The Cambridge Platonists

Viewed historically, none of the world’s major religious traditions is a monolith. The Cambridge Platonists were not so much philosophers as Christians who sought new ways to avoid the destructive sectarianism that became especially common in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. They stand out as sincerely religious figures for whom religion ought to put ethics first, rather than questions of doctrinal purity. The world needs more of those.

We are still walking through J. B. Schneewind’s The Invention of Autonomy, which seeks to characterize the full complexity of 17th- and 18th-century moral philosophy in the European tradition, and in so doing to explain the background of Kant’s innovations in ethics. In particular, it documents the existence of alternatives to the widespread medieval and early modern tendency to reduce morality to a matter of obedience to divinely sanctioned law.

Beyond the scope of Schneewind’s argument, it is also important to note that none of the Greek philosophers sees morality as reducible to obedience. It is commonly claimed that Christianity is ethically superior to Greek philosophy, but historically it is just wrong to claim that only Christianity introduced criteria of love and forgiveness. If we look seriously at what is usually translated as the cardinal virtue of “friendship” in Aristotle, it is first and foremost a kind of non-possessive love. A readiness to forgive is one of the principal characteristics of Aristotle’s other cardinal virtue of magnanimity. Aristotle’s generous, non-exclusive outlook also recognizes yet other other cardinal virtues in free and open deliberation, unbiased practical judgment, and a kind of generous fairness or equity (epieikeia) that looks beyond the letter of the law. There are multiple summits. Rather than claiming that Christianity is by definition morally superior to such a philosophical outlook, the apologetic claim ought rather to be that it is capable of reaching the same heights.

“Thomasius’s rejection of servility in our relation to God is a late articulation in Germany of an attitude that found full voice earlier in England. ‘A right knowledge of God, John Smith wrote in the middle of the seventeenth century, ‘would beget a freedom and liberty of soul within us, and not servility’. ‘Reverence God in thyself’, Benjamin Whichcote exhorted his readers, ‘for God is more in the mind of man, than in any part of this world besides’. Ralph Cudworth quoted Athanasius in order to assert that ‘God was therefore incarnated and made man, that he might deify us’. From the 1640s on, these three formed part of a group engaged in a radical rethinking of Protestantism” (p. 194).

“Like many others who contributed to the development of thought about morality, these thinkers were responding to religious controversies that were tearing their society apart. Sectarian Calvinism was swamping out the Thomism that Hooker had thought foundational for a national church…. Could one appeal to reason and decency to hold society together? Many held that such a view smacked of Pelagianism in modern dress. The appeal to reason was dangerously like Arminianism in its denial of arbitrary prevenient grace; it also resembled the anti-Trinitarian doctrines of Socinianism. Could one insist on natural law without suggesting that one was either a papist or a Hobbesian? Everyone who had opinions seemed to be absorbed in questions of doctrinal purity. Finding biblical texts to prove one was right, denouncing those who did not accept exactly the correct formulation of saving truth, taking political action to exclude those in error from membership in one’s church — these matters seemed to be overwhelmingly important. The disagreements that they occasioned and exacerbated threatened not only to destroy the possibility of a common faith among English Protestants. They were a threat to maintaining any common social and political life” (pp. 194-195).

We have already seen this concern to avoid conflict over religion in Schneewind’s coverage of the natural law tradition. It is important to see why even intensely religious thinkers were motivated to defend what we may think of as secular values. They could see very concretely the evils of rampant sectarianism.

“Whichcote, Smith, More, and Cudworth were deeply embroiled in these local battles. Unlike many of their opponents, however, they developed a stance and a philosophy that in important ways transcended the particularities of the quarrels of the times. Commonly called the Cambridge Platonists, the group’s central members were divines who spent much of their lives as academics at Cambridge. The originators of the movement were not philosophers but preachers and reformers. Though they developed a complex and coherent outlook, they did not wish to present it in the kind of systematic form that philosophers often strive for. They worked out their views in terms of Scripture, and argued, as did most of those whom they addressed, by interpreting biblical texts. Such theory as they presented was offered largely to show the implications of their new way of reading texts. Their Platonism was much mediated by Plotinus and the Greek fathers of the church. Using Plato to provide help for a new Christian exegesis was an incidental, not a central, aim. The most coherent philosophical account of the group’s outlook seems indeed quite Platonic, or neoplatonic. But Ralph Cudworth’s Plato, an all but overt Christian who had learned about God’s revelation to the Jews from the Egyptians, is not exactly the Plato of modern scholarship. The extent of genuine Platonism in the group matters far less than its attempt to put Christianity in a new light” (p. 195).

This aspect of Schneewind’s emphasis will be mine here as well.

“Benjamin Whichcote (1609-83) originated the movement. In sermons and personal teaching he insisted on two conclusions: that morality is the heart of religion, and that reason and religion are the same thing. ‘There are but two things in religion’, Whichcote writes, ‘Morals and Institutions: Morals may be known, by the Reason of the thing; morals are owned as soon as spoken, and they are nineteen parts in twenty, of all religion’ ” (p. 196).

It is important to recognize that this was not part of a minimalist, common-denominator view of religion, like that promoted by deism. Positive embrace of poetically rich specific religious heritage need not be accompanied by insistence that the virtuous pagan and others who do not share the same heritage of symbolic identification are automatically consigned to hell.

“[Whichcote] is no Deist. Unlike Lord Herbert of Cherbury, he aims to preserve the essentials of Christianity. Where Herbert had given conscience the primary role as a test of true revelation, Whichcote gave morality a place no one since Pelagius had dared to give it. His radical claim is that ‘the Moral part of religion does sanctify the soul; and is Final both to what is instrumental and instituted’. Morality suffices to win salvation and must be the controlling factor in the arrangements we make about both worship and church governance; and morality is to be known by reason, rather than by appeal to authority, including biblical authority” (ibid, internal citations omitted here and throughout).

Religious beliefs offer additional motivation and sustenance for us to act ethically ourselves, not additional requirements by which to judge others.

“The one part of religion in twenty that comes by institution — by God’s positive will revealed in scripture — has, Whichcote holds, merely instrumental value…. But the moral part of religion ‘is necessary in itself’, containing requirements dictated directly by reason. The requirements of morality are not due to God’s will; any sane person would want to abide by them even if God granted a dispensation from them. It is only if we live in accordance with these necessary moral laws that we will be truly happy. ‘Morality’, Whichcote says, ‘is not a means to anything but to happiness; everything else is a means to morality’…. Like Cudworth and Smith, Whichcote cites scripture to authorize his claim that we can be deified by making ourselves virtuous” (p. 197).

“The central thesis is that we are each able to know, by thinking for ourselves, how we are to live and behave, and that we each have ‘power to execute and perform’ according to this knowledge. Because Whichcote is strongly opposed to voluntarism, he insists that there is something to be known at the base of morality. ‘Moral laws are laws of themselves’, he tells us, ‘without sanction by will; and the necessity of them arises from the things themselves. God made us to know both him and his creation, and so made the mind with sound faculties. If we use them properly we are in accord with ourselves; to refuse to seek truth and to refuse to think for oneself are equally to be at odds with oneself. The important truths are readily accessible to us, moreover, and are neither recondite nor difficult” (ibid).

This is the principle of self-governance that we have already seen in the neo-Stoics.

“When we are immoral, we act against our own principles and contradict our own reason. We therefore need no external tribunal to tell us we have acted wrongly. ‘The unrighteous are condemned by themselves before they are condemned by God.’ Being self-condemned is what is really meant by being in hell; being self-consistent and filled with ‘humility, modesty, righteousness, temperance, reverence of deity and the like’ is what is meant by being in heaven. Heaven and hell are not places; they are states of mind…. To be saved, and so deified, simply means to live in accordance with what we ourselves see to be right” (p. 198).

“Like Lord Herbert, Whichcote argues in several sermons that because God holds us all equally accountable, he must have made saving knowledge available to all alike…. In Whichcote’s thought, then, moral knowledge [is] more widely accessible than knowledge either of the natural world or of revelation…. That inner governance which is both morality and religion must lead to virtuous action, or it is nothing” (p. 199). ” ‘The longest sword, the strongest lungs, the most voices, are false measures of truth’ ” (p. 199n).

Hear hear.

“John Smith (1618-52) … agrees that morality concerns one’s inner condition, not only law-abiding external action, that heaven and hell are states of mind, that sanctification and justification must go hand in hand, that the laws of morality do not arise from God’s arbitrary will, and that we participate in God’s mind…. Even ignorant men feel an instinctive yearning toward union with God…. If we can only bring ourselves to act better, we will know more. This is what Smith means by saying that we learn more about God through action than through speculation. Truth and goodness ‘grow both from the same root and live in one another’ ” (p. 199-200).

“It is just obvious that though we should love ourselves, we should love other people and God even more. We can increasingly transform our desires to fit that insight. The search for our own perfection is, in Smith’s eyes, an effort to increase the extent to which we act out of love for others” (p. 200).

If our own “perfection” consists in acting out of love for others, the end goal must encompass a good deal more than our individual perfection.

“Smith’s opposition to voluntarism and his belief that God is essentially a loving being push him in the direction of a consequentialist view of morality. Although it would be absurd to think of God obeying anyone else, he is ‘not Ex Lex and without all law’…. God follows his reason, and so he takes the goodness of things as a reason to bring them about. God’s aim must be to bring goodness into being in the world; and the law of nature that he has inscribed within our souls tells us to do the same…. Not only is the law inscribed in us a law of goodness. It is one which we need not be made to follow by threats. A law of that kind — the kind Grotius and Hobbes took as central — can exact only external observance” (pp. 200-201).

“Henry More (1614-87) was the one member of the Whichcote group to publish a systematic work on moral philosophy during the seventeenth century. The Encheiridion Ethicum of 1666 … is in some respects eclectic and a little eccentric. It nonetheless spells out the consequences of the views of Whichcote and Smith when those are given a philosophical form. More does not take up all the ideas they raise — he rejects voluntarism, for instance, but without elaborating on the rejection or arguing for it…. Yet its main thesis is quite straightforward, and plainly in line with the Cambridge emphasis on love and reason as together forming the center both of morality and of our relations with God” (p. 202).

What more could we need in order to be ethical, besides love and reason?

” ‘In morality we are as sure as in mathematics’, Whichcote pronounces, and More produces some twenty-three ‘moral axioms or noemas’, which, he says, in a phrase recalling Whichcote, are ‘agreed to as soon as heard’. The noemas are self-evident and can serve the purpose in moral reasoning that ‘first undeniable axioms’ do in mathematics. More introduces them because they will make morality plain and compelling even to those unfortunately lacking in what he calls the ‘boniform faculty’, a brief account of which opens his treatise” (pp. 202-203).

I have a few doubts about this part. More’s noemas, summarized below by Schneewind, all in all seem pretty reasonable, but I regard appeals to self-evident principles as a weakness, even in mathematics. (Martin-Löf’s constructive type theory manages to do without.) Some things are so evident that they are hard to explain; but that does not make them self-evident. On the other hand, this is a rather technical point. Somewhat more seriously, while we may feel something close to certainty about the abstract principles themselves, all practical applications involve interpretation at the point where universals are applied to particulars, and such interpretation is in principle always open to further development. But again on the other hand, in practice what is almost self-evident is hard to distinguish from what “is” self-evident.

“What exactly that faculty is remains somewhat of a mystery even at the end of the book. But it is at least a love of the highest good as well as an insight into it; it leads us to do good as well as to desire it for ourselves; it makes us ‘pant after God’; and it is the supreme faculty in our minds or souls, through which we resemble God, ‘who is goodness it self’ ” (p. 203).

It is undeniable that the whole human being (often, at least) has a kind of overall sense for what is good in various situations. Calling it a faculty seems a bit reified.

“Noema I tells us that the good is that which is ‘grateful, pleasant, and congruous’ to any living being. In III and IV we learn that some beings are superior to others, and that goods may differ in quality, in quantity, or both. These noemas also underlie sincerity, the virtue by which the mind is wholly devoted to the pursuit of the best and brought to pursue the greatest good with the greatest zeal. Noema V instructs us to choose the good, preferring not simply the greater to the smaller but the more excellent to the less. The seventh noema recognizes an asymmetry of good and evil: it is better to miss a considerable good than to suffer a comparable evil. Noema IX suggests that there might be a trade-off between a lesser good of more ‘weight and duration’ than a superior good of less extent. Noemas X and XI tell us that, allowing for probabilities, pursuit of good and avoidance of evil should not be affected by the times at which they occur. These plainly show the rationale of prudence; and noema XII gives the ‘demonstration’ of that virtue, saying that a calm mind undisturbed by the passions judges better than a mind roiled by desires. Noema XIII, finally, requires that we purse the greater good with the greater zeal” (pp. 203-204).

What is perhaps most noteworthy in this enumeration is the passing mention of sincerity. A bit further below, Schneewind characterizes More’s ethical stance, as he previously did that of Cumberland, as consequentialist (that action is good which brings about good). This invokes one of the two major dimensions relevant to ethical assessment: consequences. The other, invoked by the mention of sincerity, consists in our intentions, good will, and acting in good faith.

“Noema XIV, grounding justice, is simply More’s version of the golden rule: if you want someone to do good to you, you are bound to do the same good for him in similar circumstances. In XVI we are told to return good, not evil, for good. Noemas XVII-XIX say that it is good for people to have the means to live well, and that the more who have the means, the better. Moreover it it is better for one person to be prevented from living luxuriously than for many to be in want. There are two noemas concerned with obedience: we are to obey the magistrate ‘in things indifferent’ and to obey God rather than men. Finally, we are to give people what is due to them, without troubling them”; but we should recognize that people can forfeit their rights by bad behavior” (p. 204).

This all seems unobjectionable, if a bit pedantic. But I expect I would find the views of More’s opponents truly horrendous.

“More has no sense that there is any tension among these axioms; he seeks no reduction of their number; and he believes in addition that being fully virtuous will make us perfectly happy. He plainly thinks that morality is wholly a matter of the pursuit of good, and that there can be no ultimate conflict or disharmony among the parts of that search” (ibid).

I don’t see tension either. But in attempting to specify universal principles of good at this level of detail, it is inevitable that not all of the principles will be of the same kind. Moreover, this being the case aggravates the worry that it is hard to know whether the enumeration is complete.

” ‘Therefore it is necessary … first to inquire and find out, what is the mode and standard of this right reason?’…. The principle, perhaps not surprisingly, turns out to be the boniform faculty, which is now equated with an intellectual love of all good. Because this is the divine in us, ‘it ought in preference to be the rule and standard of all the rest … this most simple and divine sense and feeling in the boniform faculty of the soul, is that rule or boundary, whereby reason is examin’d and approves her self’. It is a single and simple idea, ‘but all the shapes and modes of virtue and well doing’ come from it — including justice, temperance, and fortitude. If your boniform faculty is operating, you need not appeal to the noemas, which cover the same ground” (pp. 204-205).

We have encountered the Stoic criterion of right reason numerous times recently. Here More raises the good question of its “mode and standard”, though he answers it rather quickly. But his answer is not vacuous, even if it does raise further questions.

While the “intellectual love of all good” sounds a bit like Spinoza, Spinoza’s library and correspondence, which have been well studied, contain no reference to any of the Cambridge Platonists. Like many of their contemporaries, More and Cudworth in fact denounced the conclusions of Spinoza. But a century later, Herder would synthesize what became the influential Romantic view of Spinoza by integrating Cudworth’s notion of “plastic natures”, mentioned again below.

“More thus presents a fully consequentialist ethic. He is quite willing to speak of laws of nature, even giving a rather Grotian account of the rights involved in them. But he plainly intends the laws to be explained in terms of their tendency to produce good. Divine reason, he says, has dictated to us ‘such laws as tend, in their own nature, to the happiness of all mankind’. And we find in the supreme rule derived from, or constituted by, the boniform faculty, a principle that everyone can use to make moral decisions. Considering the value of things other than virtue, More dismisses subtle wit and strong memory as unimportant as long as we are filled with love of neighbor and goodwill to mankind. ‘For the good and perfect man is not so much actuated by a list of precepts gotten without book, as by living inwardly and printing in his mind a single and sincere sense of things.’ We are to pursue in singleness of mind that which is the best. And the rules for doing this are plain enough for everyone to use” (p. 205).

As mentioned above, Schneewind has previously noted a consequentialist turn in Cumberland. But in Cumberland, it is natural law that anchors and gives shape to our love of the good, whereas in More, the validity of law is derived from our sense of the good. Law is no longer a voluntaristic fiat ex nihilo.

“Love is thus the source of law. The law is the expression of the boniform faculty, which is what is divine within us. By living in accordance with it, we ourselves approach divinity. That is what Plato taught when he spoke of virtue as a thing divine, ‘and how much ally’d, and resembling unto God himself’ ” (ibid).

“That [Cudworth’s] orientation is the same as Whichcote’s and Smith’s is clear from a notable sermon preached by invitation to the House of Commons in 1647. The moral quality of our lives — ‘willing or not willing as we ought to do’ — matters more than anything else. Those who turn themselves away from self-centered love to love the good in all things, as God loves, will find heaven within and thus need nothing more. They will be moved by a law of love which leaves them free in obeying it because in this obedience, even though they are under ‘the most constraining and indispensable necessity’, there is no ‘narrowness and servility’. They are a law unto themselves. Doctrinal differences are unimportant; following the commandment to love is the sole way to know more about God. And our chief task is to perfect not our intellects but our wills or hearts” (p. 206).

Will is now a definite intent that can be explained, rather than a faculty serving as a supernatural unexplained explainer, as it is for the voluntarists.

“Like his Cambridge colleagues Cudworth thinks that when we come to know God better through reforming our will and loves and lives, we are coming to know God’s mind directly. The aim of his True Intellectual System is to spell out a metaphysics that explains how this is possible” (ibid).

Here will has the unobjectionable sense of a definite intent, rather than an unexplained super-power that disrupts and hijacks our ability to reason about the good.

“He is opposed also to the occasionalist element in Cartesianism — the thought that God and God alone sustains the world and its apparent activity, by exercising his power at every moment to keep things existing and working in accordance with his plans” (ibid).

Occasionalism usually arises as a consequence of theological voluntarism, so to oppose the latter is also implicitly to oppose the former.

“Yet we are not forced to say that God does everything. Nature is not divinity itself, but there are what Cudworth calls ‘plastic natures’ that affect natural things, acting without consciousness but as if intelligently. They serve as God’s under-ministers to do the job of maintaining order. Animal reproduction and the ‘mellification’ of bees are examples of this. Plastic natures are at work as much in the macrocosm of the universe as in the microcosm, ‘which makes all things thus to conspire every where, and agree together into one harmony’ ” (ibid).

In effect, Cudworth’s plastic natures act as natural agents of providence. Cudworth is highly aware of the fact that Descartes’s mechanistic view of nature allows no place for any such agents. Meanwhile previous Christian accounts of providence had implicitly assumed an overtly supernatural direct control of, or intervention in, natural events by God. By this innovation, Cudworth charts a course between Scylla and Charybdis. Cudworth has little use for Aristotle, but his plastic natures take over the role of what for Aristotle is “internal” teleology embedded in the workings of nature.

Following the old scholastic pattern that was also adopted by the Renaissance Platonist Marsilio Ficino, More and Cudworth both explicitly attack the unity of the material intellect in Averroes. More wrote an elaborate poem “Antimonopsychia” that uses Plotinus to refute the “monopsychism” that various writers misattributed to Averroes. But Cudworth also uses Platonic ideas in God’s mind in a way that unwittingly resembles Averroes’s use of the “treasury” of forms in the material intellect to underwrite and explain the human intellect’s capability for objective understanding of essences.

“Cudworth’s Platonizing theory is that unless we were in direct contact with God’s ideas no one could think or speak in ways that could be understood by anyone else…. But when all created minds contemplate the very same ideas or truths in God’s mind, ‘they do all of them but as it were listen to one and the same original voice of the eternal wisdom that is never silent’ ” (p. 207).

“What, then, do we learn about morality when by living in love we manage to suppress the passions and desires that muddy our thoughts and obtrude between our minds an God’s? ” (ibid).

The Cambridge Platonists seem generally to adopt the Stoic and neo-Stoic view that human passions both can and need to be radically suppressed so that they do not impede our reason, rather than the more moderate Aristotelian view that desire and reason can come to form an integrated whole in the human being. They identify Plato’s eros with the caritas that Augustine sharply distinguishes from cupiditas.

“A central part of the answer … is that there are special moral ideas in God’s mind that guide him in his creativity and which ought to guide us. Voluntarism is, consequently, false.”

“Cudworth is quite willing to accept God’s omnipotence, but he denies what he accuses Descartes of thinking, that it alone entails voluntarism. It is not limiting God’s power to say that he can do only what is not self-contradictory. God’s wisdom is as much a part of God as his will, so if the latter is limited by the former, God is still not controlled by anything external to himself” (pp. 207-208).

“To make a more positive case, Cudworth brings in some considerations about essences and concepts. Like Suarez, he holds that essences are immutable. One might change the name one attached to the essence, but doing so would not touch the essence. Now it is essences that make things what they are; and if essences cannot conceivably be changed, then even God cannot change them. So God cannot by will alone make something that is essentially good into something that is not essentially good. God can either make something exist or refrain from doing so; but if that thing is by its nature good, then God in creating it is necessarily creating a good thing. And God cannot make something good without endowing it with the essence of goodness. Will alone, therefore, Cudworth concludes, cannot be what makes good things good” (p. 208).

“In chapter XLVI of Leviathan Hobbes used his theories of language and knowledge to attack the kind of theory of meaning to which Cudworth is here appealing…. Cudworth plainly knew Hobbes’s view and saw the threat it posed to his own Platonism. He adverts parenthetically to the possibility that moral terms might be ‘meer names without significance, or names for nothing else but willed and commanded’ ” (ibid).

“Against materialism Cudworth erects a theory of plastic natures, based on the view that the evidences of design in nature would not have come about from matter alone, and on the rejection of occasionalism. In defending the irreducibility of moral concepts, his purpose is to defeat voluntarism, whether Hobbesian or Cartesian. To do so he moves to arguments about essences and meanings that are quite general, and not tied specifically to morality as such. His other Cambridge colleagues did not use arguments of this kind. But Cudworth was plainly not satisfied with the kind of view that underlies Smith’s and More’s rejection of voluntarism…. The upshot of this view, as I pointed out in the case of More and of Cumberland after him, is a proto-utilitarian ethic, a consequentialist view that tells us that God necessarily loves good generally and acts to bring about as much as he can, and that we ought to do likewise” (p. 209).

“John Smith spells out a further consequence, as I noted earlier. Punishment cannot be retributive; it must be either determent or reformative. Cudworth raises an objection to this conclusion, an objection we do not really expect…. Consequentialism must be rejected because it forces us to the wholly unacceptable conclusion that God could not reasonably carry out retributive justice. But if consequentialism cannot be accepted, then the argument from God’s goodness will not give a satisfactory reason for rejecting voluntarism. Cudworth seems to think he is forced by his moral concerns into arguments about meaning and metaphysics” (pp. 209-210).

Even the proto-deist Herbert of Cherbury had included reward and punishment in an afterlife in his minimalist program. Cudworth clearly recognizes Smith’s point that punishment or retribution cannot be a good in itself. As Schneewind points out, this results in an impasse for Cudworth, who also clearly wants to hold onto a traditional Christian view of supernatural reward and punishment.

“It is as if he would like to attribute to God two moral attributes, goodness and justice, yet hesitates to do so…. His view of eternal punishment suggests that he believes that divine retribution does not do good in the way that beneficience does. Hence justice and love might conflict. But not only is such conflict theoretically inadmissible in Cudworth’s harmonious universe. The question is politically loaded. The Puritans emphasized an Old Testament deity of justice and vengeance. If Cudworth were to give justice priority in God’s moral nature, he would seem to have gone over to their side. But insisting on the priority of love, as he generally does, leads him into serious difficulties explaining eternal punishment. Perhaps silence seemed the best way out” (p. 210).

I will devote a separate post to Cambridge Platonist views on free will.

The Last Natural Lawyer

“After issuing a large Latin Pufendorfian treatise on natural law in 1688, [Christian Thomasius] published in 1692 a little German Introduction to Ethics, subtitled On the Art of Loving Reasonably and Virtuously, and followed it with a book about applying the art…. His final Latin treatise … embodied yet further and more fundamental changes of view” (Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy, p. 160).

That subtitle caught my attention, because it sounds like Duns Scotus on love. Thomasius’s view of love is actually closer to Cumberland, though.

“The two books on love show Thomasius working in terms of a long tradition of moral and therapeutic thought centered on love — love not as Christian agape or caritas but as a purely human phenomenon not requiring to be explained by divine grace. Cumberland treated love similarly, and constructed his doctrine of natural law so as to show that morality centers on it. He also sought to avoid voluntarism; and the two aims coincided beautifully. The logic of displacing voluntarism led him to the law of love, the requirement that we maximize natural good; and if that is the moral law, we have a plain way of showing that God’s commands are not arbitrary but are justifiable in terms we understand. Thomasius began as a thorough disciple of Pufendorf; and when he finally rejected voluntarism, he moved at least as close to utilitarianism as Cumberland did” (ibid).

Rather than implicitly invoking fire and brimstone in the manner of the Protestant voluntarists, Thomasius emphasizes seeking the good. Actions are to be judged not in terms of obedience, but in terms of their consequences.

“Thomasius took the Grotian problematic for granted even when he rejected Pufendorf. His objections to modern natural law theory are of special interest precisely because they come from an erstwhile adherent” (ibid). “As head of the new university of Halle, Thomasius occupied a commanding position in the intellectual life of Germany. His defection from Pufendorf was a highly significant response to the dominant work on natural law” (p. 161).

“Early in his chapter on the passions Thomasius gives us a central indication of his reason for abandoning Pufendorf. Proper religious feeling, he tells us, is definable as reasonable hope and fear of God, and is also called childlike fear. Unreasonable fear of God is superstition. It is a servile fear. After this it is no surprise to read later that ‘the concept and representation of God as a father grounds a childlike fear, but that of God as absolute monarch a servile fear’. Only fools imagine God as a despot: [quote from Thomasius:] ‘if a wise man should imagine God as a human ruler, he would rather imagine him as father than as ruler. For it is more suitable to God’s perfection to seek for the best for men than to pursue his own utility through laws written in men’s hearts in a despotic manner’ ” (ibid).

I think it better not to speak in terms of fear at all, but the main point here is the rejection of servile fear as a motivation. Thomasius clearly recognizes the terrible consequences of regarding God as an absolute monarch.

“Here the rejection of voluntarism is tied directly to God’s pursuit of the greatest good. Thomasius adds that if we think of God as ‘a despotic lawgiver who obligates men outwardly through punishment’, then we must also think that no actions are honorable or shameful independent of God’s will” (ibid).

Aristotle might remind us that the greatest goods are those sought for their own sake. Acting for the sake of a reward is a sub-ethical motivation. Avoidance of punishment is even lower. Something is deeply and profoundly wrong with the idea that God would want us to be sub-ethically motivated.

“A wise God is a teacher rather than a lawgiver, he says, and we can only learn when we have a peaceful mind, not one disturbed by fears. God, moreover, teaches by reason” (ibid).

“If God does not punish, then his directives are not law in the same sense as human laws are. Divine and human law are not really members of a common species…. Thomasius retains the natural law distinction between what a teacher does in counseling and what a superior does in issuing a command. But he no longer says that what a commanding superior does is to obligate. A superior rules. And he almost says that God’s directives are to be taken as counseling. God is a father, and ‘a father’s directions are more Counsels than Rules’. God directs us to our good, and we can understand what that is” (p. 162).

Obeying a command does not make us moral. What matters for ethics are the intentions and consequences of an action.

“Counsel binds by showing the person counseled an ‘intrinsic’ force coming from what is necessarily connected with the act in question. Rule binds by an external or outer force connected only by human choice to the act. A wise man, Thomasius says, ‘considers the inner duty the superior kind’, and is usually governed by counsel. Fools are usually governed by rule’ ” (pp. 162-163).

Only intrinsic motivation is ethical.

“Justice, for Thomasius, is concerned with preventing people from damaging one another so seriously that society will not be able to continue. Its rules concern only publicly observable behavior toward other people. Justice matters because there are wicked people who tend to disturb the peace and who must be controlled. The honorable, by contrast, concerns only one’s inner life. Honorable people control their passions and desires and do nothing shameful. Decorum or propriety, like justice, is a matter of one’s relations to others. It concerns the ways in which one might help others or improve one’s inner condition so that one does not wish to harm them. If the honorable person is the most estimable, and the unjust is the worst, the person of propriety is of a middling sort. In the wise person all three kinds of goodness must be combined” (p. 163).

“The principle of honor is ‘Whatever you will that others should do, do yourself’; the principle of propriety is ‘Whatever you will that others should do to you, do to them’; and the principle of justice is ‘Whatever you do not want to have done to you, do not do to others’ ” (pp. 163-164).

“The rules of justice are appropriately backed by threats of punishment. The rules of the other two domains cannot be. The honorable is a wholly inner matter, hence beyond the reach of force; and Thomasius is quite explicit about propriety. ‘Certainly the rules of propriety regard men in their relations to other men. Nevertheless no one can be forced to propriety, and if one is forced, then it is no longer propriety’…. We must perform such duties in the right spirit, a spirit of love or direct concern. Obligation, however, exists only where we can be compelled, and we cannot be compelled to feel love, gratitude, or pity” (p. 164).

“Moreover since the duties of honor and propriety are more fully inner duties than those of justice, and are given more weight by the wise man, they are in an important sense higher or ‘more perfect’…. In this domain we are ruled neither by God nor by the magistrate. Inner obligation does not have other people as its source. Hence we can say that here we ‘can be obligated to ourselves and that we can make laws for ourselves (for example, through a vow). These obligations are higher and more important than merely external obligations open to enforcement by sanctions. The latter constitute the domain in which humans make laws properly so called. The former come very close indeed to constituting a domain we are now inclined to recognize as that of morality. In it we are self-governed” (p. 165).

Moral Entities and Voluntarism

This will continue the last post’s in-depth look at The Invention of Autonomy, J. B. Schneewind’s insightful history of moral philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries. We come to the chapter on the “central synthesis” of the religious but relatively secularized Protestant natural law tradition, carried out by the Lutheran jurist Samuel Pufendorf (1632-1694). Pufendorf develops a novel theory of what he calls “moral entities”. Schneewind notes that “Locke recommended Pufendorf’s work for the education of any gentleman’s son. It is, he said, ‘the best book of that kinde’ ” (p. 141).

While the non-naturalist and anti-realist theory of moral entities is only presented rather sketchily by Pufendorf and retains a voluntarist coloring, it is important as an alternative to the ethical naturalism of Hobbes and Locke (Locke’s endorsement of Pufendorf notwithstanding). Despite its clear voluntarist heritage and its emphasis on positive law, Pufendorf’s work also emphasizes government by consent, which — to a degree at least — explicitly undoes the unilateral conception of authority with which legal and political voluntarism, with its emphasis on the will of the sovereign, is commonly associated. (Incidentally, I just learned that Duns Scotus preceded Pufendorf in speaking explicitly of the consent of the governed, which further complicates the picture of Scotus. Locke will later become the most famous advocate of this notion of consent.)

Pufendorf introduces moral entities saying, “[C]hiefly for the direction of acts of the will, a specific kind of attribute has been given to things and their natural motions, from which there has arisen a certain propriety in the actions of man…. Now these attributes are called Moral Entities, because by them the morals and actions of men are judged and tempered” (On the Law of Nature, quoted in Schneewind, p. 120, ellipses in original).

Pondering this material has led to another conceptual refinement on my part, which again further complicates the discussion on voluntarism. Under this heading up to now I have been concerned mainly with worries over the “ideological” kind of voluntarism that plays an important role in sectarian disputes among Western Christians during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation; whose origins a number of scholars trace back to the Condemnation of 1277; whose more remote origins I have noted in the creationism of Philo of Alexandria; and which is paralleled in the occasionalism of al-Ghazali.

There is also a “technical” use of voluntarist concepts, in which a voluntarist explanatory model is used in in a more neutral way in the formulation of new theories like Pufendorf’s account of law, or in the earlier Latin medieval formulation of the theory of signification. Encountering a second instance of this in Pufendorf has led me to think more explicitly about this “technical” voluntarism, which could perhaps also describe an aspect of Brandom’s earliest, pragmatist-flavored work on social practices involved in the constitution of meaning.

To express the status of moral entities as different from natural things, Pufendorf employs the term “imposition”, which was previously used in the theory of signification developed by Roger Bacon and others. The slightly odd connotations of this term “imposition” seem in both cases to be very non-accidental. Each of these two theories makes important technical use of what can be called a “voluntarist” model. The signifier is explicitly said to be arbitrary in relation to its signified. This technical use of arbitrariness is paralleled in Pufendorf’s theory of moral entities and positive law.

In contemporary terms, both of these could alternatively be explained as “anti-realist” theories that need not depend on voluntarist claims. A certain verbal allegiance to some strands of voluntarism for a while seems to have become de rigueur in Protestant countries, even though Luther and Calvin emphasized the late Augustine’s rather extreme anti-Pelagianism, which denies any role of human free will specifically in Christian salvation. The “technical” use of voluntarist language is at least as closely related to contemporary disputes about realism and anti-realism, as it is to disputes involving ideological voluntarism. It seems that in this more technical and less ideological use of voluntarist language, its voluntarist aspect may reflect an accident of historical origin that is not essential to its meaning.

These anti-realist uses of voluntarist language partially anticipate Kant’s talk of “taking” of things to be thus-and-such. One of the most common ways in which Kant is misunderstood is by the assimilation of Kantian “taking” to some kind of subjectivism or ideological voluntarism. Before I learned the error of my ways from Brandom, I used to do this myself.

In continuing to use the term voluntarism in spite of these and other complications, and continuing to hold that it is a Bad Thing, I am deliberately practicing a kind of studied vagueness, with the thought that it names a cluster of related concepts — some more closely related than others — each of which is individually a bad theory, whether it be Divine Command Theory, which one-sidedly insists on the absolute freedom of God; an insistence on the absolute sovereignty of the ruler; a claim that law is prior to ethics, and therefore requires no justification; the intemperate attribution of metaphysically absolute or inherently sovereign free will to humans, which not only exceeds what is really required for ethical practice, but tends to undermine conscience, deliberation, and critical thought; or a theory that culture is something that we one-sidedly “impose” on the world, which ignores the extent to which culture is something we are passively assimilated into.

In a very broad sense, though, the notion of “moral entities” plays a positive role, insofar as it asserts the existence of a space for ethical practice and interpretation that is very different from the also valuable investigation and interpretation of facts and “natural” causes. Insofar as talk about imposition plays a more “technical” role, it is an optional vocabulary.

As Schneewind expounds, “Moral entities are better said to arise from ‘imposition’…. God imposes some moral entities on all human beings, and these may be called ‘natural’. The moral entities that we impose are not natural in that sense, but otherwise the two are of the same kind. Both serve to bring order into human life. The natural duties and rights which are central to morality and law obviously have this function. When we organize our affairs by giving individuals and groups socially defined roles such as husband, mayor, and town council, we are imposing moral entities on their physical being. The prices we set for things are moral entities. So also are the esteem we accord to people and all the culturally diverse distinctions constituting the offices, honors, and titles governing the right to esteem. As physical and biological beings we are independent of moral entities; but those entities constitute all the other aspects of the human world” (pp. 120-121, citations omitted here and throughout).

Pufendorf uses the anti-realist language of imposition to distinguish his view of the status of morality from that of Grotius. Grotius sees natural-law-based moral values as directly inhering in actions or things in a realist way, and Schneewind relates this back to the realist way in which natural law is developed by Aquinas. Pufendorf’s critique of Grotius seems to be the proximate historical instance for Brandom’s abstracted contrast between the derivation of normative attitudes from normative statuses, and the derivation of normative statuses from normative attitudes.

“The theory of moral entities is not worked out in any great detail in On the Law of Nature and is omitted entirely from On the Duty of Man and Citizen. But Pufendorf takes it to separate his position on the status of morality quite sharply from that of Grotius. Grotius thinks that there is a ‘quality of moral baseness or necessity’ intrinsic to certain acts, which guides God’s legislation. Pufendorf maintains strongly that it is a mistake to say ‘that some things are noble or base of themselves, without any imposition, and that these form the object of natural and perpetual law, while those, the good repute or baseness of which depends upon the will of the legislator, fall under the head of positive laws’ ” (p. 121).

The term positive law is normally applied to human law, viewed as creating rights and responsibilities. Rather than being grounded in moral valuations, rights and responsibilities on this view always already have a pre-constituted legal and binding character that is posited as prior to any moral valuation. From this point of view, law is prior to ethics and is presupposed by it. This fits hand-in-glove with the view that moral goodness is first and foremost a matter of obedience to law. The concept of law as instituted by God is also closely related to Islamic and Jewish theories that give a central place to a divine law.

In any case, it seems that for Pufendorf, natural law should be understood on the model of positive law. It is a kind of positive law that is founded by God, who is very unknowable to us. However, it is unclear how this is supposed to fit together with Pufendorf’s empiricist side, which will lead him to say that adequate knowledge of moral entities for humans can be derived from ordinary experience. The whole “modern” or “Protestant” stream of thought about natural law that makes up one facet of Scheewind’s book seems to agree that natural law is in one way or another adequately knowable from experience, and that this knowledge is not very difficult to attain.

One way that a command-and-obedience model has been claimed to be justified is by pointing out that a criterion of obedience can also be seen as leading to the idea that all humans are equally subject to the law. It can then be claimed that an interpretive paradigm of ethics, which holds that simple obedience is not an adequate ethical criterion, must be an elitist view because it sets the bar too high for ordinary people. I think this is disingenuous, because it is the obedience criterion that serves in a more direct way to ostensibly justify the view that some people just are superior, and therefore are to be obeyed.

Anyway, instead of grounding the content of law in valuations and reasons in the manner of Plato and Aristotle, Pufendorf seems to want reasons to be grounded in a primordial law. This seems to put all the determination inherent in creation under something that we are asked to think on the model of positive law.

The model of positive law seems to provide the technical basis for a radical foundationalism that has no precedent in Greek philosophy, and was only made possible by the later emergence of strong theism. This brings out an important logical tie between foundationalism and voluntarism that I had not considered before.

As I think about it now, this seems to bring out a constitutive relation between ideological voluntarism and the emergence of strongly foundationalist views, from which logical conclusions are supposed to follow in an absolute and unconditioned way. Such foundationalisms stand in sharp contrast with the classic, ultimately non-foundationalist view of Socratic, Platonic, and Aristotelian ethical reason, which makes the rightness of law depend on ethical interpretation and inquiry that is in principle open-ended.

“[Pufendorf] offers several reasons for his position. One rests on the claim that the nobility or baseness of action arises from the conformity of action to law, and since ‘law is the bidding of a superior’ there cannot be nobility or baseness antecedent to law. Another is that man’s reason alone cannot account for the difference between bodily motions that are sinful and those that are not. Reason alone might enable us to do more cleverly or efficiently what animals do, and so to make a distinction between what is expeditiously done and what is not. But without a law it would never enable us ‘to discover any morality in the actions of a man’.”

This implies a calculative view of reason rather than an ethical one.

“These rather specious arguments do not reveal Pufendorf’s central concern. It is the voluntarist concern. To set up ‘an eternal rule for the morality of actions beyond the imposition of God’ is to admit some external principle coeternal with God, ‘which He Himself had to follow in the assignment of forms of things’. Pufendorf finds this quite unacceptable. Any such principle would limit God’s freedom of action in creating man. But everyone, he thinks, admits that God created man and all his attributes freely. So God must have been able to give man any nature he wished. Hence there cannot be any eternal and independent moral properties in things. Morality first enters the universe from acts of God’s will, not from anything else” (pp. 121-122).

As Schneewind makes clear, from a mostly secular point of view Pufendorf explicitly defends a number of the classic claims of theological voluntarism. Nonetheless Pufendorf’s God acts not by just any arbitrary will that could be chaotic or random, but by foundational law-giving, which also implies coherence and self-consistency. God’s will on this view can be understood on the model of a legislator who aims to be consistent.

“God does not contradict his own will. He did not have to create man, or to give him his actual nature. But once he had decided to make man a rational and social animal, then ‘it was impossible for the natural law not to agree with his constitution, and that not by an absolute, but by a hypothetical necessity’ ” (p. 122).

Natural law would then be something like a consequence of the creation of elaborated forms. The point about hypothetical necessity is also interesting. Commands are usually compared to an unconditional or absolute necessity that cannot be rationally justified, because commands are not supposed to be questioned. Hypothetical necessity is emphasized both by Aristotle and by the founder of American pragmatism, Charles Pierce.

” ‘Now good is considered in an absolute way by some philosophers, so that every entity, actually existing, may be considered good; but we pay no attention to such a meaning’. With this apparently casual remark Pufendorf breaks with a long-standing tradition in which goodness and being are equated. Grotius would have been at least sympathetic to the tradition, and Cumberland takes it as obvious that ‘Good is as extensive as Being’. Hobbes’s definition of good in terms of desire indicates that he rejects the equation, but he does not think the metaphysical point worthy of note. Pufendorf elaborates on it in ways that separate him from Hobbes as well as from Cumberland” (p. 123).

It is not quite accurate to speak of an “equation” between good and being. The neoplatonic sources of the views Schneewind is referring to do not simply equate the two, but rather assert a kind of inherent syntactic relation between them. The Good is supposed to be the ultimate cause or reason in the constitution of all things, and therefore, it is argued, all things must be good in some way or another.

“[Pufendorf] concentrates on what is good or bad in relation to persons. So understood, he says, ‘the nature of good seems to consist in an aptitude whereby one thing is fitted to help, preserve, or complete another’. Such aptitudes are part of the nature of things and do not depend on what people want or what they think about them. With Cumberland and against Hobbes, Pufendorf takes the relations which make one thing good for another as purely objective. He goes out of his way to indicate that although the good arouses desire whenever perceived, it may be misperceived or overlooked, and in that case desire would mistakenly urge us to pursue an ‘imaginary’ good” (pp. 123-124).

Schneewind is saying that for Pufendorf, the relations that make one thing good for another are part of the nature of things, and therefore fall under natural rather than moral goodness. So it makes sense that he would call them purely objective. Since he is calling them objective and generally claiming they are to easy to know, it also makes sense that he would point out the possible exception that a perceived good may be imaginary. Some reference to the nature of things seems to be inevitable in a natural law perspective, and any such reference is in some sense a counter-weight to voluntarist ways of thinking.

“Moral goodness is quite different from natural. Moral goodness belongs to actions insofar as they agree with law. For complete moral goodness, an act must accord materially with the law or moral rule, and must be done because it does so accord” (p. 124).

This sounds like fidelity in obedience, and obedience for its own sake. There is a kind of formal analogy between this and Aristotle’s notion of ends that are sought for their own sake, but I don’t think Aristotle would agree that obedience is that kind of end.

“In his definition of law Pufendorf breaks as radically with tradition as he does in abandoning the equation of goodness and being — and he does so just as casually. ‘Law’ is defined simply as ‘a decree by which a superior obligates a subject to adapt his actions to the former’s command’. Suarez and Cumberland, following Thomas, held that law is necessarily ordered to the common good, and even Hobbes defined law in terms of what on his view is the supreme good, life” (ibid).

Certainly Aquinas but also Suarez, Cumberland, and even Hobbes do not have a purely voluntaristic conception of law. Pufendorf’s definition by contrast is purely voluntarist, which is in accordance with his conception of law as purely “positive”. This may be the main reason why it eventually fell out of favor. Later on, Schneewind will document the rise of explicit anti-voluntarism.

Schneewind goes on to document a number of ways in which Pufendorf himself already rejects the idea of a purely voluntaristic conception of authority, even though he defends a purely voluntaristic conception of law.

Pufendorf also develops a doctrine of entitlement that acts as a counter-weight to voluntaristic authority. This is likely a source for Brandom’s important idea in our own time that authority and entitlement should balance one another.

“Neither strength nor beauty nor wit necessarily entitles one to anything. Neither do facts about one’s biological parentage. The logic of moral entities entails that nature cannot morally require us to accept hereditary rulers; and power alone entitles no one — not even God — to authority” (ibid).

Pufendorf’s explicit rejection of the Hobbesian idea that the sheer possession of power confers entitlement to use it in any way one sees fit might be his most important contribution. Within the broader proto-deontological paradigm that seems to have first arisen within a voluntaristic context, and while defending a purely voluntaristic conception of law, he effectively rejects the voluntaristic conception of authority. For Pufendorf, empiricism functions as a safeguard against voluntarist excesses.

“Pufendorf is firm in rejecting several views about the attainment of moral knowledge. He denies, for instance, that moral rules are so clearly imprinted in the mind at birth that we have but to look within ourselves to know them. He finds this objectionable first on epistemological grounds. Pufendorf is an empiricist and thinks we must be able to learn the laws of nature from evidence available in experience…. [W]hat he calls the axioms or basic principles of natural law are to be gathered from experience. On these matters Pufendorf is at one with Grotius, Hobbes, and Cumberland ” (p. 127).

“For him conscience is simply the ability of men to judge actions in terms of laws…. Grotius, Hobbes, and Cumberland would have been sympathetic to this way of defining conscience. All of them hoped, with Pufendorf, that insisting on observable evidence to support moral claims would offer a way to damp down some of the fiercest outbursts of human unsociability” (ibid).

We could certainly use some damping down of those fierce outbursts in the world today.

Reasoning ought to seek evidence, rather than claim self-evidence.

The term “experience” hides a deep ambiguity between the substantive practical wisdom of “experience” that can be acquired only over time, and subjective or empiricist “experience”, understood in terms of a simplistic model of immediate sensation or immediate consciousness. (The very notion of appealing to immediacy in questions of knowledge is a late development. It is at best problematic, and at worst a cover for ideological misdeeds.)

Empiricism is another term that is fraught with ambiguity: do we mean a view that focuses on subjective experience? An experimental method? A kind of faithfulness to evidence? A focus on concrete “real world” cases? And again, “consciousness” is profoundly ambiguous. Even sensation is itself ambiguous. Are we assuming that it is somehow inherently and entirely passive? Or not?

“The question of the justification of God’s authority is more difficult for Pufendorf than it is for Cumberland. Neither thinks that the content of God’s command is what obligates; the formality of his commanding is for both what obligates” (p. 135).

The recognition that authority needs to be justified — that authority is a matter of being justified and not one of having power, or of accidents of social position — is however extremely important. I imagine that this is why Brandom sees Pufendorf in such a strongly positive light. But the claim that the content of a command is irrelevant to its justification is again a voluntarist claim.

Seeing all humans as equally subject to obedience to one law and one set of criteria certainly does have a morally good aspect, compared to explicit insistence on alleged foundational inequality. (All moral characters are not equal — we distinguish some as good and some as bad, and much else — but this has nothing to do with alleged foundational or inherent differences between “kinds” of people, or their formal social roles. Rather our goodness or badness has to do with the particulars of our becoming, with patterns of what we do and how we act, and that not just in the present moment but over the whole of a life.) Pufendorf’s emphasis on the formality of command, on the other hand, follows a voluntarist paradigm that undercuts his good emphasis on justification.

Schneewind turns to some of the problems with Pufendorf’s approach.

“Although he rejects any naturalistic reduction of moral to natural concepts, the doctrine seems to entail a kind of reductionism that threatens his desire to hold that God has authority and not only power. Authority can belong only to one who is willing to use power within just limits. But if just limits arise ultimately from God’s will, it is hard to see how God could be held to have authority in addition to strength. It is indeed doubtful that Pufendorf can allow that we can even mean anything nontautologous by saying that God rules justly. His voluntarism seems to force him into pure Hobbesianism” (ibid).

To speak of “authority and not only power” already means that authority is not to be defined in terms of power.

Human authority must be legitimated, but Pufendorf’s limited appeal to divine authority remains unilateral.

“The appeal to sanctions is problematic for Pufendorf as well. He holds a strong doctrine of free will. In this he is again opposing Hobbes. For Hobbes, … will is only an endeavor occurring in a certain position in an alternation of endeavors, wholly determined by the state of the universe preceding it. Pufendorf treats will as a power separate from desires. Its chief quality is that it is not confined intrinsically to a definite mode of action. Given all the things requisite to action, the will is able to ‘choose one, or some, and to reject the rest’, or to do nothing…. Although the will has a general propensity toward good, it can remain indifferent in the presence of any instance of it” (p. 137).

This is a restatement of the common theological claim that the human has liberum arbitrium, or a power of arbitrary choice. It is the distinguishing mark of what I call anthropological or psychological voluntarism, as distinct from the theological voluntarism that is a claim about God.

From a point of view simultaneously secular and religious, Hobbes and Pufendorf share a theological voluntarism, which they both use in a somewhat instrumental way, although Hobbes’s sincerity in reference to God has been questioned in a way that that of Pufendorf has not. They both speak in terms of a voluntarist model of law and obedience.

Hobbes favors enlightened absolute monarchy that is supposed to be reasonable, but is not supposed to be questioned. Pufendorf develops the important notion of the consent of the governed, which the political voluntarist Hobbes ignores.

Pufendorf, however, as we saw, also defends unconditional free will in humans — a stronger concept than the Aristotelian choice that is really needed for ethics — while also claiming that the stronger concept is needed for ethics. In a somewhat truncated form, he carries forward the position of the scholastic mainstream in so doing.

“Freedom of this kind is crucial. Without it, Pufendorf holds, ‘the morality of human actions is at once destroyed’. Only because we possess it are our spontaneous and voluntary actions fully imputable to us. And Pufendorf insists that we are free to accept or reject obligations as well as natural goods. When an obligation is admitted, the will is thereby inclined to do the obligatory act, but it does not lose its ‘intrinsic liberty’. Thus without the capacity freely to obey or disobey, there can be no obligation” (p. 138).

This shows the way in which theological and anthropological voluntarism are analogous. The divine will and the human will are each respectively supposed have a completely unconditional power of choice, even though such a power is not empirically knowable in the way that for Pufendorf all particular values are supposed to be.

More usefully, independent of this, obligation is only relevant when it is possible to do otherwise. He also makes the important point that obligation presupposes some form of consent to or acceptance of what one is thereby obligated to.

“Obligation is a moral entity. As such it has no causal power of its own. Desires, as part of our physical nature, can cause us to act in space and time; but recognition of obligation gives us a consideration or reason for action that does not operate in the field of force in which desires operate. Desires and obligations are thus incommensurable kinds of considerations for and against action. Hobbes could explain action as the outcome of commensurable desires pulling us this way and that. Pufendorf cannot. He therefore needs a separate faculty of free will to explain how moral entities can be effective in human life even though they possess no causal strength. But he offers no account of how recognition of a moral entity can have effects in the physical world. If he was the first modern to find this problem squarely at the center of his metaphysics of ethics, he was not the last” (ibid).

This partially anticipates the views of Kant, albeit somewhat crudely. Pufendorf treats causality in the modern way as a monomorphic field of force, but then insists on unconditional free will. I think both poles of this opposition are ill-conceived, but will forego further comment on that here. This is also not the place for a lengthy digression on the strengths and weaknesses of empiricism. But as an empiricist, Puffendorf might not be very concerned with this conceptual issue.

“The success of Pufendorf’s exposition of natural law did much to make a concern with voluntarism inescapable in European moral philosophy. It affects both our understanding of the ontological position of morality in the universe, and our understanding of our moral relation to God.”

Pufendorf’s aims were mainly practical. His main concern was law, not philosophy.

“The ontological significance of the doctrine of moral entities is fairly definite. It is a major effort to think through a new understanding of the relation of values and obligations to the physical world. It presents a new response to the developing scientific view of the world as neutral with respect to value. Accepting the concept of a purely natural good dependent on the physical relations of things to humans, Pufendorf refuses to see it as the sole kind of value, and insists that moral norms are conceptually independent of it. He denies the old equation of goodness with existence, and the Grotian assertion of special moral qualities built into the nature of things. He equally repudiates the reductionism of Hobbes and Cumberland, the definition of all evaluative terms by means of terms descriptive of the physical world. Moral entities involve ideas and beliefs that do not in any way represent the way things are in the world. Their whole point is to guide action. Moral entities are inventions, some of them divine, most of them human” (pp. 138-139).

The view attributed to Grotius that he denies is not exactly an “equation” of goodness with existence, but more the assertion of an intrinsic relation.

“Pufendorf’s main reason for taking this line is that it alone allows us to have a proper understanding of God. Only voluntarism leaves God untrammeled. Religious voluntarists before Pufendorf might have accepted much of this. What they could not have accepted, and what makes Pufendorf’s voluntarist account of the construction of morality so striking, is that humans are accorded the ability to construct functioning moral entities in just the way that God does, and just as efficaciously. It takes God to get the process started; but God has made us so that constructive willing is part of our normal rational activity” (p. 139).

Pufendorf defends what I and some others call anthropological voluntarism, as well as theological voluntarism. Hobbes by contrast is widely recognized as an anthropological anti-voluntarist, because he not only does not treat free will as central in the human, but denies it altogether.

In all contexts like this, though, it is also important to ascertain what each author means by free will in the human. Some people speak as though any denial of strict determinism should count as an affirmation of free will. Others speak as though free will in the human is something radical and altogether exempt from natural determination. That is what I mean by anthropological voluntarism.

It is important to me to affirm that there is a spectrum of possible positions here. Strict determinism and voluntarism are two extremes. All the views that are called “compatibilist” would fall in between. I hold that Aristotelian choice also falls in between, though I would not call it “compatibilist”, because neither of the extremes had even been explicitly formulated yet in Aristotle’s time. I think the talk about compatibilism is somewhat misguided, because it seems to be understood as the claim that the two extreme views are compatible. I agree with Kant that they are not.

Schneewind’s implication that religious voluntarists as a whole could not accept anthropological voluntarism might be true within the early Protestant traditions, which I have not studied. It is certainly possible to have theological voluntarism without anthropological voluntarism. But while I am from being an expert on the Franciscan tradition, my recent investigations have strongly strongly suggested that a combination of theological with anthropological voluntarism (which would be something like the view that free will is prior or more fundamental in the human than intellect) is in fact the norm in that tradition. The early Augustine of the famous treatise on free will also seems clearly to embrace anthropological as well as theological voluntarism.

“[Pufendorf’s] view of religious language is Hobbesian, but with him there is no question, as there is with Hobbes, about whether his voluntarism is a cover for atheism. Pufendorf was a sincere Lutheran. God, for him, is beyond our comprehension. He is our creator and ruler, whom we are to honor and obey. But he and we are not in any sense members of a single community, as Cumberland thought that we are” (ibid).

“Pufendorf takes it that [God’s] message to us is that in this life we are to rely on one another. Any advantages we have now come to us from ‘men’s mutual assistance’. Reason shows us God’s most general instructions. The rest is up to us” (p. 140).