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Payton Eggering
PHI 308 01: Ethics
Dr. Echelbarger
15 August 2021
Daughter Vice of Gluttony: Improper Joy
When looking at capital vices, it is beyond important to consider how one gets to the
point of committing such a grave sin. It begins by looking at something called a daughter vice,
one of the key signs that a capital vice is close to consuming one’s soul. In order to understand
how this process occurs, there needs to be a clear understanding of what a daughter vice is, how
it relates to the capital vice, and how diligence and attentiveness can avoid one’s soul from being
stained by these vices. The best way to describe this concept is by looking at one of the capital
vices and its daughter vice. Gluttony, and its daughter vice of improper joy, will be the examples
used in order to help in the understanding of how to look for this capital vice in one’s day-to-day
life.
A daughter vice is a type of vice that originates as a sort of symptom from the capital
vice. The capital vice in question, gluttony, has five daughter vices. These vices, improper joy,
rudeness, garrulousness, sexual impurity, and dullness of the senses in relation to the use of
intelligence, all are the signs and symptoms to the greater vice. For further understanding, one
can turn to St. Thomas Aquinas’ work, On Evil, to understand where the term “daughter vice”
comes from:
“We call a sin capital and the mother of sins by the same consideration, namely, insofar
as other sins arise from it, ordained to its end. For such a consideration belongs to the
nature of head insofar as the head has the power to rule over things subject to the head,
and we understand the nature of every governance from its end. And such a consideration
also belongs to the nature of mother, since a mother conceives offspring within her very
self. And so we say that a sin from which other sins arise is the mother of the others,
which result from the sinner conceiving their end.” (Aquinas 349)
All this to say that the reason they are considered daughters is because when looking at the term
“capital,” it means that it is the head of something. Therefore, a capital vice is the head of other
vices. Continuing with Aquinas’ work, one can see his definition of improper joy and how it
relates to its mother vice of gluttony.
Improper joy is defined as “a disorder result[ing] in one’s disposition, which is
inordinately affected when the governance of reason is lulled to sleep” (416). Translated in a
more modern way, this means that once one has partaken in the immoderate pleasure in food and
drink that is gluttony, our minds become disordered to the point that reason is no longer in
control, it is our pleasure. To see the relationship of improper joy to gluttony, Aquinas says that
sins that arise from gluttony are ones that can result from immoderate pleasure in food and drink
(416). Because one can have an immoderate amount of joy due to food and drink, it can lead to
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their reason being put to the side because of any number of reasons, such as inebriation,
ignorance, or just a general lack of care.
This uniquely undermines the flourishing of human beings because it embraces the idea
that pleasure is the way in which we are meant to be happy. However, human happiness has been
proven to not be our end to happiness by many different philosophers and writers. For example,
in Robert J. Spitzer’s “The Four Levels of Happiness,” he clearly defines our happiness as
needing to be “‘pervasive’, ‘enduring’, and ‘deep’” (Spitzer 67). Since pleasure is able to change
based on one’s mood and may only go as “deep” as how delicious food is, there is little hope for
those who like to put pleasure at the center of their happiness to stay that way forever. Looking at
Rebeeca DeYoung’s book, Glittering Vices, when talking about gluttony on page 187, she says,
“[T]he pursuit of happiness in material goods and the pleasures they afford, as well as the
attempt to provide them for ourselves in the form of pleasure, can never fill or fulfill us.” This,
once again, is due to putting pleasure at the center of our happiness and it being something that is
not and can never be fulfilling and intrinsically enduring.
By having the ability to see when one’s thoughts are straying from joy for the proper
reasons, it can allow them to step back before it is too late and shift the priorities to the proper
ones. For example, if one starts to notice that they have nothing to do, so they begin to look for
something to eat, this can be the first sign that improper joy may be occurring. In this example,
one is not eating because their body told them that they are hungry, they are eating out of
boredom, which would be a lack of reason to be eating, showing the improper joy. By identifying
this and avoiding these times of boredom and lull, there can be measures put in place in order to
avoid the path to gluttony.
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Works Cited

Aquinas, Thomas. On Evil. Edited by Brian Davies. Translated by Richard Regan, Oxford

University Press, 2003.

DeYoung, Rebecca Konyndyk. Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their

Remedies. Brazos Press, a Division of Baker Publishing Group, 2020.

Spitzer, Robert J. Finding True Happiness: Satisfying Our Restless Hearts. Ignatius Press, 2015.