination as strength, retaliation as justice or intoxication as relief, but such judgements are mistaken only because there is some more complete account of human “good” that they fail to grasp.
Aquinas’s account is not straightforwardly Platonic. He does not merely posit an independently existing Form of the Good in which particular things participate. His more immediate claim is that something is good insofar as it possesses the actuality or perfection appropriate to the kind of thing it is.
Sight is a good for an animal with eyes. Blindness is an evil because it is the absence of a capacity that the animal would ordinarily possess. Knowledge, friendship and rational social life are human goods because they fulfil characteristic human capacities. Evil is not generally an independently existing substance. It is a privation or disordering of an appropriate good.
A modern naturalistic translation is possible up to a point. We might say that certain goods are suited to human nature, where “human nature” refers to our biological inheritance and to the social and cultural structures created by beings with that inheritance.
We are vulnerable, embodied, interdependent animals. We need food, attachment, care, knowledge, security, social recognition and some ability to act within our environment. We can observe that particular conditions help human beings flourish while others predictably cause impairment, isolation and suffering.
But Aquinas needs more than this descriptive claim. He needs a normative hierarchy in which our different capacities and inclinations are correctly ordered.
Humans are naturally inclined towards self-preservation, knowledge, social life and the care of children. We are also naturally inclined, in varying circumstances, towards status, partiality, sexual jealousy, revenge and aggression under threat. Nature does not arrive with an annotation explaining which inclination should govern and when.
Aquinas answers that inclinations are good insofar as they are ordered by reason towards integral human fulfilment. Yet this returns us to the question we were trying to answer:
How does reason know what integral human fulfilment is?
Part of the answer can come from observation, experience and practical wisdom. But part depends upon Aquinas’s wider metaphysics:
- human beings have a divinely created nature,
- natural law participates in eternal law, and
- the direction of practical reason ultimately reflects an intelligible order grounded in God.
I cannot follow him all the way there.
Invoking God may provide a final metaphysical foundation, but for someone who does not already accept that foundation it can appear to close the inquiry rather than complete it. Why is the “good” objectively good? Because it reflects God’s nature. How do we know God’s nature is good? Because God is the ultimate good.
That may be internally coherent within the theological system. It does not provide an independent route by which an outsider can distinguish the real good from the apparent one.
This is not an accusation that religious believers are dishonest or intellectually unserious. Aquinas’s system is extraordinarily serious. My difficulty is that its confidence ultimately depends upon commitments that I do not know how to verify.
In a world where we are all the badly brought-up child
Consider a child raised among impulsive, coercive and destructive behaviour.
The child might learn that domination is strength, retaliation is justice, emotional volatility is honesty, and immediate relief matters more than long-term welfare. Other people’s needs might be experienced primarily as threats, manipulations or obstacles.
Aquinas can accommodate much of this. He accepts that people can acquire corrupt habits and make profoundly mistaken moral judgements. Vicious customs, strong passions and bad instruction can obscure secondary principles and prevent someone from applying a more general good to a particular situation.
He would nevertheless deny that this person possesses an entirely different synderesis. Even destructive behaviour is generally chosen under the appearance of some good:
- revenge as apparent justice;
- domination as apparent security;
- intoxication as apparent relief;
- aggression as apparent self-protection;
- impulsive pleasure as apparent happiness.
People rarely choose something because they perceive it as wholly and unqualifiedly evil. The action offers agency, status, pleasure, belonging, protection or relief. The moral failure lies in pursuing a partial good in a disordered way or at the expense of goods that matter more.
I find this account psychologically convincing. But it still assumes that someone, somewhere, can distinguish the partial or apparent good from the real one.
The problem is that, in a world where we are all versions of the badly brought-up child, all we encounter directly are apparent goods.
No human experience comes with an epistemic label saying:
REAL GOOD — OBJECTIVELY VERIFIED.
We encounter attraction, relief, attachment, pleasure, security, dignity, resentment, concern and social approval. We construct judgements about which of these correspond to worthwhile goods and how they should be balanced.
Calling something an “apparent good” already presupposes a standpoint from which it can be declared incomplete or mistaken. Aquinas thinks that standpoint is supplied by objective human nature, natural inclination, practical reason and ultimately eternal law.
Without his metaphysics, we need another account of the standpoint.
Morality as a distributed process
I am drawn towards a constructivist answer, but not one in which morality is merely arbitrary, conventional or whatever the majority happens to prefer.
My starting point is that moral judgement does not ordinarily begin with an abstract principle. It begins with embodied appraisal.
We witness or imagine fear, pain, humiliation, isolation, coercion or helplessness, and something in us recoils. We may possess evolved dispositions that contribute to this response. We also learn through our own experiences: being hurt, restrained, ignored, excluded or treated unfairly gives us small models of what similar experiences might be like for someone else.
These intuitions are partial and biased. We respond more strongly to identifiable people than to statistical populations. We are more sensitive to vivid, personalised violence than to harm produced through distance, bureaucracy or abstraction. We care more readily about those who resemble us. Our feelings can be manipulated, selectively activated or trained out of us.
But affective appraisal is still often the beginning of moral understanding.
I would therefore reverse the order in which moral philosophy often presents the process:
- Affective and embodied appraisal: this appears harmful, frightening or intolerable.
- Collective calibration: testimony, observation, statistics and stories reveal who suffers, how severely, how frequently and for how long.
- Conceptual compression: philosophers, lawyers and political theorists identify recurring structures—coercion, domination, violated consent, discrimination or removal of agency – and formulate general principles.
Philosophy tends to present the third stage as though it were the psychological source of the first. We say that an action is wrong because it violates autonomy, as though people first apprehended an abstract principle of autonomy and then deduced their emotional response.
More often, I suspect, the concept of autonomy is created because it names a recurring structure within experiences people have found damaging, terrifying or oppressive.
This does not make the concept unreal or useless. Compression is indispensable. We could not reason about every case from the complete history of every affected person. Concepts allow us to recognise patterns, compare situations and construct institutions.
But the concept is a model of recurring human experience, not necessarily a moral atom embedded in the fabric of the universe.
Why suffering supplies moral direction
What, then, distinguishes a morally successful construction from a morally disastrous one?
My answer is suffering.
Morality is an affectively grounded, socially distributed process through which human beings learn how actions and institutions generate suffering. Individual reports provide partial observations. Stories make inaccessible experiences imaginatively available. Collective comparison reveals recurring patterns. Abstract reasoning compresses those patterns into revisable principles and rules.
The direction of moral improvement is supplied by the reduction of suffering.
This is not the claim that every unpleasant experience must be eliminated, or that morality can be reduced to a simple sum of reported discomfort. Suffering differs in severity, duration, voluntariness, distribution and effect. Some short-term suffering prevents much greater harm. Some is voluntarily undertaken for love, achievement, discovery or solidarity. Some distress results from the frustration of a desire to dominate or exclude other people.
A plausible moral assessment therefore has to give particular weight to suffering that is:
- severe rather than trivial;
- involuntary rather than freely accepted;
- prolonged or irreversible rather than transient;
- concentrated upon particular people rather than dispersed as minor inconvenience;
- imposed upon one person for another’s benefit;
- liable to destroy the sufferer’s future ability to act, relate, recover or flourish;
- reported by people with direct access to consequences that outsiders cannot readily observe.
Suffering is therefore not a complete algorithm that automatically answers every moral question. It is better understood as a direction or negative gradient. It tells us where something has gone badly wrong and where further inquiry is required.
Nor can this inquiry be reduced to majority preference. A majority can impose terrible suffering upon a minority while regarding the resulting social order as entirely natural.
Moral knowledge must therefore be produced through critically structured intersubjectivity. We need to include those normally excluded, examine how burdens are distributed, expose claims to counterevidence and remain alert to long-term and systemic consequences. No individual viewpoint, and no majority viewpoint, should be treated as infallible.
What matters is not merely how many people endorse a practice, but who bears its costs and how those costs alter their ability to live.
Stories as moral transmission
Statistics are essential to this process because intuition is easily captured by the most vivid case. A dramatic story may concern an unrepresentative event. It may demonise an out-group, conceal ordinary experience or direct empathy towards those who already possess social power.
But statistics alone do not readily enter the human affective system.
“Ten per cent of this population experiences serious adverse effects” is abstract. It does not automatically supply a person, a body, a sequence of events, a set of thwarted intentions or a life altered over time.
Stories do.
A narrative allows me to recruit my existing experiences of pain, fear, exclusion and helplessness in order to model a life I have not lived. Stories allow minority evidence to enter the emotional world of the majority.
This is one of culture’s central moral functions. Novels, films, memoirs, testimony and journalism transmit otherwise private experiences across the boundaries between minds. They can make a harm perceptible before it is fully captured by a political or philosophical vocabulary.
But stories and statistics must constrain one another.
Stories make suffering emotionally available. Statistics help establish whether the story represents a recurring pattern. Testimony reveals forms of harm that outsiders fail to measure. Critical comparison prevents the loudest, most familiar or most socially powerful narrator from standing in for everyone.
Moral development is therefore neither pure sentiment nor pure calculation. It is a continuing negotiation between felt experience, distributed evidence and conceptual reasoning.
A hard test case
Rape provides a difficult but clarifying test case. I use it because its grave wrongness is not in doubt, not because I think that wrongness is culturally optional.
A conventional philosophical account might say that rape is wrong because it violates consent, overrides agency, appropriates another person’s body and treats a person as an instrument.
Those descriptions are correct and important. But I do not think they ordinarily explain how human beings first come to recognise the wrong.
The developmental and causal order is more likely to be:
- human beings possess learned and perhaps partly evolved aversions to direct violence, pain, fear and forced action;
- our own smaller experiences of injury, unwanted touch, restraint, humiliation or ignored refusal provide embodied models of being overpowered;
- testimony and stories allow those models to extend to experiences we have not personally undergone;
- accumulated evidence reveals a robust pattern of severe, imposed and often prolonged suffering;
- concepts such as consent, coercion and bodily autonomy compress that pattern;
- law converts the compression into a comparatively sharp rule.
The gendered reality matters. The prevalence of sexual violence, physical asymmetries, reproductive consequences and surrounding social structures have historically placed highly unequal burdens upon women. Recognising this does not exclude male victims or make the underlying moral prohibition gender-specific. It means that an abstractly universal rule exists within a social reality whose risks and consequences are not evenly distributed.
To say that concepts such as consent and autonomy are constructed does not mean they are dispensable fictions. They are among our most important moral technologies.
Taking control of another person’s body is morally significant because it predictably creates fear, injury, helplessness, humiliation and lasting disruption – and because it removes the person’s ability to determine which experiences and risks they will bear.
Consent is a particularly powerful boundary because outsiders have limited access to another person’s internal experience. We cannot safely allow each observer or alleged perpetrator to decide whether this particular person’s refusal mattered enough, whether the victim suffered sufficiently, or whether some supposed benefit outweighed the violation.
Law therefore has to discretise a continuous and complicated world.
The underlying moral situation may involve context, uncertainty and multiple perspectives. Institutions nevertheless have to act. The legal prohibition against non-consensual sex establishes a strong protective boundary because the costs of allowing people to override another’s refusal are severe, predictable and overwhelmingly borne by the person whose control has been taken away.
The rule is not merely abstract absolutism. It is a decision boundary designed to protect people against repeated reinterpretation by those with an interest in dismissing their suffering.
Why agency still matters
Grounding morality in suffering raises some awkward cases.
What if someone is violated while unconscious, never discovers it and experiences no subsequent distress? What if a person has been conditioned from childhood to accept exploitation and reports little dissatisfaction? What if domination is normalised so thoroughly that its victims lack the language with which to describe it?
These examples suggest that immediate, consciously reported suffering cannot be the only measure.
But I do not think they force us to treat agency as an independently existing metaphysical absolute. Agency can instead re-enter the account as an epistemic and practical safeguard.
Giving people meaningful control over their own lives is one of the best available ways to avoid imposing suffering that outsiders cannot perceive or predict.
A person generally possesses better access than an observer to their own priorities, vulnerabilities, relationships, bodily states and future plans. Removing their control exposes them to risks whose full consequences may emerge only much later. It also changes their social position, making them more vulnerable to further use or domination.
This helps explain why painless or undiscovered exploitation can remain wrong. The exploiter has taken a decision that properly belonged to another person, imposed risks without permission and established a relationship in which one subject’s interests are subordinated to another’s purposes. The absence of consciously experienced distress in a particular case does not erase the wider pattern of danger that makes the practice intolerable.
Agency is therefore not an alternative to suffering. It is partly a protective proxy for suffering, including suffering that is delayed, unreported, normalised or inaccessible to external observers.
This also explains why paternalism is dangerous. The supposedly benevolent decision-maker generally has worse access to another person’s experienced costs and priorities than the person themselves. Respecting agency is a way of acknowledging the limits of a single viewpoint.
A suffering-centred intersubjective constructivism
The position I arrive at might be called suffering-centred intersubjective constructivism.
It is:
- sentimentalist, because moral motivation and initial appraisal arise largely through affective responses;
- empirical, because moral learning depends upon testimony, consequences and observable patterns;
- intersubjective, because no single viewpoint can establish the whole picture;
- constructivist, because moral concepts and rules are human compressions of distributed experience;
- fallibilist, because intuitions, stories, theories and collective judgements can all be wrong;
- suffering-centred, because suffering supplies the principal negative signal through which practices are criticised.
This is an anti-realist position in the sense that I do not think moral rules exist as discrete, stance-independent objects waiting to be discovered. Human interactions are contextual, probabilistic and multidimensional. There are always multiple viewpoints and unknown consequences, including facts that are inaccessible within the minds of the people involved.
But anti-realism need not mean moral indifference.
The fact that our concepts are constructed does not make all constructions equally defensible. Bridges are constructed, but some collapse. Scientific models are constructed, but some predict the world better than others. Moral systems can likewise be evaluated by how adequately they register the experiences of affected people, how fairly they distribute burdens, how open they are to correction and how successfully they predict and reduce severe and involuntary suffering.
The majority may be wrong. Intuition may be prejudiced. Stories may manipulate. Statistics may conceal what was never measured. Reason may mistake its own abstractions for reality.
The answer is not to appoint one of these as infallible. It is to make them answerable to one another.
Suffering is not an abstract moral substance. It is the experienced error signal from which moral communities learn. Stories transmit that signal across otherwise separated minds. Evidence reveals its distribution. Concepts compress its recurring causes. Rules attempt to prevent its recurrence.
This reverses the conventional philosophical presentation.
We do not first discover a principle and then notice suffering as evidence that the principle has been breached. We experience and communicate suffering, recognise recurring structures in its production, and gradually formulate principles capable of protecting us.
Those principles remain revisable because we remain fallible. But they need not be arbitrary. They are the accumulated product of human beings trying – imperfectly, collectively and from many different viewpoints- to learn how not to destroy one another.
Robotic Ape 