Did St. Thomas Aquinas Justify the Transition from 'Is' to 'Ought'

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0. A Short History of the Problem
a deficient one. If this is so, then there is a possibility that, in studying Aquinas’s
thought, we may learn something.
I hope it will be evident from this dissertation that the “Is/Ought Thesis” and
“Naturalistic Fallacy,” as meta-ethical claims, are incompatible with St. Thomas’s
thought because of different epistemological, semantical, logical and metaphysical
presuppositions. It is also advisable to take into account that some renowned authors
have recently attempted to show that these two philosophical devices are doubtful
achievements. 45 We should be all the more cautioned not to defend important moral
truths with faulty premises and not to interpret Aquinas by use of such distorting lenses.
45 See for example G. E. M. Anscombe, “On Brute Facts,” originally published in 1958, reprinted in
Ethics, Religion and Politics, 22-25; idem, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” 26-42; Philippa Foot, atural
Goodness (Oxford University Press, 2001) as well as her many essays reprinted in collections Virtues
and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy and Moral Dilemmas and Other Topics in Moral
Philosophy (both published in Oxford University Press, 2002); John R. Searle, “How to Derive
‘Ought’ From ‘Is’,” The Philosophical Review 73 (1964): 43-58 (reprinted in Speech Acts: An Essay in
the Philosophy of Language, [Cambridge University Press, 1970], as Section 6.1: “The Naturalistic
Fallacy Fallacy”); Julius Kovesi, Moral otions, first published in 1967 and re-edited by R. E. Ewin
and Alan Tapper in Moral otions (with Three Papers on Plato) (Christchurch, New Zealand:
Cybereditions, 2004); Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A study in moral theory (London: Duckworth
1981), especially 6-83; Jean-Louis Gardies, L'erreur de Hume (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1987); Candace Vogler, Reasonably Vicious (Harvard University Press, 2002); Hilary Putnam, The
Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and other essays (Harvard University Press, 2002).