Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Care by Opposition

It may strike some readers as odd to speak of social dissent or civil disobedience as care, but it would be a serious mistake to suppose that all care is gentle, nurturing, and soft. Not much care is evinced for a person or an institution if one is content to let that person or institution go to moral ruin, and preventing the moral ruin of institutions or persons may require aggressive public opposition to them. There was more care for Henry VIII in More's intransigence than in Woolsey's compliance.

Eleonore Stump, Aquinas, Routledge (New York: 2003) p. 310.