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).

Illocution

Habermas wants to promote a notion of communicative rationality as “uncurtailed communication”, an orientation toward developing shared understanding. He even calls shared understanding the telos of human speech, in something close to an Aristotelian sense, although he generally uses “teleology” only in a negative way, as a mere utilitarian calculation of the means to realize empirical self-interest. But I find the ethical sense that he gives to communication to be very admirable.

“The positivization, legalization, and formalization of law mean that the validity of law can no longer feed off the taken-for-granted authority of moral traditions but requires an autonomous foundation, that is, a foundation that is not only relative to given ends. Moral consciousness can satisfy such a requirement only at the postconventional level. It is here that there first emerges the idea that legal norms are in principle open to criticism and in need of justification” (p. 260, emphasis in original).

He speaks here of the postconventional and posttraditional in law and ethics, as he elsewhere speaks of the postmetaphysical and the postsecular.

“These posttraditional basic concepts of law and morality are first developed and systematized in modern natural law theories. The model for justifying legal norms is an uncoerced agreement, arrived at by those affected, in the role of contractual partners who are in principle free and equal” (p. 261).

I really was not at all familiar with the early modern “natural law” tradition when I first encountered Brandom’s significant references to it. Here we reach another limitation that Habermas finds in Weber.

“Weber stresses precisely the structural properties connected with the formalism of a law that is systematized by specialists and with the positivity of norms that are enacted. He emphasizes the structural features I have elucidated as the positivity, legalism, and formality of law. But he neglects the moment of a need for rational justification; he excludes from the concept of modern law precisely the conceptions of rational justification that arose with modern theories of natural law in the seventeenth century…. It is in this way that Weber assimilates the law to an organizational means applied in a purposive-rational manner, detaches the rationalization of law from the moral-practical complex of rationality, and reduces it to a rationalization of means-ends relations” (p. 262).

This remark by Habermas seems to have large consequences. He points to an important principle of rational justification in the natural law tradition that goes beyond means-ends calculations, and criticizes Weber for deemphasizing it.

“Rational natural law, in its different versions from Hobbes and Locke through Rousseau and Kant to Hegel, … rests on a rational principle of justification and is, in terms of moral-practical rationalization, further advanced than the Protestant ethic, which is still founded on religion. Nevertheless, Weber does not hold it to be purely and simply an element of modern law. He wants to separate it carefully ‘from revealed, as well as from enacted and from traditional law’. Thus he constructs an antithesis between modern law in the strict sense, which rests only on the principle of enactment, and the not yet completely ‘formal’ law of modern natural law theories which rests upon principles of grounding (however rational). In his view, modern law is to be understood in a positivistic sense, as law that is enacted by decision and fully disconnected from rational agreement, from ideas of grounding in general, however formal they might be.” (p. 263, emphasis in original).

I did not realize that Weber had a decisionist theory of modern law. “Decisionist” views of law and politics, as Habermas points out, fundamentally appeal to authority rather than to meaning or reason. In my view, this means they ought to be shunned by anyone who cares about meaning or reasonableness.

“This argument is confusing because it combines, in an opaque manner, an immanent critique of the deficient radicalism of natural law conceptions of grounding that are not yet sufficiently formal with a transcendent critique of the need for principles of justification at all and clothes both in the guise of a criticism of the naturalistic fallacy. One might certainly raise the objection that the concept of natural rights still had strong metaphysical connotations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, with the model of a contract through which all legal associates, after rationally weighing their interests, regulate their common life as free and equal partners, modern natural law theorists were the first to meet the demand for a procedural grounding of law, that is, for a justification by principles whose validity could in turn be criticized. To this extent, ‘nature’ and ‘reason’ do not stand in this context for some metaphysical contents or other; rather, they circumscribe formal conditions which an agreement must satisfy if it is to have legitimating force, that is, if it is to be rational. Weber again confuses the formal properties of a postconventional level of justification with particular substantive values (p. 264).

“[A]ssuming that legitimacy is a necessary condition for the continued existence of every type of political domination, how can a legal domination whose legality is based on a law that is viewed in purely decisionistic terms (that is, a law that devalues all grounding in principle) be legitimated at all?” (pp. 264-265, emphasis in original).

Habermas has a marvelously sharp critique of attempts to separate law and politics from requirements for rational ethical justification. He distinguishes two very different kinds of “proceduralist” views of law. One is reductively empiricist and collapses the distinction between is and ought. At best it orients toward a kind of conformity or obedience. The other aims to ground “procedure” in rational ethics, conditions of dialogue, and what Habermas calls ideal speech situations.

“Legitimation through procedure does not mean here going back to formal conditions for the moral-practical justification of legal norms; it means rather keeping to procedural prescriptions in administering, applying, and enacting law. Legitimacy rests then on ‘belief in the legality of enacted rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands’. It remains unclear how the belief in legality is supposed to summon up the force of legitimation if legality means only conformity with an actually existing legal order, and if this order, as arbitrarily enacted law, is not in turn open to practical-moral justification. The belief in legality can produce legitimacy only if we already presuppose the legitimacy of the legal order that lays down what is legal. There is no way out of this circle…. The transitions between ‘agreed upon’ and ‘imposed’ order are fluid” (p. 265, emphasis added).

Empirical, factual conformity to law is no guarantee of moral rightness. The Nazi regime in Germany, for example, had a factual conformity to law, thanks in part to the apologetics of Carl Schmitt. This can hardly be taken to legitimate it.

“Notwithstanding these fluid transitions, the two sources of legitimacy on which the belief in legality depends can certainly be distinguished analytically: rationally motivated agreement versus the imposition of a powerful will” (p. 266).

Here he puts it very clearly. Legal/political “impositionism” is a kind of voluntarism. Like all voluntarism, it elevates arbitrary will above reason. This effectively destroys the space in which ethical reason could flourish, by eliminating the possibility of questioning whatever is imposed.

Habermas is very clear that there is a sharp opposition between any kind of authoritative “imposition” and agreement based on reasons. I find this highly commendable. Unlike Brandom, he does not get caught up in apologizing for the elements of impositionism that can also be found in the natural law tradition.

(Brandom even takes this so far as to retrospectively claim a historically progressive role for theological voluntarism. I think Brandom is a truly great philosopher overall, but on this particular issue Habermas seems to do much better. Brandom is quite right that the natural law theorists like Pufendorf introduced new ideas of holding authority to certain standards of reasonableness. But he takes the voluntarist element in Pufendorf to be an essential ingredient, rather than an unresolved inconsistency. Indeed everyone seems to call Pufendorf a political voluntarist. But my brief examination of Pufendorf did not find him emphasizing the justification of arbitrary actions, which is the sin qua non of voluntarism. Quite the contrary, his avowed emphasis seemed to be on reasonable standards. Pufendorf wrote during the age of absolute monarchies, when any advocate of limitations on the monarch’s prerogative had to write cautiously.)

“Belief in the legality of a procedure cannot per se — that is, in virtue of positive enactment — produce legitimacy” (ibid).

Legality is a mere fact. Rightness is an ideal.

“Weber confuses an appeal to the need to justify legal domination — that is, an attempt to go back to the legitimating foundation of rational agreement — with an appeal to particular values” (p. 267).

Habermas is saying that Weber treats criteria of reasonableness in law and politics as inevitably particularist. Habermas sharply rejects this conclusion, as do I.

“Weber forcefully works out the formal properties of modern law, on the basis of which it is suited as a means of organization for subsystems of purposive-rational action. But he restricts the concept of law positivistically to such an extent that he can neglect the moral-practical aspect of rationalization (the principle of justification) and take account only of its cognitive-instrumental aspect (the principle of enactment). Weber considers the advances of modern legal development exclusively from the standpoint of formal rationality, that is, of a value-neutral, means-ends, systematic shaping of spheres of action, which is tailored to the type of strategic action. The rationalization of law is then no longer measured against the inner logic of the moral-practical sphere of value, as is that of ethics and life-conduct; it is directly connected to the progress of knowledge in the cognitive-instrumental sphere of value” (p. 268).

This is to say that despite his commendable neo-Kantian scruples regarding the importance of values, Weber aims to completely withdraw questions of value from law and politics.

“The assumption — which sprang up with legal positivism and was adopted and overextended by social-scientific functionalism — that normative validity claims could be withdrawn, without any noteworthy consequences for the stability of the legal system in the consciousness of the system’s members, is empirically untenable” (p. 269).

I quite agree with Habermas that a policy that is disconnected from all values cannot and does not govern in real life. But it matters a lot whether we criticize the empiricist freedom from values from a point of view of inquiry into reasons, or from a traditionalist point of view that takes reasons for granted, and treats the questioning of authority as improper.

“This leads to a rather ironic consequence for Weber’s diagnosis of the times. He deplores the switch from ethical to purely utilitarian action orientations…. Thus he ought to welcome movements that are directed against parallel tendencies in the law…. [But] Weber regards as detracting from the formal qualities of law not only traditionalist attempts to reideologize it but also progressive efforts to reattach it to procedural requirements for grounding” (ibid).

Apparently, Weber regards the formal positivity of law (the principle of “enactment”) as having more to do with the rationalization of modern society — which he sees in terms of technique — than any substantive inquiry into reasons. Habermas traces this to defects in the way action is understood.

“It is not my intention to pursue a critique of ideology probing the roots of this inconsistency. I am concerned with the immanent reasons for Weber’s inability to carry through his theory of rationalization as it is set up…. First, I want to unearth certain bottlenecks in the concept formation of his action theory…. Second, I would like to show that the ambiguity in the rationalization of law cannot be grasped at all within the limits of a theory of action” (p. 270).

This is extremely important. Meaning is not adequately explainable by the mental intentions of nominal subjects. Along with Habermas, Paul Ricoeur and Alain de Libera have pointed out major blockages in the 20th-century “theory of action”. Gwenaëlle Aubry has developed an Aristotelian alternative that I rather like. Brandom has developed a new normative pragmatics and a new inferentialist semantics. He sees Kant as having developed a highly original alternative notion of intentionality that is based on shareable notions of responsibility and commitment, rather than on attributions of private subjective consciousness or belief.

“Intentionalist semantics is based on the counterintuitive idea that understanding the meaning of a symbolic expression X can be traced back to understanding the intention of speaker S…. For a theory of communicative action only those analytic theories of meaning are instructive that start from the structure of linguistic expressions rather than from speakers’ intentions” (pp. 274-275).

Linguistic expressions have a degree of objectivity, substantiality, or seriousness mainly because they are shareable. About the private intentions and mental states of speakers we can only speculate in the ordinary pejorative, non-Hegelian sense. With what is said on the other hand (at the level of understandable meaning and what Habermas calls validity claims, not that of putative bare fact or event), we can go much further.

“Starting from the pragmatist theory of signs introduced by Pierce and developed by Morris, Carnap made the symbolic complex … accessible to an internal analysis from syntactic and semantic points of view. The bearers of meaning are not isolated signs but elements of a language system, that is, sentences whose form is determined by syntactic rules and whose semantic content is determined by relations to designated objects or states of affairs. With Carnap’s logical syntax and the basic assumption of referential semantics, the way was opened to a formal analysis of the representational function of language. On the other hand, Carnap considered the appellative and expressive functions of language as pragmatic aspects that should be left to empirical analysis” (p. 276).

“The theory of meaning was finally established as a formal science only with the step from reference semantics to truth semantics. The semantics founded by Frege and developed through the early Wittgenstein to Davidson and Dummet gives center stage to the relation between sentence and state of affairs, between language and the world. With this ontological turn, semantic theory disengaged itself from the view that the representational function can be clarified on the model of names that designate objects. The meaning of sentences, and the understanding of sentence meanings, cannot be separated from language’s inherent relation to the validity of statements. Speakers and hearers understand the meaning of a sentence when they know under what conditions it is true. Correspondingly, they understand the meaning of a word when they know what contribution it makes to the capacity of truth of a sentence formed with its help. Thus truth semantics developed the thesis that the meaning of a sentence is determined by its truth conditions” (pp. 276-277).

This mini-history of 20th-century philosophy of language is very close to that put forward by Brandom, who calls Habermas one of his heros. (Habermas in turn sympathetically cites Rorty.)

Habermas is enthusiastic about Austin and Searle’s work on speech acts, and points out that this belongs to the more generally neglected area of the pragmatics of language. I think this predates Brandom’s major original work on a normative pragmatics.

“The limits of this approach become visible as soon as the different modes of using sentences are brought under formal consideration…. Along the line from the later Wittgenstein through Austin to Searle, the formal semantics of sentences was extended to speech acts. It is no longer limited to the representational function of language but is open to an unbiased analysis of the multiplicity of illocutionary forces” (p. 277).

Here we touch on Habermas’s version of the critique of representationalism. In its place he suggests that we address a multiplicity of illocutionary forces (taking force in the Fregean linguistic sense, rather than the more common one). Habermas strongly ties Austin’s “illocution” — or the doing involved in speech acts — with conditions and practices for evaluation of what he calls validity claims, as distinct from claims of truth.

“The theory of speech acts marks the first step toward a formal pragmatics that extends to noncognitive modes of employment. At the same time … it remains tied to the narrow ontological presuppositions of truth-conditional semantics. The theory of meaning can attain the level of integration of the communication theory that Bühler advanced in a programmatic way only if it is able to provide a systematic grounding for the appellative and expressive functions of language (and perhaps also for the ‘poetic’ function related to the linguistic means themselves, as this was developed by Jakobson)” (ibid).

One of the areas in which Habermas has been criticized has been his avowed commitment to a form of “cognitivism”. But once again, the vocabulary is ambiguous. Cognitivism could mean anything from the view that all judgment is exclusively of a calculating sort, to the view that value judgments depend on interpretation of meaning. Habermas rejects the former, and endorses the latter. He emphasizes that there are also “noncognitive” elements in speech acts.

“For this purpose the paradigm change in philosophy of language that was introduced by J. L. Austin … must be radicalized in such a way that the break with the ‘logos characterization of language’, that is, with privileging its representational function, also has consequences for the choice of ontological presuppositions in the theory of language…. It is with this in mind that I have proposed that we do not set illocutionary force over against propositional content as an irrational force, but conceive of it as the component which specifies which validity claim a speaker is raising with his utterance, how he is raising it, and for what” (pp. 277-278).

Illocutionary force is “the component which specifies which validity claim a speaker is raising with his utterance, how he is raising it, and for what”. This seems like a nice alternative to subject-centered notions of intentionality.

“With the illocutionary force of an utterance a speaker can motivate a hearer to accept the offer contained in his speech act and thereby accede to a rationally motivated binding (or bonding, Bindung) force” (p. 278).

He criticizes the appeals that Weber and others make to consciousness, as if it were a source. We ought to look at shareable meaning instead. The only thing that makes anything binding is the so-called force of reasons.

“Weber does not rely here on a theory of meaning but on a theory of consciousness. He does not elucidate ‘meaning’ in connection with the model of speech; he does not relate it to the linguistic medium of possible understanding, but to the beliefs and intentions of an acting subject, taken to begin in isolation” (p. 279).

“Weber does not start with the social relationship. He regards as rationalizable only the means-ends relation of teleologically [sic] conceived, monological action. If one adopts this perspective, the only aspects of action open to objective appraisal are the effectiveness of a causal intervention into an existing situation and the truth of the empirical assertions that underlie the maxim or the plan of action — that is, the subjective belief about a purposive-rational organization of means” (p. 281).

Here he enumerates symptoms of what he calls a “monological” (opposite to dialogical) exclusive focus on what I would call a modern interpretation of efficient causality as a basis for explanation. He emphasizes the second-person, “I-Thou” communicative aspect of reason over the more common reduction of everything to first- and third-person (“subjective” and “objective”) points of view. He is arguing that the reason we ought to care about and cultivate has an I-Thou character, first and foremost.

“A communicatively achieved agreement has a rational basis; it cannot be imposed by either party, whether instrumentally through intervention in the situation directly or strategically through influencing the decisions of opponents. Agreement can indeed be objectively obtained by force; but what comes to pass manifestly through outside influence or the use of violence cannot count subjectively as agreement” (p. 287).

I want to cheer when I read things like this.

“If we were not in a position to refer to the model of speech, we could not even begin to analyze what it means for two subjects to come to an understanding with one another. Reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech…. The concepts of speech and understanding reciprocally interpret one another” (ibid, emphasis added).

I think Plato and Aristotle were very aware of this reciprocity between speech and understanding, but it got largely forgotten later on. Plato centrally stresses open dialogue and questioning as the way to truth. Aristotle develops a whole art of simultaneously addressing linguistic meaning, reality, and ultimate rightness in a balanced way that anticipates many points in Kant and Hegel.

“”[E]xamples of the use of language with an orientation to consequences seem to decrease the value of speech acts as the model for action oriented to reaching understanding.”

Here consequences are understood in a modern causal sense, and not a logical or inferential one. Consequences and truth conditions were the main concern of earlier analytic philosophy. There is an ethical view called “consequentialism” that judges deeds strictly by their outcome, and is closely related to utilitarianism.

“This will turn out not to be the case only if it can be shown that the use of language with an orientation to reaching understanding is the original mode of language use, upon which indirect understanding, giving something to understand or letting something be understood, and the instrumental use of language in general, are parasitic. In my view, Austin’s distinction between illocutions and perlocutions accomplishes just that” (p. 288, emphasis in original).

This is very important. Second-person communication is more primary than third-person representation. Habermas recalls Austin’s three-way distinction among speech acts.

“Through locutionary acts the speaker addresses states of affairs; he says something. Through illocutionary acts the speaker performs an action in saying something…. Finally, through perlocutionary acts the speaker produces an effect upon the hearer…. The self-sufficiency of the speech act is to be understood in the sense that the communicative intent of the speaker and the illocutionary aim he is pursuing follow from the manifest meaning of what is said. It is otherwise with teleological [sic] actions. We identify their meaning only in connection with the intentions their authors are pursuing and the ends they want to realize. As the meaning of what is said is constitutive for illocutionary acts, the intention of the agent is constitutive for teleological [sic] actions” (pp. 288-289).

The kind of meaning we should care most about links the “manifest” meaning of what is said with the pragmatics of justification. Representational and truth-conditional semantics are logistical tools that should be in service to a broader pragmatic inquiry. Brandom has developed an original inferential semantics, in close connection with a normative pragmatics that he considers ultimately to be more primary.

“What we mean by reaching understanding has to be clarified solely in connection with illocutionary acts” (p. 293).

This follows from his description of the three kinds of speech acts.

“I have called the type of interaction in which all participants harmonize their individual plans of action with one another and thus pursue their illocutionary aims without reservation ‘communicative action’ (p. 294, emphasis in original).

Now he says that the whole huge topic he has been addressing as distinctively communicative action revolves around illocution.

“Thus I count as communicative action those linguistically mediated interactions in which all participants pursue illocutionary aims, and only illocutionary aims” (p. 295, emphasis in original).

He glosses this in terms of the “acceptability” of speech acts.

“We understand a speech act when we know what makes it acceptable” (p. 297, emphasis in original).

“A speech act may be called ‘acceptable’ if it satisfies the conditions that are necessary in order that the hearer be allowed to take a ‘yes’ position on the claim raised by the speaker. These conditions cannot be satisfied one-sidedly, either relative to the speaker or to the hearer. They are conditions rather for the intersubjective recognition of a linguistic claim” (p. 298, emphasis in original).

“Registering a validity claim is not the expression of a contingent will; and responding affirmatively to a validity claim is not merely an empirically motivated decision…. Validity claims are internally connected with reasons and grounds” (p. 301, emphasis in original).

This is the beginning of wisdom.

“That a speaker means what he says can be made credible only in the consistency of what he does and not through providing grounds” (p. 303).

In an earlier post, we saw that Habermas carefully distinguishes between truth, validity, and sincerity.

“We have distinguished genuine imperatives, with which the speaker connects a claim to power, from speech acts with which the speaker raises a criticizable validity claim” (p. 304).

Claims of authority too are qualitatively different from claims of validity or general reasonableness. In discussions of validity, authority as such has no place. To bring claims of authority into a discussion of reasons, where claims of authority have no place, is a kind of cheating.

“We discover the incompleteness of the literal meaning of expressions only through a sort of problematizing that is not directly under our control. It emerges as a result of problems that appear objectively and have an unsettling effect on our natural worldview. The fundamental background knowledge that must tacitly supplement our knowledge of the acceptability conditions of linguistically standardized expressions if hearers are to be able to understand their literal meanings, has remarkable features: It is an implicit knowledge that cannot be represented in a finite number of propositions; it is a holistically structured knowledge, the basic elements of which intrinsically define one another; and it is a knowledge that does not stand at our disposition, inasmuch as we cannot make it conscious and place it in doubt as we please” (p. 336, emphasis in original).

Next in this series: Second-Person Thinking?

The Phenomenology’s Ending

Having more or less completed a walk-through of Hegel’s Phenomenology in the company of Harris’ unique literal commentary, the first thing I want to comment on is Brandom’s decision not to cover the Phenomenology‘s last two chapters (on Religion and Absolute Knowledge) in A Spirit of Trust. Brandom argues that the actual climax of Hegel’s work is the end of the preceding Spirit chapter, where Conscience finds its completion in mutual recognition, confession, and forgiveness. This allows him to avoid entering into controversy on the secondary point of the status of historical, socially instituted religion. As my own coverage illustrates, this is indeed a thorny area. Brandom develops his own somewhat minimalist treatment of absolute knowledge, carefully avoiding the connections with historical religion and the issues of the latter’s status that Harris explicitly brings out.

In a historically Christian culture, it is difficult to speak of confession and forgiveness without implicitly invoking religious connotations. Clearly they can also be given a purely ethical meaning, though, and this is what Brandom does.

It seems clear that Hegel thinks the standpoint of Conscience already stands on the threshold of absolute knowledge, requiring only an explicit consideration of mutual recognition and forgiveness to complete it. In this regard, Brandom is right. Moreover, I think Brandom’s parallel path to absolute knowledge ultimately yields conclusions compatible with those that Harris draws from following the remainder of Hegel’s argument. They both give absolute knowledge a mainly ethical rather than theological (or epistemological) meaning.

Harris thinks, though, that the Religion chapter is the one place where Hegel does argue for a linear, progressive historical development. Brandom replaces this with references to Enlightenment political theory that Hegel does not explicitly discuss at all in the Phenomenology. Here we are concerned with the transition from ancient Greek recognition that “some are free” to Kantian/Fichtean and modern democratic recognition that “all are free”. For Hegel himself, this goes through historical Christianity.

Brandom charts an alternative linear development to “all are free” that goes through the attitude-dependence of norms in secular traditions of natural law and social contract theory. While I have serious issues with the political and legal voluntarism of these traditions, I do think Brandom’s alternate genealogy of the modern “all are free” is probably more factually historical than the path Hegel himself traces through the Unhappy Consciousness, primitive Christianity, and the Reformation.

Another important point that Harris makes, though, is that Hegel treats historical religion because he wants to be maximally socially inclusive. The peasant-wife with her cows in Sense-Certainty could be deeply touched by historical religion, but is most probably totally unaware of Enlightenment political theory. Harris says that religion already gives the most naive “natural” consciousness the sense that there is something greater than itself, which begins the path to Self-Consciousness and Spirit.

Another alternative path to the more political sense of “all are free” (which I like better than the one through natural law and social contract theory) goes through the more explicitly democratic concerns of the Spinozist movement and the French Encyclopedists (see Enlightenment).

Modernity, Voluntarism

A draft chapter on pre-Hegelian stages in the history of normativity that Brandom removed from the published Spirit of Trust is now separately available on the internet. Parts or aspects of this historical narrative are the main source of issues I’ve had with Brandom in recent times. I take his removal of the chapter as confirmation that this historical argument should be viewed as an independent, optional supplement to the main philosophical argument of this truly great work. But Brandom still implicitly relies on it in summarily characterizing what he calls the single most important transformation in history — having to do with the status of normativity in the Enlightenment — and I have issues with those statements as well.

He begins by recalling a number of core themes I would wholeheartedly endorse. Hegel “fully appreciated, as many of Kant’s readers have not” that Kant fundamentally rethought notions of self, self-consciousness, apperception, and “consciousness in the sense of apperception” in normative terms. This is a vitally important point.

“Judgment is the minimal form of apperceptive awareness because judgments are the smallest units one can commit oneself to, make oneself responsible for”. The “I” in “I think” that Kant called the “emptiest of all representations” is a kind of formal mark of taking responsibility for the judging. What is represented in the judgment is what one makes oneself responsible to, and the “I” in turn only acquires determinate reference from what we implicitly or explicitly take responsibility for. What Brandom following popular usage still calls “conscious selves”, he glosses with precision as “apperceptively unified constellations of commitments”.

Concepts are “rules that determine what commitments are reasons for and against”, and as such govern the synthesis of apperceptive unities, but they should not be thought of as pre-existing. “Judgeable contents take methodological pride of place because of their role in Kant’s normative account of judging”. Concepts used in judgments acquire their content from the activity of judging, from what one does in applying them. Brandom thinks Hegel sees Kant as a “semantic pragmatist” not just in the Fichtean sense of the primacy of practical philosophy over theoretical philosophy, but in the more radical sense that for Kant, a normative account of discursive activity has methodological explanatory authority over the determination of discursive content in both theoretical and practical philosophy.

Brandom identifies Hegel’s Geist or Spirit with discursive normativity, and says Hegel sees earlier moral theorists as offering important insights not just about morality, but about normativity as such. Hegel himself starts from conceptual norms expressed in language, rather than from moral norms. He says that “language is the Dasein [“being there”] of Geist”. “In another (completely unprecedented) move, Hegel historicizes his social metaphysics of normativity”. Normativity is for the first time explicitly recognized as having a history.

“The traditional metaphysics of normativity that Hegel sees all subsequent forms of understanding as developing from the rejection of is the subordination-obedience model.” On this model, obligation is instituted by the command of a superior. Brandom notes that Hegel initially discussed it under the famous figure of the relation of Master and Servant.

Protestant natural-law theorists – including Grotius, Cumberland, Hobbes, Pufendorf, Thomasius, and Locke — secularized and naturalized the voluntarism of medieval Catholic theologians like Scotus and Occam, tracing the binding force of law from “the antecedent existence of a superior-subordinate relationship”. For the theological voluntarists, Brandom says, such relations of subordination were not only matters of objective fact, but “in some sense the fundamental objective metaphysical structure of reality”, embodied in Arthur Lovejoy’s figure of a broadly neoplatonic “Great Chain of Being”. The natural-law theorists explained relations of subordination among humans in terms of different theories of God’s dominion over humans. Brandom notes that on the obedience model, the status of being a superior is itself a normatively significant status entailing a right to legislate and command, but having that status relative to other humans is reduced to a non-normative matter of presumed objective fact. (We should not rely on presumption in such important matters, and all attempts to reduce normativity to something non-normative stand in opposition to the autonomy of ethical reason championed by Kant.)

Brandom says the natural-law theorists began to question the subordination-obedience model in two ways – first by attaching some normative criteria to the status of being a superior, and second by suggesting that the right of a human to command might depend on some kind of implicit consent or attitude of the affected subordinates. I would emphasize that any such move is already a move away from voluntarism. As Brandom says, the subordination-obedience model is incapable of being extended to explain a normative status of being entitled to command. The invocation of the consent of subordinates, he says, is an “even more momentous” step forward. It is distinctive of Brandomian modernity to take normative statuses to be instituted by attitudes of acknowledgement. Ultimately, modernity for Brandom is thus related to the emergence of democratic politics.

Brandom says that for Hegel, the modern model of attitude-dependence of normative statuses expresses a genuine and important truth, but like the subordination-obedience model, it is ultimately one-sided. Hegel’s own view will make room for both an objectivity and an attititude-dependence of norms and normative statuses, by deriving objectivity itself from a vast ensemble of processes of normative mutual recognition over time. Brandom translates Hegel’s vocabulary of “independence” and “dependence” into authority and responsibility, and says that for Hegel, what self-conscious beings are “in themselves” depends on what they are “for themselves”, on what they take themselves to be, as well as on what others take them to be. What is “in itself” or “for itself” is thus a matter of normative interpretation, rather than of metaphysics in the traditional sense.

All of this seems both fine and important. Things begin to become much more problematic, however, when he briefly discusses the contrast between voluntarist and “intellectualist” views of the will in medieval Latin theology. He ends up valorizing the voluntarism of Occam at the expense of the so-called intellectualism of Aquinas, on the ground that voluntarism can be taken as grounding normativity in attitudes attributed to God. Even though he notes that Occam’s nominalism makes all universals – including normativity — the product of “brute arbitrariness”, while recognizing that for Aquinas normativity is always grounded in reasons, he is more impressed by the fact that in Aquinas, those reasons are traceable to objective statuses. Brandom’s language suggests that any reliance whatseoever on attitudes — even if they are arbitrary and do not involve any kind of recognition of an other — is ethically preferable to reliance on objective statuses.

I on the contrary much prefer Aquinas’ appeal to reasons – in spite of the fact that Aquinas ultimately relies on assumed objective statuses – to Occam’s appeal to arbitrariness, even though the latter can be argued to implicitly involve attitudes. It is a rather common motif of shallow accounts of the prehistory of modern science to valorize Occam and nominalism generally as anticipating modern developments, while overlooking both the negative ethical consequences of voluntarism and the positive value of the ethically “intellectualist” emphasis on reason.

I want to put greater stress on the contrast between arbitrariness and reasons than on that between relying on assumed objective statuses and relying on attitudes. Of course I agree that objective normative statuses should not be simply assumed. But I see nothing at all progressive in arbitrariness glossed as the product of an arbitrary attitude. The result is still arbitrariness. So, I cannot at all agree that theological voluntarism is “the thin leading edge of the wedge of modernity”, if modernity is supposed to be anything good. I think a transition to relying on attitudes for the constitution of normativity only becomes progressive when those attitudes are non-arbitrary.

The other odd thing in Brandom’s account is the complete absence of any mention of Plato and Aristotle. Unlike most authors of the Enlightenment, Plato and Aristotle put no limits on the free use of reason. They explicitly treated reason as bound up with normativity. And even though they did not question existing distinctions of social status as much as we might, nothing in their ethics actually presupposes the subordination-obedience model. Thus I locate the single greatest historical break with Plato and Aristotle’s invention of rational ethics, rather than with the Enlightenment’s appeal to attitudes.

However one takes the ethical “intellectualism” of Aquinas, it combines Plato and Aristotle’s merger of normativity and reason with doctrinal concerns. The assumptions about objective statuses that Brandom objects to belong to the doctrinal component of his synthesis rather than its Platonic-Aristotelian component. If we are looking for historical antecedents of the ethically good aspects of modernity, we should look to Plato and Aristotle.

Voluntarism’s endorsement of arbitrariness over reasons is quite simply the short path to evil. It is the bad attitude of the Master discussed by Hegel, raised to a sort of anti-philosophical principle. Brandom is a great champion of the importance of reasons, and presents an exemplary reading of Mastery as an evolutionary dead end with no progressive role to play, so I think it would be more consistent for him to avoid any historical valorization of voluntarist positions.