Resolution Revisited

After all the troubled waters of late with voluntarism and free will, it’s time for a breath of fresh air. In an upcoming post, I’ll be taking a more detailed look at the chapter “Resolution” in Olivier Boulnois’s Généalogie de la liberté (2021), which does a brilliant job of uncovering what I think is a genuinely Aristotelian perspective on what I too have still been calling ethical “choice’. This also has tremendous importance for the evaluation of global claims about the history of metaphysics. For now, as a kind of reminder, here are the bits of the chapter that I translated last year.

“Is free will proper to the human? All of medieval and modern reflection on action rests on this thesis…. The concept of proairesis is analyzed for the first time in book III of the Nicomachean Ethics” (p. 133, my translation throughout).

“To begin with, must we follow the [12th century Latin] translation of Burgundio? Does proairesis really mean free will?” (p. 134).

“With the translation of proairesis by ‘choice’, the key concept of Aristotelian ethics is integrated into the semantic field of will. The Burgundian point of intersection, which connects Aristotle and [the Church Fathers] Nemesius and Damascene in the same bundle of translations, constitutes a second origin of proairesis as free will in the 12th century” (p. 137).

“Aristotle defines proairesis as a kind of desire joined with deliberation (with discourse)” (p. 139).

“With Aristotle, we are indeed far from the medieval and modern interpretation, which speaks of choice (electio)” (p. 141).

“The most rigorous translation seems to be ‘resolution’…. Resolution introduces logos and time” (p. 140).

“The object of our resolution is first of all the object of our desire, insofar as this results from a deliberation” (pp. 140-141).

“Our moral character depends not on our theoretical attitude but on the ensemble of our resolutions, the repetition of which constitutes our disposition to act, indeed our aptitude for beautiful actions” (p. 142).

“Since Cicero, the boulesis of the Stoics has been translated to Latin by voluntas [will]. But the Stoics affirm that such a mastery of impulse is found only in the sage…. It is only later, with Augustine, that this prerogative of the sage becomes a faculty accessible to all. Our concept of will, as capacity to consent or not to our representations, carries all this history. But in Aristotle, boulesis always designates the desire that pertains to that part of the soul that is capable of speech. It is a form of desire that is enunciable, intelligible…. Boulesis indeed is a wish: a wish does not require the existence of a will; like all desire, it is moved by its object” (p. 143).

“Among our desires, resolution results from a deliberation, which deploys itself in language…. The true principle of our resolution is of the order of language and of thought. Like all living beings, the human is necessarily moved by what appears to her as desirable; but in distinction from the other living beings, it is through speech that the desirable appears to her…. Resolution bears on action that can be accomplished by us…. There is only a place for deliberation when several lines of action are possible…. We deliberate on that which no one can do in our place” (p. 145, emphasis in original).

“It is necessary to underline: Aristotle does not exactly say that the resolution depends on us. What depends on us is the action that is the object of that resolution…. Aristotle does propose a theory of decision, or of resolution, but not a theory of freedom of choice, or of free will” (pp. 145-146, emphasis in original).

“Such actions are ontologically contingent: they could [also] not be. The metaphysical tradition deduced from this the existence of a power of choice, of a will or a free will” (pp. 146-147).

“Nothing obliges us to understand contingency in an absolute manner, and as subject to our power. Aristotle refers to the ensemble of actions that depend on us (eph’ hemin) in general (in the sense of a collectivity: the humans, the agents, the citizens), but not to those that depend on me (here and now)…. But Aristotle never claims that an agent has, other things being equal, at a given instant, the capacity to do one thing or its contrary, to act and not to act. ‘What depends on us’ is a generic capacity, proper to humankind, and not to some particular individual, here and now. Reciprocally, in insisting on the idea that deliberation is the cause of our resolution, Aristotle holds that at the interior of this bivalence, we more often see what the logos presents as desirable” (p. 147, emphasis in original).

“In this context, what is the principle of action?” (p. 150).

He quotes Aristotle, “and the principle of resolution is desire and reason…. What affirmation and negation are in thought, pursuit and flight are to desire…. For resolution to be good, it is necessary at the same time that the discourse be true and the desire just” (p. 150).

“The sophists affirm that every desire is good; Plato, that we can only truly will the true or absolute good” (ibid).

“While the sophists identify freedom with the capacity to do what we want, and Plato with sole adherence to the Good, Aristotle proposes a third way: ethical freedom is the art of deciding well, of arriving at the resolution the circumstances require…. The resolution taken by the homme de bien [literally, “man of the good”] is indeed a point of coincidence between the apparent good (which all seek) and the true good (that she discerns). In leaving behind the confrontation between sophists and Platonists, Aristotle has recourse neither to a relativism of appearances nor to an objective norm; in the element of virtue (and of desire), he aims at a coincidence between the phenomenon of good and its truth” (p. 152).

“Is it necessary to say that resolution is free? Does it consist in a choice?… Aristotle never makes the concept of freedom intervene in relation to the question of choice, nor even that of willingness” (p. 153).

“Nevertheless, Aristotle knows and uses a concept of freedom (eleutheria). But this pertains to politics and not to the theory of action” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“The Latin translation notwithstanding,‘hekousion’ (willing) does not mean ‘voluntary’ (voluntarium); it is rather the mode of our action, except in cases of constraint or ignorance. Proairesis does not mean ‘free will’ (liberum arbitrium), but decision, resolution… Freedom is the ethical horizon of our action, and not the metaphysical attribute of a will that Aristotle did not envisage” (p. 154).

“It is indeed possible to analyze human action without postulating in the agent a central instance of arbitration, and without inscribing her in a physical determinism…. Ethics is indeed thinkable without a theory of will” (p. 155).

“Ethical action does not necessarily require a freedom of choice. It depends on a resolution (proairesis), which mainly refers to a dimension of anticipation, and does not always imply a choice. Ethics is indeed thinkable without the doctrine of free will” (ibid).

“Resolution presupposes a process of deliberation in the agent: she at least implicitly evaluates the reasons to do x rather than nothing; that which she does is not imposed on her from the outset. That is to say that for her, there are a multitude of options and reasons to act” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“A stranger to the metaphysical problem of free will, freedom is ethical in essence; it consists in the ability to act well; it is only acquired at the completion of an education in virtue” (ibid).

“All thought about action situates itself in the horizon of the good, and freedom is nothing other than liberation from the bad” (p. 156).

“It is ethics that founds freedom, and not freedom that founds ethics” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“On the plane of finite existence, no one knows if they have absolutely accomplished the best action. In the same way in their reflections on our moral lack of power, Aristotle and Ovid speak of that which is ‘better’ (comparative) and not of that which is ‘best’ (superlative)” (ibid).

Kant’s Anti-Voluntarism

There is a great deal more of interest in J. B. Schneewind’s The Invention of Autonomy beyond what I have covered. His treatment of the 18th century is as rich as what we have seen from the seventeenth. Nonetheless, the main contours of his argument have already been well enough documented to show the basis of his conclusions about the respective historical roles of voluntarism and antivoluntarism, to which I will now turn.

“The Kantian conception of morality as autonomy was not invented just out of the blue…. In earlier chapters I have argued that controversies over voluntarism, the doctrine that God creates morality by a fiat of will, were central to the development of modern moral philosophy. Because of its importance in the theologies of Luther and of Calvin, and in the philosophical thought of Descartes, Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Locke, the issues voluntarism raised could be avoided only by unbelievers like Hume, the radical French thinkers, and Bentham. Everyone else held that God must somehow be essential to morality. Those opposed to the voluntarist explanation of God’s role in it were united in their moral rejection of what the theory implied about the kind of community that is possible between God and human beings, and consequently among ourselves. Voluntarism, they held, makes it impossible for us to love God. Hence it excludes a central Christian moral requirement. And if love of God is impossible, then the common moral understanding of our relations to one another is unavoidably affected. A morality of tyranny and servility can be avoided only if God and man form a moral community whose members are mutually comprehensible because they accept the same principles” (p. 509).

The positive side of Schneewind’s argument has to do with the emergence of a new paradigm of self-governance, as a major alternative to the paradigm of morality as obedience that dominated earlier Christian teaching about ethics. Self-governance is the main precursor of the characteristically Kantian emphasis on autonomy. Meanwhile, voluntarism leads to a morality of tyranny and servility.

“Montaigne opened the way to modern moral philosophy by rejecting every conception of morality as obedience that he knew…. The psychological assumptions of the morality of obedience were formally challenged as early as 1625, when Lord Herbert of Cherbury argued that everyone could know what morality requires. His argument was repeated, in essentials, by a number of later philosophers. In the middle of the seventeenth century the Cambridge Platonists began to offer a more hopeful picture of our desires than that of Hobbes or the Calvinist Puritans. Later thinkers — some, like Shaftesbury, influenced directly by the Cambridge philosophers — elaborated on the point. Eventually a variety of new views were worked out in order to underpin conceptions of morality as self-governance” (p. 513).

The originally Stoic idea of self-governance came to be embraced by many later Christians, as an alternative to voluntarism and one-sided emphasis on obedience. There were also voluntarists who were not obedience theorists, and obedience theorists who were not voluntarists, but these are exceptions. Through consideration of a great many historical figures, Schneewind documents strong correlations between voluntarism and obedience theory, and between antivoluntarism and self-governance theory.

This also suggests a more particular motivation for Kant’s emphasis on the investigation of “pure” or a priori principles. Whatever is pure or a priori — which for Kant means it has no dependence on any particular empirical content — he deems to be valid for the whole universal community of rational beings, which for Kant includes God. Part of the significance of pure or a priori principles for Kant is that they are shareable between God and humans.

Without further ado, here is a longer passage from Schneewind’s conclusion.

“A remark in the Foundations [of the Metaphysics of Morals] gives us a telling indication of Kant’s alliance with the antivoluntarists. Kant says that it is ‘self-evident’ (leuchtet von selbst … ein) from the common ideas of duty and of the moral law that there must be a pure moral philosophy, independent of anything empirical. Everyone will admit, he says, that if there is a genuine moral law, then it ‘does not apply to men only, as if other rational beings had no need to observe it’. If he did not know Pufendorf’s specific denial that there is any law common to God and man, his study of Crusius and of Leibniz’s Theodicy would have taught him that voluntarists would have denied these points. He might have argued for them; it is surely surprising that he could have thought them self-evident. An unquestioned assumption that the moral community must include God would, however, make it seem self-evident to him that there must be a moral law that applies to all rational beings, not to humans only, and a pure a priori moral philosophy to explain it. Kant is plainly making that assumption.”

“Another indication of Kant’s antivoluntarist moral stance is his attitude toward servility. As I pointed out in the last chapter, the early Notes show how strongly Kant objected to the thought of the dependence of one rational being on the commands and desires of another, seeing it as somehow contradicting our essential free agency. The mature Kant does more than condemn servility, as the antivoluntarists always do. He explains what is wrong with it. Humanity in our own person requires us to respect ourselves and to pursue those ends which are our duties ‘not abjectly, not in a servile spirit‘, but always aware of our dignity ‘as a person who has duties his own reason lays upon him’.”

“If these are small pointers to Kant’s agreement with the antivoluntarists, his account of the basic moral principle as a principle of pure practical reason, together with his thesis that the principle motivates rational agents to comply with it, make it plain that he stands with them on the central issues. His account of God’s indispensability to morality is also common among the opponents of voluntarism. From Hooker through Leibniz and Wolff, they assign God the task of assuring us that we live in a morally ordered universe, one in which virtue is, ultimately, rewarded and vice punished. Only in such a world does morality make sense for free and intelligent but needy and dependent creatures. Kant describes God as having this function when he discusses the religious outlook that moral agents will have. They will believe in a Kingdom of God, ‘in which nature and morality come into a harmony, which is foreign to each as such, through a holy Author of the world’. The antivoluntarists thought that they could give theoretical grounds for their belief in divine order. Kant defends the older view on new grounds, resting the belief in divine order on the requirements of autonomy itself. But this radical reversal should not conceal the deep similarity of his position to the older one.”

“The Kantian morality of autonomy is decisively opposed to voluntarism because the rationality of the moral law that guides God as well as us is as evident to us as it is to him” (pp. 509-512).

“For Kant, however, it is not knowledge of independent and eternal moral truth that puts us on an equal footing with God in the moral community. It is our ability to make and live by moral law. The invention of autonomy gave Kant what he thought was the only morally satisfactory theory of the status of humans in a universe shared with God” (p. 513).

Free Will in the Cambridge Platonists

Schneewind dedicates the final section of his chapter on the Cambridge Platonists to their views on the vexed topic of free will. There are quite a few interesting nuances here. But it is important to first recall a few generalities, beyond what Schneewind mentions. The following thumbnail sketch is far from complete, but will serve for this discussion.

What is called free will is in general a subject of immense linguistic confusion. Each time the term is used, we need to pause and consider in which of several highly divergent ways it is being said. First of all, there is no such term in ancient Greek. Second, not only have there been a great many highly developed positions on questions related to this, but different authors use key terms like “free” and “will” in quite different ways. We have to be careful when translators use such modern terms to translate ancient authors.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle instead uses a number of more specific terms, in ways close to their meanings in ordinary speech. These include “deliberation” (bouleusis), “choice” (prohairesis), and what is “up to us” (eph hemin). He classifies human actions as voluntary (hekousios), involuntary (akousios), or mixed (miktos). Actions may also be considered abstractly (aplos), or in the context of an occasion (kata ton chronon).

What is most relevant here is that for Aristotle, an action is called “voluntary” when it is not forced and is not attributable to ignorance. We are unequivocally morally responsible for voluntary actions; responsible in a weaker sense for mixed actions; and not responsible for involuntary actions. It is my contention that insofar as they are justified, claims about the necessity of something called free will for ethics refer to this relatively common-sensical Aristotelian distinction.

In a much more specialized and systematic way, the late Stoic Epictetus (d. 135 CE) redefines prohairesis (choice) as the one and only thing that is eph hemin (up to us), and therefore makes us who we are. In Stoicism generally, all things are said to be governed by fate, understood in terms of cause and effect. Its main early systematizer, Chrysippus (late 3rd century BCE), is usually understood as advocating a “compatibilist” theory of human freedom. Choice in Stoicism is said to involve an inner hegemonikon or ruling principle in the human that is able to exercise or withhold assent (prokatathesis) to appearances and desires. It does not automatically have power over them, but can in principle discipline itself so as to achieve an inner freedom of choice. Only in the fully realized Stoic sage does it have full control.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all broadly emphasize that we are morally responsible for our actions, although their main concern in this seems to be not the dignity of the human, but rather to explain how God can be omnipotent, and yet have no responsibility for evil. Jewish, Eastern Christian, and Islamic traditions all seem to pretty consistently draw the conclusion that humans have what is translated as free will, even though God has foreknowledge of the outcome. But perhaps because it is less controversial in these contexts, the exact meaning of “free” and “will” is left relatively open.

Matters are far more complicated in Western Christian traditions, which came to be dominated by highly nuanced attempts to mediate between conflicting doctrinal concerns. Augustine (354-430) in his early work seems to be a strong advocate of free will, but in his later polemics against Pelagianism, strong doctrines of original sin and the insufficiency of human virtue come to overshadow this. It has been argued that Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) was the first defender a fully “libertarian” account of free will in the human. The first universally recognized advocate of such a position is Duns Scotus (d. 1308). Many other writers such as Aquinas make important uses of early Augustine’s term “free will” or liberum arbitrium, while giving it an “intellectualist” slant and taking great care to avoid imputations of Pelagianism.

The Cambridge Platonists sought to heal sectarian divisions in Christianity by promoting a new kind of Christian Platonism. Schneewind previously mentioned that they drew inspiration from the Greek church fathers, as well as Plato and Plotinus. Cudworth wrote a whole book on free will from this point of view.

“Cudworth’s objections to Smith’s consequentialist view of punishment occurs as a passing comment in his discussion of free will. Because our relation to God is such a central issue for the Cambridge thinkers, the complexities of the free-will problem could not be avoided. How can we explain our status as genuine agents, neither mere mechanical transmitters of divine activity nor servile subjects made to comply with commands we would otherwise resist, while acknowledging God’s supremacy and our total dependence on him? Whichcote did not produce any extended philosophical treatment of free will. Smith’s remarks on the issue are more interesting for the attitude they reveal than for the philosophical light they shed on it. More and Cudworth alone grappled with its more difficult aspects. Although Cudworth’s work was not published until the nineteenth century, we can use it to discover the difficulties seen by the most astute philosophical thinker of the Cambridge group as arising from an effort to reconcile the deification of the human, on which they all insisted, with that proper obedience to God, which none of them wished to deny” (Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy, pp. 210-211).

We saw last time that Cudworth wants to defend the traditional view of reward and punishment in the afterlife, even though he is honest enough to admit that eternal punishment cannot in itself be a good of any kind. He agrees that other actions all aim at some good. But instead of rejecting eternal punishment on that Platonic ground, he wants or feels doctrinally compelled to uphold a traditional view of justice as retribution, alongside his broadly Platonic view of the good.

“As always in this period, the question of human free will leads unavoidably to the question of what divine free will is, or perhaps is not. Does our liberty make us similar to God, or different from him? He sees God as free not because God acts from ‘an absolute will’, doing as he pleases in an arbitrary fashion, but because God always wills what is best, in accordance with his own nature as shown him by his own understanding. So too in us. Liberty is reason, the ‘liberal election of, and complacency in, that which our understandings propound to us as most expedient’. To be free is to act voluntarily. It is doing what we see to be best, even in the particular situation and not only in general. When we do not see clearly what is best, we fluctuate in a kind of indifference and are in suspense about what to do. God is never in this unhappy state. Our indifference is therefore an imperfection. The perfection of freedom is to be moved by the universal good seen clearly in the particular case. It is to be moved wholly by the divine order of goodness in the universe” (p. 211, internal citations omitted throughout).

The idea that God wills what is best and that we should too sounds promising as an alternative to command and obedience, but the reference to expediency is a bit disappointing. This aspect sounds more like another anticipation of utilitarianism than an inspiration from Plato or any other Greek philosopher. Of course, there are broader and narrower conceptions of utility and expediency, and it is the narrower ones that are most troublesome.

Cudworth rejects theological voluntarism, but he wants to defend a version of human free will that is stronger than what he himself thinks is needed for ethics. Here we must pay close attention to exactly what notion of free will is at issue.

That liberty is reason and that God does not act from an absolute will but wills what is best, is good Platonism. That for a human to be free is to act voluntarily rather than involuntarily is good Aristotelianism, even though Cudworth generally wants to avoid Aristotle. That perfect freedom is to be moved by the order of goodness in the universe steers the Christian concern with freedom in a broadly Platonic direction that is a big improvement over the voluntarist emphasis on sheer will. Cudworth’s anti-voluntarist idea that freedom of indifference is an imperfection is original and interesting.

“Why should we ever have thought otherwise? Smith blames it on the Jews. Their notion of legal righteousness, now replaced by the inner righteousness of the Gospels, forced them to believe in a free will so absolute that it could do or refrain from any action of its own power. The law, for them, was merely the ‘object’ on which this power was to be exercised. Compliance earned absolute merit, and nothing more was needed from God than the law’s indication of his will” (ibid).

That in contrast to Christian emphasis on love, Judaism and Islam recognize only Law, is a cliché common among Christians. It is of a piece with other clichés about the moral inferiority of paganism, which are refuted by a better acquaintance with Greek philosophy. Apparently too, it was very common for 17th-century English Christians to characterize theological ideas they did not like as Jewish. All four of the Cambridge Platonists Schneewind discusses reportedly do this at times. In today’s polarized world, one need not be a defender of Zionist divine right to recognize that this is wrong. But apart from the red herring of blaming the evils of voluntarism on the Jews, these Christian Platonists make valid and telling criticisms of theological voluntarism. Schneewind does us a great service by bringing these angles to our attention.

“Smith calls Maimonides as witness to the Jewish belief that man’s ability to remain totally indifferent to good or evil, and to choose either, showed itself only after Adam’s sin. Thus Adam’s Fall occasioned ‘the rise of that Giant-like free will whereby [humans] were enabled to bear up themselves against heaven itself’ and live without any need for grace” (ibid).

Smith’s reference to Maimonides sounds distorted at best, since Maimonides was known as a strong “intellectualist” and not as a voluntarist. The connection between free will and sin has its classic source in Augustine. The earliest appearance of theological voluntarism is in Philo of Alexandria who of course was Jewish, but apparently Philo had essentially no influence on historical Judaism until he was rediscovered in the 19th century. On the other hand, contemporary scholarship finds a very significant influence of Philo on the Alexandrian church fathers like Clement (150-220 CE) and Origen (185-254 CE).

“Once we see that God is not to be served for wages, but out of love, we will see why we need not and should not claim to possess a free will of this kind” (ibid).

God is not to be served for wages, which is to say that for these Christian Platonists, promises of reward in the afterlife offer only motivation of a very inferior kind, compared to the Platonic and more generally Greek-philosophical motivation of seeking the good for its own sake. Cudworth will nonetheless also defend the traditional view of reward and punishment as socially needed, in order to keep the unphilosophical masses in line.

As we saw above, More’s initial explanation of free will uses what we can recognize as the Aristotelian distinction of voluntary from involuntary actions. To this he adds the Stoic notion of assent. Schneewind points out how far this is from late Augustine and Luther.

“More does not find things so simple. If there are any people who by nature always act for the best, they are indeed blessed; but they are in a small minority. More is concerned with the rest of us, who have to struggle to be good. Is there free will, entitling us to merit if we choose rightly? More’s first answer is that action from free will is simply one kind of spontaneous or voluntary action. We act voluntarily when we do what we ourselves see to be best. By contrast, we act from free will when we could, even seeing what is best, either act or refrain from acting. Only some external force or our ignorance can make action involuntary. But it is less clear what, on More’s view, might deprive us of free will. His problem arises because he holds that a truly honest man really cannot choose to do something base and vicious. It would seem that in forbearing, the honest man acts voluntarily but not freely. And although More speaks of ‘this power of not acting, when it regards things that are base’ as a perfection, he finally defines free will as a ‘power of abstaining from ill’. St. Augustine, with Luther following him, had said that since the Fall we are free only to choose what is sinful. More instead cheerfully says we are free only to resist evil — if our character is poor enough for evildoing to be an option for us” (pp. 211-212).

This distinction between acting voluntarily and acting from free will again effectively recovers Aristotle’s ethical criterion of voluntary versus involuntary actions, while appropriately putting aside voluntarist claims about a freedom of indifference. No extravagant metaphysical claims are needed or even relevant for the kind of freedom or “voluntariness” that is relevant to ethical judgments about responsibility for actions. But these Platonists seem to doubt their own claim that ethical goodness is within the reach of all normal adult humans.

“Even this asymmetrical freedom does not leave More happy. One of the objections to allowing it arises from the theory that the will necessarily follows the greatest perceived good. This of course is his own basic view; and he sees that it entails that sin arises from ignorance. That makes sin, by his own account, involuntary. But is it? Are we not all able to know the good? Here More suddenly develops doubts. ‘The bulk of mankind’, he says, ‘see little of themselves [and] can never discover what is the ultimate good’. If this is their own fault, then they are culpable, as having freely willed not to develop their potential insight into the good. But the ability to learn what is good is itself a gift, for which one can claim no merit. Not having it is also not a moral fault, even though its absence makes it impossible for one to be virtuous. ‘But whether any are so utterly deprived of this natural aptitude’, Smith confesses in despair, ‘is to me so hard and perplexing a question that I had rather wholly decline it, than involve myself with such mysteries of providence” (p. 212).

“More’s concern arises out of Smith’s position. Those who are so thoroughly moved by love that they need no law are also those who cannot bring themselves to act basely. For them the kind of free will claimed by the Jews [sic] is not needed, or rather, as More puts it, we should not say of them that they have free will. But More is less willing than Smith to take these blessed few to be meritorious. Are they not so fully tied to the divine order of goodness that they have no real agency of their own? Is it only the imperfect who need freedom in order to be blamed, and perhaps to be controlled by laws and sanctions? More sees the issue but not a solution” (pp. 213-213).

One who is thoroughly moved by love and reason and cannot bring herself to act basely needs nothing else. The reference to “merit” applies to views of Christian salvation that base it on something other than our moral goodness. Schneewind finds something similar in Cudworth, presented with a little more sophistication. Cudworth cannot quite free himself from a retributive concept of justice that runs deep in the Christian tradition, alongside celebration of the new dispensation that is supposed to be based on love. He nonetheless makes the point that contrary to what has been claimed for it, a liberty of indifference has no moral value.

“Cudworth thinks he needs a strong form of free will in order that ‘divine justice retributive, dispensing rewards and punishments’, may have a justifiable sphere. One kind of freedom poses no problem. We can choose between things that do not differ in goodness or badness at all, as when we pick one coin rather than another when someone offers us money. God also possesses this power. Though he always acts for the best, much about the world is in itself indifferent — for example, whether the number of stars is odd or even, or the exact date of the last judgment. But liberty of indifference of this kind makes for neither praise nor blame. Only where we choose what we clearly see to be the worse alternative can we be blamed. And this is where the problem lies” (p. 213).

Perhaps the problem here has to do with the intrusion of questions about efficient causality, conceived as something over and above good intentions and good consequences. On such a theory, we would not deserve credit for the good intentions and good consequences of our actions, unless it could be shown that we were also the efficient cause of those actions. But if a putative showing of this sort comes back to a kind of metaphysical claim that if applicable at all would always be applicable, we would not have added anything to our account of what makes this or that particular action meritorious.

“The ‘common psychology’ is at fault. Either it makes the will always follow the understanding’s judgement of good and ill, in which case the will is necessitated, not free. Or it allows the will to set the understanding to work on specific objects. But then the will must act blindly, and liberty amounts only to ‘mere irrationality and madness itself acting … all human actions’. A blind will independent of knowledge would make virtue and vice as impossible as praise and blame. What psychology must we call upon to allow freedom, and to avoid imputing all moral evildoing to God as the sole agent?” (ibid, ellipses in original).

More precisely, it is a certain received notion of hypostasized will as superior to reason that is the problem. A will that is not guided by understanding can only be blind. A will that is guided by understanding need not be “free” in what I would call the spurious sense of anthropological voluntarism. Cudworth at least begins to find a better model of freedom in the Stoic concept of self-governance, and even anglicizes the Stoic notion of the hegemonikon as superior to the voluntarist concept of will: “the ruling principle is none of these”.

“Cudworth’s answer is suggestive if not wholly clear. The division of the mind into faculties of will and understanding is a mistake: it is the individual as a whole who knows and chooses. The soul has many powers, or levels of activity. Its plastic nature, the source of its basic life functioning, is not within its control at all; desires are not directly under our control; conscience exerts itself whether we will it to or not, and joins the will sometimes in controlling desire. The ruling principle is none of these, nor is it the understanding alone. He uses the Stoic term ‘hegemonicon’ for the governing principle in us, or our self-power. It is, he says, ‘the soul as comprehending itself, all its concerns and interests, its abilities and capacities, and holding itself, as it were, in its own hand … redoubled upon itself more or less, in consideration and deliberation’. It can be self-impairing as well as self-improving, but either way it is that through which we make ourselves what we are” (ibid, ellipses in original).

The reification of a separate faculty of “will” as an internal efficient cause of our choosing as we do does indeed seem to be part of the problem here. On some accounts at least, the Stoic hegemonikon is not a separate faculty acting as a kind of interior cause, but an emergent property of self-governance in the whole human being. It makes good sense that self-governance in a human would be a kind of holistic property, rather than the effect of a discrete cause. This would also be a remote ancestor of something like the emergent unity of apperception in Kant.

The source of the power of assent or non-assent in Stoicism is left relatively open. In Kant, the unity of a unity of apperception transcends the order of factuality. Not only is it not attributable to a separate faculty, it does not name an existing state of affairs either. It is rather a kind of goal toward which we can be seen to tend — in effect, an Aristotelian telos or final cause.

“How does this reflexive hegemonicon operate? It does in the distinctively human world what plastic natures do in the purely material world. It serves as a source of order, under God but acting independently of God. It does not make us indifferent to apparent good and ill. It enables us, however, to consider carefully before we act. Haste is thus the source of blameworthiness. We might always have suspended choice and thought again. Grant that we have this power over ourselves and you grant that we are not always determined by ‘antecedent necessary causes’. Thus in the war between conscience and the passions, the understanding does not inevitably determine the agent one way or the other: ‘the matter wholly depends upon the soul’s hegemonic or power over itself, its exerting itself with more or less force and vigor in resisting the lower affections … this is not a single battle … but commonly a long lasting or continued war’. God praises or blames us as the battle turns out” (pp. 213-214).

In my lexicon at least, reflexivity or self-consciousness in us humans is also not a simple global property that we could be said to simply have or not have in a binary way. It is a matter of nuance and detail. It grows weaker and stronger at different times.

“Cudworth argues that the possession of a ruling power of this kind is a necessary attribute for beings as complex as we are. Without it, our various aspects would not function together to make meaningful action possible. In making us at all, God had to make us free; and he therefore had to make us capable of erring and sinning. It is thus no derogation from God’s power that he created self-acting beings other than himself, nor even that he created them with a freedom — that of choosing a known lesser good — that he himself does not possess. God’s fecundity is such that he makes all the possible kinds of being, even those that are self-acting; and out of them all he creates a harmonious whole, without constantly interfering in the world he has made” (p. 214).

Likewise, the freedom that matters for ethics is not something that we are simply given, or have or do not have. It is always a matter of degree, and it is again a matter of nuance and detail.

“What leads us, then, to use or not use our power over ourselves? How does the hegemonicon reflexively decide whether we shall follow our conscience or passion? On what principle does it accept or reject the promptings to action that come before it? Free choice is not the same, Cudworth insists, as determination by the good. Neither is it the same as chance determination, or pure contingency. We do not make ourselves damnable by ‘the cast of a die’. But on the details of the alternative to these rejected views, showing how self-acting agency is to be understood, Cudworth is silent” (ibid).

If my analysis is at all correct, these are badly framed questions. There is no single efficient cause that gives us, or could give us, freedom or self-consciousness. Our self-governance inheres, in varying degrees, in many different details of how we lead our lives.

Neo-Stoicism to Descartes

We have reached part 2 of Schneewind’s The Invention of Autonomy, which will develop a portrait of the major alternative to the natural law tradition in 17th-century ethics. Within this scope, the major figures will be the neo-Stoics; the Cambridge Platonists; and the four canonical “rationalists”, Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, and Leibniz. What makes Schneewind’s book especially interesting is his strong focus on the history of ethical thought. I am giving it unusually thorough treatment because I agree with his assessment that the history of ethics tends to be badly under-represented in general histories of philosophy, and in briefer accounts of individual major philosophers.

The first chapter of part 2, which I will discuss here, treats the neo-Stoics and Descartes. We have seen before that a concept of “right reason” derived from the Roman writers Cicero and Seneca already began to play a role in medieval ethics. This is now joined by notions of constancy and self-governance that also come from Cicero and Seneca. Not only the neo-Stoics but also Descartes embrace all three. The view of Descartes that emerges here is new and interesting, and quite unexpected.

To set up a contrast with the account he will be developing here, Schneewind quickly recalls the ground already covered.

“The modern natural lawyers held that by reasoning from observable facts we can find out how to cope with the moral and political problems that beset our lives. Experience gives us the evidence we need in order to infer that God exists and cares for us. Part of what we learn from it is that God has made the proper structure of our common life independent of any larger cosmic scheme” (p. 169).

“The major seventeenth-century alternative to modern natural law theory rejected both its empiricism and its refusal to tie morality to a divinely supervised universe. Many of those who rejected natural law theory held that God’s mind and ours are fundamentally akin…. As we improve our understanding — as we perfect ourselves — we will see ever more clearly that we are part of a harmonious whole and can live on harmonious terms with ourselves and others. On this view our participation in the divine mind is the most important fact about us” (pp. 169-170).

These writers have what I would call the Greek philosophical idea that reason and nature are themselves divine, or at least can legitimately be said to participate in a divine character. They do not rely on specific revelation for their respective views of God, but that does not make them irreligious. They reject a reductive, empiricist view of reason. They think that through participating in reason, we ourselves can be said to participate in divine activity, and this is our highest calling. So I don’t think it is quite right to say that these writers want to defend a divinely supervised universe. They variously defend a divine universe or a divinely created universe. Supervision sounds like direct intervention from outside. But Herbert of Cherbury has been called the father of English deism. The original Stoics saw divinity as immanent. Spinoza would have vigorously rejected the applicability of a notion like supervision to God. For Leibniz, God exercises providence at the level of possible worlds. There are a great many alternatives to the traditionalist or literalist theism that is implied by the term “supervised”.

From the phrase “as we perfect ourselves”, we begin to get a sense of what Schneewind will mean by perfectionism. (Part 2 is called “Perfectionism and rationality”. This chapter is called “Origins of modern perfectionism”.) It is uncontroversial that the figures he surveys in part 2 used the term “perfection” in various ways. But it is quite a leap to conclude from that fact, that this whole scope is appropriately summed up by an ism term of very recent coinage, “perfectionism”. At the outset, it has yet to be established that this grouping of figures has enough in common even to be appropriately called a stream. Leibniz is very different from Spinoza, and they are both very different from Descartes. One might also be concerned that an exclusive focus on perfecting ourselves is too narrow or individualistic to adequately characterize some of these figures. But Schneewind will bring to light a great deal that is of interest. In any case, he does an excellent job at the detailed level.

“The thought that our morality arises from our awareness of the divine mind was worked out in detail by the Stoics; and restatements of Stoicism were formative for seventeenth-century moral philosophy…. In the late fifteenth century the first printings of the works of Cicero and Seneca and of Latin translations of Epictetus made some of the major accounts of Stoicism readily accessible. Two sixteenth-century books helped spread Stoic teaching even more widely…. The Latin text [of Lipsius] went through more than eighty editions and was translated into several vernaculars” (p. 170).

Stoicism commonly contrasts our current state with the figure of the ideal Stoic sage, who by following the immanent divine logos or reason is able to rise above all disturbance by the passions.

“If Stoicism was to help modern Europeans cope with their lives, or if it was, as du Vair hoped, to shame them into improvement by showing how virtuously even a pagan could live, its doctrines had to be made acceptable to Christian readers. Neo-Stoicism was the result of the effort to blend two rather disparate views” (p. 171).

Much the same could be said of scholastic Aristotelianism. Whether we approve or disapprove of their innovations, both neo-Stoicism and scholastic Aristotelianism have an innovative character, and do not simply repeat Greek philosophy.

“Du Vair has no qualms about adding a notion of will to Stoic moral philosophy” (p. 171n). “The will’s main task is to enable us to pursue only what is truly in our power…. Du Vair ends by saying that God is delighted above all else by seeing us attain the perfection he created us for; but because ‘our natural forces can never bee sufficient of themselves to keepe us in this perfection’ we must invoke God’s favor” (p. 172).

It is important to note that a notion of will has to be added here. The way it is defined by du Vair above is unique and interesting. It recalls the later Greek Stoic Epictetus’s recommendation that only that which is in our power should be called good or evil.

“Lipsius gives us rather more theory than du Vair, but with no less of a Christian turn. In urging the great virtue of constancy upon us, Lipsius is urging us to live by right reason, ‘a true sense and judgement of things human and divine’. Reason, he says, is the remainder in man of the image of God…. Reason is divinity within us…. Through right reason all of us belong to a common kingdom” (p. 173).

The reference to constancy and right reason is significant. Both of these terms are important in both Cicero and Seneca. They do not exactly come from Greek Stoicism, but rather represent new contributions to Stoic thought (or Stoic-influenced thought, in Cicero’s case). In a bit, we will see that Descartes also adopts them.

“[Lipsius] develops Cicero’s deep belief that the honorable course of life is also the useful course” (p. 174).

“[Neo-Stoicism] tells us that if we look at our own reason we can both see what the highest good is and move toward attaining it. We can do so essentially because reason in us is the divine in us” (p. 175).

“For Herbert [of Cherbury], and for the moral innatists generally, our guide to God’s mind is our own mind, and therefore moral ignorance, leading to wrongdoing, is first of all defective self-knowledge” (p. 183).

The neo-Stoic notion of innate ideas will be adopted by Descartes, and criticized from an empiricist point of view by Locke.

“Herbert held that, in becoming aware of the Common Notions, we are sharing thoughts with God” (p. 184).

Herbert’s Common Notions with respect to religion consist of five affirmations: existence of God; a duty of worship; centrality of virtue; need for repentance; and reward or punishment in an afterlife.

“Descartes rejects this view because of a position he holds firmly but never fully expounds, a position that greatly distressed a good many of his early readers. He thinks that truths of the kind Herbert’s Common Notions contain would constrain God, the way pagan deities are tied by fate; and he is emphatic in asserting that we must not admit that anything could subject God to such necessities. Even eternal verities must depend on God’s will, as a king’s laws do in his country. There are eternal truths, such as that the whole is greater than the part; but they would not be true unless God had willed them to be so. God’s will is as much the cause of essences and of what is possible as it is of what is actual” (ibid, extensive embedded citations omitted here and below).

Here we get a taste of Descartes’s famous voluntarism, which, it seems to me, leads in a very different direction from those of Herbert and the neo-Stoics. But even here, there is a new twist.

“God’s creative willing is completely free because he is initially indifferent to every possible state of affairs. He does not create something because it is better that it should exist than that it should not; rather, his willing something to exist makes its existence better. Before he wills, he could have no reason to will as he does. Descartes goes to the extreme of allowing that God could perfectly well have commanded his creatures to hate him. But unlike Luther, Calvin, and Suarez, he says not a word about God’s having commanded that we are to obey certain laws of nature” (ibid).

This last distinction has huge importance. In common with the fundamentalists, Descartes defends an outrageous voluntarism, but in so doing he does not appeal to special revelation or fundamentalist literalism.

“It will become clear that Descartes is proposing a thoroughgoing ethic of self-governance.”

This I find utterly fascinating. Self-governance is another important theme from Cicero and Seneca. I think of it as a kind of opposite pole to voluntarism and the command/obedience paradigm. But as we were just reminded, Descartes is one of history’s more notorious voluntarists. We have recently seen that there were defenders of natural law who were not at all voluntarist. With Descartes, it is the converse — we get a very strong but abstract voluntarism that is not tied to any claims about specific natural law.

“His refusal to make any claims about divine imposition of laws of nature goes beyond his determination not to discuss anything that is properly a matter for theologians” (pp. 184-185). “It is part of the same outlook that leads him to exclude all talk of final causes from physics” (p. 185).

This is another large subject. Galileo and Descartes are among the early advocates of a physics that looks to mathematics rather than teleology to ground its explanations of the workings of nature. What is less frequently recognized in standard accounts of this is that Avicenna, Aquinas, Suarez, and their co-thinkers already turn what they call efficient causality into a “cause of existence”, which then makes it appear that efficient causality is fundamental and grounds all other causality, rather than being limited to an account of the relations of means to ends. Or again in another way more relevant to modern physical explanation, the means are given an expanded explanatory role that eclipses the original Aristotelian priority of ends.

“Descartes is no atheist, but he does not think that we can use rational knowledge of God to solve problems either in theory or in practice. His God is at least as inscrutable as the God of Luther and his predecessors, perhaps more so” (ibid).

Descartes uses the unknowability of God in a way that is in a sense opposite to the role it plays in Luther’s proto-fundamentalism. For Descartes it opens up a large space for secular modes of explanation; for Luther on the other hand, it requires an increased reliance on revelation over natural knowledge.

“Our most basic ways of thinking do not allow us to infer anything at all about how God thinks. The fact that we cannot conceive alternatives to the laws of geometry and logic shows the limits only of our minds, not of God’s power. Confined thus to our own way of thinking, we cannot ‘share in God’s plans’. Hence in physics, Descartes holds, ‘we must never argue from ends’ ” (ibid).

Though they do have points in common, mathematical physics and what I would call Aristotle’s hermeneutics of nature are fundamentally different disciplines. Received views of the history of science notwithstanding, the one does not really compete with the other. If we are doing mathematical physics, Aristotelian ends will not be relevant.

In common with the neo-Stoics, Descartes defends an important role for innate ideas. But Descartes does not understand his innate ideas in the Stoic way, as immanent fragments of a divine mind within us.

“The same is true in practice. Knowing nothing of God’s purpose in making the world, we cannot suppose that he made everything in it for our benefit” (ibid).

“We can know God’s purposes only if he reveals them” (ibid). Here Descartes is closer to Luther.

“If we are speaking ‘from the human point of view adopted in ethics’, we rightly say that God made all things for his glory; but all that this means is that we must praise God as the efficient cause of all that exists. A further conclusion also follows. Whoever loves God fully will be completely resigned to whatever happens, even if it involves evil or death to himself. For Descartes as for the Christian neo-Stoics, God’s providence is a kind of fate, showing us that mere fortune has no role in the world” (ibid).

Descartes takes for granted the notion of efficient cause as “cause of existence” that was developed by Avicenna, Aquinas, and Suarez to replace Aristotle’s “source of motion”.

“But from the attitude we are to take toward life as a whole, we cannot infer any specific guidance” (ibid).

For Descartes at least, it is a straightforward consequence of his voluntarism that God has nothing like an ethical stance, from which practical conclusions can be drawn. From God’s completely arbitrary freedom, logic dictates that no definite ethical conclusion can possibly follow. The more theologically minded voluntarists, on the other hand, follow tradition rather than strict logic on this point, and assume that morality should be derived from God’s commands, which are assumed to be known by revelation.

“Descartes offers an a priori proof of God’s existence, and an a priori proof to show that he is not a deceiver; he thinks of God as the creator and the indispensable continuing ground of the existence of the world; but his voluntarist insistence on keeping God untrammeled entails that although God’s existence and power explain everything in general, they can never be used to explain anything in particular” (ibid).

The thought behind this seems to be that to directly explain particulars by appeals to God is to treat God as unconditionally committed to those particulars, whereas Descartes wants to say that God is not unconditionally committed to any particulars. But this also means that we should not claim the authority of God’s will to justify any worldly particulars. No human view of worldly particulars has an exclusive or unquestionable claim to divine sanction. Love of God, properly understood, can never legitimately excuse dogmatism, sectarianism, or claims that some particular human authority is unconditional.

“What is true of physics and biology is equally true of morality. We can come to trust our faculties by considering God’s perfection, but then we must do our science for ourselves. We can come to love God by considering his perfection, but then we must determine for ourselves how we are to act” (ibid, emphasis added).

“He included what he called a ‘provisional morality’ … but he told Burman that he did so only ‘because of people like the Schoolmen [who] would have said that he was a man without any religion or faith, and that he intended his method to subvert them’…. The provisional morality is to be used while Descartes, or his reader, is withholding assent from all his beliefs…. obey the laws and customs of your country … be constant once you have chosen a course of action … master yourself rather than the world, by making yourself desire only what is fully within your power…. God gave us the power to separate truth from falsity ourselves, and he intends to spend his lifetime using it…. Metaphysics may constitute the root of the tree of knowledge, but the useful sciences are its fruits” (p. 186).

Constancy, mastering oneself, and desiring only what is in our power are all precepts highlighted by the neo-Stoics. At each point in time we work from the best resources available to us, but no general inquiry into morality is ever really over. Something new can always arise.

“[N]one of us will ever have all the knowledge we need to live an ideal life. Whatever morality we come to, it will always be ‘provisional’ ” (p. 187).

“For Descartes the thinking substance that is our mind is simple. All the different mental functions must therefore be construed as ways of thinking. To a critic’s suggestion that this must entail that there is no such thing as will, Descartes replies that the conclusion does not follow: ‘willing, understanding, imagining, and sensing and so on are just different ways of thinking, and all belong to the soul. The thoughts we experience as depending on us alone are volitions, the sole actions of the mind; the perceptions that constitute knowledge are passions. Some volitions, such as those directing us to think about an abstract entity, aim inward; others aim outward, as when we decide to walk. However directed, volitions, as thoughts, are about some object; and their function is to unite us to or separate us from that object” (pp. 187-188).

Gone is the insistence of the theological voluntarists on a separate faculty of arbitrary choice. For Descartes it is the whole person who is unconditionally free.

“The will is as important in purely theoretical thinking as it is in practice. When a theoretical thought occurs to us, we can either accept it — make it ours — or reject it; and if we accept it, we come to believe or know it. When a thought about something good occurs to us, our acceptance of it is what we call desire, and the desire may effectively move our body by redirecting spirits to the pineal gland. Willing in relation to action is thus active thought about good and ill, or about perfection and its opposite. We necessarily pursue what we take to be good and avoid what we take to be ill. If we see clearly and distinctly ‘that a thing is good for us’, then, Descartes says, as long as we keep that thought before us it is impossible to ‘stop the course of our desire’. We can abstain from pursuing a clearly perceived good only by thinking that it is good to demonstrate, by so doing, that we possess free will” (p. 188).

Will is here identified with Stoic interior freedom to assent or not assent to anything that is suggested to us. This is not the same thing as arbitrary choice of a course of action.

“Our liberty is thus not basically a liberty of indifference. We are indifferent to alternatives before us only when we lack sufficient clear knowledge of the goods and ills involved in them. Indifference in us is an imperfection — a lack of knowledge — though on God it is a result of omnipotence. But our ability to give or withhold assent, or our freedom, is a positive power, and no imperfection. That we have this power is so self-evident, Descartes claims, that our knowledge that we possess it ranks with our knowledge of the other innate ideas. We cannot doubt our freedom, even when we see that God has predetermined all events and cannot understand how this predestination is compatible with our freedom. When we act freely we do what we most want to do. We want to assent to clear and distinct propositions, since clarity and distinctness give us the best reasons for assent. And we want to unite ourselves with what we clearly see to be good, since, again, there could be no better reason for desiring something. We can be indifferent when we lack reasons either to accept or to reject; and acting without reason is not what we think of as acting freely. ‘And so’, Descartes says to a critical questioner, ‘I call free in the general sense whatever is voluntary, whereas you wish to restrict the term to the power to determine oneself only if accompanied by indifference’. We can indeed act freely in cases of indifference, but the ability to do so is not significant. It is because free will is the power to accept or reject that we are open to praise and blame and can acquire merit or demerit” (pp. 188-189).

This seems to further confirm that human freedom in Descartes is an elaboration of neo-Stoic concepts, rather than a continuation of the scholastic liberum arbitrium, or power of arbitrary choice.

“For Descartes, then, ‘voluntariness and freedom are one and the same thing’, and the proper use of freedom is to lead us to act only from clear and distinct perceptions. But these are hard to obtain, in large part because the soul is tied to the body. The body causes us to have imperfect perceptions of objects in the world. These perceptions are confused and indistinct thoughts that what is perceived would be good or bad for us. The desires they tend to lead to are usually desires for what is in fact not as good as it is made it seem. Only knowledge can help us; yet even though we desire knowledge when we see how good it is, we cannot always get it” (p. 189).

The association of freedom with acting on clear and distinct perceptions combines Descartes’s own criterion of clarity and distinctness with the Stoic theory of assent. This is the result we would expect when both are affirmed.

“Descartes’s remedy for ignorance lies in the second maxim of his provisional morality: to be as decisive as possible and to be constant in acting even on doubtful opinions, once he has made a decision. He later rephrases the rule as requiring ‘a firm and constant resolution to carry out whatever reason recommends’, even when we know we may not have the final truth. Virtue, he adds, ‘consists precisely in sticking firmly to this resolution’. If we had clear and distinct knowledge of the good, it would give order to our action. Because we lack such knowledge, only the will’s strong resolve to be constant can create order. If we are resolute, we act firmly even on beliefs we are not sure of. The free will, Descartes repeatedly says, is what comes closest to making us like God. God is utterly constant. As long as we are constant and act on what seem to us after reflection the best reasons, we will never feel remorse or regret. We will have nothing with which to reproach ourselves” (ibid).

This is the richest elaboration of the Stoic virtue of constancy that we have seen. In the inevitable presence of uncertainty, the best we can do is to consistently act based on our best assessments, and not to abandon our current best assessment of any given matter until we have a better one. He is making the point that vacillation is not evidence of open-mindedness. Rather, it is due to a lack of constancy.

“Descartes’s definition of virtue as resolute constancy of will puts self-governance squarely at the center of his ethics” (ibid).

In order to achieve this, we must not be swayed this way and that by passions. This is a Stoic criterion.

“Our final goal ought to be to obtain the supreme good…. Next, he supposes that the sovereign good must be something that is wholly within our power. Plainly wealth, power, and other external goods are not so. If anything is, it is our thought” (p. 190).

That our highest good must be something that it is within our power to achieve again recalls the precept of Epictetus that only things within our power are properly called good or evil. Descartes does not, however, share the Stoic goal of eradicating the passions.

“But because the passions are to be accepted and are in any case not eliminable… We must form the habit of thinking that only what lies wholly within our power is good. What lies wholly within our power is the exercise of our will…. [T]o show that we have free will, we can suspend action…. Suspension for Descartes … is an act that enables us to make a better decision” (p. 191).

What he calls suspension here is again the Stoic withholding of assent that Epictetus says is always within our power. This shows how constancy as a criterion leads to a concept of self-governance. To hold consistently to right reason is to show constancy, and the ability to show constancy only emerges as a consequence of self-governance. Right reason itself is not reducible to any set of fixed rules. It is rather a higher-order criterion of coherence. In this way, it is not unlike Kant’s criterion of unity of apperception, which is also a higher-order criterion. Stoic self-governance is the remote ancestor of Kantian autonomy. According to Schneewind’s front matter, this is the single most important thesis of his book. No Greek philosopher would agree with the medieval and early modern reduction of morality to obedience.

” ‘It is the nature of love’, Descartes says in his longest discussion on the subject, ‘to make one consider oneself and the object loved as a single whole of which one is but a part; and to transfer the care one previously took of oneself to the preservation of this whole’ ” (p. 192).

For all his emphasis on the individual cogito, Descartes recognizes that those we love are from a moral point of view part of us.

“Descartes presents what he calls ‘generosity’ as the quality that leads us ‘to esteem ourselves at our true value’…. We properly esteem ourselves most highly when we find that we know that only our power of free willing belongs to us” (ibid). “Generosity involves control of one’s desires, and leads one to think well of others, as being equally with oneself able to use their free will well. Generosity is thus ‘the key to all other virtues’. The generous person will be led away from love of the kinds of goods that are made less valuable when others share them, such as wealth or glory, and toward love leads us toward the kinds of things whose value is not altered when everyone shares them, such as health, knowledge, and virtue. When the love of God leads us to think of ourselves as part of the great whole he has made, the nobler we think the whole, the more we will esteem ourselves as well” (p. 193).

Descartes’s allergy to Aristotle may prevent him from invoking Aristotelian magnanimity, but when he says generosity is the key to all other virtues, the effect is similar.

“Because believing something and knowing that one believes it are different, ‘many people do not know what they believe’. Innatism is thus compatible with a denial of any cognitive standing to commonsense views of morality; and it is significant that, unlike Herbert, Descartes makes no appeal to common agreement as a test of truth. He does, however, agree with Herbert in stressing that we should each think things through for ourselves…. Self-perfection, either through increased knowledge or, lacking that, through constant will, is the key to all morality. And only seeing for ourselves will give us the knowledge we need” (ibid).

Here we are indeed coming close to the Kantian criterion of autonomy.

Perfectionism?

I have been thoroughly enjoying all the unfamiliar detail of Schneewind’s The Invention of Autonomy. His next major section I found even more interesting. But as is common with this kind of history, generalizing abstractions can be problematic. Schneewind wants to characterize a counter-trend to natural law in the moral philosophy of the 17th and 18th centuries. In so doing, he moves back and forth between two different models that have very different implications.

When he states the top-level thesis of the book, he does so in terms of an ethics of self-governance that stands in contrast to the reduction of morality to obedience. This I find provocative and insightful. But the section immediately following the one on natural law is presented in terms of a model of “perfectionism”. Fortunately, he seems to use this only as a shallow grouping mechanism that does not significantly affect either the excellent detail or his main thesis about self-governance. But the connotations of the term “perfectionism” are nonetheless troublesome.

It seems that the term “perfectionism” was introduced into contemporary discourse by the political philosopher John Rawls in the later 20th century. Rawls uses the term to primarily name an elitist view of justice, that the state should accord special treatment to certain kinds of high achievers, rather than emphasizing equality before the law. He cites Nietzsche as a primary example, and contrasts this with his own view of justice as fairness. But Nietzsche does not like the state at all, and does not concern himself with matters of state policy.

Rawls attributes a more moderate version of this elitism to Aristotle, while also giving positive mention to a benign Aristotelian principle that people naturally enjoy the exercise of more developed capabilities, both by themselves and by others. Some latter-day conservatives have certainly tried to appeal to Aristotle in order to justify views based on presumptions of natural inequality.

Aristotle does along the way make incidental comments about observable differences in achievement. In these contexts, he does not always clearly distinguish between accidental, localized social facts and more general facts of nature. But at the level of principles, Aristotle is the historical source of the notion of justice as fairness that Rawls defends. Aristotle recommends extending the inherently reciprocal model of friendship to politics. He defines constitutional rule as one in which the same people both rule and are ruled. Moreover, Aristotle is in general highly sensitive to the accidental character of accidental facts. Anecdotal reports of accidental facts do not justify generalization about what is natural. In spite of his emphasis on particular cases, Aristotle is far more committed to these matters of principle than to any particular generalization from accidental facts.

Many discussions in contemporary philosophy are conducted at the level of broad generalizations about kinds of positions. In itself there is nothing wrong with this, but people are not always careful about the fit of particular cases to the generalizations. The outcome is that generalizations about kinds of positions are often applied in a sweeping, ahistorical manner.

Many of Rawls’s sympathizers have ended up relaxing his strictures against perfectionism. Stanley Cavell has argued for a concept of “moral perfectionism”, based on the transcendentalist Emerson, that has nothing to do with elitism. But this is even more recent.

In the present case, without really justifying it, Schneewind applies the term “perfectionism” to the whole early modern “rationalist” tradition, which is itself often the subject of overly broad generalizations. Implicitly, scholastic philosophy and ancient philosophy would be perfectionist as well. (He does not mention Rawls at all, though he does in passing mention elitism.) However, Schneewind also discusses the roots of “modern” natural law in scholasticism and Stoicism.

Schneewind includes valuable data on voluntarism and/or anti-voluntarism in many of the figures he discusses, but does not generalize much about it. Across the whole span of material that he discusses, I think a better contrast could be made between voluntarism and obedience theories on the one hand, and self-governance on the other.

Self-governance provides a far more sound and useful notion of freedom than strong metaphysical notions of absolutely unconditional free will. The great value of Schneewind’s book comes from his documentation of a long tradition of thought about practical self-governance, as background for the distinctively Kantian notion of autonomy.

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).

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).

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).

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).