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).

17th and 18th Century Moral Philosophy

I was working on a second installment on Brandom’s “lost” historical chapter of A Spirit of Trust, which makes some use of J. B. Schneewind’s The Invention of Autonomy (1998). Upon directly consulting Schneewind’s book, I found so much of interest that I have decided on a detour. This is an impressive history of moral philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries, with which I previously had little acquaintance.

Schneewind’s eventual main concern will be to bring out the way that ideas of self-governance originating from Stoicism — particularly as elaborated by the Roman authors Cicero and Seneca — were taken up and significantly developed by some of the leading writers of the day. This seems to be distinct from the tradition of natural law, which is also Stoic in provenance.

He notes that Kant uses the unprecedented expression “fact of reason” in relation to human freedom. “Readers who hold, as I do, that our experience of the moral ought shows us no such thing will think of his version of autonomy as an invention, rather than an explanation” (op. cit., p. 3). Nonetheless his book aims “to broaden our historical comprehension of Kant’s moral philosophy by relating it to the earlier work to which it was a response” (ibid). In this sense, Kantian autonomy is not at all an invention out of the blue.

The existence of this tradition makes Kant’s unusual claim much more understandable. I think the “fact of reason” claim is intended to be justified neither by our individual direct experience of the moral, nor even by Kant’s distinctive emphasis on our “taking” of things to be thus and such. Rather, it is suggested by the existence of the very substantial tradition of discourse about the role of self-governance in moral affairs that Schneewind documents. This discussion involved many of the leading writers of the 17th and 18th centuries. It would have been familiar to the audience Kant was writing for, even though it has not been well known in more recent times. The fact of reason claim makes much more sense as a claim about socio-historical or cultural fact. This also brings Kant closer to Hegel.

This discourse about self-governance has clear relevance to Kant’s affirmations of the moral equality of humans as humans. It thus represents an emerging alternative to what Brandom calls the traditional obedience paradigm of morality. (Recently, in the context of Duns Scotus, it came out that Stoic ideas of self-governance already had some currency among the early Franciscans. But in that context there was no explicit theme of equality.)

This post will in varying degrees cover Schneewind’s first six chapters, wherein the obedience paradigm is elaborated in new ways by the founder of the Protestant natural law tradition, Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) and his notorious follower Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). Still within the obedience paradigm, we will see that Richard Cumberland (1631-1718) contests the views of Hobbes on many points. But first Schneewind looks ahead to situate the notion of self-governance.

“During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries established conceptions of morality as obedience came increasingly to be contested by emerging conceptions of morality as self-governance. The new outlook that emerged by the end of the eighteenth century centered on the belief that all normal individuals are equally able to live together in a morality of self-governance” (p. 4).

“The conception of morality as self-governance provides a conceptual framework for a social space in which we may each rightfully claim to direct our own actions without interference from the state, the church, the neighbors, or those claiming to be better or wiser than we. The older conception of morality as obedience did not have these implications” (ibid).

“My main theme in what follows is the emergence of various conceptions of morality as self-governance. As early as Machiavelli and Montaigne there were thinkers who set aside the conception of morality as obedience in order to work out an alternative. But most of the philosophers who rethought morality in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries did not intend to replace the older conception with a conception of morality as self-governance. They were for the most part trying to solve problems arising within the older view. Most of them were hoping to show how Christian morality could continue to offer helpful guidance in the face of difficulties that no one had previously faced…. They could not have foreseen the uses to which later thinkers eventually put their ideas” (p. 5).

The last part about unforeseen uses is an important methodological consideration in working on this kind of history. Just as, for example, the modern notion of subject did not emerge all at once and is not a monolith, but underwent a long, complex development full of twists, turns, branchings, and occasional reversals, so too the developments here are anything but simple. And this is not just a happy aesthetic appreciation of difference, but also a matter of bloody religious wars and civil wars.

“Moral and political concerns led increasing numbers of philosophers to think that the inherited conceptions of morality did not allow for a proper appreciation of human dignity, and therefore did not properly allow even for the moral teachings of Christianity” (ibid).

This was a complex development. The obedience paradigm came to be more and more strongly associated with voluntarism. But voluntarism also became more differentiated, and began to be secularized. Explicit anti-voluntarism emerged as a significant trend, in Christian as well as secular contexts.

“Conceptions of morality as self-governance reject the inequality of moral capacity among humans that was a standard part of conceptions of morality as obedience” (p. 6).

“Events outside of philosophy itself were largely responsible for stimulating the rethinking of morality that occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Reformation and the Counter-Reformation made anything tied to religion a matter of controversy — and everything was tied to religion. The warfare that racked Europe almost continuously from the sixteenth century until the middle of the seventeenth century, and the civil conflicts in Britain that lasted almost until the century’s end, were understood in terms of issues about religion…. Morality as interpreted by churches that were themselves rent by sectarian disagreements could not provide either an inner sense of community or external constraints sufficient to make civilized life possible” (pp. 6-7).

Modern science was also developing by leaps and bounds, but for Schneewind this was not the main factor in the religious and social ferment of the time.

“Without the science, the course that moral philosophy took would no doubt have been different. But morality would have required reexamination and reshaping even if there had been no new science…. [T]he problems arising from religious dissension and from calls for wider participation in politics were not themselves due to advances in scientific knowledge” (p. 7).

“But there were many more people who, without being atheists or doubters, were taken to be antireligious because they held that institutionalized religion was doing great harm. They certainly hoped to see the churches or the clergy reformed, but they sought no secular ethic. Anticlericalism is not atheism” (p. 8).

This is important. Many opponents of religious authoritarianism have been profoundly religious themselves, but the hardline defenders of authoritarian and sectarian views have (and still do) commonly misrepresent them as atheists.

“Briefly, the claim that the main effort of the moral philosophy of the eighteenth century was to secularize morality does not stand up to the most cursory inspection” (ibid).

The Enlightenment mainstream opposed superstition and the religious sectarianism that was all too common. Some defenders of religion equated that opposition with a wholesale denial of religion, but this was a polemical misrepresentation.

Defenders of religion were not the only practitioners of polemical misrepresentation. “Among antireligious thinkers there were many who talked as if the only interpretation of religion on which God is essential to morality is that of the strong voluntarists” (ibid).

“Voluntarists hold that God created morality and imposed it on us by an arbitrary fiat of his will” (ibid). A concern with voluntarism was unavoidable in discussions of religion and morality during the period I shall be considering” (p. 9).

But “For everyone except the atheists, morality and religion remained tightly linked in early modern moral philosophy. The ethics of self-governance was created by both religious and antireligious philosophers” (ibid).

On the other hand, “Empiricism from Bacon through Locke had a strong affinity with voluntarism in ethics. Voluntarism in ethics tended to be associated with extreme conceptions of morality as obedience to God” (p. 10). Newton was a strong voluntarist too.

Schneewind’s work will show that Kant’s key concept of autonomy is firmly rooted in the anti-voluntarist tradition of self-governance, although this is not quite the lesson that Brandom draws from it.

“It seems to me not unreasonable to suppose that [Kant’s] normative commitment to a strong conception of morality as self-governance was at least a large part of what motivated him to develop his remarkable constructivist theory of knowledge as well as his motivational psychology. His is not the only case where the conventional portrayal of the historical relations between epistemology and moral philosophy is worse than useless” (p. 11).

“From [the work of Locke and Thomasius] it became evident why natural law theory seemed unable to meet the moral demands placed on it. Although Locke did not think it a failure, Thomasius did. There were no major natural law thinkers after these two, and I shall try to indicate why” (ibid).

“Influenced by Stoicism, rationalist thinkers from Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Descartes through Leibniz offered various versions of perfectionist ethics. Some thought we should focus on perfecting our knowledge, others, especially the Cambridge Platonists, emphasized perfecting our wills…. But even religious believers of orthodox persuasions aimed to show that morality requires much less of God’s direct operation than their predecessors had thought” (p. 12).

We’ll see a bit more on this “perfectionism” in a later post. This seems to be a different angle that cuts across the division between voluntarism and anti-voluntarism.

“The belief that human action should be guided by natural laws that apply to all people, no matter what their race, sex, location, or religion, originated outside of Judaism and Christianity. Once accepted into Christian thought, the idea of natural law became central to the European way of understanding morality…. These different Christian interpretations of natural law were far more significant for the development of modern moral philosophy than the ethical writing of Plato or Aristotle” (p. 17).

This is one of the more admirable aspects of Stoicism. From here, Schneewind begins his chronological account.

“The concept of natural law is at least as old as the Stoics” (ibid). “The most widely read transmitter of the idea of natural law was Cicero” (p. 18). “In accordance with Stoic teaching Cicero identified natural law with the dictates of right reason. Reason speaks with the voice of nature, showing us eternal and unchangeable laws applicable to all. It is the legislation of the gods, not alterable by human rulers” (ibid).

We have recently seen that even a strong voluntarist like Scotus could embrace the Stoic criterion of right reason in practical ethics.

“Ideas of natural law found a vital place in the development of Christian thought about the guidance of action. St. Paul provided the ground for incorporating them, in one of the most influential and frequently cited passages in the New Testament, Romans 2.14-15: ‘For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves. Which show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts meanwhile accusing or else excusing one another’ ” (ibid).

“[I]n about 1140 [the Decretals of Gratian took] the crucial step of identifying the natural law both with the directives contained in the Bible and with the law common to all people, the law they are led to acknowledge by a natural instinct” (pp. 18-19).

“The moral virtues, Aquinas holds, are habits enabling us to control the passions and desires that tend to lead us away from our true good. As habits concerned with practice these virtues must be guided by the principles of practical reason; and the principles of reason concerning the good are the laws of nature” (p. 19).

“But Thomas departs from Aristotle in holding that the laws of the virtues can be formulated and used in practical reasoning…. Thomas does not invoke the Aristotelian insight of the virtuous agent as our final guide. For him, the virtues are basically habits of obedience to laws” (p. 20, emphasis added).

Aristotle’s own view is that we should trust that a virtuous human will do the right thing.

“For Thomas, because ‘the will can tend to nothing except under the aspect of good’, the will is necessarily guided by what the intellect shows it as good” (ibid).

This side of Aquinas approaches Plato’s view that all beings desire the Good.

“When Christ summarized the laws, he told us to love God above all else and our neighbor as ourself. Not surprisingly, Thomas thinks that the laws of nature turn out to say the same thing. They teach us how to love rightly” (ibid).

On the other hand, for Aquinas “Our participation in the eternal law shows that we are not self-governed. We are governed by another” (p. 21).

“[F]or Duns Scotus the will is nobler than the intellect and is not tied by what the intellect can show it” (p. 23). “The most basic consideration leading Duns Scotus to the voluntarist position was the desire to maintain God’s omnipotence” (p. 25).

“Omnipotence is secured, at the cost of making God’s commands concerning the moral relations of human beings to one another an outcome of his arbitrary will. Luther and Calvin did not mind the cost. Voluntarism became an inescapable issue for later thinkers because of the decisive place they gave it in their moral theologies” (ibid).

“Suarez explains why the theologian must be the authority on the laws of nature” (p. 59). “Natural goodness provides the material for God’s command and justifies it; the formality of command alone makes obligation supervene upon natural goodness” (p. 61). “Suarez argues that everything concerned with moral goodness falls within the domain of natural law” (p. 62). “God could not achieve his end without making his law known, but no special revelation of it is required. The natural light, through the faculty of judgment — a part of right reason — teaches us what we are to do” (p. 63). “His own view is that the law is one for all humans because it is tied to the rational nature common to all” (p. 64). “Hence if conscience informs us adequately of the relevant precept and shows us that the case at hand falls under it, and we act with those considerations in mind, we do all that the law requires, inwardly as well as outwardly” (p. 65). “God does not efficaciously will the performance of all that he requires…. But he does efficaciously will that there be binding force, and hence obligation, to what the natural law requires” (ibid).

“Grotius’s central thought is that the laws of nature are empirically discoverable directives” (p. 72). “Grotius does not appeal to a divine manager of the universe whose governance assures us that obedience to natural law will contribute to the cosmic good while bringing us our own as well. He does not tell us that natural law points us toward perfecting our nature, or toward living as God’s eternal law requires. He considers only the empirical data about human conflict and its resolution” (ibid). “The general tenor of his remarks is opposed to voluntarism, and Grotius’s readers all took him to be opposed to it” (p. 74).

“He is therefore left with the problem of explaining exactly how acknowledging an obligation differs from noting goods and ills…. If rules impose obligation independently of the will of God, then it is not clear why God’s will must be invoked at all” (p. 75).

“The theory of the mean is one way of bringing out an an important point of difference between understanding morality as centered on virtue and taking it as centered on law” (p. 76). “The point of justice has nothing to do with the agent’s motives. To be just is simply to have the habit of following right reason with respect to the rights of others. Since right reason shows us the laws of nature, Grotius is assimilating virtue to obedience to law, as we have seen St. Thomas do…. He does not think the laws of nature determine what we are to do down to the last detail. Where the law is indeterminate, however, what operates is not insight but discretion. In such cases we make nonmoral choices among permissible acts. Grotius brings this out in direct confrontation with Aristotelianism” (p. 77).

It seems to me that these comparisons to Aristotle do not do him justice. Aristotle explicitly disavows any merely mechanical application of his criterion of the mean. It is not at all clear that Aristotle means to privilege “insight” over discretion. Either of these terms can be given a positive or negative spin.

“Thus, for Grotius, law points to good but is defined, not in terms of good, but in terms of injustice…. A perfect right gives rise to the kind of law under which people have strict obligations. As we would expect, justice is concerned with perfect rights and the obligations arising from them…. An imperfect right, by contrast, is an agent’s ‘aptitude’ or worthiness to possess or control something. This kind of right is associated, not with strict obligation, but with ‘those virtues which have as their purpose to do good to others’, for example, generosity and compassion…. He calls it the law of love, or a rule of love” (p. 79). “The law of love is not a law properly so called…. But it is significant that he treats the law of love as on an equal footing with the law of justice…. He treats rights as qualities grounding law, not as derived from law. They are personal possessions” (p. 80).

This may be the origin of the distinction between the good and the just, which is well established in the tradition but not obvious.

“Thus political authority need not arise from consent…. Moreover, not all rule is for the benefit of the governed. A good deal of it is for the good of the ruler. And there is really nothing for the people to do but endure it” (p. 81).

I tend to think of the consent of the governed in social contract theory as a kind of foundation myth. As long as we are going to have government, it ought to be in some real way “by consent”. But that does not mean that things are that way.

“Numerous Protestant writers on ethics and the foundations of politics followed him in using the language of natural law while detaching it from the specific doctrines of any particular religious confession, whether Protestant or Catholic” (p. 82).

“Like Grotius, Hobbes wrote about war and peace, but his concern was civil rather than international strife. He lived through the horrendous English civil war and experienced many of its consequences himself…. Philosophy, for Hobbes, is the rational discovery of connections of causes and effects…. The point of moral philosophy is to enable us to keep our society from disintegrating under the stresses produced by human nature” (pp. 83-84).

“Because he thinks that war is caused by ignorance, Hobbes says more about the causes of human conflict than Grotius does. At the center of his analysis is his view of the passions and desires. His psychology is intimately tied to his physics…. Hobbes defines desire and aversion in terms of the smallest motions — the ‘endeavors’ — of the atoms that constitute us. When we are moved toward some perceived or imagined object we say that we desire it…. When we are moved toward something, we call that toward which we are moved ‘good’. Thus we do not desire something because we think it good. We think it good simply because the thought of it moves us to get it…. Going beyond Grotius, who simply sets the issue aside, Hobbes flatly asserts that ‘there is no such Finis ultimis (utmost ayme), nor Summum bonum (greatest good), as is spoken of in the Books of the old Moral Philosophers’ ” (p. 84).

In this somewhat cynical refusal of the concept of a higher good, Hobbes recapitulates the Greek Sophists.

“In advancing the psychology that yields this conclusion Hobbes is rejecting the Stoic theory of desire and passion…. Hobbesian desires … are not propositional in the Stoic way…. [D]esires are causal forces. They stem from the interaction between our bodies and causal chains originating outside them, and they determine literally our every move. The Stoics thought the world was infused by rational deity and was consequently ordered toward harmony. If our desires represented the world and the goods in it accurately, we would live harmoniously, finding a highest good for ourselves which could be shared with all other like-minded people. Hobbes has no such view. Physical laws like those Galileo discovered hold no promise of humanly meaningful order” (pp. 85-86).

“The outcome is the famous war of all against all…. It is striking that although Hobbes’s portrayal of our nature and its social effects rivals in its vivid pessimism the dismal pictures of St. Augustine, Luther, and Calvin, his point is not theirs. He explicitly refuses to say that our nature is sinful. He is simply giving a scientific account of the factors that cause the problem we must learn to solve” (p. 87).

“In a complex situation we will feel moved in various directions. The conflict of desires and aversions thus constituted is what we call ‘deliberation’, and its outcome — the last appetite, the one that effectively causes one’s body to behave in a certain way, or, as we say, moves one to act — is the act of will. If the will is caused by an apparent good, the act is spontaneous, and a spontaneous act following deliberation is voluntary. If the will is moved by fear we do not call the act spontaneous, but acts done from fear and those done from hope are both caused in the same general way” (p. 88).

This candid recognition of the reality of conflict has something to say for it, but the reductionist dismissal of deliberation makes ethics impossible.

“It makes no sense to speak of the will as free. ‘I acknowledge this liberty‘, Hobbes says pithily, ‘that I can do if I will, but to say that I can will if I will, I take to be an absurd speech’ ” (p. 89, emphasis in original).

Here I think he is right. The genuine reality of ethical choice does not depend on the common post-Aristotelian assumption of a hypostasized faculty of choice.

“In the state of nature each has a right to all things and so no one is acting unjustly whatever one does for self-preservation” (ibid). “How is peace to be obtained? By giving up our right to all things…. This means that I cease to use my liberty to prevent others from getting what they want…. Once I actually limit my desires, then it may be said that I am bound or obliged not to interfere with any use made of the right I have given up; or that I ought not or have a duty not to interfere…. This means I cease to use my liberty to prevent others from getting what they want” (p. 90).

Hobbes views natural rights as inherently in conflict with one another, as indeed they must be if they were each a “right” to all things. In my view, even legitimate rights are artificial and not natural. They are a kind of distant second best that we reach for as a defense against abuses.

“Hobbes says also that he is not proposing new laws of nature. From the law requiring that we seek peace, he proceeds to demonstrate laws requiring us to be just, which for him means honoring contracts, to show gratitude, to do our best to get along with others, to judge fairly between disputing parties, to avoid arrogance and pride, and many others. These laws are contained in the Decalog. Its second table is summed up in the injunction to love one’s neighbor as oneself, its first table in the requirement that one love God; and these together form a fine summary of the laws of nature, useful in public instruction” (p. 92).

This is the same gloss on the ten commandments that we recently saw among the Franciscan theologians.

Hobbes’s version of the social contract strongly emphasizes one-sided obedience to the sovereign.

“Hobbes differs from Montaigne in thinking that we must each admit that our own sovereign’s laws are just. His laws may not be good; they may fail to help preserve peace; but ‘no law can be unjust’ because we have contracted to obey” (p. 93, emphasis added).

“In denying that we can appeal to natural law in order to criticize positive law, Hobbes is repudiating a major point in classical natural law theory. He is also attacking those who think that everyone has a private source of illumination about morals or religion, which could put each of us in a position to interpret the laws of nature for ourselves…. The havoc that could be wreaked by such teaching in a time of deep division over religion does not need to be explained; the constant turmoil in England between 1640 and 1660 shows how the doctrine could work with economic and political strife to endanger civil society itself” (pp. 93-94).

The critique of private sources of illumination is good. But the main value of natural law is that it depends on no particular human authority, and thus offers some shelter against abuses of such authority. Hobbes makes everything depend on particular human authority, while effectively denying that abuses of authority are abuses.

“Conscience for Hobbes is not itself a source of knowledge or even revelation…. It cannot be our supreme ruler, because we give up our right to take our own opinion as the sole measure of reason when we give up our right to all things” (p. 94).

This depends on a false dichotomy. We indeed have no right to take our own opinion as the sole measure of reason. But that is not what genuinely conscientious people do. A so-called conscience with no regard for others is not conscience at all.

“Hobbes allows that most people will not be able to follow his arguments. He has two remedies for this. One is regular teaching…. Hobbes suggests that there is a second remedy. Everyone can use the simple formula, ‘do not that to another, which thou wouldest not have done to thyself’ ” (ibid).

So even Hobbes recognizes the golden rule, at least for the rest of us.

“Hobbes thus agrees with Aquinas and Suarez that obedience to moral rules and positive laws is in most people the result of commands issued by an authority with power to penalize disobedience. The masses will understand the rules but not their rationale. Unlike Suarez, he does not say that obedience may come simply from a direct concern for righteousness, aroused by awareness of a law. Hobbes’s theory as a whole leaves little space outside the state of nature for anyone to exercise moral self-governance” (ibid).

Here, relatively speaking, I have to sympathize with Suarez.

” ‘The savages of America are not without some good moral sentences’, Hobbes says, just as they can add and divide small numbers. What they lack is not morals but science” (p. 95).

This sentiment as far as it goes is laudable, but I don’t see how it could be compatible with the unqualified natural war of all against all that Hobbes insists upon.

“Hobbes also goes out of his way to include another commonplace of the time. He ties morality to religion by claiming that the dictates of reason about how to live … cannot be called law unless we think that God commands us to obey them. Hobbes uses here the familiar natural law distinction between advice or counsel and law or command…. Readers of the time would have recognized this as a familiar point about the nature of law. They would have coupled it with Hobbes’s notorious remark that God’s right to reign over men ‘is to be derived, not from his creating them (as if he required obedience, as of gratitude for his benefits), but from his irresistible power‘. And they would have concluded that Hobbes was presenting a voluntarist view of morality” (ibid, emphasis in original).

And they would have been right.

“The impression would have been reinforced by some of Hobbes’s other statements…. Only beings capable of being moved to obey by threats of punishment and offers of reward can be subjects in any but a metaphorical sense…. We are not expected to understand God, still less to see justice in his action…. We should not expect to see any moral point in the distribution of goods and ills in this world. However unjust it may seem in human terms, it comes from God’s power and must be accepted. The similarity of this Hobbesian comment to Protestant doctrines of prevenient grace and election to salvation could not be missed…. All of this is quite in line with the Lutheran and Calvinist view that God is beyond our intellectual grasp” (pp. 95-96).

And this is supposed to be historically progressive and morally superior?

“The Suarezian moral impulse may be the impulse to righteousness, or to compliance with law as such, but that, as I have noted, is absent from Hobbes’s theory. Hobbes agrees instead with Grotius that reason teaches us directives whose obligatory force does not depend on God. If command is needed for law, it is unnecessary for obligation; Hobbes indeed insists that God commands only what reason shows to be obligatory for our preservation” (pp. 96-97).

Unconditional submission to authority is obligatory for our preservation? I still think the appropriate guide to action is whether something is good or right. The moral force of the teaching of reason indeed does not depend on a command.

“Hobbes’s aim is consistently to present a theology that reinforces the need for obedience to the ruler. Unlike Machiavelli he makes a serious effort to show that Christianity can be the appropriate civil religion…. What he is arguing for is in fact a minimalist Christianity not unlike the kind that Grotius expounded…. The most important conclusion from this is that no one can ever rightly think that God commands disobedience to the sovereign” (p. 98).

“I do not think we should take Hobbes to be ‘secularizing’ morality. He thinks that religious belief is the chief cause of anarchy. It is therefore vitally important to his political aims to make impossible any claims about the relation of religion and morality other than his. The God of voluntarism has a crucial role in Hobbes’s preemptive strategy. If the God who is adumbrated in Hobbes’s voluntarist terms is essential to morality, constituted as such by his command, then Hobbes’s theory implies that the management of our lives must be entirely up to us. Priests and churches and Scriptures have no authority; only our mortal deity does” (p. 99).

“Luther and Calvin do not intend voluntarism to take God out of the human community. They use it to ensure that his inscrutable ways will always be in our thought…. Hobbesian voluntarism has an entirely different function” (ibid). “Hobbes says, ‘God has no ends’…. The theorems God turns into laws are moral laws only for us. They cannot be laws for God because he has no ruler over him to command him. Moreover he does not have the nature from which our laws derive their obligatory force” (p. 100).

“To counter Hobbes, Cumberland found it necessary to put forward a new theory of morality…. He was not a reformer. But he was the first philosopher who created an important new ethical theory because he thought it was morally required in order to defeat voluntarism” (pp. 101). “Cumberland, unlike [Grotius and Hobbes], aimed to show that love is the core of morality, and law only its instrument. He invoked nothing less than the universe to do so…. God’s creation must be harmonious. Concord must be natural in both the material and the moral world. It is the view held by Aquinas and Hooker” (p. 102). “But when they said that the first law of nature is that good is to be pursued and evil avoided, they were not thinking in terms of aggregates of goods of individuals, and they certainly did not have the maximization of such an aggregate in mind. These ideas make their first appearance in Cumberland. He leaves us in no doubt that we are to understand the good in thoroughly quantitative terms…. When Cumberland spelled out precisely what the law of love is and claimed that it is the sole basis of all of morality, he was quite deliberately taking a radical new step in moral theory” (p. 104).

Cumberland is apparently often regarded as a sort of proto-utilitarian. The calculus of utility is less horrible than the emphasis on command.

“Cumberland rejects the Hobbesian view that our words and deductive systems are inventions we make to serve our desires. Ideas and the truths they form when brought together are, rather, impressed upon us by the world…. Truth is thus the conformity of our ideas ‘with the things themselves’ ” (p. 105). “Establishing a necessary and eternally true principle of morality is for Cumberland the key to defeating voluntarist denial that God and we form a single moral community. He thinks it is imperative to win this point. Unless we do so, we are left with Hobbes’s contention that God rules solely because of his irresistible power…. We can learn his morality. We do not need to appeal to innate ideas or to metaphysics to see this. Modern science has established the necessary geometrical laws of the physical universe. Cumberland thinks that he himself has done the same for morality” (p. 106). “He presents the law of nature as a statement of necessary causal connections relating benevolence, individual happiness, and the greatest happiness of all rationals” (p. 107).

In Brandom’s terms, Cumberland is all about the primacy of normative “statuses” that are supposed to objectively exist, and not to depend on any judgment by us.

“God legislates by telling us that it is necessary for us to act to bring about the greatest good of all rationals. This is true because, no matter whether we pursue our own good or the good of others, we can reach our end fully only by acting in ways that forward the greatest good. The obligation of law comes, then, simply from God’s telling us the truth about what it is necessary for us to do, given our ends. We can learn the truth from experience” (p. 110). “Cumberland’s claim that empirical evidence shows the truth of the law of nature is thus a claim about natural sanctions. Selfishness is self-punishing, benevolence self-rewarding, and these facts are empirical” (p. 111). “For Cumberland nature enables us to move from what we do desire to what is truly desirable, and the law of nature is thus a schoolmaster to lead us to God (Galatians 3.24)” (p. 112).

Natural sanctions seem like a good idea, as does the idea that we can learn. It is hard to argue with an emphasis on the greatest good. But the assumption that all goods are commensurable is false. The constant challenge of ethics is that some goods are incommensurable with one another.

“Since the will must seek clearly perceived good, what God understands about good is ‘analogous to a natural law’; and since his understanding is infinite, the necessity with which he follows it is much greater than any that could be induced by sanctions. There is therefore an ‘intrinsic propension of the divine will’ that makes it impossible for God to violate the dictate that the greatest good is to be pursued” (p. 113). “Cumberland thus thinks that we need not fear Hobbesianism because he has shown that God thinks rationally, as we do. God and we must follow the same moral law. We can confidently apply our understanding of morality to God in order to conclude that God is just; and because God could not reveal anything ‘contradictory to the just conclusions of our reason’, we are to believe the Scriptures” (ibid).

Cumberland here draws a conclusion that is diametrically opposite to the Radical Orthodoxy claims about Scotist univocity.

“As ‘subordinate members’ of the Kingdom of God. we are each entitled to only as much personal good as is in proportion to our importance in that Kingdom” (p. 114). “We have individual rights, in short, only insofar as it serves the common good for us to have them” (p. 115).

“No two true propositions can be inconsistent. So if any of us judges that our taking something we need to support our own life would be permissible, we must admit that a similar act by anyone else similarly situated would be so as well” (ibid). “Only a morality of obedience gives us the guidance we need” (p. 116).

While opposed to voluntarism, Cumberland still very strongly and clearly endorses the obedience paradigm.

“Human ignorance, he argues, justifies our keeping the present system of private property intact” (p. 117). “But justice consists in observing the rights of possessors, and those rights must be treated as inviolable. Moreover we must acquiesce even in a division of property that arose from chance, such as casting lots or first occupancy, because the importance of having settled ownership is so great” (p. 117). “Hence ‘a desire of innovation in things pertaining to property, is unjust’ because necessarily inconsistent with the fundamental law requiring pursuit of the greatest good. Ignorance puts us in a condition where we must all be obedient to God, and where most of us must be obedient as well to the wealthy and the powerful in this world” (ibid).

In case anyone worried that a concern with the greatest good of the greatest number might lead to socialism, Cumberland makes it very clear that he puts property rights ahead of other rights. This is actually typical in classic accounts of rights. Schneewind clearly thinks Cumberland goes even further, and holds that we must obey those who are wealthier than we are. Cumberland’s God apparently supports plutocracy.