17th and 18th Century Moral Philosophy

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.

Beyond Obedience: Brandom’s “Lost Chapter”

Early modern legal and political theory has a significant historical relationship to theological voluntarism that it would be important to understand. This also seems relevant to my recent work on Scotus (or vice versa).

A chapter of Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust that was omitted from the final published version, and mainly traces antecedents of Hegelian mutual recognition in early modern social contract theory, first brought this issue to my attention. I will be devoting a few posts to it.

It seems indisputable that social contract theory has a genealogical relationship to theological voluntarism. But it is no secret that I prefer to ground mutual recognition in Aristotle’s ethical concept of friendship. Among other issues, social contract theories are tainted by an at best only partial emancipation from their voluntarist heritage. It is my contention that Kant and Hegel finally work free of this widespread voluntarist taint that Plato and Aristotle never shared, and this is one of the reasons why they are so valuable.

I was initially quite horrified to see what looked like a kind of historical valorization of voluntarism by one of my heroes. But although it does contain a few valorizing phrases, as I read it now, Brandom’s discussion really has more to do with the existence of counter-trends within trends than with a real endorsement. In any case, this additional complication deserves to be documented. For now I will skip over the first section, which offers a nice recap of his high-level view of Kant and Hegel, on which I have commented several times already.

“The traditional metaphysics of normativity that Hegel sees all subsequent forms of understanding as developing from the rejection of is the subordination-obedience model” (Pre-Hegelian Stages in the History of the Metaphysics of Normativity, p. 6).

Elsewhere, Brandom has referred to this as the authority-obedience model, but the meaning is the same. This bad model puts all authority on one (commanding) side, and all responsibility on the other (obeying) side. Brandom has championed the idea that authority and responsibility should instead be apportioned symmetrically. Aristotle would approve of this.

Obedience has no role in rational ethics. A rationally ethical person will normally obey the law, giving the benefit of the doubt to measures designed to promote safety and social peace. But her motivation for doing so is a general consent to the reasonableness of enacting such measures.

Aristotle’s highest moral ideal is the reciprocity of friendship. He further suggests that we extend the model of friendship to those who dwell in our city. In the same spirit, it could be extended further, and that is just what Hegel eventually did. The only reference to obedience in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is the incidental mention of a sick person disobeying her doctors, in one of his examples.

However, in the development of the Latin tradition, obedience came to be designated as a virtue in its own right. In the early modern period, all virtue was sometimes reduced to obedience. This was reinforced by the concept of “positive” law, which is supposed to be obeyed merely because it is law, independent of whether the law is just or rational or not. This makes goodness a derivative property that follows from the meeting of obligations, rather than being based on independent criteria. An obligation of obedience to authority displaces proper human ends. Meeting such obligations becomes an end in itself.

“The distinguishing feature of this model is that the paradigmatic normative status, obligation, is taken to be instituted by the command of a superior. As an explicit metaphysics of normativity, the origin of theories of this sort is in theology, in a picture of God as the ultimate legislator, whose commands institute laws that his creatures are obliged to obey. The voluntarist wing of Catholic natural law theory represented by Duns Scotus and William of Ockham gave rise to Protestant natural law theorists who to one extent or another secularized and naturalized the approach. (I’ll say something further along about the significance for Hegel of the contrary intellectualist wing of the natural law tradition — paradigmatically Aquinas, but also Averroes — and of Suarez’s characteristic attempt at a synthesis of the two.) Grotius, Cumberland, Hobbes, Pufendorf, Thomasius, and Locke all understood the normatively binding force of laws, their capacity to oblige obedience, as rooted in the antecedent existence of a superior-subordinate relationship between the authoritative promulgator of the law and those responsible for obeying it” (pp. 6-7).

This emphasis on obedience to authority is a big part of what I mean by a “voluntarist taint”. For some, like Hobbes, this is not just a taint, but something wholeheartedly embraced.

“Hobbes attributes God’s natural right to command obedience to his ‘irresistible power’ to punish disobedience. His ‘state of nature’ is identified precisely with the lack of natural social relations of ‘sovereignty and subordination,’ among humans, in which no-one owes obedience to anyone else because power to punish, from which the right to command obedience derives, has not yet been concentrated in a sovereign. Locke, too, thinks that ‘the inferior, finite, and dependent is under an obligation to obey the supreme and infinite.’ But he understands God’s authority to oblige and compel human obedience as consisting not only in his power to do so, but as rooted in another matter of objective fact: his status as our creator. A creator, he thinks, has a natural right to lay down laws creating obligations of obedience for his creations” (pp. 7-8).

Hobbes bluntly affirms political voluntarism and a Thrasymachan “might is right” doctrine as justification for absolute monarchy. Locke is more refined, but adding a creationist justification to a voluntarist justification is not particularly helpful.

“Cumberland offers a characteristically mixed account. He analyzes law into two components, the precept (the content enjoined or proscribed) and the sanctions provided for noncompliance. Possession of the power to punish disobedience is a non-normative matter. But God’s paradigmatic possession of normative authority as a superior to legislate for subordinates depends crucially on his benevolence towards those subordinates. It is his wishing them well (and knowing what is best for them) that is the basis of his normative status as superior in the sense of having the right to legislate. On the one hand, one can think of God’s (or a king’s) benevolence as a matter of objective fact. He either has the attitude of wishing the good for his subordinates, or he does not. On the other hand, the attitude of benevolence is itself a normative attitude: being motivated to act for their welfare, aiming at what is good for them” (p. 9).

The moment authority becomes even partially answerable to something like benevolence or a standard of reasonableness or justice, we no longer have pure authoritarianism or voluntarism. It is debatable whether we still have voluntarism at all if it is qualified in any way, since the distinctive mark of voluntarism is to explicitly allow or “justify” arbitrariness, which means anything at all. But whatever we call them, the existence of mixed forms needs to be recognized.

[quote from Richard Cumberland, A Treatise of the Laws of Nature (1672):] “the Obligation of a Law properly so called, which proceeds from the Will of a Superior,” (p. 9n).

Here we have the voluntarist calling card.

[Cumberland:] “the intrinsick Force of all those Arguments, with which the Legislator (God) uses to enforce Universal Benevolence, is, in my opinion, all that is meant by the Obligation of Laws: The Rewards annext to Universal Benevolence by the right Reason of Men, chiefly oblige, because they promise, beside the Favour of Man, the Friendship of the Chief of Rational Beings, GOD, the Supreme Governour of the World. The Punishments they inflict by the same Reason, are both Parts of the present, and most certain presages of the future, Divine Vengeance” (ibid).

Reward and punishment are sub-ethical motivations. But benevolence is a genuine ethical criterion.

[Cumberland:] “That the End of the Legislator, and also of him who fulfils the Law of Nature, is far greater and more excellent, than the avoiding that Punishment, or the obtaining that Reward, whence the Law receives its Sanction, and which is what immediately affects every Subject; though the Obligation of every Subject to yield Obedience be indeed, immediately, discover’d by those Rewards and Punishments. For the End, that is, the Effect directly intended by both, is the Publick Good, the Honour of the Governor, and the Welfare of all his Subjects” (ibid).

The public good and welfare are again genuine ethical criteria.

Brandom finds greater clarity in Samuel Pufendorf (1642-1694). The next section, to which I will devote a separate post, will go into more detail on Pufendorf as a precursor to Kantian ethics. We get just a taste of it here.

“Pufendorf, too, rejects Hobbes’s claim that the superior/subordinate status relationship that is the source of the normative force of obligations consists solely in the differential power of the one who is owed and the one who owes obedience” (p. 9).

Might does not confer right.

[quote from Samuel Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations (1672):] “Neither strength nor any other natural pre-eminence is alone sufficient to derive an obligation on me from another’s will, but that it is farther requisite that I should have received some extraordinary good from him, or should have voluntarily agreed to submit myself to his direction” (pp. 9-10).

“God, for instance, gave us an ‘extraordinary good’, performed a ‘special service’ by creating us, so this thought might be seen to be behind Locke’s invocation of the right of the creator. Or, as Cumberland has it, God showed us his benevolence towards us by not only creating us, but creating us in his image in the specific sense of making us like him at base universally benevolent. Here we see two rising themes challenging the grounding of obligation in prior objective relative statuses of superior/subordinate, calling forth command on the part of the superior and obedience on the part of the subordinate as the consequent appropriate practical acts or normative attitudes” (p. 10).

Here Brandom’s analysis is extremely valuable.

“One is the idea that the status of superior, having the right to command, to oblige those commanded to obey, has not only normative consequences, but also normative conditions. This is the idea that being a superior is a normative status that one must deserve (for instance, through the fact of service or an attitude of benevolence). This goes beyond the simple idea that authority is more than mere power. For that distinction can be made entirely on the side of the consequences of application of the concept superior. It is the claim that the circumstances of application of that concept are themselves normative in character. One has to have done well by the subordinates through performing a service, or at least had an attitude of wishing them well, that is, benevolence towards them. The second idea is the idea that the status of being a superior, in the sense of having a right or authority to impose obligations and command obedience (as opposed to the mere power to punish noncompliance) might be dependent on the attitudes of the subordinates: on their having agreed or consented to, or otherwise acknowledged that authority” (ibid).

If there is such a thing as a right to command others and not just a power to do so, that right is necessarily conditional and not absolute. This is related to the Enlightenment notion of government by consent.

“Both these ideas can be seen at play throughout early modern thinking about normativity. And they both stand in substantial tension with the traditional metaphysical picture of normative statuses of obligation as rooted in the prior existence of objective ontological relations of superiority and subordination, as epitomized by the neoplatonic scala naturae. The idea that beyond one’s power to enforce obedience, status as a superior with the normative authority to impose obligations is something one might or might not be entitled to — that the normative issues of one’s right to command or whether one deserves to do so are not settled just by how things non-normatively are — threatens to undermine the idea that all normative statuses can be understood to be instituted by the commands of superiors to subordinates. As Leibniz argues in his “Opinion on the Principles of Pufendorf” of 1706, if it is acknowledged that besides power there must be reasons justifying commands for them to be legitimately imbued with the authority of a superior, understanding what entitles the superior to command as a normative status instituted by the command of a superior would create a circle ‘than which none was ever more manifest’ ” (p. 11).

Once the issue of entitlement to command is raised, it cannot be answered by simply appealing to another command.

“The subordination-obedience metaphysical model of normativity that explains the normative status of obligation on the part of the subordinate cannot be extended to explain the normative status of being entitled to the authority to command. If the concept of the status of superiority not only has normative consequences of application in the form of authority to impose obligations on subordinates, but also normative circumstances of application in the sense that the one who commands must be justified in doing so, must deserve, be worthy, or have a right to that authority, then some other form of normative status must be acknowledged that is not itself to be understood on the model of institution by the command of a superior. Leibniz, like Cumberland, looked to the attitude of benevolence. The thought that the relative statuses of superiority and subordination are themselves already fully normative statuses is part of what is behind the famous opposition between law and love (for example in the natural law tradition and in the Cambridge Platonists, respectively) as what is taken to be the most basic conception in early modern moral theory” (pp. 11-12, emphasis in original).

“The second idea is even more momentous. For it is the idea that the normatively significant status of having the authority to impose obligations (which according to the first idea also counts as a normative status in the sense that exhibiting it has normative conditions of desert, worth, or entitlement) is, or at least can be, attitude-dependent. Pufendorf’s invocation of ‘consent’ (or elsewhere ‘acknowledgement’) by the subordinate as a condition of the superior’s right to command marks a decisive change from traditional views. The idea that the normative statuses instituted by natural law might be dependent on normative attitudes is a distinctively modern one. Indeed, the core of Hegel’s understanding of the transition from traditional to modern selves, norms, and societies, as laid out in the Spirit chapter, should be understood to consist in a shift in the relative priority of normative statuses and normative attitudes…. The basic thought is that it is of the essence of traditional structures of normativity that normative statuses are conceived of as objective, in the sense that neither their content nor their binding force depends on anyone’s normative attitudes. Those normative statuses set the standard for assessments of the propriety of attitudes. The law is what it is, independently of what anyone thinks about it, and one is obliged to acknowledge one’s responsibility to its authority. The paradigmatic form of this traditional structure is what I have called the “subordination-obedience” model of normativity. In its classic form, being a subordinate or a superior is an objective normative status, and normative subjects are supposed to (are subject to a distinctive kind of criticism, including punishment, if they do not) acknowledge them by adopting practical attitudes of obedience and command” (pp. 12-13).

I would say this a little differently. What is important to the argument is that from a Kantian or Hegelian point of view, normative statuses are never simply given. They are always the result of an evaluation, though the quality of the evaluation may be better or worse. What is important to the argument is that normative statuses are the result of an interpretation.

“By contrast, it is distinctive of modernity to take normative statuses of authority and responsibility, entitlement and commitment, to be instituted by normative attitudes of acknowledging or attributing those statuses: taking or treating someone in practice as authoritative or responsible, entitled or committed. While Hegel insists that this modern model expresses a genuine and important truth about the metaphysics of normativity, in the end he sees both the traditional and the modern models of normativity as one-sided: the first as hyper-objective and the second as hyper-subjective. Just as traditional accounts failed to acknowledge the authority of attitudes over statuses, the responsibility of statuses to attitudes that the moderns had discovered, even the most sophisticated version of the modern understanding, Kant’s autonomy account, though it does also acknowledge the authority of statuses over attitudes, the responsibility of attitudes to statuses, which the tradition had appreciated, fails adequately to integrate the traditional and modern lines of thought. Hegel’s own social recognitive metaphysics of normativity is to give each its due” (p. 13).

Kant already aims at a kind of synthesis of these two perspectives. Hegel, according to Brandom, judges that Kant fails to achieve it, because Kant treats moral judgment only from the point of view of the individual.

“The vocabulary I am using to express these ideas is mine rather than Hegel’s. He does not use the terms ‘authority’ and ‘responsibility’. These are the terms I am adopting to talk about what he discusses under the headings of ‘independence’ and ‘dependence’, neither of which, he insists, can properly be understood independently of its relation to the other, both of which must be understood as themselves interdependent ‘moments’ in a more complex structure. Though he uses these central logical-metaphysical terms in many ways, I want to claim that the normative uses paraphrasable in terms of authority and responsibility are fundamental — their ‘home language game’. Nor does Hegel use the terms ‘status’ and ‘attitude’. These are the terms I am adopting to talk about what he discusses under the headings of what things are in themselves (Ansichsein) and what they are for themselves or others (Fürsichsein). The discussion in the previous chapter of understanding self-conscious selves as beings such that what they are in themselves is an essential element of what they are for themselves introduces the idea of a kind of normative status, being a self-conscious individual normative subject, that depends on (is responsible to) normative attitudes (the commitments one acknowledges by identifying with them). Though ‘in-itself’ and ‘for-itself’ (also ‘for-an-other’) are central logical-metaphysical terms Hegel uses in many ways. For instance, in discussion [of] the Perception chapter, we saw them used to distinguish, roughly, intrinsic from relational properties. But I claim that their use to distinguish normative statuses from practical normative attitudes in the social recognitive metaphysics of normativity is fundamental — their ‘home language game’. This strategy of understanding ‘independence’ and ‘dependence’ in terms of authority and responsibility and ‘in-itself’ and ‘for-itself’ (‘for-an-other’) in terms of normative statuses and normative attitudes lies at the core of the semantic reading of the Phenomenology I am offering here” (p. 14).

This is a good reminder that when Brandom speaks of attitudes, he means to express what for Hegel is part of a broader notion of what something is for itself, or for another. As Brandom points out, relational properties are another example of what something is “for” (in relation to) another. Hegelian self-consciousness is perhaps the most famous “for” relation. Its relational character is the simplest reason why self-consciousness is not properly speaking a (non-relational) thing, and why it should not be identified with any simple term like ego, which is again a non-relational thing. When we speak of attitudes in an empirical way, they may seem like non-relational, simple properties, perhaps of a psychological sort. On the other hand, the Avicennan intentions that are so important for Scotus and others do have an intrinsically relational character. But in all these cases, the meaning of “relation” (Latin relatio) in question is the Aristotelian category of (asymmetrical) pros ti (toward what). It is in view of this well-established and different older usage that Pierce avoids the term “relation” when speaking about the inherently symmetrical mathematical relations that he calls “relatives”.

“Of course ancient and medieval philosophers acknowledged that there were some normative statuses that were instituted by practical normative attitudes. Having the authority or responsibilities exercised by one who holds some elected office, or those conferred by explicit legislation in cases where the aim of the legislation could obviously have been achieved in other ways are central among them. But the most basic norms, those defining the persons or normative subjects of positive laws, were not understood to be of this kind. The whole idea of natural law is intended to contrast with that artificial kind of law. The normative statuses articulated by natural laws are to be construed as necessary, as conceptually and metaphysically antecedent to and independent of the contingent attitudes, practices, and institutions of creatures of the kind whose nature they articulate” (p. 15).

The term “person” names a standing under Roman law. The reference to normative subjects here reflects Brandom’s main philosophical use of “subject”, which is normative and non-psychological, as is also true of his use of “intention” and “intentionality”. (This sharply distinguishes the latter from its Avicennan sense, revived by Brentano in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874). Brentano says that all psychological phenomena and only psychological phenomena are intentional.)

Next, Brandom devotes three paragraphs to medieval voluntarism and intellectualism. This is obviously a very limited engagement, but his concern is with tracing antecedents backward from Hegel. This is the farthest point he reaches, so it makes sense that it would be the least detailed part of the discussion. (In contemporary Hegel scholarship, it is Robert Pippin who has discussed Hegel’s relation to Aristotle in the greatest depth.)

“In this connection it is illuminating to consider the distinction within the natural law tradition between intellectualists and voluntarists. Intellectualists, paradigmatically among the Catholic theologians, Aquinas, held that the authoritativeness of commands issued by superiors to subordinates (expressions of the attitudes of those superiors) answered to (depended upon) reasons rooted in the same objective natures that determined their relative ‘primacy’ as superiors/subordinates. Even God, with the objective status of superior to all, is understood as constrained in the laws he lays down by the demands of reasons concerning the objective good of creatures with the natures with which he has endowed them. God’s unconstrained omnipotence is acknowledged by attributing to him the ‘absolute’ power to have created beings with different natures than the ones he actually created, but his ‘ordained’ power, given the natures he actually created, is understood as constrained by reasons provided by those determinate natures. He could not have made murder or (tellingly) adultery right. Even God’s normative attitudes, as expressed in his commands, in this sense answer to antecedent objective normative statuses” (pp. 15-16).

“By contrast, theological voluntarists, such as William of Ockham reject the constraint on God’s attitudes by reasons rooted in objective natures, as codified in Aquinas’s distinction between his absolute and his ordained power. What makes something right or obligatory (institutes those normative statuses) is just God’s normative attitudes towards them, his approval or commands. Those attitudes are not constrained by reasons stemming from any antecedent objective normative statuses. It is his will alone (which I am talking about in terms of his normative attitudes) that institutes normative statuses of obligation and permission. God could, if he so chose, have made murder and adultery right — though he did not in fact do so. The theological disagreement between intellectualists and voluntarists about the relationship between normative statuses stemming from objective created and creating natures and normative attitudes (obligation-instituting acts of divine will) is intimately entangled with the ontological-semantic dispute between realists and nominalists about universals. Ockham attributes no reality to kinds or natures over and above the reality of the particulars they group. Assimilating particulars by treating them as exhibiting a common universal or nature is itself an act of will, the expression of a practical attitude. The groupings are arbitrary in the original sense — the product of ‘arbitrium brutum’. Understanding universals, including kinds and natures, as the product of contingent activities of naming (hence ‘nominalism’) makes reasons deriving from those natures themselves attitude-dependent” (p. 16).

Brandom here treats will as a normative attitude. What it makes sense to treat this way is any particular, definite will, but not the famous or notorious faculty of unconstrained choice. It is assertion of the latter that defines voluntarism.

I believe Brandom is a truly great philosopher, but Aquinas and Ockham are mere cartoon figures here. Aquinas is indeed more “traditional” in some ways. But Aquinas recognizes the existence of rational ethics, independent of revelation. That to me is huge. Ockham, like Scotus, both makes radically voluntarist claims and endorses ethical criteria of right reason and good intent. I find the combination very confusing.

Later, Brandom mentions that Luther and Calvin were voluntarists. Nominalism also seems to have been strong in early Protestantism. I have no basis for arguing with any of that. But all this together is far from justifying a presumption that voluntarism per se must therefore be considered historically progressive. There are a great many other alternatives to voluntarism besides Thomism. And Thomism itself is far from monolithic.

(But Hegel himself valorizes Protestantism, and Luther in particular, and shares the Enlightenment disdain for scholasticism. But in Hegel’s day as in the Enlightenment, medieval philosophy was virtually terra incognita, especially in Protestant countries. This was true because printed books and pamphlets in vernacular languages had become predominant. Most works of medieval philosophy did not exist in print or in a vernacular language, but only as rare Latin manuscripts that hardly anyone studied, or even had access to. It is easy to be disdainful of what we only know from a caricature.)

The third paragraph devoted to this topic sums up the outcome.

“Divine command theorists understand the obligations — normative statuses obliging the adoption of normative attitudes of obedience — of us subordinates-because-inferiors as instituted by divine attitudes (expressed in commands, acts of will), even if the framework of relative normative statuses of superior-subordinate is understood as objective in the sense of attitude-independent. Where intellectualists see all attitudes as answering to attitude-independent statuses, voluntarist natural lawyers do not see the status-instituting attitudes of superiors as themselves constrained to acknowledge prior statuses. The voluntarists can be thought of as holding a variant of the traditional subordination-obedience model. But compared to the still more traditional intellectualists, they substantially inflate the significance of attitudes relative to statuses” (pp. 16-17).

He is right that both voluntarists and “intellectualists” in the middle ages largely adhered to the obedience model. But if all attitudes are attributed to the will, it is pretty much a tautology that voluntarism puts more weight on attitudes. The voluntarist refusal to acknowledge any constraint on the will is precisely what leads to arbitrariness.

The argument of Plato’s Euthyphro is not mentioned here. According to the internet, this objection to divine command theory is well known to contemporary scholarship. The so-called Euthyphro dilemma is widely regarded as the most serious issue that divine command theory has to face.

At the paragraph’s end is the sentence that I found really disturbing.

“In this sense, theological voluntarism in the Catholic natural law tradition represents the first stirrings of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses that would burst into full bloom among the early modern Protestant natural lawyers: the thin leading edge of the wedge of modernity. (Luther and Calvin were voluntarists.)” (p. 17).

Given Brandom’s sympathy for the classic American pragmatists’ “Whiggish” belief in progress, this “thin leading edge of the wedge of modernity” amounts to a claim that theological voluntarism should be seen as historically progressive. Fortunately, this weak link in this part of the argument is not essential to the larger point he is making. In particular, it does not affect the insightful reading of Pufendorf’s notion of the consent of the governed that is to follow.

“It is still a huge, distinctively modern, step from understanding the normative statuses of subordinates to be dependent on the normative attitudes of their superiors to seeing the normative status of being a superior (‘primacy’) as dependent on the attitudes of the subordinates. It is, of course, the driving idea of social contract theories of specifically political obligation. I quoted Pufendorf above rejecting Hobbes’s claim that objective matter-of-factual power over others could confer the status of superiority in the sense of the right to command attitudes of obedience, when introducing the notion of consent of the subordinates as an attitude that can institute the relative statuses of superior-subordinate. Pufendorf himself recognizes that a thought like this is also present already in Hobbes, quoting him as saying as saying ‘All right over others is either by nature or by compact.’ Pufendorf radicalizes Hobbes by rejecting the idea that power all by itself can confer right over others, insisting that only the combination of consent and power to punish confers such normative primacy” (pp. 17-18).

This notion of consent, of course, is foundational to modern democratic politics.

“Hegel sees a paradigm of the shift from traditional to modern modes of thought in what became the popular contrast between status-based ‘divine right of kings’ political theories and the attitude-based consent theories epitomized by Thomas Jefferson’s resonant words in the American Declaration of Independence (paraphrasing Locke in his “Second Treatise of Civil Government” of 1690): ‘…governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.’ According to this line of thought, the distinction between possessing matter-of-factual power and exhibiting the normative status of just power is a matter of the attitudes of the subordinates subject to that authority to oblige obedience” (p. 18).

Scotus on the First Principle

Here I will discuss a single short passage from Duns Scotus’s Treatise on God as First Principle from a number of different angles, using my own reactions (and quite different and non-medieval reading of Aristotle) as a sort of foil.

The Treatise is one of the most celebrated proofs for the existence of God in the Latin tradition. It also claims to in some meaningful sense demonstrate the nature of God, in a way that is accessible to natural reason.

It is widely accepted that the Treatise is both one of Scotus’s most mature works, and one of those most thoroughly reviewed and edited by Scotus himself. Compared to his massive commentaries on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, it is also far more compact.

(The larger Scotus corpus has been notoriously challenging for scholars to work with. His admirers aver that if he had lived as long as Aquinas, his works would have been equally well polished and edited by the author. As it stands, many were left in very rough form. There is also an unusual amount of divergence in the manuscript traditions, which has greatly complicated the publication of critical editions. Work on critical editions has advanced substantially but is still incomplete, and some of it has been controversial. Scholars have debated at length which of certain manuscripts should be regarded as more authoritative, and this is interwoven with disagreements on questions of interpretation. Specialists also disagree on the relative maturity of thought embodied in some of the texts.)

Several recent scholars have suggested that Scotus may be (in part at least) more Aristotelian than has been thought. Needless to say, this caught my interest. But scholars of medieval philosophy are not required to distinguish the Aristotle I find inspiring from his very different image in the Latin world or the modern one, so an evaluation of this will require careful sifting.

It does seem that in practical ethics, there is a surprising proximity. Also, intriguingly, he calls theology a practical discipline. He devotes most of his attention to what might be called a kind of meta-ethics. But as far as I can tell at this stage of the research, Scotus’s meta-ethics — that is to say, the main part of his theology, as well as his post-Avicennan reinvention of metaphysics — still after all elaborates a forceful and sophisticated voluntarism, in the anti-Aristotelian spirit of the condemnation of 1277. The condemnation is commonly mentioned by scholars as important background for understanding Scotus.

Here is the quote, which Richard Cross reproduces in the introductory section of the chapter “Knowledge and Volition of a First Being” in his Duns Scotus on God (2005):

“[1] The first efficient cause directs its effort toward a goal. Therefore, [it does so] either naturally or by loving it. But not in the first way, because something lacking knowledge directs nothing other than in virtue of something that knows, for the first ordering belongs to the wise. The first [efficient cause] does not direct in virtue of anything [else], just as it does not cause [in virtue of anything else].”

“[2] Something is caused contingently; therefore the first cause causes contingently; therefore it causes voluntarily. The first consequence is proved: any second cause causes insofar as it is moved by the first cause. Therefore, if the first cause moves necessarily, every [cause] is moved necessarily and everything is caused necessarily. Proof of the second consequence: there is no principle of acting contingently other than will, for everything else acts by the necessity of nature, and thus does not act contingently.”

“[3] I do not call contingent everything that is neither necessary or everlasting, but that whose opposite could have happened when this did. For this reason I did not say ‘something is contingent’, but ‘something is caused contingently’ ” (Scotus, op. cit., Wolter trans., quoted in Cross, op. cit., pp. 55, 56, 57, brackets in original).

In this admirably concise argument Scotus, using Latin Aristotelian terminology, packs together a whole series of claims about the first cause that are either completely un-Aristotelian, or not exactly Aristotelian. I’ll begin with a few global remarks, then address a number of details.

Very much unlike Aristotle, Scotus often frames his arguments as a kind of proof. This is a further accentuation of the strong emphasis on a kind of demonstrative science in the Arabic tradition that originated from al-Farabi. That theology should be such a science seems to be taken for granted in the Latin tradition of this period. (I think of theology as aiming to discern and elucidate a poetic kind of truth.)

Across the body of his work, Aristotle more often uses what might be called a hermeneutically oriented dialectic than the demonstration that is the subject of the Analytics. Aristotelian dialectic examines the inferential consequences of hypotheses. At the beginning of the Topics, he particularly singles out dialectic as appropriate for the discussion of first principles. Aristotelian dialectic aims at an open-ended wisdom, rather than exact knowledge. Rather than deductively expounding a preconceived system or an accomplished science in the manner of Euclid or Spinoza, Aristotle’s Metaphysics consists of a converging series of dialectical investigations. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he explicitly warns against making overly precise claims.

Aristotelian demonstration has the pedagogical aim of providing clear insight into reasons for adopting certain conclusions. The whole Arabic and Latin tradition, however, has it aimed instead at al-Farabi’s goal of demonstrative science. Such an approach aims to decisively prove that the conclusion is true, and it does so by making additional assumptions that are deemed to be reasonable. This too can be instructive as a kind of thought experiment, to see what can be achieved in this way.

But even though he never claims to eliminate dependence on assumptions, Aristotle himself continually works hard to minimize the role that assumptions play in his arguments. This is especially true for his arguments about first principles. Where first principles intersect with matters of religion, he seems to regard it as unseemly to claim too much. We should especially aim to minimize speculative assertions about ultimate matters, and this is a way of showing appropriate respect (as well as promoting peace and harmony in human society).

The great monotheistic religious traditions have often effectively taken the diametrically opposite stance, that it is virtuous to glorify God by making all possible maximalist claims about him. As many have recognized, this kind of theistic piety is profoundly un-Aristotelian. Rather than taking this as a ground for rejecting a stereotypical Aristotle as many have done, without wishing to offend anyone, in the ongoing work here I aim to help bring to light an unfamiliar and provocative Aristotle, for whom an open sense of wonder at the universe is more primordial, more enlightening, and indeed more theologically virtuous than maximalist praise of God. Moreover, I think the best praise consists not in any assertion, but in a more profoundly ethical way of acting.

Scotus speaks here of a first efficient cause. As I have discussed several times, the Latin concept of efficient cause is far removed from what in Aristotle’s text is called a “source of motion”. In Aristotle, the source of motion governs the character of the motion in question, in the way that the art of building governs the activity of building a house. In general, Aristotle inquires into activities rather than punctual actions. Aristotelian causes are not powers but ways of explaining things.

New readers may be surprised to learn that Aristotle himself presents the first cause not as an efficient cause at all, but rather as a final cause. That-for-the sake-of-which or the end is for Aristotle the way of explaining that comes logically first in the order of explanation. More elaborately, the first cause is entelechy, or an entelechy. What is first in itself, however, is not first in the order of our understanding.

It was the neoplatonic commentator Ammonius (5th-6th century CE), known for his accommodations to Christianity, who introduced the idea that the first cause is also what is now translated as an efficient cause. The notion of a first efficient cause effectively rewrites the order of causes in Aristotle to accommodate a theistic view. In Aquinas, for example, God’s creation from nothing becomes the paradigmatic example of efficient causality.

Scotus says that the first efficient cause directs its effort toward a goal. Having eliminated the Aristotelian teleology that is indwelling and primary, in company with many others he introduces a secondary, transcendent teleology that is more anthropomorphic in its operation. In this rendering, the first cause is said to knowingly aim at a goal it has chosen. Within the Arabic tradition, Ghazali’s Incoherence of the Philosophers — to which Averroes replied on behalf of the philosophers — had earlier similarly argued in effect that any teleology must depend on a being endowed with knowledge and will. Aristotle strictly avoids any language of that sort.

The division of action into action by nature and action by love is interesting. The introduction of love in a discussion of first principles is sometimes taken to be a Christian innovation. But Aristotle in the Metaphysics says the stars are moved by love of the first cause. Socrates in Plato’s Republic argues that all beings love the Good. Plato elaborates on the role of love from several points of view in the Symposium.

The way that Scotus explains natural action, it is strictly necessitated, but the whole order of nature is subordinated to a free cause. Again we see the interesting identification of free will with love. But the way that he mentions secondary causes seems to give them no role that is not already necessitated by the first cause.

When Aristotle speaks of secondary causes, it makes sense, because with Aristotle’s non-total first cause there is something for secondary causes to contribute to the whole. But secondary causes that are entirely necessitated by a first cause contribute nothing of their own, in which case the very mention of secondary causes is “in vain”, as the medievals might say.

All directing is said to presuppose knowledge. At the same time, it is emphasized that the Scotist first cause does not direct or cause in virtue of anything else. This is the first of several explicit statements insisting that the first cause must be understood as completely unconditioned.

Directing has the implication of control or command. The first cause in Aristotle does not control or command things, but works by inspiring the love that is motion toward a telos. The Good in Plato does not control or command things either; but all beings are said to love the Good. The more particular forms of this love of the Good, which characterize the striving of things, can be said to make them what they are.

Like Ghazali, Scotus insists that the first cause causes voluntarily and by will. He specifically invokes what contemporary scholars call synchronic contingency, which again is supposed to be completely unconditioned. The order of nature is again associated with strict necessity. The only alternative to strict necessity for Scotus must depend on something that is wholly unconditioned.

Aristotle’s nature does not operate according to strict necessity, but only according to a general determination that leaves options open. Because the first cause is a final cause, things are determined only generally, not in all their particulars. For example, animals must eat to live, but the particulars of which things they eat and when and how are not determined by this. Because there was never a strict but only a general necessity to begin with, freedom does not have to depend on something that is radically outside of nature.

Scotus criticizes the Arabic commentators for including humans in nature. This is an issue for him because the objective correlate, so to speak, of Farabian demonstration in natural science is strict necessity in nature. Like many Christian authors, Scotus objects to the inclusion of humans under strict necessity. Scotus apparently has no issue with strict necessity in nature, which he too asserts, but he subordinates that necessity to something radically unconditioned that he also sees at work in the human will.

Whereas in Aristotle himself necessity is not strict, and so freedom does not require anything radically unconditioned, Scotus instead seeks to explain everything in terms of two extreme poles of strict necessity and absolutely unconditional freedom. This same polarity will later be affirmed by Descartes — nature is to be explained mechanistically, but God and the human are treated voluntaristically.

The Moral Core of Scotist Ethics

Previously, I discussed the introduction to Mary Beth Ingham’s The Harmony of Goodness, on the ethics of John Duns Scotus. Here I extensively quote and discuss her central chapter on moral goodness.

“Scotus inherited a framework of Stoic natural law and Augustinian eternal law from his immediate predecessors…. The created order is the direct result of divine choice; all nature and human nature have been established according to God’s will” (ibid).

Only a single sentence separates the two in the above quote, which seem to pull in opposite directions. The venerable tradition of natural law is usually seen as a family of views that hold core ethical values to be universal, inherent to human nature, and discoverable by reason. This is usually seen as incompatible with their depending directly on the will of God.

Like natural law, the eternal law in Augustine that she mentions is similarly supposed to be universal and unchangeable, in accordance with Augustine’s strong emphasis on separation of the eternal from the temporal. But at the same time, Augustine’s early work On Free Choice of the Will is the founding document for voluntarism in the Latin tradition. So the same tension is already present in Augustine. (Incidentally, On Free Choice of the Will was translated by the same Thomas Williams who translated the newer anthology of Scotus’s writings on ethics, and who has debated with Ingham about voluntarism in Scotus). And already the earliest Franciscan theologians sought to explicitly weave a modified view of natural law into their theological voluntarism (see also A Theology of Beauty?, Free Will as Love?). All this prefigures the ambiguity that we have recently begun to see in Scotus.

“To pursue and love the good is in fact to pursue God, the proper object of the human will. All this means that Scotus understands moral goodness according to an ancient paradigm: as the beautiful whole made up of an action and all the circumstances surrounding it” (p. 84).

This sort of perspective ought to be welcomed. The formulation here, though, seems crafted to remain agnostic on the question of Plato’s Euthyphro: Does God will a thing because it is good, or is it good because God wills it? The Platonic Socrates and Leibniz hold the former; the latter defines theological voluntarism.

“Deus diligendus est (God is to be loved) expresses theologically the first and fundamental principle of the moral domain. As Scotus explains, this principle belongs to natural law and admits of no exception” (p. 86).

With Plato, we ought to affirm that the Good is beautiful, and is to be loved. Any view that supports this (and I believe that includes the implicit views of most people) ought to be kindly received. The good, the beautiful, and the lovable constitute the free and generous poetic ground of religion. Darker views of a world dominated by sin and requiring commanding authority to achieve a semblance of goodness ought to be banished.

“The Good is to be loved” or “God is to be loved” is a very abstract kind of natural law. According to Ingham, Scotus holds that the first three of the ten Mosaic commandments — glossed by the Franciscans as “God is to be loved” — have an absolute status, whereas the other seven are metaphysically contingent on choices made by the Creator in instituting the order of the world. It is the absolute part that he associates with natural law.

Any substantive natural law limits the scope of voluntarism. But the meaning of voluntarism is precisely to assert that there is no such limit. But Scotus asserts the truth of voluntarism, and he asserts the existence of natural law. In this he is followed by Ockham.

“[T]he more perfect moral act is really a more intensely loving action. As primary moral principle, the command to love God above all grounds the body of knowledge called moral science. Here too, this body of knowledge is accessible to human reason and to the human will via the higher affection for justice…. Our human will is constituted to seek the good as known in a manner which is not necessitated by any external force. Our ability to control our own actions and to develop in self-mastery and self-determination is the foundation for moral living. In other words, persons who wish to pursue a moral life seek to love justly, in accord with an objective order. We want to love the highest good in the most perfect manner” (p. 87, emphasis in original).

The main substance of this seems right, and the universality at the end is to be commended. But in company with Aristotle, I prefer to speak neither of moral science nor of commands. What could be termed loving justly, in accordance with a broadly but not strictly objective order, is matter for wise judgment that can also be called free. No genuine seeking of the good by any being is necessitated by external force. It is a desire from within. We are attracted to the good. The affection for justice is as much of a motivator for humans as the desire for advantage and convenience.

“Accordingly, the human desire to love God is not limited to a narrow class of believers. In fact, all persons desire to love the highest good in an absolute manner” (p. 88).

This is a most welcome conclusion. It is a ground for the elimination of all sectarianism.

“There are two great commandments. Love for God constitutes the first commandment, love for neighbor the second” (p. 89). “The first command ‘God is to be loved’ is an analytic truth…. According to the present contingent order, we observe the command to love God through acts of love for our neighbor” (p. 90).

Notwithstanding the oddness of identifying commands with propositions, to speak of analytic truth here is consistent with calling it natural law.

“In his distinction between natural law narrowly understood … and more broadly construed … Scotus remains coherent without requiring narrow legalism. Exceptions are seen to be part of the moral landscape; we should not be surprised when we encounter them. Indeed, the natural and moral orders are woven with threads of particularity. Concrete situations require good judgment and right action” (pp. 93-94).

Yea, verily.

“Although Scotus’s discussions of the relationship of the law to the divine will appears to align him with a divine command tradition, in fact this is not the case. In contrast to a natural law tradition (where moral goodness depends upon rational discernment of the good as seen in the natures of things and their natural perfection), a divine command theory maintains that the foundation for moral living (both necessary and sufficient) rests entirely upon God’s commands” (p. 94).

I think she successfully makes the case that this is not a crude divine command theory, such as we might hear from some fundamentalists. But I expect that Ockham’s version would also not be a crude one. But it is Scotus and Ockham themselves who want to affirm that there is a kind of natural law layered on top of a subtler divine command theory.

“He identifies the first command (Love God) as a self-evident truth. It is true on the basis of the meaning of its terms, not on the basis of any ulterior proposition or command. Scotus explicitly argues, ‘if God is, then God is to be loved’, since God is, by definition, the highest Good. Moral actions are determined on the basis of the natural and rational recognition of the good.”

If we put aside the somewhat spoiling but possibly inessential references to command, otherwise this does not sound at all voluntaristic. Self-evidence is another notion that is perfectly valid when taken broadly, though it goes wrong when we attempt to take it too strictly. But excessive claims of self-evidence are a very different kind of error from voluntarism.

The question is whether any additional essential good is accomplished by also calling something (the object of ) a command, when we have already recognized it as an intrinsic good. Plato and Aristotle would say no.

“A second implication of this vision relates to the ecumenical dimension of this moral approach. By identifying a first, self-evident principle for moral living, Scotus escapes moral sectarianism and remains a thinker whose ideas are strong enough to be attractive to traditions other than Judeo-Christian. His moral presentation of law neither requires adherence to Christianity nor to any specific Christian revelation” (pp. 94-95).

These are consequences we ought to expect from a point of view that recognizes the existence of any natural moral law, even (or perhaps especially) a very abstract one like Scotus is advocating.

“Scotus removes any reference to necessary fulfillment (a transcendent teleology) in an eternal reward from moral discussion and focuses his attention on the concrete act and agent seen, here and now, in all their particularity as morally beautiful. The morally good act is not judged insofar as it is a means to a pre-determined end. Rather, it constitutes an artistic whole within which harmony and proportion exist among its several elements. Likewise, the morally mature person imitates divine creativity in judging what is morally beautiful, in producing beautiful acts and a beautiful character” (pp. 97-98).

The morally good act is not to be viewed as a means to obtain a future reward, but as an intrinsic good in itself. The criteria for human goodness are to be found here in earthly life, thoughtful inquiry, and attitudes of caring concern. Belief in specific propositions about sin and reward does not add to moral goodness.

“Ordinatio I, distinction 17 offers us the classic text for Scotus’s elaboration of moral goodness as it is linked to judgments of beauty.”

[quote from Scotus:] “one could say that just as beauty is not some absolute quality in a beautiful body, but a combination of all that is in harmony with such a body (such as size, figure, and color), and a combination of all aspects (that pertain to all that is agreeable to such a body and are in harmony with one another), so the moral goodness of an act is a kind of decoration it has, including a combination of due proportion to all to which it should be proportioned (such as potency, object, end, time, place, and manner), and this especially as right reason dictates” (p. 98).

This is the centerpiece of her case. Though so far at least it is only a single passage, moral goodness is here very clearly identified by Scotus with a kind of beauty. I do find it odd to refer to it as a decoration, though. This makes it sound like a superficial addition. I think the goodness of an act is essential to what act it is.

“The Ordinatio I, distinction 17 definition of moral goodness as ‘the harmony of all circumstances [belonging to an act] in accord with right reason’ blends mutuality, virtue, consequences, and principle within an aesthetic model.”

“When Scotus refers to all the circumstances which belong to an act, he appeals to Aristotle’s discussion in the Nicomachean Ethics. The morally good act admits of several converging factors: goal, object, intention, time, place, manner and consequences” (p. 100, brackets in original).

I can only applaud when Scotus explicitly invokes the Nicomachean Ethics here. Others might insert ugly talk about sin at this juncture. And again, this part does not seem at all voluntaristic.

“The appropriate course of action must be determined by the operation of right reasoning. For example, while lying is wrong, telling the truth is not always appropriate. Sometimes ‘telling the whole truth’ would do more harm than good. The morally mature person is capable of determining when the truth should be told, and to what degree the truth should be told” (ibid).

Scotus according to Ingham seems to be saying, God commands us to use good judgment. With that sort of claim and that sort of command, I have no issue.

“The most fundamental dimension of goodness in a moral act relates to its objective quality. By objective, Scotus means directing attention to the object of the action. For example, in the proposition ‘tell the truth’, truth is the object of the action. ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ is an objectively good act because persons (both you and your neighbor) are worthy of love. ‘Protect life’ is a moral command, because living beings have value. Every moral action has a natural objective dimension which can be identified if we reflect on what is being done and to whom. Scotus assumes that this sort of objective identification of goodness belongs to common sense reasoning. Everyone, he states, knows who they are and what they are doing. Anyone who has lived more than several decades comes to the realization that some things are better than others, if only as a result of living with the consequences of our actions” (p. 101).

The sense of “objective” here seems close to that which it has in contemporary common speech, but this might be misleading. Scotus was one of the originators — possibly the originator — of the philosophical use of the terms object, objective, objectivity, etc. But it is generally accepted that this group of terms and the correlated one of subject, subjective, subjectivity have — in a way, at least — undergone a 180 degree reversal in meaning. For “objective” in Scotus is said of things present to the mind, while “subjective” is said of the thing itself. This is a fascinating piece of history.

Ingham’s text above notably does not distinguish between the meaning of the terms in Scotus and their common meaning in present-day English. I think this is possible because at a connotative level they are not far apart, even though Scotus speaks of an objectivity of things present to the intellect, and we speak of an objectivity of things in the world.

What is “in the intellect” in Scotus’s sense is not “subjective” in our sense. This probably also has to do with the Augustinian sense of interiority as an opening onto a kind of universality, rather than something private to us. Outer things meanwhile we apprehend only through the medium of sense perception, imagination, and emotion. In this context it makes sense to regard intellect as a source of objectivity.

We could also associate this talk of objectivity with the realism commonly attributed to Scotus. It should be remarked too that any kind of realism also seems to push back against voluntarist tendencies, insofar as the real is granted some status independent of us.

“But this initial objective dimension does not exhaust the moral beauty of the action. In addition, there is the free quality of an act chosen by someone. In other words, I might tell the truth or love my neighbor simply because someone in authority has told me to do so. These acts would be objectively good but they would not be the result of my own free choice: they would not enhance my moral character” (ibid).

Intent is not the only thing we attend to in considering acts from a moral point of view, but it seems an inalienable part of it.

“Moral objects are human goods which can be identified by reflection on what it means to be human” (ibid).

“Because we are rational, we seek reasonable explanations for human behavior, explanations which exhibit consistency, coherence, and rationality. In addition, everyone desires goodness, even though we can be mistaken about all the consequences of certain actions seen to be good…. Thus, the truth and the good (either real or apparent) are significant moral objects: they are human goods. Indeed, truth and goodness are the two most fundamental moral objects: they respond to our human aspirations which express themselves in activities of knowing and loving” (p. 102).

Calling the truth and the good human goods seems promising.

“Conscious intent to perform a moral action is essential to the morally good act. It is not just doing what good people do, it is acting as good people act, when and where they act, and for the same reason that good people act. In the truly moral action, character is joined to performance, motivation to action, in the here and now” (p. 103, emphasis in original).

I would just say intent here. Scotus lived long before the Cambridge Platonist Cudworth, who coined the English term “consciousness”, and Locke, who popularized it. It might be argued that something like this is implicit in Augustine — who clearly does at least partially anticipate Descartes’s cogito ergo sum. But at the very least, there is a clear difference between explicitly saying something and arguably implying it.

“Loving motivation depends upon the natural goodness of the act, upon its objective appropriateness. I cannot perform any act I please out of love; I can only perform good acts out of love…. Thus, the orders of love depend upon orders of natural and moral goodness. A key implication of this analysis is the way in which Scotus avoids a moral theory based solely on love” (p. 105).

This is important on both counts. There is no such thing as lovingly demeaning someone. Love is not an empty criterion.

“[quote from Scotus:] “… For no sin should be left unpunished anywhere if there is one ruler of the universe and he is just…” (p. 108).

This one is much less auspicious. What happened to mercy and charity? Shouldn’t they always be in sight?

“Law is neither impersonal nor necessary. On the contrary, it is very personal, highly creative and brilliantly executed by the symphony of nature…. When we pay attention to and imitate the goodness of nature, we have the foundation for our own creativity” (ibid).

This is an important point, but it is really about juridical interpretation as a practice. Law as such — i.e., viewed in terms of its content — is “impersonal”. But a good jurist like Averroes exercises mercy and charity in applying the law (conservatives claimed that his sentencing was too lenient).

“In De Primo Principio, for example, Scotus analyzes the concept ens infinitum [infinite being]. This is the philosopher’s name for God…. We know this as possible, he asserts, because when we bring the terms together, we notice no dissonance” (ibid).

She calls infinite being the philosopher’s name for God. This is a non-Biblical designation, and perhaps philosophical in that very diffuse sense. But in stricter terms, it is Scotus’s new non-Biblical name for God, which would not be accepted by Plato or Aristotle. This usage of “philosopher’s” goes against the commonly accepted usage in Scotus’s time, which is derived from the Arabic (the “philosophers” implementing various combinations of Plato and Aristotle were all finitist).

“There is nothing in the terms themselves which would make them mutually exclusive. Thus ens infinitum is possible and, if possible, necessary” (p. 109).

The basis of this argument is the claim that some contentful truths can be derived solely from the principle of non-contradiction. This is a modern “rationalist” notion, favored, e.g., by the Wolffians who were the most immediate target of Kant’s critique. An infinity of being is not claimed by Plato or Aristotle or anyone else before Scotus, except perhaps Lucretius and other atomists.

“While such an aesthetic approach to moral goodness might appear odd to us today, this relationship of the mind to beauty has a long philosophical history. Plato’s Symposium celebrates the rational search for wisdom as the ascent to beauty. Augustine echoes Plato in his hymn to God as that Beauty he had longed for (Confessions X, 27)” (p. 109).

For better or worse, aesthetic approaches to ethics were adopted by the Romantics. The Romantic version came to be sharply criticized by Hegel, after his juvenile period. On this matter, my sympathies are divided.

“With his rejection of an objective or pre-determined external goal for human moral reflection available to natural reason alone, Scotus focuses his discussion upon the functioning moral agent. His is a theory of moral praxis, here and now. The object of moral reflection is not, he states, an abstract excellence but the perfection of the human person” (p. 112).

Aristotle focuses his discussion on what might be called the deliberating moral agent, although the provenance of this use of “agent” is medieval and not Aristotelian in the proper sense.

“Scotus’s critique of natural teleology was not, for all that, a rejection of happiness as the goal of moral living. Rather, he sought to reframe moral living around the happy life, understood to be the fruit of the harmonic relationship between the two affections of the will. It is, as I have argued elsewhere, the replacement of Aristotelian teleology with Stoic teleology” (ibid).

It is with the Stoics that teleology came to be associated with the exercise of divine providence. Though he speaks of it with reverence, Aristotle’s first cause is the beautiful and loved telos or good end to which beings are attracted. It is not a personified being that exercises providence, or directly or specifically addresses current states of affairs in the world.

“Proper and appropriate moral decision-making is itself the goal of human action. It is not simply a question of choosing, but of choosing well and ‘rejoicing, loving and hating rightly’ ” (p. 116).

This itself seems well and proper. As soon as we are concerned with doing anything well or rightly, we have left the terrain of voluntarism and command and obedience. There is also an argument that good obedience, if taken seriously, requires more than mere obedience. This has an air of partial plausibility, but only at the cost of paradox — as soon as we raise the question of obeying well, it is no longer obedience that enables us to obey.

“Finally, Scotus’s presentation of moral goodness underscores the personal and intentionally relational aspects of moral living. It emphasizes goodness to be enhanced by the operation of deliberative human reasoning and charitable human desire” (ibid).

It seems that Scotus himself does apply this terminology of relation. This is the pros ti (toward what) of Aristotle’s Categories, which became relatio in Latin, and also seems to play a role in Scotus’s theology of the Trinity. The modern mathematical notion of relation, to which Pierce made major contributions, treats it as a predicate that is (equally or symmetrically) abstracted from the relata or things that are related, whereas “toward what” has a constitutive asymmetry. The mutuality that Ingham attributes to the Scotist conception of the Trinity is also not fully symmetrical in the way that Hegelian mutual recognition explicitly is.

“This is a person-centered, not principle-centered moral paradigm…. The ability to make moral decisions in difficult circumstances comes as a result of moral training and experience. Drawn toward beauty, the moral person seeks to enhance both beauty of character and beauty of action. The central moral imperatives of love for God and neighbor are both accessible to natural reasoning and available to the will through the affection for justice. Proper reflection on the significant aspects of human nature, such as intellection and love, reveal those actions which promote fundamental human goods. These goods are not limited to the Christian tradition but belong to all persons of good will: truth, peace and harmony…. Finally, at the highest level of goodness within human action, we become co-creators and co-artists, co-musicians with God, whose ear is delicately attuned to the music of the human heart” (pp. 116-117).

Scotus’s Voluntarism

In what began as a due diligence exercise, I had begun to wonder if I should be swayed by the arguments of Wolter and Ingham on the issue of Scotus’s voluntarism.

There has been a significant dispute about this among recent scholars of Duns Scotus. The received view has been that Scotus is a radical voluntarist about both God’s will and human will. In the late 20th century, however, Wolter and Ingham both argued that this presumption is refuted by Scotus’s approach to ethics, about which I knew nothing until very recently. And it seems beyond dispute that however we explain it, Scotus’s ethics involve criteria of love and right reason and interpretation of situations, and do not stress simple obedience.

But voluntarism as I understand it is radical by definition, because it is the doctrine that whatever appearances we may encounter, the way things really are is really determined exclusively by divine and/or human will. In the early 20th century, C. R. S. Harris reportedly concluded that there is an unresolved antinomy in Scotus, between his voluntarist theology and psychology on the one hand, and his rational ethics on the other. More recently Thomas Williams, the translator/editor of the newer anthology of Scotus’s ethical writings, has argued in numerous journal articles that Scotus is a radical voluntarist after all, and that there is a deep systematic consistency in his work. In this he is supported by Richard Cross, another leading contemporary scholar of Scotus. Williams says

“Scotus is notorious for occasionally making statements that, on their face at least, smack of voluntarism, but there has been a lively debate about whether Scotus is really a voluntarist after all. Now the debate is not over whether Scotus lays great emphasis on the role of the divine will with respect to the moral law. No one could sensibly deny that he does, and if such an emphasis constitutes voluntarism, then no one could sensibly deny that Scotus is a voluntarist. As I am using the word, however, voluntarism is the view that (i) the goodness of almost all things, as well as the rightness of almost all acts, depends wholly on the divine will and (ii) what God wills with respect to those things and those acts is not in turn to be explained by reference to the divine intellect, human nature, or anything else. This is the view that Scotus’s critics decry and his defenders disclaim. Thus, his critics have seized on these passages and accused Scotus of believing that the moral law depends simply on ‘the arbitrary will of God.’ His most sympathetic interpreters, however, have devoted great ingenuity to showing that Scotus did not mean anything unpalatable by these statements.”

“What the critics and defenders apparently have in common is the view that voluntarism is an implausible and even discreditable doctrine. Interpreters who read Scotus as a voluntarist intend thereby to damn his moral views; interpreters sympathetic to his moral views feel compelled to mitigate his voluntarism. I wish to argue for a different approach. I agree with his defenders that Scotus’s moral philosophy ought to be taken seriously. But I think the best way to take any philosopher’s view seriously is to let him speak for himself, not to decide in advance that he must not have held a view that we find implausible.”

“Let me suggest an analogy that will make my position clearer. Very nearly everyone finds immaterialism implausible, paradoxical, and utterly untenable. But we would hardly be taking Berkeley seriously if we insisted on denying that he was really an immaterialist. We can take him very seriously indeed, examine what he says and what reasons he gives, and then, if we cannot bear to follow him into immaterialism, reluctantly part company with him” (“The Unmitigated Scotus” (1998)).

This analogy could be a good one. Williams pretty much exactly captures my attitude toward Berkeley.

“Scotus was as convinced of his brand of voluntarism as Berkeley was convinced of his brand of immaterialism. He asserts it outright. He gives arguments for it. He cheerfully embraces the very conclusions from which his defenders have tried to save him. I propose to take a fresh look at what Scotus says, to marshall the textual evidence and present Scotus’s arguments. And since many interpreters have tried to mitigate Scotus’s apparent voluntarism, I shall also deal in some detail with the best of the mitigating interpretations and show why it fails. Perhaps my readers, having examined what Scotus says and what reasons he gives, will not wish to follow him into voluntarism, and will reluctantly (or otherwise) part company with him. But we will at least have taken an unprejudiced look at the unmitigated Scotus” (ibid).

A Harmony of Goodness

The title is from Mary Beth Ingham, The Harmony of Goodness: Mutuality and Moral Living According to John Duns Scotus (1996; 2nd ed. 2012). Until very recently, my limited sense of Scotus was based only on the remarks of philosophers engaged in other work, who were themselves mainly responding to summary accounts of his views, which did not even mention a distinctive approach to ethics. This early book of Ingham’s, which fills that gap, is said to have contributed significantly to a recent revival of interest in Scotus. Ingham historically situates Scotus’s ethics within a larger context of practical concerns within the Franciscan tradition. Though her starting point is quite different from mine, I am impressed by the amount of common ground I am finding with her conclusions.

“Scotus’s spiritual tradition, with the primacy of love and the goal of ordered loving, affects his thinking in three important areas: the centrality of freedom as self-mastery, the role of the divine desire and creativity, and practical reasoning as an aesthetic act of moral discernment…. Within his Franciscan spiritual vision, we discover here a unified moral vision whose central experience is the beauty of the created order, whose inspiration is divine creative and abundant love, and whose fulfillment is found in building loving and inclusive relationships. It is only in this way that we promote the common good” (pp. 5-6, emphasis in original throughout).

A bit later, she will sketch a deep historical trinitarian basis for the way love is used here, but at the outset, to my ear, her Scotist-inflected view of mutuality recalls the mutuality of Aristotelian friendship described in the Nicomachean Ethics. She will also cite “friendship love” as the highest form of love, which has a surprisingly Aristotelian sound. (It may have a more specific Franciscan basis as well, of which I have yet to learn.) I also think of the very young Hegel’s Romantically inflected emphasis on love, which later grew into his more Aristotelian mature theory of mutual recognition.

Creationist views that emphasize raw power I find utterly alien. But with those whose practical import is to emphasize goodness and beauty in ordinary worldly being, I can find common ground. Divine goodness — especially when linked to a sense of beauty — many others before me have found to be a compelling metaphor. And at least since Avicenna if not since Plotinus, there have been major philosophers who aimed at a kind of reconciliation between philosophy and the traditions of monotheistic theology, which developed only after the time of Plato and Aristotle.

Ingham continues in the conclusion of her preface to the second edition, “My more recent discovery of Stoic and monastic influences on the medieval Franciscans, and my growing awareness of the importance of Franciscan Christian humanism have helped me reframe Scotus’s emphasis on the will to a deeper defense of the rationality of love. The central image of the morally mature person is the trained artisan whose self-mastery holds the key to enlightened tranquility and peace of heart. Here is that person whose presence, along with her actions, are transformative of the world around her. Here is the life of Christian praxis, fully realized” (p. 6).

Of course I welcome the de-emphasis in regard to will. The vocabulary of self-mastery probably comes from the Roman Stoic Seneca, whose influence on the Franciscans she will document later on. Self-mastery is the least objectionable form of mastery, for which I nonetheless try to find other words in light of Hegel’s critique as expounded by Brandom. The connection of ethical being to beauty in the whole of life still seems profoundly right to me, even though Hegel also legitimately criticizes the Romantic ideal of the beautiful soul.

Morality properly speaking is indeed a kind of maturity of a human, for which the common early modern reduction to obedience to sovereign authority is a poor substitute.

Personal presence and praxis are not in my preferred vocabulary, because they seem to put a sort of rose-colored fog around crisper Platonic and Aristotelian hermeneutic principles, but they do both in a sense refer to ethically relevant realities, even if only in a diminished way.

Ingham will also expound a Scotist critique of what I regard as the post-Aristotelian Stoic-Epicurean-Skeptical Hellenistic paradigm of medicine for the soul. This turns out to have significant points in common with the critique of the medical model that Nussbaum in hindsight attributes to Aristotle.

“A significant spokesperson for this moral vision of relational love and generous living is the man known as the Subtle Doctor, John Duns Scotus. Writing after the Condemnations of 1277 (Paris) and 1284 (Oxford), Scotus pursued a relentless analysis of the legacy of Greek thought available to Latin thinkers at the close of the thirteenth century…. This rethinking involved a serious and critical rejection of the naturalist and necessitarian worldview which had emerged from the Arab philosophers” (pp. 7-8).

“Generous living” recalls the cardinal Aristotelian virtue of magnanimity, though I suppose that Ingham is thinking of Christian charity.

I appreciate the explicit drawing out of a notion of “relational” love from trinitarian perichoresis or mutual inherence. She draws attention to Scotus’s emphasis on the notion of a deeply “relational” native affection for justice in the soul, which, following Anselm, he contrasts with the affection for possession or convenience that generalizes possessive “love”.

The affection for justice can also be read as recalling Plato’s deliberately provocative suggestion that all beings should be understood as in some sense desiring the ultimate Good. The latter stands in contrast to the modern ideology of possessive individualism that was already germinating in the Greek Sophists, who were so sharply criticized by Plato and Aristotle (a criticism that also grounds Hegel’s repugnance toward the status of all Roman citizens as chattels of the sovereign Emperor).

“Scotus possesses several qualities which make him attractive. As a Franciscan, he is deeply committed to the value of creation and to our relationship with all that exists. As a theologian, he exhibits very positive attitudes toward women, both in the inclusive imagery he uses when speaking of God and his focus on Mary as sinless model of human perfection. As a medieval writer, he is aware of the dangers of the original sin tradition within Latin Christianity…. Scotus rejects out out of hand the famous argument of Anselm, in which the Bishop of Canterbury places the Incarnation within the context of payment for the sin of Adam and Eve…. There is no repayment of an infinite debt for which Jesus had to be born or to be sacrificed” (p. 9).

Scotus is a leading defender of the immaculate conception of Mary. I don’t have opinions on issues of this sort, but a de-emphasis on sin in favor of more affirmative values is certainly to be welcomed. This is a very significant distinction, which could support recovery of a positive valuation of finite things in general. But even if it does not depend on original sin, Incarnation still poses serious difficulties.

“Scotus moves beyond a binary presentation of issues and seeks to harmonize various aspects of a situation, so as to discover the truth beneath the differing positions. His is an approach which is reconciling: bringing together internal and external realms, human and divine activity, natural and graced living. In Scotus we discover an integrated presentation of what human really might mean” (p. 10).

The general practice of seriously airing arguments pro and con on any topic — perhaps derived from Abelard’s initially controversial Sic et Non — is an attractive dimension of scholasticism that the Enlightenment’s wholesale dismissals do not appropriately attend to.

Ingham develops a guiding metaphor of the harmonious sound of a wind chime in her presentation of Scotus in this book.

“The harmony of musical sounds coming from a wind chime is not a tune that one could whistle. It is a quiet song created by the fragility of the figures, the balance of the pieces and the harmony of their interaction…. I have chosen this image because Scotus offers, in my view, an aesthetic paradigm within which to consider the contours of moral living…. Part of my own reading of Scotus has been informed by his concern to speak of the morally good act as a beautiful work of art or as a beautifully executed performance, and of the moral agent as a formed artist” (p. 11).

In her metaphor, the central part of a wind chime that strikes the others and creates a beautiful sound corresponds to the will. But the wind chime metaphor overall does not seem at all voluntarist.

“The ability to choose freely, after proper deliberation, constitutes the uniquely human quality of moral living” (p. 12).

Ingham here reinserts the Aristotelian practical coupling of choice with deliberation that Scotus seems at a theoretical level to explicitly repudiate in favor of a categorical, undialectical, absolutist insistence on free will. Clearly she is arguing that Scotus himself in ethical contexts restores a more balanced view, and that Scotus does in fact generally commend more balanced views in practical matters. She also points out that Scotus says theology is ultimately a practical discipline and not a theoretical one. This seems right as far as it goes, though Scotus also seems to insist, contrary to Aristotle, that there is is such a thing as a practical science.

“[T]he spiritual tradition within which he writes… sees human living as an ongoing process of divinization within which human and divine persons work together to produce goodness, within which there is no rift between the natural and so-called supernatural realms” (p. 13).

Taking up and extending Aristotle’s orientation of the human toward divinization at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, Plotinus directly challenges us to become godlike, and in effect says to a theistic reader that this is what God would want for us. Meister Eckhart holds such an orientation to be compatible with Christianity. The stakes are high here, because Christianity has often categorically rejected such a goal, equating it with Luciferan pride. Ingham seems to be saying that Franciscan humanism and Scotus in particular also have a more moderate stance on this question.

“As one might imagine, the integration of Aristotelian philosophy into Christianity was not an easy matter…. Study of Aristotle was not favorably received by the theologians…. As early as 1215, public lectures on the Metaphysics and De Anima were forbidden. Even Thomas Aquinas, with his sympathetic reading of Aristotle, did not escape posthumous condemnation in 1277 (Paris) and again in 1284 (Oxford)” (p. 16).

“[Scotus] takes great pains to defend another’s position with the best arguments available and he answers these arguments methodically. This type of openness is rare in any thinker, and all the more surprising when one is dealing with a non-Christian opponent” (p. 17).

“I have chosen to present Scotus’s moral paradigm not as a defense of the primacy of freedom in moral living, but rather as an appeal for the harmony of goodness and as an expression of mutuality at all levels of human living. To a great extent, this is because I find love to be more central than freedom in his texts (ibid).

“Scotus emphasizes freedom because the highest form of love (love of friendship) is, by definition, a love that cannot be coerced or demanded…. This purest and best love is mutual; it entails reciprocity and produces communion…. The entire journey of human living, from internal choices to external actions, culminates in a relation of mutuality with God and with all persons” (p. 18).

A Theology of Beauty?

My understanding of Scotus and his historical significance might be headed for a major shift. [For the beginning of a resolution, see here.]

This kind of change of mind is not unprecedented. I used to read Kant and Hegel’s valorizations of freedom as sophisticated apologetics for some kind of voluntarism. But across many posts, we have seen that better readings of Kant and Hegel can eliminate such worries (see especially Hegel on Willing.) Very recently, I’ve been starting to wonder if what by general consensus is called the “voluntarism” of Scotus might also be read in some other way.

What is called “voluntarism” in the Latin theological tradition has to do with a relatively narrow debate about the priority of “will” and intellect. The will involved in this case is not any definite will, but rather an alleged power of free decision, where “free” is supposed to mean completely unconstrained. Theologians have often wanted to deny that God was subject to any constraint. But is it “constraint” to recognize the better reason? I think not, and many theologians seem also to agree.

Then too, in a scholastic context, those who like Aquinas are called “intellectualist” rather than voluntarist also defended the existence of liberum arbitrium, which technically includes a so-called “freedom” to cleave to the worse reason, or to any arbitrary fancy. But a common argument, also repeated in many variations, is that God’s “absolute” freedom — in effect a freedom to choose the worse — is never really exercised. There is still intense disagreement on this non-exercise means, as also occurs in the debate on absolute versus ordained power.

The pragmatist might advise us that a power that is never exercised does not in any meaningful sense exist. But as we have seen recently, Charles Pierce, the originator of pragmatism, vigorously rejected the reduction of reality to facts. Reality for Pierce is characterized by true — and in principle testable — conditional statements about what “would be” the case if this or that.

Aristotelian potentiality and actuality are often misread as power and fact, which completely loses the valuational significance that they acquire over the course of the argument of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Pierce too seems to follow this diminished reading. But this does not prevent him from making the valid point that scholastic talk about “powers” already goes beyond talk about present fact. In this way it is a good thing, even if (as I would add) it is also deeply tied to non-Aristotelian assumptions about the predominance of “efficient” causality.

Scotus does seem to argue that God in a supernatural way really exercises both absolute power and absolute freedom, and that humans making practical decisions do also in fact exercise absolute freedom. But in recognizing that he makes these claims, we still have to consider what these assertions mean in the total context of his thought, and what other countervailing tendencies there may be that need to be taken into account.

In the case of Aquinas, in spite of many divergences from Aristotle on important points, there is still a substantial extent to which he also defends many good Aristotelian positions that have been sharply contested by some conservative theologians. Overall I think Aquinas played a progressive historical role, by inventing and promoting an Aristotle whose texts mainstream opinion in the Church could allow to be read sympathetically, and thus no longer felt the need to ban. This is in spite of my disagreement on numerous matters of interpretation. Augustine has of course never been mistaken for an Aristotelian, but he too played a historically progressive role by taking philosophical thought seriously and making it theologically respectable.

These achievements of broad respectability — for Aristotle, and/or for philosophy in general — had the immense value of leaving open the possibility that others could read the philosophical texts in an even more sympathetic way. I therefore tend to read Aquinas (and scholasticism in general) in a sympathetic way, even though I harp on various matters of interpretation.

I have been feeling the deep irony that some of what I write nowadays, if taken out of context, could be misunderstood as professing a kind of dogmatic Aristotelianism. While I have always regarded Aristotle’s works with interest and sympathy, the degree of that sympathy and the strength of that interest have increased greatly over the years, as I have gradually overcome prejudicial judgments that I had too uncritically accepted, from the contemporary world’s widely diffused bias against Aristotle.

In any case, from my recent investigations it is beginning to appear that Scotus’s actual writings touching on ethics and natural-philosophical topics do not really at all sound like the working out of the consequences of a radical voluntarism. I do still think that Scotus’s theory of synchronic contingency — as it has been called in recent years — goes way too far in opposing the determinist bias attributed to the Arabic Aristotelians. But the most substantial account yet available of Scotus’s general attitude toward Aristotelian natural philosophy — Richard Cross’s The Physics of Duns Scotus (1999) — says in the front matter that when addressing natural-philosophical questions, Scotus never primarily relies on theological arguments, but only uses them in a secondary and corroborating way. This is actually true of many of the scholastics.

There is a new collection of Scotus’s ethical writings (Williams 2017), which seems to have largely superseded the Wolter 1996 collection mentioned recently. The most substantial secondary work on Scotus’s ethics seems to be Mary Beth Ingham, The Harmony of Goodness: Mutuality and Moral Living According to John Duns Scotus (1996; 2nd ed. 2012). She speaks of Scotus’s “moral vision of relational love and generous living” (p. 7) as rooted in a broader Franciscan emphasis on the beauty of Creation. In her view, Scotist ethics develops and builds on a Franciscan theological aesthetics. Ingham’s account opens up perspectives on Scotus’s ethics that seem far closer to the ethical themes in Aristotle and Hegel than I ever expected,

The case for the existence and importance of such a Franciscan theological aesthetics gains additional support from The Beauty of the Trinity: A reading of the Summa Halensis (2022) by Justin Coyle. He argues that the main document of early Franciscan theology gives beauty a central place in its account of the Trinity that has been little recognized. Schumacher and Bychkow’s A Reader in Early Franciscan Theology: The Summa Halensis (also 2022) translates selections from this same work, which had multiple authors, the most prominent of whom were Alexander of Hales (d. 1245) and John of La Rochelle (also d. 1245). Along with Roger Bacon, Alexander and John are the most prominent of the Franciscan predecessors of Scotus, whom Boulnois partially credits for some of the innovations that have been attributed solely to Scotus.

Free Will as Love?

I was surprised and intrigued to learn that Augustine in various works seems to more or less identify will with love. Of course it is not surprising that a Christian theologian would write about love. I count 65 occurrences of the word “love” in Augustine’s famous early treatise On the Free Choice of the Will. But my quick scan of all 65 passages did not find this identification. Nor is this identification mentioned in the introduction to the Cambridge edition, or in a great many discussions of free will by other writers who mention Augustine. I have confirmed, however, that this surprising identification of will with love does appear in a number of Augustine’s other works, and is considered by some to be an important theme. I first encountered this identification of will with love quite recently, in secondary literature on Scotus. Then I found references back to Augustine.

Scotus reportedly makes this identification too. He also seems to hold that all virtue is virtue of the will. I think of virtue more generally as virtue of something like character or emotional disposition. Once a separate faculty of will and decision is posited in the human, I can see how it might seem plausible to locate virtue in the will. But I don’t think there is such a separate faculty, and Plato and Aristotle did not think so either.

We make judgments and decisions based on varying combinations of thinking and feeling. The particular drift or orientation of our judgments and decisions could reasonably be described as some definite will, but this does not justify the assumption that choice and decision should be attributed to a separate faculty that is independent of all our thinking and feeling, as well as of all external circumstance.

What is clear is that we want some things, and don’t want others. Plato and Aristotle call this desire. Our desires count as ours by Aristotle’s criterion of willingness. We are responsible for the whole of our desire, even though there are things we desire without choosing to do so. There is a whole spectrum of desires, some of which are ethically beneficial and highly rational, while others may be completely irrational and ethically harmful.

Greek philosophers may attribute some things to love that some moderns attribute to will. In this vein, we may be said to “love” all that we prefer or seek. Some of Augustine’s references to love have a rather similar sound.

In any case, Augustine and Scotus both emphasize the role of love in their trinitarian theology. Sometimes this is called an ordered love, to distinguish it from animal passion. This ordered love is what they call caritas, or charity. One of Boulnois’s numerous books on Scotus that is out of print and expensive has a title that translates to The Rigor of Charity. An introductory book on Scotus by Thomas Ward is called Ordered by Love. If there is a non-evil voluntarism, this emphasis on love might help explain it.

I believe that in recent browsing I saw a passage in Scotus arguing that the best love, which he calls theologically meritorious, is freely given with no thought of advantage, and therefore the will is free. Unlike all the other arguments for free will that put it in the register of power and efficient causality, love freely given is something I too hold dear.

Voluntarism

I think most people understand believing in free will simply as believing that humans are able to make genuine choices. This is entirely unobjectionable.

It is a very different matter to claim that the will is innately unconditionally free. That is what I call voluntarism, and “free will in the strong sense”.

This is different from the way the term “voluntarism” is used in the secondary literature on medieval philosophy. There it means the view that there is a separate faculty for choosing that is called will, and that this will is prior to intellect, in the sense of being able to overrule what our intellect tells us is true or right. In this view, will governs intellect rather than being governed by it. It is in this sense, for example, that Aquinas is called an “intellectualist” and not a voluntarist, because he holds that the will is governed by intellect, even though he also defends liberum arbitrium, or free will in the strong sense. (There is a separate question about how to understand complex views like this, which include contrasting elements. My simple answer is that we should give them the benefit of the doubt.)

Leaving aside the expanded concept of responsibility that Brandom recommends in A Spirit of Trust, I hold that moral responsibility is well explained by Aristotle. Aristotle says we are responsible for all “willing” actions, but not for “unwilling” ones. It really is no harder than that.

In ordinary life, without any philosophy, we already distinguish willing actions from unwilling or unintended ones that happen as a result of coercion or ignorance. These distinctions of willingness from unwillingness apply at the level of particular actions. Some things we do willingly, others we do not.

This distinction between willing and unwilling could not even possibly be a matter of metaphysical or anthropological truth, because metaphysical and anthropological conclusions are both too general to support this kind of distinction. A metaphysical or anthropological account could only give us ways of generalizing about action or human action as such. But we do not have responsibility in particular cases because of some general metaphysical or anthropological truth. Rather, we have responsibility in particular cases because of what is true in those cases.

We should notice that Aristotle’s whole discussion of willing and unwilling actions — and of choice — not only does not assume, but does not even mention a separate faculty called “will”, unless this has been introduced by a translator. Moreover, meaningful discussion of any definite will or intent revolves around its particular content, not its source. Meanwhile, the source of choice is well described by Aristotle as “either intellect fused with desire, or desire fused with thinking, and such a source is a human being” (Nicomachean Ethics, Sachs tr., p.104; see also Free Will in Aristotle?)

People should be broadly forgiven for having been brought up with the pervasive inflated language about free will, even though a more precise analysis shows it is not really needed to explain or justify the claim we want to defend: that humans are able to make genuine choices.

This is true especially because there is a whole family of old (largely 19th-century) clichés about free will and determinism that tend to force discussion of these topics into very narrow channels. “Free will” and “determinism” are commonly taken to be two opposite extremes. Either everything is determined in advance, or nothing is. Then we are told that in order to avoid the evils of a total determinism, the only alternative is to believe that we are not determined at all. This is a false dichotomy.

Historically, it was Augustine who coined the original Latin term liberum arbitrium, and he is often credited with originating the notion of what I call “free will in the strong sense”. Boulnois mentions the commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias (2nd-3rd century CE) as an important precursor.

Theological voluntarism is closely bound up what I have called strong omnipotence, for which the earliest source I know is Philo of Alexandria (1st century BCE to 1st CE). Some form of omnipotence is at least verbally affirmed by nearly all later authorities in all three monotheistic traditions. It is even more pervasive than free will in the strong sense. But again, most of those same authorities make other statements which seem to indicate that they do not at all mean really to endorse the extreme consequences that follow from strong omnipotence, or from free will in the strong sense. We should apply a good measure of interpretive charity in these cases.

More Work on Scotus

My initial motivation for the recent series on Boulnois’s Being and Representation had to do with large-scale, second-order, “historiographical” interpretation of the history of philosophy. More particularly, I wanted to draw attention to this work because it provides abundant evidence for a much more specific medieval and early modern counter-story to Heidegger’s sweeping claims to implicate Plato and Aristotle as well as Hegel in a wrong turn of metaphysics that is supposed to lead to technological domination and general evil. One of the distinctive features of Boulnois’s account is his highlighting of the novel theory of “objective being” in Duns Scotus.

As someone who much appreciates Aristotle’s view that being is “said in many ways”, I naturally have severe doubts about Scotus’s thesis of the univocity of being, though I don’t think it makes Scotus an apostle of secularism, as some have apparently been claiming in recent years. But on this issue, an interesting challenge is posed by Andrew Lazella’s The Singular Voice of Being: John Duns Scotus and Ultimate Difference (2019). Lazella makes a serious argument that Scotus puts difference before identity in the order of the constitution of things. If this is borne out, it would radically change the profile of the univocity claim.

I’m even starting to temper my very severe misgivings about Scotus’s theological and anthropological voluntarism. Franciscan scholar Allan Wolter’s translated volume Duns Scotus on the Will & Morality (1st ed. 1986) presents Scotus as in practice emphasizing a criterion of “right reason” in ethical matters, and as promoting Anselm’s thesis that the human soul is moved by an affectio justitiae or “affection for justice” as well as by a natural affection for the advantageous. It shows Scotus foregrounding Aristotelian phronesis or open-ended practical judgment in ethical matters. While I don’t much care for the narrowing latinization of the latter as prudentia or “prudence”, William Frank’s preface to this volume likens Scotist ethics in general to the “aesthetic judgment of a creative artist” (p. xiii). Not Scotus but William of Ockham is apparently the chief source of “divine command theory”, which reduces virtue to obedience.

There is a recent translation of the important Third Distinction of Scotus’s Ordinatio volume I as On Being and Cognition (2016) by John van den Bercken. Duns Scotus’s Theory of Cognition (2014) by Richard Cross pursues the same topics across the whole body of Scotus’s work. Voluntarism seems to play essentially no role in either of these. Cross incidentally says that both Scotus and Aquinas held that we have only inferential knowledge of Aristotelian substance. My Brandomian inferentialist ears perked up at this.

Another of Allan Wolter’s translated volumes is A Treatise on Potency and Act, which was a late addition to Scotus’s incomplete Questions on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, dealing with Book Theta. This work rather inauspiciously promotes a view of these matters as revolving around active and passive powers, in a context of efficient causality. But as such, it could make an interesting historiographical case study.