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).