La sinergia entre la inteligencia, la voluntad y la afectividad en el conocimiento connatural del bien. Impronta novedosa en la Ética de Tomás de Aquino

The contemporary ethical landscape reveals a crisis of credibility regarding the foundations of the normative order, along with a weakening of the traditional values that guided life. Relativism takes center stage, and the validity of moral judgments is restricted to the private sphere of subjective conscience, thereby closing in on the possibility of objectively grounding ethics. Against this backdrop, the main objective of this work is to revive a traditional ethical vision, such as that of Thomas Aquinas, but giving it a novel twist. This novel twist proposes reviving the theme of natural law as the objective foundation of ethics, based on a path of innate knowledge of the good, characterized by a constitutive synergy between the different human capacities: intellectual, volitional, and affective. The innate knowledge that human beings experience with the good is a type of knowledge of an intellectual nature that inherently carries with it the affectivity that accompanies the will in every act. This type of knowledge will be explained through a chain of connaturalities, ranging from the virtues of synderesis and prudence to the voluntas ut natura and the accompanying voluntas ut ratio. Re-evaluating all these themes of Thomas Aquinas’s Unitary anthropology is vitally important, as they show that within human nature there is an intrinsic dynamism, grounded in the inception of natural law. Through this chain of connaturalities, we will attempt to re-evaluate, on the one hand, humankind’s capacity to intellectually know this law, and, on the other, the power of their will and the impetus of their affectivity to follow it accurately. Finally, we will be able to demonstrate that moral experience is a synthesis of nature and freedom, where affectivity and inclinations always accompany intelligence and will in the pursuit of one’s own human goods.