 Along with very many other Thomistic commentators, McInerny and O’Callaghan 2005 and Celano 2003 treat Aquinas’ moral philosophy as founded, like his moral theology, upon his determination of what felicitas (= perfecta beatitudo and Aristotle’s eudaimonia) truly is, a determination made in the opening quaestiones of the Second Part of his Summa Theologiae, where he elaborately argues that complete beatitudo or felicitas consists in an uninterruptible vision of God (and, in God, of the other truths we naturally desire to know), something possible for us only in a life – in many respects another life – after death. But it is possible to regard Aquinas’ argument in those quaestiones as dictated by the needs of a specifically theological pedagogy, as open to telling objections, and as detachable from (or at least as methodologically posterior to) the working and sound foundations of his moral philosophy and his treatment of specific moral issues – detachable, that is to say, in a way that Aquinas would not need to regard as inappropriate in the different context of today’s discourse. This article will treat Aquinas’ ethics and political theory as detachable from his theology of life’s ultimate point, and will take seriously his emphatic and reiterated thesis that, apart from the divinely given and super-natural opportunity of perfecta beatitudo (a gift about which philosophy as such knows nothing), the only ultimate end and beatitudo (fulfillment) for human beings is living in a completely reasonable, morally excellent (virtuosus) way. That thesis entails that philosophy’s main account of morality need and should contain no claim about what perfect happiness consists in.