I was working on a second installment on Brandom’s “lost” historical chapter of A Spirit of Trust, which makes some use of J. B. Schneewind’s The Invention of Autonomy (1998). Upon directly consulting Schneewind’s book, I found so much of interest that I have decided on a detour. This is an impressive history of moral philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries, with which I previously had little acquaintance.

Schneewind’s eventual main concern will be to bring out the way that ideas of self-governance originating from Stoicism — particularly as elaborated by the Roman authors Cicero and Seneca — were taken up and significantly developed by some of the leading writers of the day. This seems to be distinct from the tradition of natural law, which is also Stoic in provenance.

He notes that Kant uses the unprecedented expression “fact of reason” in relation to human freedom. “Readers who hold, as I do, that our experience of the moral ought shows us no such thing will think of his version of autonomy as an invention, rather than an explanation” (op. cit., p. 3). Nonetheless his book aims “to broaden our historical comprehension of Kant’s moral philosophy by relating it to the earlier work to which it was a response” (ibid). In this sense, Kantian autonomy is not at all an invention out of the blue.

The existence of this tradition makes Kant’s unusual claim much more understandable. I think the “fact of reason” claim is intended to be justified neither by our individual direct experience of the moral, nor even by Kant’s distinctive emphasis on our “taking” of things to be thus and such. Rather, it is suggested by the existence of the very substantial tradition of discourse about the role of self-governance in moral affairs that Schneewind documents. This discussion involved many of the leading writers of the 17th and 18th centuries. It would have been familiar to the audience Kant was writing for, even though it has not been well known in more recent times. The fact of reason claim makes much more sense as a claim about socio-historical or cultural fact. This also brings Kant closer to Hegel.

This discourse about self-governance has clear relevance to Kant’s affirmations of the moral equality of humans as humans. It thus represents an emerging alternative to what Brandom calls the traditional obedience paradigm of morality. (Recently, in the context of Duns Scotus, it came out that Stoic ideas of self-governance already had some currency among the early Franciscans. But in that context there was no explicit theme of equality.)

This post will in varying degrees cover Schneewind’s first six chapters, wherein the obedience paradigm is elaborated in new ways by the founder of the Protestant natural law tradition, Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) and his notorious follower Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). Still within the obedience paradigm, we will see that Richard Cumberland (1631-1718) contests the views of Hobbes on many points. But first Schneewind looks ahead to situate the notion of self-governance.

“During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries established conceptions of morality as obedience came increasingly to be contested by emerging conceptions of morality as self-governance. The new outlook that emerged by the end of the eighteenth century centered on the belief that all normal individuals are equally able to live together in a morality of self-governance” (p. 4).

“The conception of morality as self-governance provides a conceptual framework for a social space in which we may each rightfully claim to direct our own actions without interference from the state, the church, the neighbors, or those claiming to be better or wiser than we. The older conception of morality as obedience did not have these implications” (ibid).

“My main theme in what follows is the emergence of various conceptions of morality as self-governance. As early as Machiavelli and Montaigne there were thinkers who set aside the conception of morality as obedience in order to work out an alternative. But most of the philosophers who rethought morality in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries did not intend to replace the older conception with a conception of morality as self-governance. They were for the most part trying to solve problems arising within the older view. Most of them were hoping to show how Christian morality could continue to offer helpful guidance in the face of difficulties that no one had previously faced…. They could not have foreseen the uses to which later thinkers eventually put their ideas” (p. 5).

The last part about unforeseen uses is an important methodological consideration in working on this kind of history. Just as, for example, the modern notion of subject did not emerge all at once and is not a monolith, but underwent a long, complex development full of twists, turns, branchings, and occasional reversals, so too the developments here are anything but simple. And this is not just a happy aesthetic appreciation of difference, but also a matter of bloody religious wars and civil wars.

“Moral and political concerns led increasing numbers of philosophers to think that the inherited conceptions of morality did not allow for a proper appreciation of human dignity, and therefore did not properly allow even for the moral teachings of Christianity” (ibid).

This was a complex development. The obedience paradigm came to be more and more strongly associated with voluntarism. But voluntarism also became more differentiated, and began to be secularized. Explicit anti-voluntarism emerged as a significant trend, in Christian as well as secular contexts.

“Conceptions of morality as self-governance reject the inequality of moral capacity among humans that was a standard part of conceptions of morality as obedience” (p. 6).

“Events outside of philosophy itself were largely responsible for stimulating the rethinking of morality that occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Reformation and the Counter-Reformation made anything tied to religion a matter of controversy — and everything was tied to religion. The warfare that racked Europe almost continuously from the sixteenth century until the middle of the seventeenth century, and the civil conflicts in Britain that lasted almost until the century’s end, were understood in terms of issues about religion…. Morality as interpreted by churches that were themselves rent by sectarian disagreements could not provide either an inner sense of community or external constraints sufficient to make civilized life possible” (pp. 6-7).

Modern science was also developing by leaps and bounds, but for Schneewind this was not the main factor in the religious and social ferment of the time.

“Without the science, the course that moral philosophy took would no doubt have been different. But morality would have required reexamination and reshaping even if there had been no new science…. [T]he problems arising from religious dissension and from calls for wider participation in politics were not themselves due to advances in scientific knowledge” (p. 7).

“But there were many more people who, without being atheists or doubters, were taken to be antireligious because they held that institutionalized religion was doing great harm. They certainly hoped to see the churches or the clergy reformed, but they sought no secular ethic. Anticlericalism is not atheism” (p. 8).

This is important. Many opponents of religious authoritarianism have been profoundly religious themselves, but the hardline defenders of authoritarian and sectarian views have (and still do) commonly misrepresent them as atheists.

“Briefly, the claim that the main effort of the moral philosophy of the eighteenth century was to secularize morality does not stand up to the most cursory inspection” (ibid).

The Enlightenment mainstream opposed superstition and the religious sectarianism that was all too common. Some defenders of religion equated that opposition with a wholesale denial of religion, but this was a polemical misrepresentation.

Defenders of religion were not the only practitioners of polemical misrepresentation. “Among antireligious thinkers there were many who talked as if the only interpretation of religion on which God is essential to morality is that of the strong voluntarists” (ibid).

“Voluntarists hold that God created morality and imposed it on us by an arbitrary fiat of his will” (ibid). A concern with voluntarism was unavoidable in discussions of religion and morality during the period I shall be considering” (p. 9).

But “For everyone except the atheists, morality and religion remained tightly linked in early modern moral philosophy. The ethics of self-governance was created by both religious and antireligious philosophers” (ibid).

On the other hand, “Empiricism from Bacon through Locke had a strong affinity with voluntarism in ethics. Voluntarism in ethics tended to be associated with extreme conceptions of morality as obedience to God” (p. 10). Newton was a strong voluntarist too.

Schneewind’s work will show that Kant’s key concept of autonomy is firmly rooted in the anti-voluntarist tradition of self-governance, although this is not quite the lesson that Brandom draws from it.

“It seems to me not unreasonable to suppose that [Kant’s] normative commitment to a strong conception of morality as self-governance was at least a large part of what motivated him to develop his remarkable constructivist theory of knowledge as well as his motivational psychology. His is not the only case where the conventional portrayal of the historical relations between epistemology and moral philosophy is worse than useless” (p. 11).

“From [the work of Locke and Thomasius] it became evident why natural law theory seemed unable to meet the moral demands placed on it. Although Locke did not think it a failure, Thomasius did. There were no major natural law thinkers after these two, and I shall try to indicate why” (ibid).

“Influenced by Stoicism, rationalist thinkers from Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Descartes through Leibniz offered various versions of perfectionist ethics. Some thought we should focus on perfecting our knowledge, others, especially the Cambridge Platonists, emphasized perfecting our wills…. But even religious believers of orthodox persuasions aimed to show that morality requires much less of God’s direct operation than their predecessors had thought” (p. 12).

We’ll see a bit more on this “perfectionism” in a later post. This seems to be a different angle that cuts across the division between voluntarism and anti-voluntarism.

“The belief that human action should be guided by natural laws that apply to all people, no matter what their race, sex, location, or religion, originated outside of Judaism and Christianity. Once accepted into Christian thought, the idea of natural law became central to the European way of understanding morality…. These different Christian interpretations of natural law were far more significant for the development of modern moral philosophy than the ethical writing of Plato or Aristotle” (p. 17).

This is one of the more admirable aspects of Stoicism. From here, Schneewind begins his chronological account.

“The concept of natural law is at least as old as the Stoics” (ibid). “The most widely read transmitter of the idea of natural law was Cicero” (p. 18). “In accordance with Stoic teaching Cicero identified natural law with the dictates of right reason. Reason speaks with the voice of nature, showing us eternal and unchangeable laws applicable to all. It is the legislation of the gods, not alterable by human rulers” (ibid).

We have recently seen that even a strong voluntarist like Scotus could embrace the Stoic criterion of right reason in practical ethics.

“Ideas of natural law found a vital place in the development of Christian thought about the guidance of action. St. Paul provided the ground for incorporating them, in one of the most influential and frequently cited passages in the New Testament, Romans 2.14-15: ‘For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves. Which show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts meanwhile accusing or else excusing one another’ ” (ibid).

“[I]n about 1140 [the Decretals of Gratian took] the crucial step of identifying the natural law both with the directives contained in the Bible and with the law common to all people, the law they are led to acknowledge by a natural instinct” (pp. 18-19).

“The moral virtues, Aquinas holds, are habits enabling us to control the passions and desires that tend to lead us away from our true good. As habits concerned with practice these virtues must be guided by the principles of practical reason; and the principles of reason concerning the good are the laws of nature” (p. 19).

“But Thomas departs from Aristotle in holding that the laws of the virtues can be formulated and used in practical reasoning…. Thomas does not invoke the Aristotelian insight of the virtuous agent as our final guide. For him, the virtues are basically habits of obedience to laws” (p. 20, emphasis added).

Aristotle’s own view is that we should trust that a virtuous human will do the right thing.

“For Thomas, because ‘the will can tend to nothing except under the aspect of good’, the will is necessarily guided by what the intellect shows it as good” (ibid).

This side of Aquinas approaches Plato’s view that all beings desire the Good.

“When Christ summarized the laws, he told us to love God above all else and our neighbor as ourself. Not surprisingly, Thomas thinks that the laws of nature turn out to say the same thing. They teach us how to love rightly” (ibid).

On the other hand, for Aquinas “Our participation in the eternal law shows that we are not self-governed. We are governed by another” (p. 21).

“[F]or Duns Scotus the will is nobler than the intellect and is not tied by what the intellect can show it” (p. 23). “The most basic consideration leading Duns Scotus to the voluntarist position was the desire to maintain God’s omnipotence” (p. 25).

“Omnipotence is secured, at the cost of making God’s commands concerning the moral relations of human beings to one another an outcome of his arbitrary will. Luther and Calvin did not mind the cost. Voluntarism became an inescapable issue for later thinkers because of the decisive place they gave it in their moral theologies” (ibid).

“Suarez explains why the theologian must be the authority on the laws of nature” (p. 59). “Natural goodness provides the material for God’s command and justifies it; the formality of command alone makes obligation supervene upon natural goodness” (p. 61). “Suarez argues that everything concerned with moral goodness falls within the domain of natural law” (p. 62). “God could not achieve his end without making his law known, but no special revelation of it is required. The natural light, through the faculty of judgment — a part of right reason — teaches us what we are to do” (p. 63). “His own view is that the law is one for all humans because it is tied to the rational nature common to all” (p. 64). “Hence if conscience informs us adequately of the relevant precept and shows us that the case at hand falls under it, and we act with those considerations in mind, we do all that the law requires, inwardly as well as outwardly” (p. 65). “God does not efficaciously will the performance of all that he requires…. But he does efficaciously will that there be binding force, and hence obligation, to what the natural law requires” (ibid).

“Grotius’s central thought is that the laws of nature are empirically discoverable directives” (p. 72). “Grotius does not appeal to a divine manager of the universe whose governance assures us that obedience to natural law will contribute to the cosmic good while bringing us our own as well. He does not tell us that natural law points us toward perfecting our nature, or toward living as God’s eternal law requires. He considers only the empirical data about human conflict and its resolution” (ibid). “The general tenor of his remarks is opposed to voluntarism, and Grotius’s readers all took him to be opposed to it” (p. 74).

“He is therefore left with the problem of explaining exactly how acknowledging an obligation differs from noting goods and ills…. If rules impose obligation independently of the will of God, then it is not clear why God’s will must be invoked at all” (p. 75).

“The theory of the mean is one way of bringing out an an important point of difference between understanding morality as centered on virtue and taking it as centered on law” (p. 76). “The point of justice has nothing to do with the agent’s motives. To be just is simply to have the habit of following right reason with respect to the rights of others. Since right reason shows us the laws of nature, Grotius is assimilating virtue to obedience to law, as we have seen St. Thomas do…. He does not think the laws of nature determine what we are to do down to the last detail. Where the law is indeterminate, however, what operates is not insight but discretion. In such cases we make nonmoral choices among permissible acts. Grotius brings this out in direct confrontation with Aristotelianism” (p. 77).

It seems to me that these comparisons to Aristotle do not do him justice. Aristotle explicitly disavows any merely mechanical application of his criterion of the mean. It is not at all clear that Aristotle means to privilege “insight” over discretion. Either of these terms can be given a positive or negative spin.

“Thus, for Grotius, law points to good but is defined, not in terms of good, but in terms of injustice…. A perfect right gives rise to the kind of law under which people have strict obligations. As we would expect, justice is concerned with perfect rights and the obligations arising from them…. An imperfect right, by contrast, is an agent’s ‘aptitude’ or worthiness to possess or control something. This kind of right is associated, not with strict obligation, but with ‘those virtues which have as their purpose to do good to others’, for example, generosity and compassion…. He calls it the law of love, or a rule of love” (p. 79). “The law of love is not a law properly so called…. But it is significant that he treats the law of love as on an equal footing with the law of justice…. He treats rights as qualities grounding law, not as derived from law. They are personal possessions” (p. 80).

This may be the origin of the distinction between the good and the just, which is well established in the tradition but not obvious.

“Thus political authority need not arise from consent…. Moreover, not all rule is for the benefit of the governed. A good deal of it is for the good of the ruler. And there is really nothing for the people to do but endure it” (p. 81).

I tend to think of the consent of the governed in social contract theory as a kind of foundation myth. As long as we are going to have government, it ought to be in some real way “by consent”. But that does not mean that things are that way.

“Numerous Protestant writers on ethics and the foundations of politics followed him in using the language of natural law while detaching it from the specific doctrines of any particular religious confession, whether Protestant or Catholic” (p. 82).

“Like Grotius, Hobbes wrote about war and peace, but his concern was civil rather than international strife. He lived through the horrendous English civil war and experienced many of its consequences himself…. Philosophy, for Hobbes, is the rational discovery of connections of causes and effects…. The point of moral philosophy is to enable us to keep our society from disintegrating under the stresses produced by human nature” (pp. 83-84).

“Because he thinks that war is caused by ignorance, Hobbes says more about the causes of human conflict than Grotius does. At the center of his analysis is his view of the passions and desires. His psychology is intimately tied to his physics…. Hobbes defines desire and aversion in terms of the smallest motions — the ‘endeavors’ — of the atoms that constitute us. When we are moved toward some perceived or imagined object we say that we desire it…. When we are moved toward something, we call that toward which we are moved ‘good’. Thus we do not desire something because we think it good. We think it good simply because the thought of it moves us to get it…. Going beyond Grotius, who simply sets the issue aside, Hobbes flatly asserts that ‘there is no such Finis ultimis (utmost ayme), nor Summum bonum (greatest good), as is spoken of in the Books of the old Moral Philosophers’ ” (p. 84).

In this somewhat cynical refusal of the concept of a higher good, Hobbes recapitulates the Greek Sophists.

“In advancing the psychology that yields this conclusion Hobbes is rejecting the Stoic theory of desire and passion…. Hobbesian desires … are not propositional in the Stoic way…. [D]esires are causal forces. They stem from the interaction between our bodies and causal chains originating outside them, and they determine literally our every move. The Stoics thought the world was infused by rational deity and was consequently ordered toward harmony. If our desires represented the world and the goods in it accurately, we would live harmoniously, finding a highest good for ourselves which could be shared with all other like-minded people. Hobbes has no such view. Physical laws like those Galileo discovered hold no promise of humanly meaningful order” (pp. 85-86).

“The outcome is the famous war of all against all…. It is striking that although Hobbes’s portrayal of our nature and its social effects rivals in its vivid pessimism the dismal pictures of St. Augustine, Luther, and Calvin, his point is not theirs. He explicitly refuses to say that our nature is sinful. He is simply giving a scientific account of the factors that cause the problem we must learn to solve” (p. 87).

“In a complex situation we will feel moved in various directions. The conflict of desires and aversions thus constituted is what we call ‘deliberation’, and its outcome — the last appetite, the one that effectively causes one’s body to behave in a certain way, or, as we say, moves one to act — is the act of will. If the will is caused by an apparent good, the act is spontaneous, and a spontaneous act following deliberation is voluntary. If the will is moved by fear we do not call the act spontaneous, but acts done from fear and those done from hope are both caused in the same general way” (p. 88).

This candid recognition of the reality of conflict has something to say for it, but the reductionist dismissal of deliberation makes ethics impossible.

“It makes no sense to speak of the will as free. ‘I acknowledge this liberty‘, Hobbes says pithily, ‘that I can do if I will, but to say that I can will if I will, I take to be an absurd speech’ ” (p. 89, emphasis in original).

Here I think he is right. The genuine reality of ethical choice does not depend on the common post-Aristotelian assumption of a hypostasized faculty of choice.

“In the state of nature each has a right to all things and so no one is acting unjustly whatever one does for self-preservation” (ibid). “How is peace to be obtained? By giving up our right to all things…. This means that I cease to use my liberty to prevent others from getting what they want…. Once I actually limit my desires, then it may be said that I am bound or obliged not to interfere with any use made of the right I have given up; or that I ought not or have a duty not to interfere…. This means I cease to use my liberty to prevent others from getting what they want” (p. 90).

Hobbes views natural rights as inherently in conflict with one another, as indeed they must be if they were each a “right” to all things. In my view, even legitimate rights are artificial and not natural. They are a kind of distant second best that we reach for as a defense against abuses.

“Hobbes says also that he is not proposing new laws of nature. From the law requiring that we seek peace, he proceeds to demonstrate laws requiring us to be just, which for him means honoring contracts, to show gratitude, to do our best to get along with others, to judge fairly between disputing parties, to avoid arrogance and pride, and many others. These laws are contained in the Decalog. Its second table is summed up in the injunction to love one’s neighbor as oneself, its first table in the requirement that one love God; and these together form a fine summary of the laws of nature, useful in public instruction” (p. 92).

This is the same gloss on the ten commandments that we recently saw among the Franciscan theologians.

Hobbes’s version of the social contract strongly emphasizes one-sided obedience to the sovereign.

“Hobbes differs from Montaigne in thinking that we must each admit that our own sovereign’s laws are just. His laws may not be good; they may fail to help preserve peace; but ‘no law can be unjust’ because we have contracted to obey” (p. 93, emphasis added).

“In denying that we can appeal to natural law in order to criticize positive law, Hobbes is repudiating a major point in classical natural law theory. He is also attacking those who think that everyone has a private source of illumination about morals or religion, which could put each of us in a position to interpret the laws of nature for ourselves…. The havoc that could be wreaked by such teaching in a time of deep division over religion does not need to be explained; the constant turmoil in England between 1640 and 1660 shows how the doctrine could work with economic and political strife to endanger civil society itself” (pp. 93-94).

The critique of private sources of illumination is good. But the main value of natural law is that it depends on no particular human authority, and thus offers some shelter against abuses of such authority. Hobbes makes everything depend on particular human authority, while effectively denying that abuses of authority are abuses.

“Conscience for Hobbes is not itself a source of knowledge or even revelation…. It cannot be our supreme ruler, because we give up our right to take our own opinion as the sole measure of reason when we give up our right to all things” (p. 94).

This depends on a false dichotomy. We indeed have no right to take our own opinion as the sole measure of reason. But that is not what genuinely conscientious people do. A so-called conscience with no regard for others is not conscience at all.

“Hobbes allows that most people will not be able to follow his arguments. He has two remedies for this. One is regular teaching…. Hobbes suggests that there is a second remedy. Everyone can use the simple formula, ‘do not that to another, which thou wouldest not have done to thyself’ ” (ibid).

So even Hobbes recognizes the golden rule, at least for the rest of us.

“Hobbes thus agrees with Aquinas and Suarez that obedience to moral rules and positive laws is in most people the result of commands issued by an authority with power to penalize disobedience. The masses will understand the rules but not their rationale. Unlike Suarez, he does not say that obedience may come simply from a direct concern for righteousness, aroused by awareness of a law. Hobbes’s theory as a whole leaves little space outside the state of nature for anyone to exercise moral self-governance” (ibid).

Here, relatively speaking, I have to sympathize with Suarez.

” ‘The savages of America are not without some good moral sentences’, Hobbes says, just as they can add and divide small numbers. What they lack is not morals but science” (p. 95).

This sentiment as far as it goes is laudable, but I don’t see how it could be compatible with the unqualified natural war of all against all that Hobbes insists upon.

“Hobbes also goes out of his way to include another commonplace of the time. He ties morality to religion by claiming that the dictates of reason about how to live … cannot be called law unless we think that God commands us to obey them. Hobbes uses here the familiar natural law distinction between advice or counsel and law or command…. Readers of the time would have recognized this as a familiar point about the nature of law. They would have coupled it with Hobbes’s notorious remark that God’s right to reign over men ‘is to be derived, not from his creating them (as if he required obedience, as of gratitude for his benefits), but from his irresistible power‘. And they would have concluded that Hobbes was presenting a voluntarist view of morality” (ibid, emphasis in original).

And they would have been right.

“The impression would have been reinforced by some of Hobbes’s other statements…. Only beings capable of being moved to obey by threats of punishment and offers of reward can be subjects in any but a metaphorical sense…. We are not expected to understand God, still less to see justice in his action…. We should not expect to see any moral point in the distribution of goods and ills in this world. However unjust it may seem in human terms, it comes from God’s power and must be accepted. The similarity of this Hobbesian comment to Protestant doctrines of prevenient grace and election to salvation could not be missed…. All of this is quite in line with the Lutheran and Calvinist view that God is beyond our intellectual grasp” (pp. 95-96).

And this is supposed to be historically progressive and morally superior?

“The Suarezian moral impulse may be the impulse to righteousness, or to compliance with law as such, but that, as I have noted, is absent from Hobbes’s theory. Hobbes agrees instead with Grotius that reason teaches us directives whose obligatory force does not depend on God. If command is needed for law, it is unnecessary for obligation; Hobbes indeed insists that God commands only what reason shows to be obligatory for our preservation” (pp. 96-97).

Unconditional submission to authority is obligatory for our preservation? I still think the appropriate guide to action is whether something is good or right. The moral force of the teaching of reason indeed does not depend on a command.

“Hobbes’s aim is consistently to present a theology that reinforces the need for obedience to the ruler. Unlike Machiavelli he makes a serious effort to show that Christianity can be the appropriate civil religion…. What he is arguing for is in fact a minimalist Christianity not unlike the kind that Grotius expounded…. The most important conclusion from this is that no one can ever rightly think that God commands disobedience to the sovereign” (p. 98).

“I do not think we should take Hobbes to be ‘secularizing’ morality. He thinks that religious belief is the chief cause of anarchy. It is therefore vitally important to his political aims to make impossible any claims about the relation of religion and morality other than his. The God of voluntarism has a crucial role in Hobbes’s preemptive strategy. If the God who is adumbrated in Hobbes’s voluntarist terms is essential to morality, constituted as such by his command, then Hobbes’s theory implies that the management of our lives must be entirely up to us. Priests and churches and Scriptures have no authority; only our mortal deity does” (p. 99).

“Luther and Calvin do not intend voluntarism to take God out of the human community. They use it to ensure that his inscrutable ways will always be in our thought…. Hobbesian voluntarism has an entirely different function” (ibid). “Hobbes says, ‘God has no ends’…. The theorems God turns into laws are moral laws only for us. They cannot be laws for God because he has no ruler over him to command him. Moreover he does not have the nature from which our laws derive their obligatory force” (p. 100).

“To counter Hobbes, Cumberland found it necessary to put forward a new theory of morality…. He was not a reformer. But he was the first philosopher who created an important new ethical theory because he thought it was morally required in order to defeat voluntarism” (pp. 101). “Cumberland, unlike [Grotius and Hobbes], aimed to show that love is the core of morality, and law only its instrument. He invoked nothing less than the universe to do so…. God’s creation must be harmonious. Concord must be natural in both the material and the moral world. It is the view held by Aquinas and Hooker” (p. 102). “But when they said that the first law of nature is that good is to be pursued and evil avoided, they were not thinking in terms of aggregates of goods of individuals, and they certainly did not have the maximization of such an aggregate in mind. These ideas make their first appearance in Cumberland. He leaves us in no doubt that we are to understand the good in thoroughly quantitative terms…. When Cumberland spelled out precisely what the law of love is and claimed that it is the sole basis of all of morality, he was quite deliberately taking a radical new step in moral theory” (p. 104).

Cumberland is apparently often regarded as a sort of proto-utilitarian. The calculus of utility is less horrible than the emphasis on command.

“Cumberland rejects the Hobbesian view that our words and deductive systems are inventions we make to serve our desires. Ideas and the truths they form when brought together are, rather, impressed upon us by the world…. Truth is thus the conformity of our ideas ‘with the things themselves’ ” (p. 105). “Establishing a necessary and eternally true principle of morality is for Cumberland the key to defeating voluntarist denial that God and we form a single moral community. He thinks it is imperative to win this point. Unless we do so, we are left with Hobbes’s contention that God rules solely because of his irresistible power…. We can learn his morality. We do not need to appeal to innate ideas or to metaphysics to see this. Modern science has established the necessary geometrical laws of the physical universe. Cumberland thinks that he himself has done the same for morality” (p. 106). “He presents the law of nature as a statement of necessary causal connections relating benevolence, individual happiness, and the greatest happiness of all rationals” (p. 107).

In Brandom’s terms, Cumberland is all about the primacy of normative “statuses” that are supposed to objectively exist, and not to depend on any judgment by us.

“God legislates by telling us that it is necessary for us to act to bring about the greatest good of all rationals. This is true because, no matter whether we pursue our own good or the good of others, we can reach our end fully only by acting in ways that forward the greatest good. The obligation of law comes, then, simply from God’s telling us the truth about what it is necessary for us to do, given our ends. We can learn the truth from experience” (p. 110). “Cumberland’s claim that empirical evidence shows the truth of the law of nature is thus a claim about natural sanctions. Selfishness is self-punishing, benevolence self-rewarding, and these facts are empirical” (p. 111). “For Cumberland nature enables us to move from what we do desire to what is truly desirable, and the law of nature is thus a schoolmaster to lead us to God (Galatians 3.24)” (p. 112).

Natural sanctions seem like a good idea, as does the idea that we can learn. It is hard to argue with an emphasis on the greatest good. But the assumption that all goods are commensurable is false. The constant challenge of ethics is that some goods are incommensurable with one another.

“Since the will must seek clearly perceived good, what God understands about good is ‘analogous to a natural law’; and since his understanding is infinite, the necessity with which he follows it is much greater than any that could be induced by sanctions. There is therefore an ‘intrinsic propension of the divine will’ that makes it impossible for God to violate the dictate that the greatest good is to be pursued” (p. 113). “Cumberland thus thinks that we need not fear Hobbesianism because he has shown that God thinks rationally, as we do. God and we must follow the same moral law. We can confidently apply our understanding of morality to God in order to conclude that God is just; and because God could not reveal anything ‘contradictory to the just conclusions of our reason’, we are to believe the Scriptures” (ibid).

Cumberland here draws a conclusion that is diametrically opposite to the Radical Orthodoxy claims about Scotist univocity.

“As ‘subordinate members’ of the Kingdom of God. we are each entitled to only as much personal good as is in proportion to our importance in that Kingdom” (p. 114). “We have individual rights, in short, only insofar as it serves the common good for us to have them” (p. 115).

“No two true propositions can be inconsistent. So if any of us judges that our taking something we need to support our own life would be permissible, we must admit that a similar act by anyone else similarly situated would be so as well” (ibid). “Only a morality of obedience gives us the guidance we need” (p. 116).

While opposed to voluntarism, Cumberland still very strongly and clearly endorses the obedience paradigm.

“Human ignorance, he argues, justifies our keeping the present system of private property intact” (p. 117). “But justice consists in observing the rights of possessors, and those rights must be treated as inviolable. Moreover we must acquiesce even in a division of property that arose from chance, such as casting lots or first occupancy, because the importance of having settled ownership is so great” (p. 117). “Hence ‘a desire of innovation in things pertaining to property, is unjust’ because necessarily inconsistent with the fundamental law requiring pursuit of the greatest good. Ignorance puts us in a condition where we must all be obedient to God, and where most of us must be obedient as well to the wealthy and the powerful in this world” (ibid).

In case anyone worried that a concern with the greatest good of the greatest number might lead to socialism, Cumberland makes it very clear that he puts property rights ahead of other rights. This is actually typical in classic accounts of rights. Schneewind clearly thinks Cumberland goes even further, and holds that we must obey those who are wealthier than we are. Cumberland’s God apparently supports plutocracy.