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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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