Tag: Will

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.

Beyond Obedience: Brandom’s “Lost Chapter”

Early modern legal and political theory has a significant historical relationship to theological voluntarism that it would be important to understand. This also seems relevant to my recent work on Scotus (or vice versa).

A chapter of Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust that was omitted from the final published version, and mainly traces antecedents of Hegelian mutual recognition in early modern social contract theory, first brought this issue to my attention. I will be devoting a few posts to it.

It seems indisputable that social contract theory has a genealogical relationship to theological voluntarism. But it is no secret that I prefer to ground mutual recognition in Aristotle’s ethical concept of friendship. Among other issues, social contract theories are tainted by an at best only partial emancipation from their voluntarist heritage. It is my contention that Kant and Hegel finally work free of this widespread voluntarist taint that Plato and Aristotle never shared, and this is one of the reasons why they are so valuable.

I was initially quite horrified to see what looked like a kind of historical valorization of voluntarism by one of my heroes. But although it does contain a few valorizing phrases, as I read it now, Brandom’s discussion really has more to do with the existence of counter-trends within trends than with a real endorsement. In any case, this additional complication deserves to be documented. For now I will skip over the first section, which offers a nice recap of his high-level view of Kant and Hegel, on which I have commented several times already.

“The traditional metaphysics of normativity that Hegel sees all subsequent forms of understanding as developing from the rejection of is the subordination-obedience model” (Pre-Hegelian Stages in the History of the Metaphysics of Normativity, p. 6).

Elsewhere, Brandom has referred to this as the authority-obedience model, but the meaning is the same. This bad model puts all authority on one (commanding) side, and all responsibility on the other (obeying) side. Brandom has championed the idea that authority and responsibility should instead be apportioned symmetrically. Aristotle would approve of this.

Obedience has no role in rational ethics. A rationally ethical person will normally obey the law, giving the benefit of the doubt to measures designed to promote safety and social peace. But her motivation for doing so is a general consent to the reasonableness of enacting such measures.

Aristotle’s highest moral ideal is the reciprocity of friendship. He further suggests that we extend the model of friendship to those who dwell in our city. In the same spirit, it could be extended further, and that is just what Hegel eventually did. The only reference to obedience in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is the incidental mention of a sick person disobeying her doctors, in one of his examples.

However, in the development of the Latin tradition, obedience came to be designated as a virtue in its own right. In the early modern period, all virtue was sometimes reduced to obedience. This was reinforced by the concept of “positive” law, which is supposed to be obeyed merely because it is law, independent of whether the law is just or rational or not. This makes goodness a derivative property that follows from the meeting of obligations, rather than being based on independent criteria. An obligation of obedience to authority displaces proper human ends. Meeting such obligations becomes an end in itself.

“The distinguishing feature of this model is that the paradigmatic normative status, obligation, is taken to be instituted by the command of a superior. As an explicit metaphysics of normativity, the origin of theories of this sort is in theology, in a picture of God as the ultimate legislator, whose commands institute laws that his creatures are obliged to obey. The voluntarist wing of Catholic natural law theory represented by Duns Scotus and William of Ockham gave rise to Protestant natural law theorists who to one extent or another secularized and naturalized the approach. (I’ll say something further along about the significance for Hegel of the contrary intellectualist wing of the natural law tradition — paradigmatically Aquinas, but also Averroes — and of Suarez’s characteristic attempt at a synthesis of the two.) Grotius, Cumberland, Hobbes, Pufendorf, Thomasius, and Locke all understood the normatively binding force of laws, their capacity to oblige obedience, as rooted in the antecedent existence of a superior-subordinate relationship between the authoritative promulgator of the law and those responsible for obeying it” (pp. 6-7).

This emphasis on obedience to authority is a big part of what I mean by a “voluntarist taint”. For some, like Hobbes, this is not just a taint, but something wholeheartedly embraced.

“Hobbes attributes God’s natural right to command obedience to his ‘irresistible power’ to punish disobedience. His ‘state of nature’ is identified precisely with the lack of natural social relations of ‘sovereignty and subordination,’ among humans, in which no-one owes obedience to anyone else because power to punish, from which the right to command obedience derives, has not yet been concentrated in a sovereign. Locke, too, thinks that ‘the inferior, finite, and dependent is under an obligation to obey the supreme and infinite.’ But he understands God’s authority to oblige and compel human obedience as consisting not only in his power to do so, but as rooted in another matter of objective fact: his status as our creator. A creator, he thinks, has a natural right to lay down laws creating obligations of obedience for his creations” (pp. 7-8).

Hobbes bluntly affirms political voluntarism and a Thrasymachan “might is right” doctrine as justification for absolute monarchy. Locke is more refined, but adding a creationist justification to a voluntarist justification is not particularly helpful.

“Cumberland offers a characteristically mixed account. He analyzes law into two components, the precept (the content enjoined or proscribed) and the sanctions provided for noncompliance. Possession of the power to punish disobedience is a non-normative matter. But God’s paradigmatic possession of normative authority as a superior to legislate for subordinates depends crucially on his benevolence towards those subordinates. It is his wishing them well (and knowing what is best for them) that is the basis of his normative status as superior in the sense of having the right to legislate. On the one hand, one can think of God’s (or a king’s) benevolence as a matter of objective fact. He either has the attitude of wishing the good for his subordinates, or he does not. On the other hand, the attitude of benevolence is itself a normative attitude: being motivated to act for their welfare, aiming at what is good for them” (p. 9).

The moment authority becomes even partially answerable to something like benevolence or a standard of reasonableness or justice, we no longer have pure authoritarianism or voluntarism. It is debatable whether we still have voluntarism at all if it is qualified in any way, since the distinctive mark of voluntarism is to explicitly allow or “justify” arbitrariness, which means anything at all. But whatever we call them, the existence of mixed forms needs to be recognized.

[quote from Richard Cumberland, A Treatise of the Laws of Nature (1672):] “the Obligation of a Law properly so called, which proceeds from the Will of a Superior,” (p. 9n).

Here we have the voluntarist calling card.

[Cumberland:] “the intrinsick Force of all those Arguments, with which the Legislator (God) uses to enforce Universal Benevolence, is, in my opinion, all that is meant by the Obligation of Laws: The Rewards annext to Universal Benevolence by the right Reason of Men, chiefly oblige, because they promise, beside the Favour of Man, the Friendship of the Chief of Rational Beings, GOD, the Supreme Governour of the World. The Punishments they inflict by the same Reason, are both Parts of the present, and most certain presages of the future, Divine Vengeance” (ibid).

Reward and punishment are sub-ethical motivations. But benevolence is a genuine ethical criterion.

[Cumberland:] “That the End of the Legislator, and also of him who fulfils the Law of Nature, is far greater and more excellent, than the avoiding that Punishment, or the obtaining that Reward, whence the Law receives its Sanction, and which is what immediately affects every Subject; though the Obligation of every Subject to yield Obedience be indeed, immediately, discover’d by those Rewards and Punishments. For the End, that is, the Effect directly intended by both, is the Publick Good, the Honour of the Governor, and the Welfare of all his Subjects” (ibid).

The public good and welfare are again genuine ethical criteria.

Brandom finds greater clarity in Samuel Pufendorf (1642-1694). The next section, to which I will devote a separate post, will go into more detail on Pufendorf as a precursor to Kantian ethics. We get just a taste of it here.

“Pufendorf, too, rejects Hobbes’s claim that the superior/subordinate status relationship that is the source of the normative force of obligations consists solely in the differential power of the one who is owed and the one who owes obedience” (p. 9).

Might does not confer right.

[quote from Samuel Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations (1672):] “Neither strength nor any other natural pre-eminence is alone sufficient to derive an obligation on me from another’s will, but that it is farther requisite that I should have received some extraordinary good from him, or should have voluntarily agreed to submit myself to his direction” (pp. 9-10).

“God, for instance, gave us an ‘extraordinary good’, performed a ‘special service’ by creating us, so this thought might be seen to be behind Locke’s invocation of the right of the creator. Or, as Cumberland has it, God showed us his benevolence towards us by not only creating us, but creating us in his image in the specific sense of making us like him at base universally benevolent. Here we see two rising themes challenging the grounding of obligation in prior objective relative statuses of superior/subordinate, calling forth command on the part of the superior and obedience on the part of the subordinate as the consequent appropriate practical acts or normative attitudes” (p. 10).

Here Brandom’s analysis is extremely valuable.

“One is the idea that the status of superior, having the right to command, to oblige those commanded to obey, has not only normative consequences, but also normative conditions. This is the idea that being a superior is a normative status that one must deserve (for instance, through the fact of service or an attitude of benevolence). This goes beyond the simple idea that authority is more than mere power. For that distinction can be made entirely on the side of the consequences of application of the concept superior. It is the claim that the circumstances of application of that concept are themselves normative in character. One has to have done well by the subordinates through performing a service, or at least had an attitude of wishing them well, that is, benevolence towards them. The second idea is the idea that the status of being a superior, in the sense of having a right or authority to impose obligations and command obedience (as opposed to the mere power to punish noncompliance) might be dependent on the attitudes of the subordinates: on their having agreed or consented to, or otherwise acknowledged that authority” (ibid).

If there is such a thing as a right to command others and not just a power to do so, that right is necessarily conditional and not absolute. This is related to the Enlightenment notion of government by consent.

“Both these ideas can be seen at play throughout early modern thinking about normativity. And they both stand in substantial tension with the traditional metaphysical picture of normative statuses of obligation as rooted in the prior existence of objective ontological relations of superiority and subordination, as epitomized by the neoplatonic scala naturae. The idea that beyond one’s power to enforce obedience, status as a superior with the normative authority to impose obligations is something one might or might not be entitled to — that the normative issues of one’s right to command or whether one deserves to do so are not settled just by how things non-normatively are — threatens to undermine the idea that all normative statuses can be understood to be instituted by the commands of superiors to subordinates. As Leibniz argues in his “Opinion on the Principles of Pufendorf” of 1706, if it is acknowledged that besides power there must be reasons justifying commands for them to be legitimately imbued with the authority of a superior, understanding what entitles the superior to command as a normative status instituted by the command of a superior would create a circle ‘than which none was ever more manifest’ ” (p. 11).

Once the issue of entitlement to command is raised, it cannot be answered by simply appealing to another command.

“The subordination-obedience metaphysical model of normativity that explains the normative status of obligation on the part of the subordinate cannot be extended to explain the normative status of being entitled to the authority to command. If the concept of the status of superiority not only has normative consequences of application in the form of authority to impose obligations on subordinates, but also normative circumstances of application in the sense that the one who commands must be justified in doing so, must deserve, be worthy, or have a right to that authority, then some other form of normative status must be acknowledged that is not itself to be understood on the model of institution by the command of a superior. Leibniz, like Cumberland, looked to the attitude of benevolence. The thought that the relative statuses of superiority and subordination are themselves already fully normative statuses is part of what is behind the famous opposition between law and love (for example in the natural law tradition and in the Cambridge Platonists, respectively) as what is taken to be the most basic conception in early modern moral theory” (pp. 11-12, emphasis in original).

“The second idea is even more momentous. For it is the idea that the normatively significant status of having the authority to impose obligations (which according to the first idea also counts as a normative status in the sense that exhibiting it has normative conditions of desert, worth, or entitlement) is, or at least can be, attitude-dependent. Pufendorf’s invocation of ‘consent’ (or elsewhere ‘acknowledgement’) by the subordinate as a condition of the superior’s right to command marks a decisive change from traditional views. The idea that the normative statuses instituted by natural law might be dependent on normative attitudes is a distinctively modern one. Indeed, the core of Hegel’s understanding of the transition from traditional to modern selves, norms, and societies, as laid out in the Spirit chapter, should be understood to consist in a shift in the relative priority of normative statuses and normative attitudes…. The basic thought is that it is of the essence of traditional structures of normativity that normative statuses are conceived of as objective, in the sense that neither their content nor their binding force depends on anyone’s normative attitudes. Those normative statuses set the standard for assessments of the propriety of attitudes. The law is what it is, independently of what anyone thinks about it, and one is obliged to acknowledge one’s responsibility to its authority. The paradigmatic form of this traditional structure is what I have called the “subordination-obedience” model of normativity. In its classic form, being a subordinate or a superior is an objective normative status, and normative subjects are supposed to (are subject to a distinctive kind of criticism, including punishment, if they do not) acknowledge them by adopting practical attitudes of obedience and command” (pp. 12-13).

I would say this a little differently. What is important to the argument is that from a Kantian or Hegelian point of view, normative statuses are never simply given. They are always the result of an evaluation, though the quality of the evaluation may be better or worse. What is important to the argument is that normative statuses are the result of an interpretation.

“By contrast, it is distinctive of modernity to take normative statuses of authority and responsibility, entitlement and commitment, to be instituted by normative attitudes of acknowledging or attributing those statuses: taking or treating someone in practice as authoritative or responsible, entitled or committed. While Hegel insists that this modern model expresses a genuine and important truth about the metaphysics of normativity, in the end he sees both the traditional and the modern models of normativity as one-sided: the first as hyper-objective and the second as hyper-subjective. Just as traditional accounts failed to acknowledge the authority of attitudes over statuses, the responsibility of statuses to attitudes that the moderns had discovered, even the most sophisticated version of the modern understanding, Kant’s autonomy account, though it does also acknowledge the authority of statuses over attitudes, the responsibility of attitudes to statuses, which the tradition had appreciated, fails adequately to integrate the traditional and modern lines of thought. Hegel’s own social recognitive metaphysics of normativity is to give each its due” (p. 13).

Kant already aims at a kind of synthesis of these two perspectives. Hegel, according to Brandom, judges that Kant fails to achieve it, because Kant treats moral judgment only from the point of view of the individual.

“The vocabulary I am using to express these ideas is mine rather than Hegel’s. He does not use the terms ‘authority’ and ‘responsibility’. These are the terms I am adopting to talk about what he discusses under the headings of ‘independence’ and ‘dependence’, neither of which, he insists, can properly be understood independently of its relation to the other, both of which must be understood as themselves interdependent ‘moments’ in a more complex structure. Though he uses these central logical-metaphysical terms in many ways, I want to claim that the normative uses paraphrasable in terms of authority and responsibility are fundamental — their ‘home language game’. Nor does Hegel use the terms ‘status’ and ‘attitude’. These are the terms I am adopting to talk about what he discusses under the headings of what things are in themselves (Ansichsein) and what they are for themselves or others (Fürsichsein). The discussion in the previous chapter of understanding self-conscious selves as beings such that what they are in themselves is an essential element of what they are for themselves introduces the idea of a kind of normative status, being a self-conscious individual normative subject, that depends on (is responsible to) normative attitudes (the commitments one acknowledges by identifying with them). Though ‘in-itself’ and ‘for-itself’ (also ‘for-an-other’) are central logical-metaphysical terms Hegel uses in many ways. For instance, in discussion [of] the Perception chapter, we saw them used to distinguish, roughly, intrinsic from relational properties. But I claim that their use to distinguish normative statuses from practical normative attitudes in the social recognitive metaphysics of normativity is fundamental — their ‘home language game’. This strategy of understanding ‘independence’ and ‘dependence’ in terms of authority and responsibility and ‘in-itself’ and ‘for-itself’ (‘for-an-other’) in terms of normative statuses and normative attitudes lies at the core of the semantic reading of the Phenomenology I am offering here” (p. 14).

This is a good reminder that when Brandom speaks of attitudes, he means to express what for Hegel is part of a broader notion of what something is for itself, or for another. As Brandom points out, relational properties are another example of what something is “for” (in relation to) another. Hegelian self-consciousness is perhaps the most famous “for” relation. Its relational character is the simplest reason why self-consciousness is not properly speaking a (non-relational) thing, and why it should not be identified with any simple term like ego, which is again a non-relational thing. When we speak of attitudes in an empirical way, they may seem like non-relational, simple properties, perhaps of a psychological sort. On the other hand, the Avicennan intentions that are so important for Scotus and others do have an intrinsically relational character. But in all these cases, the meaning of “relation” (Latin relatio) in question is the Aristotelian category of (asymmetrical) pros ti (toward what). It is in view of this well-established and different older usage that Pierce avoids the term “relation” when speaking about the inherently symmetrical mathematical relations that he calls “relatives”.

“Of course ancient and medieval philosophers acknowledged that there were some normative statuses that were instituted by practical normative attitudes. Having the authority or responsibilities exercised by one who holds some elected office, or those conferred by explicit legislation in cases where the aim of the legislation could obviously have been achieved in other ways are central among them. But the most basic norms, those defining the persons or normative subjects of positive laws, were not understood to be of this kind. The whole idea of natural law is intended to contrast with that artificial kind of law. The normative statuses articulated by natural laws are to be construed as necessary, as conceptually and metaphysically antecedent to and independent of the contingent attitudes, practices, and institutions of creatures of the kind whose nature they articulate” (p. 15).

The term “person” names a standing under Roman law. The reference to normative subjects here reflects Brandom’s main philosophical use of “subject”, which is normative and non-psychological, as is also true of his use of “intention” and “intentionality”. (This sharply distinguishes the latter from its Avicennan sense, revived by Brentano in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874). Brentano says that all psychological phenomena and only psychological phenomena are intentional.)

Next, Brandom devotes three paragraphs to medieval voluntarism and intellectualism. This is obviously a very limited engagement, but his concern is with tracing antecedents backward from Hegel. This is the farthest point he reaches, so it makes sense that it would be the least detailed part of the discussion. (In contemporary Hegel scholarship, it is Robert Pippin who has discussed Hegel’s relation to Aristotle in the greatest depth.)

“In this connection it is illuminating to consider the distinction within the natural law tradition between intellectualists and voluntarists. Intellectualists, paradigmatically among the Catholic theologians, Aquinas, held that the authoritativeness of commands issued by superiors to subordinates (expressions of the attitudes of those superiors) answered to (depended upon) reasons rooted in the same objective natures that determined their relative ‘primacy’ as superiors/subordinates. Even God, with the objective status of superior to all, is understood as constrained in the laws he lays down by the demands of reasons concerning the objective good of creatures with the natures with which he has endowed them. God’s unconstrained omnipotence is acknowledged by attributing to him the ‘absolute’ power to have created beings with different natures than the ones he actually created, but his ‘ordained’ power, given the natures he actually created, is understood as constrained by reasons provided by those determinate natures. He could not have made murder or (tellingly) adultery right. Even God’s normative attitudes, as expressed in his commands, in this sense answer to antecedent objective normative statuses” (pp. 15-16).

“By contrast, theological voluntarists, such as William of Ockham reject the constraint on God’s attitudes by reasons rooted in objective natures, as codified in Aquinas’s distinction between his absolute and his ordained power. What makes something right or obligatory (institutes those normative statuses) is just God’s normative attitudes towards them, his approval or commands. Those attitudes are not constrained by reasons stemming from any antecedent objective normative statuses. It is his will alone (which I am talking about in terms of his normative attitudes) that institutes normative statuses of obligation and permission. God could, if he so chose, have made murder and adultery right — though he did not in fact do so. The theological disagreement between intellectualists and voluntarists about the relationship between normative statuses stemming from objective created and creating natures and normative attitudes (obligation-instituting acts of divine will) is intimately entangled with the ontological-semantic dispute between realists and nominalists about universals. Ockham attributes no reality to kinds or natures over and above the reality of the particulars they group. Assimilating particulars by treating them as exhibiting a common universal or nature is itself an act of will, the expression of a practical attitude. The groupings are arbitrary in the original sense — the product of ‘arbitrium brutum’. Understanding universals, including kinds and natures, as the product of contingent activities of naming (hence ‘nominalism’) makes reasons deriving from those natures themselves attitude-dependent” (p. 16).

Brandom here treats will as a normative attitude. What it makes sense to treat this way is any particular, definite will, but not the famous or notorious faculty of unconstrained choice. It is assertion of the latter that defines voluntarism.

I believe Brandom is a truly great philosopher, but Aquinas and Ockham are mere cartoon figures here. Aquinas is indeed more “traditional” in some ways. But Aquinas recognizes the existence of rational ethics, independent of revelation. That to me is huge. Ockham, like Scotus, both makes radically voluntarist claims and endorses ethical criteria of right reason and good intent. I find the combination very confusing.

Later, Brandom mentions that Luther and Calvin were voluntarists. Nominalism also seems to have been strong in early Protestantism. I have no basis for arguing with any of that. But all this together is far from justifying a presumption that voluntarism per se must therefore be considered historically progressive. There are a great many other alternatives to voluntarism besides Thomism. And Thomism itself is far from monolithic.

(But Hegel himself valorizes Protestantism, and Luther in particular, and shares the Enlightenment disdain for scholasticism. But in Hegel’s day as in the Enlightenment, medieval philosophy was virtually terra incognita, especially in Protestant countries. This was true because printed books and pamphlets in vernacular languages had become predominant. Most works of medieval philosophy did not exist in print or in a vernacular language, but only as rare Latin manuscripts that hardly anyone studied, or even had access to. It is easy to be disdainful of what we only know from a caricature.)

The third paragraph devoted to this topic sums up the outcome.

“Divine command theorists understand the obligations — normative statuses obliging the adoption of normative attitudes of obedience — of us subordinates-because-inferiors as instituted by divine attitudes (expressed in commands, acts of will), even if the framework of relative normative statuses of superior-subordinate is understood as objective in the sense of attitude-independent. Where intellectualists see all attitudes as answering to attitude-independent statuses, voluntarist natural lawyers do not see the status-instituting attitudes of superiors as themselves constrained to acknowledge prior statuses. The voluntarists can be thought of as holding a variant of the traditional subordination-obedience model. But compared to the still more traditional intellectualists, they substantially inflate the significance of attitudes relative to statuses” (pp. 16-17).

He is right that both voluntarists and “intellectualists” in the middle ages largely adhered to the obedience model. But if all attitudes are attributed to the will, it is pretty much a tautology that voluntarism puts more weight on attitudes. The voluntarist refusal to acknowledge any constraint on the will is precisely what leads to arbitrariness.

The argument of Plato’s Euthyphro is not mentioned here. According to the internet, this objection to divine command theory is well known to contemporary scholarship. The so-called Euthyphro dilemma is widely regarded as the most serious issue that divine command theory has to face.

At the paragraph’s end is the sentence that I found really disturbing.

“In this sense, theological voluntarism in the Catholic natural law tradition represents the first stirrings of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses that would burst into full bloom among the early modern Protestant natural lawyers: the thin leading edge of the wedge of modernity. (Luther and Calvin were voluntarists.)” (p. 17).

Given Brandom’s sympathy for the classic American pragmatists’ “Whiggish” belief in progress, this “thin leading edge of the wedge of modernity” amounts to a claim that theological voluntarism should be seen as historically progressive. Fortunately, this weak link in this part of the argument is not essential to the larger point he is making. In particular, it does not affect the insightful reading of Pufendorf’s notion of the consent of the governed that is to follow.

“It is still a huge, distinctively modern, step from understanding the normative statuses of subordinates to be dependent on the normative attitudes of their superiors to seeing the normative status of being a superior (‘primacy’) as dependent on the attitudes of the subordinates. It is, of course, the driving idea of social contract theories of specifically political obligation. I quoted Pufendorf above rejecting Hobbes’s claim that objective matter-of-factual power over others could confer the status of superiority in the sense of the right to command attitudes of obedience, when introducing the notion of consent of the subordinates as an attitude that can institute the relative statuses of superior-subordinate. Pufendorf himself recognizes that a thought like this is also present already in Hobbes, quoting him as saying as saying ‘All right over others is either by nature or by compact.’ Pufendorf radicalizes Hobbes by rejecting the idea that power all by itself can confer right over others, insisting that only the combination of consent and power to punish confers such normative primacy” (pp. 17-18).

This notion of consent, of course, is foundational to modern democratic politics.

“Hegel sees a paradigm of the shift from traditional to modern modes of thought in what became the popular contrast between status-based ‘divine right of kings’ political theories and the attitude-based consent theories epitomized by Thomas Jefferson’s resonant words in the American Declaration of Independence (paraphrasing Locke in his “Second Treatise of Civil Government” of 1690): ‘…governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.’ According to this line of thought, the distinction between possessing matter-of-factual power and exhibiting the normative status of just power is a matter of the attitudes of the subordinates subject to that authority to oblige obedience” (p. 18).

Scotus on the First Principle

Here I will discuss a single short passage from Duns Scotus’s Treatise on God as First Principle from a number of different angles, using my own reactions (and quite different and non-medieval reading of Aristotle) as a sort of foil.

The Treatise is one of the most celebrated proofs for the existence of God in the Latin tradition. It also claims to in some meaningful sense demonstrate the nature of God, in a way that is accessible to natural reason.

It is widely accepted that the Treatise is both one of Scotus’s most mature works, and one of those most thoroughly reviewed and edited by Scotus himself. Compared to his massive commentaries on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, it is also far more compact.

(The larger Scotus corpus has been notoriously challenging for scholars to work with. His admirers aver that if he had lived as long as Aquinas, his works would have been equally well polished and edited by the author. As it stands, many were left in very rough form. There is also an unusual amount of divergence in the manuscript traditions, which has greatly complicated the publication of critical editions. Work on critical editions has advanced substantially but is still incomplete, and some of it has been controversial. Scholars have debated at length which of certain manuscripts should be regarded as more authoritative, and this is interwoven with disagreements on questions of interpretation. Specialists also disagree on the relative maturity of thought embodied in some of the texts.)

Several recent scholars have suggested that Scotus may be (in part at least) more Aristotelian than has been thought. Needless to say, this caught my interest. But scholars of medieval philosophy are not required to distinguish the Aristotle I find inspiring from his very different image in the Latin world or the modern one, so an evaluation of this will require careful sifting.

It does seem that in practical ethics, there is a surprising proximity. Also, intriguingly, he calls theology a practical discipline. He devotes most of his attention to what might be called a kind of meta-ethics. But as far as I can tell at this stage of the research, Scotus’s meta-ethics — that is to say, the main part of his theology, as well as his post-Avicennan reinvention of metaphysics — still after all elaborates a forceful and sophisticated voluntarism, in the anti-Aristotelian spirit of the condemnation of 1277. The condemnation is commonly mentioned by scholars as important background for understanding Scotus.

Here is the quote, which Richard Cross reproduces in the introductory section of the chapter “Knowledge and Volition of a First Being” in his Duns Scotus on God (2005):

“[1] The first efficient cause directs its effort toward a goal. Therefore, [it does so] either naturally or by loving it. But not in the first way, because something lacking knowledge directs nothing other than in virtue of something that knows, for the first ordering belongs to the wise. The first [efficient cause] does not direct in virtue of anything [else], just as it does not cause [in virtue of anything else].”

“[2] Something is caused contingently; therefore the first cause causes contingently; therefore it causes voluntarily. The first consequence is proved: any second cause causes insofar as it is moved by the first cause. Therefore, if the first cause moves necessarily, every [cause] is moved necessarily and everything is caused necessarily. Proof of the second consequence: there is no principle of acting contingently other than will, for everything else acts by the necessity of nature, and thus does not act contingently.”

“[3] I do not call contingent everything that is neither necessary or everlasting, but that whose opposite could have happened when this did. For this reason I did not say ‘something is contingent’, but ‘something is caused contingently’ ” (Scotus, op. cit., Wolter trans., quoted in Cross, op. cit., pp. 55, 56, 57, brackets in original).

In this admirably concise argument Scotus, using Latin Aristotelian terminology, packs together a whole series of claims about the first cause that are either completely un-Aristotelian, or not exactly Aristotelian. I’ll begin with a few global remarks, then address a number of details.

Very much unlike Aristotle, Scotus often frames his arguments as a kind of proof. This is a further accentuation of the strong emphasis on a kind of demonstrative science in the Arabic tradition that originated from al-Farabi. That theology should be such a science seems to be taken for granted in the Latin tradition of this period. (I think of theology as aiming to discern and elucidate a poetic kind of truth.)

Across the body of his work, Aristotle more often uses what might be called a hermeneutically oriented dialectic than the demonstration that is the subject of the Analytics. Aristotelian dialectic examines the inferential consequences of hypotheses. At the beginning of the Topics, he particularly singles out dialectic as appropriate for the discussion of first principles. Aristotelian dialectic aims at an open-ended wisdom, rather than exact knowledge. Rather than deductively expounding a preconceived system or an accomplished science in the manner of Euclid or Spinoza, Aristotle’s Metaphysics consists of a converging series of dialectical investigations. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he explicitly warns against making overly precise claims.

Aristotelian demonstration has the pedagogical aim of providing clear insight into reasons for adopting certain conclusions. The whole Arabic and Latin tradition, however, has it aimed instead at al-Farabi’s goal of demonstrative science. Such an approach aims to decisively prove that the conclusion is true, and it does so by making additional assumptions that are deemed to be reasonable. This too can be instructive as a kind of thought experiment, to see what can be achieved in this way.

But even though he never claims to eliminate dependence on assumptions, Aristotle himself continually works hard to minimize the role that assumptions play in his arguments. This is especially true for his arguments about first principles. Where first principles intersect with matters of religion, he seems to regard it as unseemly to claim too much. We should especially aim to minimize speculative assertions about ultimate matters, and this is a way of showing appropriate respect (as well as promoting peace and harmony in human society).

The great monotheistic religious traditions have often effectively taken the diametrically opposite stance, that it is virtuous to glorify God by making all possible maximalist claims about him. As many have recognized, this kind of theistic piety is profoundly un-Aristotelian. Rather than taking this as a ground for rejecting a stereotypical Aristotle as many have done, without wishing to offend anyone, in the ongoing work here I aim to help bring to light an unfamiliar and provocative Aristotle, for whom an open sense of wonder at the universe is more primordial, more enlightening, and indeed more theologically virtuous than maximalist praise of God. Moreover, I think the best praise consists not in any assertion, but in a more profoundly ethical way of acting.

Scotus speaks here of a first efficient cause. As I have discussed several times, the Latin concept of efficient cause is far removed from what in Aristotle’s text is called a “source of motion”. In Aristotle, the source of motion governs the character of the motion in question, in the way that the art of building governs the activity of building a house. In general, Aristotle inquires into activities rather than punctual actions. Aristotelian causes are not powers but ways of explaining things.

New readers may be surprised to learn that Aristotle himself presents the first cause not as an efficient cause at all, but rather as a final cause. That-for-the sake-of-which or the end is for Aristotle the way of explaining that comes logically first in the order of explanation. More elaborately, the first cause is entelechy, or an entelechy. What is first in itself, however, is not first in the order of our understanding.

It was the neoplatonic commentator Ammonius (5th-6th century CE), known for his accommodations to Christianity, who introduced the idea that the first cause is also what is now translated as an efficient cause. The notion of a first efficient cause effectively rewrites the order of causes in Aristotle to accommodate a theistic view. In Aquinas, for example, God’s creation from nothing becomes the paradigmatic example of efficient causality.

Scotus says that the first efficient cause directs its effort toward a goal. Having eliminated the Aristotelian teleology that is indwelling and primary, in company with many others he introduces a secondary, transcendent teleology that is more anthropomorphic in its operation. In this rendering, the first cause is said to knowingly aim at a goal it has chosen. Within the Arabic tradition, Ghazali’s Incoherence of the Philosophers — to which Averroes replied on behalf of the philosophers — had earlier similarly argued in effect that any teleology must depend on a being endowed with knowledge and will. Aristotle strictly avoids any language of that sort.

The division of action into action by nature and action by love is interesting. The introduction of love in a discussion of first principles is sometimes taken to be a Christian innovation. But Aristotle in the Metaphysics says the stars are moved by love of the first cause. Socrates in Plato’s Republic argues that all beings love the Good. Plato elaborates on the role of love from several points of view in the Symposium.

The way that Scotus explains natural action, it is strictly necessitated, but the whole order of nature is subordinated to a free cause. Again we see the interesting identification of free will with love. But the way that he mentions secondary causes seems to give them no role that is not already necessitated by the first cause.

When Aristotle speaks of secondary causes, it makes sense, because with Aristotle’s non-total first cause there is something for secondary causes to contribute to the whole. But secondary causes that are entirely necessitated by a first cause contribute nothing of their own, in which case the very mention of secondary causes is “in vain”, as the medievals might say.

All directing is said to presuppose knowledge. At the same time, it is emphasized that the Scotist first cause does not direct or cause in virtue of anything else. This is the first of several explicit statements insisting that the first cause must be understood as completely unconditioned.

Directing has the implication of control or command. The first cause in Aristotle does not control or command things, but works by inspiring the love that is motion toward a telos. The Good in Plato does not control or command things either; but all beings are said to love the Good. The more particular forms of this love of the Good, which characterize the striving of things, can be said to make them what they are.

Like Ghazali, Scotus insists that the first cause causes voluntarily and by will. He specifically invokes what contemporary scholars call synchronic contingency, which again is supposed to be completely unconditioned. The order of nature is again associated with strict necessity. The only alternative to strict necessity for Scotus must depend on something that is wholly unconditioned.

Aristotle’s nature does not operate according to strict necessity, but only according to a general determination that leaves options open. Because the first cause is a final cause, things are determined only generally, not in all their particulars. For example, animals must eat to live, but the particulars of which things they eat and when and how are not determined by this. Because there was never a strict but only a general necessity to begin with, freedom does not have to depend on something that is radically outside of nature.

Scotus criticizes the Arabic commentators for including humans in nature. This is an issue for him because the objective correlate, so to speak, of Farabian demonstration in natural science is strict necessity in nature. Like many Christian authors, Scotus objects to the inclusion of humans under strict necessity. Scotus apparently has no issue with strict necessity in nature, which he too asserts, but he subordinates that necessity to something radically unconditioned that he also sees at work in the human will.

Whereas in Aristotle himself necessity is not strict, and so freedom does not require anything radically unconditioned, Scotus instead seeks to explain everything in terms of two extreme poles of strict necessity and absolutely unconditional freedom. This same polarity will later be affirmed by Descartes — nature is to be explained mechanistically, but God and the human are treated voluntaristically.

The Moral Core of Scotist Ethics

Previously, I discussed the introduction to Mary Beth Ingham’s The Harmony of Goodness, on the ethics of John Duns Scotus. Here I extensively quote and discuss her central chapter on moral goodness.

“Scotus inherited a framework of Stoic natural law and Augustinian eternal law from his immediate predecessors…. The created order is the direct result of divine choice; all nature and human nature have been established according to God’s will” (ibid).

Only a single sentence separates the two in the above quote, which seem to pull in opposite directions. The venerable tradition of natural law is usually seen as a family of views that hold core ethical values to be universal, inherent to human nature, and discoverable by reason. This is usually seen as incompatible with their depending directly on the will of God.

Like natural law, the eternal law in Augustine that she mentions is similarly supposed to be universal and unchangeable, in accordance with Augustine’s strong emphasis on separation of the eternal from the temporal. But at the same time, Augustine’s early work On Free Choice of the Will is the founding document for voluntarism in the Latin tradition. So the same tension is already present in Augustine. (Incidentally, On Free Choice of the Will was translated by the same Thomas Williams who translated the newer anthology of Scotus’s writings on ethics, and who has debated with Ingham about voluntarism in Scotus). And already the earliest Franciscan theologians sought to explicitly weave a modified view of natural law into their theological voluntarism (see also A Theology of Beauty?, Free Will as Love?). All this prefigures the ambiguity that we have recently begun to see in Scotus.

“To pursue and love the good is in fact to pursue God, the proper object of the human will. All this means that Scotus understands moral goodness according to an ancient paradigm: as the beautiful whole made up of an action and all the circumstances surrounding it” (p. 84).

This sort of perspective ought to be welcomed. The formulation here, though, seems crafted to remain agnostic on the question of Plato’s Euthyphro: Does God will a thing because it is good, or is it good because God wills it? The Platonic Socrates and Leibniz hold the former; the latter defines theological voluntarism.

“Deus diligendus est (God is to be loved) expresses theologically the first and fundamental principle of the moral domain. As Scotus explains, this principle belongs to natural law and admits of no exception” (p. 86).

With Plato, we ought to affirm that the Good is beautiful, and is to be loved. Any view that supports this (and I believe that includes the implicit views of most people) ought to be kindly received. The good, the beautiful, and the lovable constitute the free and generous poetic ground of religion. Darker views of a world dominated by sin and requiring commanding authority to achieve a semblance of goodness ought to be banished.

“The Good is to be loved” or “God is to be loved” is a very abstract kind of natural law. According to Ingham, Scotus holds that the first three of the ten Mosaic commandments — glossed by the Franciscans as “God is to be loved” — have an absolute status, whereas the other seven are metaphysically contingent on choices made by the Creator in instituting the order of the world. It is the absolute part that he associates with natural law.

Any substantive natural law limits the scope of voluntarism. But the meaning of voluntarism is precisely to assert that there is no such limit. But Scotus asserts the truth of voluntarism, and he asserts the existence of natural law. In this he is followed by Ockham.

“[T]he more perfect moral act is really a more intensely loving action. As primary moral principle, the command to love God above all grounds the body of knowledge called moral science. Here too, this body of knowledge is accessible to human reason and to the human will via the higher affection for justice…. Our human will is constituted to seek the good as known in a manner which is not necessitated by any external force. Our ability to control our own actions and to develop in self-mastery and self-determination is the foundation for moral living. In other words, persons who wish to pursue a moral life seek to love justly, in accord with an objective order. We want to love the highest good in the most perfect manner” (p. 87, emphasis in original).

The main substance of this seems right, and the universality at the end is to be commended. But in company with Aristotle, I prefer to speak neither of moral science nor of commands. What could be termed loving justly, in accordance with a broadly but not strictly objective order, is matter for wise judgment that can also be called free. No genuine seeking of the good by any being is necessitated by external force. It is a desire from within. We are attracted to the good. The affection for justice is as much of a motivator for humans as the desire for advantage and convenience.

“Accordingly, the human desire to love God is not limited to a narrow class of believers. In fact, all persons desire to love the highest good in an absolute manner” (p. 88).

This is a most welcome conclusion. It is a ground for the elimination of all sectarianism.

“There are two great commandments. Love for God constitutes the first commandment, love for neighbor the second” (p. 89). “The first command ‘God is to be loved’ is an analytic truth…. According to the present contingent order, we observe the command to love God through acts of love for our neighbor” (p. 90).

Notwithstanding the oddness of identifying commands with propositions, to speak of analytic truth here is consistent with calling it natural law.

“In his distinction between natural law narrowly understood … and more broadly construed … Scotus remains coherent without requiring narrow legalism. Exceptions are seen to be part of the moral landscape; we should not be surprised when we encounter them. Indeed, the natural and moral orders are woven with threads of particularity. Concrete situations require good judgment and right action” (pp. 93-94).

Yea, verily.

“Although Scotus’s discussions of the relationship of the law to the divine will appears to align him with a divine command tradition, in fact this is not the case. In contrast to a natural law tradition (where moral goodness depends upon rational discernment of the good as seen in the natures of things and their natural perfection), a divine command theory maintains that the foundation for moral living (both necessary and sufficient) rests entirely upon God’s commands” (p. 94).

I think she successfully makes the case that this is not a crude divine command theory, such as we might hear from some fundamentalists. But I expect that Ockham’s version would also not be a crude one. But it is Scotus and Ockham themselves who want to affirm that there is a kind of natural law layered on top of a subtler divine command theory.

“He identifies the first command (Love God) as a self-evident truth. It is true on the basis of the meaning of its terms, not on the basis of any ulterior proposition or command. Scotus explicitly argues, ‘if God is, then God is to be loved’, since God is, by definition, the highest Good. Moral actions are determined on the basis of the natural and rational recognition of the good.”

If we put aside the somewhat spoiling but possibly inessential references to command, otherwise this does not sound at all voluntaristic. Self-evidence is another notion that is perfectly valid when taken broadly, though it goes wrong when we attempt to take it too strictly. But excessive claims of self-evidence are a very different kind of error from voluntarism.

The question is whether any additional essential good is accomplished by also calling something (the object of ) a command, when we have already recognized it as an intrinsic good. Plato and Aristotle would say no.

“A second implication of this vision relates to the ecumenical dimension of this moral approach. By identifying a first, self-evident principle for moral living, Scotus escapes moral sectarianism and remains a thinker whose ideas are strong enough to be attractive to traditions other than Judeo-Christian. His moral presentation of law neither requires adherence to Christianity nor to any specific Christian revelation” (pp. 94-95).

These are consequences we ought to expect from a point of view that recognizes the existence of any natural moral law, even (or perhaps especially) a very abstract one like Scotus is advocating.

“Scotus removes any reference to necessary fulfillment (a transcendent teleology) in an eternal reward from moral discussion and focuses his attention on the concrete act and agent seen, here and now, in all their particularity as morally beautiful. The morally good act is not judged insofar as it is a means to a pre-determined end. Rather, it constitutes an artistic whole within which harmony and proportion exist among its several elements. Likewise, the morally mature person imitates divine creativity in judging what is morally beautiful, in producing beautiful acts and a beautiful character” (pp. 97-98).

The morally good act is not to be viewed as a means to obtain a future reward, but as an intrinsic good in itself. The criteria for human goodness are to be found here in earthly life, thoughtful inquiry, and attitudes of caring concern. Belief in specific propositions about sin and reward does not add to moral goodness.

“Ordinatio I, distinction 17 offers us the classic text for Scotus’s elaboration of moral goodness as it is linked to judgments of beauty.”

[quote from Scotus:] “one could say that just as beauty is not some absolute quality in a beautiful body, but a combination of all that is in harmony with such a body (such as size, figure, and color), and a combination of all aspects (that pertain to all that is agreeable to such a body and are in harmony with one another), so the moral goodness of an act is a kind of decoration it has, including a combination of due proportion to all to which it should be proportioned (such as potency, object, end, time, place, and manner), and this especially as right reason dictates” (p. 98).

This is the centerpiece of her case. Though so far at least it is only a single passage, moral goodness is here very clearly identified by Scotus with a kind of beauty. I do find it odd to refer to it as a decoration, though. This makes it sound like a superficial addition. I think the goodness of an act is essential to what act it is.

“The Ordinatio I, distinction 17 definition of moral goodness as ‘the harmony of all circumstances [belonging to an act] in accord with right reason’ blends mutuality, virtue, consequences, and principle within an aesthetic model.”

“When Scotus refers to all the circumstances which belong to an act, he appeals to Aristotle’s discussion in the Nicomachean Ethics. The morally good act admits of several converging factors: goal, object, intention, time, place, manner and consequences” (p. 100, brackets in original).

I can only applaud when Scotus explicitly invokes the Nicomachean Ethics here. Others might insert ugly talk about sin at this juncture. And again, this part does not seem at all voluntaristic.

“The appropriate course of action must be determined by the operation of right reasoning. For example, while lying is wrong, telling the truth is not always appropriate. Sometimes ‘telling the whole truth’ would do more harm than good. The morally mature person is capable of determining when the truth should be told, and to what degree the truth should be told” (ibid).

Scotus according to Ingham seems to be saying, God commands us to use good judgment. With that sort of claim and that sort of command, I have no issue.

“The most fundamental dimension of goodness in a moral act relates to its objective quality. By objective, Scotus means directing attention to the object of the action. For example, in the proposition ‘tell the truth’, truth is the object of the action. ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ is an objectively good act because persons (both you and your neighbor) are worthy of love. ‘Protect life’ is a moral command, because living beings have value. Every moral action has a natural objective dimension which can be identified if we reflect on what is being done and to whom. Scotus assumes that this sort of objective identification of goodness belongs to common sense reasoning. Everyone, he states, knows who they are and what they are doing. Anyone who has lived more than several decades comes to the realization that some things are better than others, if only as a result of living with the consequences of our actions” (p. 101).

The sense of “objective” here seems close to that which it has in contemporary common speech, but this might be misleading. Scotus was one of the originators — possibly the originator — of the philosophical use of the terms object, objective, objectivity, etc. But it is generally accepted that this group of terms and the correlated one of subject, subjective, subjectivity have — in a way, at least — undergone a 180 degree reversal in meaning. For “objective” in Scotus is said of things present to the mind, while “subjective” is said of the thing itself. This is a fascinating piece of history.

Ingham’s text above notably does not distinguish between the meaning of the terms in Scotus and their common meaning in present-day English. I think this is possible because at a connotative level they are not far apart, even though Scotus speaks of an objectivity of things present to the intellect, and we speak of an objectivity of things in the world.

What is “in the intellect” in Scotus’s sense is not “subjective” in our sense. This probably also has to do with the Augustinian sense of interiority as an opening onto a kind of universality, rather than something private to us. Outer things meanwhile we apprehend only through the medium of sense perception, imagination, and emotion. In this context it makes sense to regard intellect as a source of objectivity.

We could also associate this talk of objectivity with the realism commonly attributed to Scotus. It should be remarked too that any kind of realism also seems to push back against voluntarist tendencies, insofar as the real is granted some status independent of us.

“But this initial objective dimension does not exhaust the moral beauty of the action. In addition, there is the free quality of an act chosen by someone. In other words, I might tell the truth or love my neighbor simply because someone in authority has told me to do so. These acts would be objectively good but they would not be the result of my own free choice: they would not enhance my moral character” (ibid).

Intent is not the only thing we attend to in considering acts from a moral point of view, but it seems an inalienable part of it.

“Moral objects are human goods which can be identified by reflection on what it means to be human” (ibid).

“Because we are rational, we seek reasonable explanations for human behavior, explanations which exhibit consistency, coherence, and rationality. In addition, everyone desires goodness, even though we can be mistaken about all the consequences of certain actions seen to be good…. Thus, the truth and the good (either real or apparent) are significant moral objects: they are human goods. Indeed, truth and goodness are the two most fundamental moral objects: they respond to our human aspirations which express themselves in activities of knowing and loving” (p. 102).

Calling the truth and the good human goods seems promising.

“Conscious intent to perform a moral action is essential to the morally good act. It is not just doing what good people do, it is acting as good people act, when and where they act, and for the same reason that good people act. In the truly moral action, character is joined to performance, motivation to action, in the here and now” (p. 103, emphasis in original).

I would just say intent here. Scotus lived long before the Cambridge Platonist Cudworth, who coined the English term “consciousness”, and Locke, who popularized it. It might be argued that something like this is implicit in Augustine — who clearly does at least partially anticipate Descartes’s cogito ergo sum. But at the very least, there is a clear difference between explicitly saying something and arguably implying it.

“Loving motivation depends upon the natural goodness of the act, upon its objective appropriateness. I cannot perform any act I please out of love; I can only perform good acts out of love…. Thus, the orders of love depend upon orders of natural and moral goodness. A key implication of this analysis is the way in which Scotus avoids a moral theory based solely on love” (p. 105).

This is important on both counts. There is no such thing as lovingly demeaning someone. Love is not an empty criterion.

“[quote from Scotus:] “… For no sin should be left unpunished anywhere if there is one ruler of the universe and he is just…” (p. 108).

This one is much less auspicious. What happened to mercy and charity? Shouldn’t they always be in sight?

“Law is neither impersonal nor necessary. On the contrary, it is very personal, highly creative and brilliantly executed by the symphony of nature…. When we pay attention to and imitate the goodness of nature, we have the foundation for our own creativity” (ibid).

This is an important point, but it is really about juridical interpretation as a practice. Law as such — i.e., viewed in terms of its content — is “impersonal”. But a good jurist like Averroes exercises mercy and charity in applying the law (conservatives claimed that his sentencing was too lenient).

“In De Primo Principio, for example, Scotus analyzes the concept ens infinitum [infinite being]. This is the philosopher’s name for God…. We know this as possible, he asserts, because when we bring the terms together, we notice no dissonance” (ibid).

She calls infinite being the philosopher’s name for God. This is a non-Biblical designation, and perhaps philosophical in that very diffuse sense. But in stricter terms, it is Scotus’s new non-Biblical name for God, which would not be accepted by Plato or Aristotle. This usage of “philosopher’s” goes against the commonly accepted usage in Scotus’s time, which is derived from the Arabic (the “philosophers” implementing various combinations of Plato and Aristotle were all finitist).

“There is nothing in the terms themselves which would make them mutually exclusive. Thus ens infinitum is possible and, if possible, necessary” (p. 109).

The basis of this argument is the claim that some contentful truths can be derived solely from the principle of non-contradiction. This is a modern “rationalist” notion, favored, e.g., by the Wolffians who were the most immediate target of Kant’s critique. An infinity of being is not claimed by Plato or Aristotle or anyone else before Scotus, except perhaps Lucretius and other atomists.

“While such an aesthetic approach to moral goodness might appear odd to us today, this relationship of the mind to beauty has a long philosophical history. Plato’s Symposium celebrates the rational search for wisdom as the ascent to beauty. Augustine echoes Plato in his hymn to God as that Beauty he had longed for (Confessions X, 27)” (p. 109).

For better or worse, aesthetic approaches to ethics were adopted by the Romantics. The Romantic version came to be sharply criticized by Hegel, after his juvenile period. On this matter, my sympathies are divided.

“With his rejection of an objective or pre-determined external goal for human moral reflection available to natural reason alone, Scotus focuses his discussion upon the functioning moral agent. His is a theory of moral praxis, here and now. The object of moral reflection is not, he states, an abstract excellence but the perfection of the human person” (p. 112).

Aristotle focuses his discussion on what might be called the deliberating moral agent, although the provenance of this use of “agent” is medieval and not Aristotelian in the proper sense.

“Scotus’s critique of natural teleology was not, for all that, a rejection of happiness as the goal of moral living. Rather, he sought to reframe moral living around the happy life, understood to be the fruit of the harmonic relationship between the two affections of the will. It is, as I have argued elsewhere, the replacement of Aristotelian teleology with Stoic teleology” (ibid).

It is with the Stoics that teleology came to be associated with the exercise of divine providence. Though he speaks of it with reverence, Aristotle’s first cause is the beautiful and loved telos or good end to which beings are attracted. It is not a personified being that exercises providence, or directly or specifically addresses current states of affairs in the world.

“Proper and appropriate moral decision-making is itself the goal of human action. It is not simply a question of choosing, but of choosing well and ‘rejoicing, loving and hating rightly’ ” (p. 116).

This itself seems well and proper. As soon as we are concerned with doing anything well or rightly, we have left the terrain of voluntarism and command and obedience. There is also an argument that good obedience, if taken seriously, requires more than mere obedience. This has an air of partial plausibility, but only at the cost of paradox — as soon as we raise the question of obeying well, it is no longer obedience that enables us to obey.

“Finally, Scotus’s presentation of moral goodness underscores the personal and intentionally relational aspects of moral living. It emphasizes goodness to be enhanced by the operation of deliberative human reasoning and charitable human desire” (ibid).

It seems that Scotus himself does apply this terminology of relation. This is the pros ti (toward what) of Aristotle’s Categories, which became relatio in Latin, and also seems to play a role in Scotus’s theology of the Trinity. The modern mathematical notion of relation, to which Pierce made major contributions, treats it as a predicate that is (equally or symmetrically) abstracted from the relata or things that are related, whereas “toward what” has a constitutive asymmetry. The mutuality that Ingham attributes to the Scotist conception of the Trinity is also not fully symmetrical in the way that Hegelian mutual recognition explicitly is.

“This is a person-centered, not principle-centered moral paradigm…. The ability to make moral decisions in difficult circumstances comes as a result of moral training and experience. Drawn toward beauty, the moral person seeks to enhance both beauty of character and beauty of action. The central moral imperatives of love for God and neighbor are both accessible to natural reasoning and available to the will through the affection for justice. Proper reflection on the significant aspects of human nature, such as intellection and love, reveal those actions which promote fundamental human goods. These goods are not limited to the Christian tradition but belong to all persons of good will: truth, peace and harmony…. Finally, at the highest level of goodness within human action, we become co-creators and co-artists, co-musicians with God, whose ear is delicately attuned to the music of the human heart” (pp. 116-117).

Free Will as Love?

I was surprised and intrigued to learn that Augustine in various works seems to more or less identify will with love. Of course it is not surprising that a Christian theologian would write about love. I count 65 occurrences of the word “love” in Augustine’s famous early treatise On the Free Choice of the Will. But my quick scan of all 65 passages did not find this identification. Nor is this identification mentioned in the introduction to the Cambridge edition, or in a great many discussions of free will by other writers who mention Augustine. I have confirmed, however, that this surprising identification of will with love does appear in a number of Augustine’s other works, and is considered by some to be an important theme. I first encountered this identification of will with love quite recently, in secondary literature on Scotus. Then I found references back to Augustine.

Scotus reportedly makes this identification too. He also seems to hold that all virtue is virtue of the will. I think of virtue more generally as virtue of something like character or emotional disposition. Once a separate faculty of will and decision is posited in the human, I can see how it might seem plausible to locate virtue in the will. But I don’t think there is such a separate faculty, and Plato and Aristotle did not think so either.

We make judgments and decisions based on varying combinations of thinking and feeling. The particular drift or orientation of our judgments and decisions could reasonably be described as some definite will, but this does not justify the assumption that choice and decision should be attributed to a separate faculty that is independent of all our thinking and feeling, as well as of all external circumstance.

What is clear is that we want some things, and don’t want others. Plato and Aristotle call this desire. Our desires count as ours by Aristotle’s criterion of willingness. We are responsible for the whole of our desire, even though there are things we desire without choosing to do so. There is a whole spectrum of desires, some of which are ethically beneficial and highly rational, while others may be completely irrational and ethically harmful.

Greek philosophers may attribute some things to love that some moderns attribute to will. In this vein, we may be said to “love” all that we prefer or seek. Some of Augustine’s references to love have a rather similar sound.

In any case, Augustine and Scotus both emphasize the role of love in their trinitarian theology. Sometimes this is called an ordered love, to distinguish it from animal passion. This ordered love is what they call caritas, or charity. One of Boulnois’s numerous books on Scotus that is out of print and expensive has a title that translates to The Rigor of Charity. An introductory book on Scotus by Thomas Ward is called Ordered by Love. If there is a non-evil voluntarism, this emphasis on love might help explain it.

I believe that in recent browsing I saw a passage in Scotus arguing that the best love, which he calls theologically meritorious, is freely given with no thought of advantage, and therefore the will is free. Unlike all the other arguments for free will that put it in the register of power and efficient causality, love freely given is something I too hold dear.

Voluntarism

I think most people understand believing in free will simply as believing that humans are able to make genuine choices. This is entirely unobjectionable.

It is a very different matter to claim that the will is innately unconditionally free. That is what I call voluntarism, and “free will in the strong sense”.

This is different from the way the term “voluntarism” is used in the secondary literature on medieval philosophy. There it means the view that there is a separate faculty for choosing that is called will, and that this will is prior to intellect, in the sense of being able to overrule what our intellect tells us is true or right. In this view, will governs intellect rather than being governed by it. It is in this sense, for example, that Aquinas is called an “intellectualist” and not a voluntarist, because he holds that the will is governed by intellect, even though he also defends liberum arbitrium, or free will in the strong sense. (There is a separate question about how to understand complex views like this, which include contrasting elements. My simple answer is that we should give them the benefit of the doubt.)

Leaving aside the expanded concept of responsibility that Brandom recommends in A Spirit of Trust, I hold that moral responsibility is well explained by Aristotle. Aristotle says we are responsible for all “willing” actions, but not for “unwilling” ones. It really is no harder than that.

In ordinary life, without any philosophy, we already distinguish willing actions from unwilling or unintended ones that happen as a result of coercion or ignorance. These distinctions of willingness from unwillingness apply at the level of particular actions. Some things we do willingly, others we do not.

This distinction between willing and unwilling could not even possibly be a matter of metaphysical or anthropological truth, because metaphysical and anthropological conclusions are both too general to support this kind of distinction. A metaphysical or anthropological account could only give us ways of generalizing about action or human action as such. But we do not have responsibility in particular cases because of some general metaphysical or anthropological truth. Rather, we have responsibility in particular cases because of what is true in those cases.

We should notice that Aristotle’s whole discussion of willing and unwilling actions — and of choice — not only does not assume, but does not even mention a separate faculty called “will”, unless this has been introduced by a translator. Moreover, meaningful discussion of any definite will or intent revolves around its particular content, not its source. Meanwhile, the source of choice is well described by Aristotle as “either intellect fused with desire, or desire fused with thinking, and such a source is a human being” (Nicomachean Ethics, Sachs tr., p.104; see also Free Will in Aristotle?)

People should be broadly forgiven for having been brought up with the pervasive inflated language about free will, even though a more precise analysis shows it is not really needed to explain or justify the claim we want to defend: that humans are able to make genuine choices.

This is true especially because there is a whole family of old (largely 19th-century) clichés about free will and determinism that tend to force discussion of these topics into very narrow channels. “Free will” and “determinism” are commonly taken to be two opposite extremes. Either everything is determined in advance, or nothing is. Then we are told that in order to avoid the evils of a total determinism, the only alternative is to believe that we are not determined at all. This is a false dichotomy.

Historically, it was Augustine who coined the original Latin term liberum arbitrium, and he is often credited with originating the notion of what I call “free will in the strong sense”. Boulnois mentions the commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias (2nd-3rd century CE) as an important precursor.

Theological voluntarism is closely bound up what I have called strong omnipotence, for which the earliest source I know is Philo of Alexandria (1st century BCE to 1st CE). Some form of omnipotence is at least verbally affirmed by nearly all later authorities in all three monotheistic traditions. It is even more pervasive than free will in the strong sense. But again, most of those same authorities make other statements which seem to indicate that they do not at all mean really to endorse the extreme consequences that follow from strong omnipotence, or from free will in the strong sense. We should apply a good measure of interpretive charity in these cases.

Contingency

While researching Duns Scotus for the recent series, I ran across an article claiming that Scotus provides an underpinning for what it called the modern view of contingency. Once again, Aristotle’s concern for things said in many ways is extremely relevant for making sense of this.

Ordinarily, contingency is only involved when one thing depends on another. When one thing depends on another, we say that it is conditional. That which is conditional is not in itself necessary. It is also called possible. But possibility itself is ambiguous. Many things that are logically possible are not practically or “really” possible.

Logical possibility includes anything that is not self-contradictory or “incompossible”, as Leibniz would say. This kind of possibility is a fundamental concept of modal logic, where analysis in terms of possible worlds has become dominant since the 1960s, due to the influence of the analytic philosopher Saul Kripke. The term “possible worlds” is inspired by Leibniz, who argued that creation should be rigorously understood as applying only to a whole “compossible” world.

The requirement of compossibility or realizable combination treats every possible world as a rational whole, in which things have real dependencies on other things. Even God will never actually do things that are not “possible together”.

This is not compatible with extremist claims that eternal or even logically necessary truths could be arbitrarily revoked at any time, or that there simply are no eternal or necessary truths.

It is easy to draw illegitimate, sophistical conclusions about what seem to be eternal or necessary truths. That does not mean that there are none, only that the way to clarity in these matters is difficult. But advocates of what are really extremist views take advantage of this, to draw illegitimate, sophistical conclusions of their own. What makes this easy is that it “only” requires ignoring aspects of the relevant context.

The classic early modern “metaphysical” view treats individual things in a kind of artificial isolation that never occurs in the real world. Needless to say, this kind of anticontextual metaphysics has nothing to do with Aristotle. Such a view has been attributed to Leibniz, based on a shallow interpretation of the Leibnizian monads. This fails to take into account either his general emphasis on whole worlds, or his explicit claim that the internal detail of each monad reprises the entire universe from a certain point of view. But it does seem that something like this was characteristic of the Wolffian school, which was the main concrete target of Kant’s criticism.

The contingency that that article on Scotus was celebrating was a form of radical “contingency” like that advocated by al-Ghazali, Ockham, and Sartre, among others. This occasionalism is the extremist view that nothing in or about the world is intrinsically firm or solid or substantial.

The essential point to understand about this is that radical contingency abolishes ordinary contingency.

Ordinary contingency is relational. We say that A is contingent on B. One thing (or action or status) either constrains another thing, or removes a constraint on another (in the sense that we speak of removing contingencies on a loan). Contingency in the ordinary sense by definition implies 1) some relevant context, and 2) some relevant constraint(s) that may or may not apply in that context.

One thing could never remove a constraint on another if there were really no such thing as constraint in the world. Similarly, a too-open view of possibility — one that posits an absolute freedom or absolute power — eliminates all meaningful modal analysis of possibility, because it eliminates any contrasting element of impossibility. To make no distinction — for example to claim that absolutely anything is possible — is effectively to say nothing. Claims of radical contingency eliminate the basis for ever saying “A is contingent on B“.

A defender of radical contingency might claim that there is something all A are contingent on — a will. But this is circular, because claims about the existence of a will over and above meaningful choice between alternatives are only introduced in order to putatively justify claims of radical contingency.

Seeming, Trying

In pursuing a pragmatist account of what meaning is, the young Brandom already anticipates a theme that will be very important in A Spirit of Trust: a thoroughgoing critique of claims to “mastery” in knowledge and action, illustrated here by the example of Descartes.

The main object of his 1976 dissertation is to show that from a starting point in what he calls social practices, pragmatism can go on to affirm that some things are nonetheless objectively real. This is in part an implicit criticism of his teacher and colleague Richard Rorty, who notoriously made ethical arguments against the very idea of objective reality. My last post treats the first chapter, which enlists Wittgenstein as a source of powerful arguments supporting the basic pragmatist emphasis on social practices as a sort of third way that avoids both subjectivism and objectivism. This post treats the second chapter.

Brandom distinguishes between two different legacies of Descartes, one concerning the special privileged status of the mental, which he strongly rejects, and one consisting of a very broadly specified epistemological project the core of which Brandom wants to uphold, while transposing it to different ground. From a highly abstracted perspective, he generously attributes philosophical worth to the very idea of a medium of thought and knowledge, and treats this as a Cartesian innovation. But for Descartes, this medium is something like consciousness that is supposed to be immediately and fully self-aware. The medium Brandom wants to uphold on the other hand is substantive language use and the inherently social practices that govern it.

“The challenge which [the second Cartesian] legacy presents to the pragmatist is this: if the use of a language, the application of expressions, consists of social practices which are whatever some community takes them to be, as Wittgenstein has argued, how is it that those practices enable the community to talk about objective things, which are independent of the community?…. According to the Cartesian tradition, all of our cognitive interaction with the objective world is by means of that medium with which alone we have direct, immediate commerce, namely the mind” (p. 42).

Compared to Brandom’s later much more fine-grained emphasis on the constitutive role of Hegelian mutual recognition, his undifferentiated Wittgensteinian appeal to the “takings” of empirical communities here is a blunt instrument. Community stands in contrast to the common modern notion of the individual as a sort of atom, but no community is a monolith, and no empirical community fully incarnates the ideal universal community of all rational animals. The “takings” of empirical communities are as much subject to error as the takings of individuals.

“This [second legacy] is a project with which the Cartesian tradition had only limited success. When the project failed, the result was a phenomenalism which concluded that because all cognition is by means of mental particulars, only mental particulars are knowable, that all knowledge is of mental particulars. There is a parallel danger for the pragmatist tradition. It is the danger that one might conclude from the fact that all cognition is by means of the social practices which make up our languages, that these practices are all that is knowable…. The prime project of this thesis is to show how knowledge which consists of social practices can be knowledge of objective states of affairs” (p. 43).

Brandom says the parallel danger for the pragmatist tradition is instrumentalism, which he characterizes as the view that social practices are all that is knowable. I have endorsed a kind of “instrumentalism” myself, but see it as applying more narrowly to practices of empirical science, not to all that is knowable.

Brandom treats the putative certainties of Descartes in light of Rorty’s account of “incorrigibility”. Like “certainty” in Hegel’s deflationary view of it, incorrigibility in this sense is a mere fact and not at all a foundation for knowledge. Things are about to become very interesting.

“There is an account of the social practices we use to talk about mental things … which may be extracted from Sellars’ “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” and Rorty’s “Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental”…. Thoughts and sensations became mental only when the noninferential reports of these entities which it turned out that people could make came to be taken to be incorrigible…. Rorty calls an utterance-type ‘incorrigible’ if within the community within which it is used there are no procedures for overruling it” (pp. 44-45).

Whether or not incorrigibility is the criterion for calling things “mental”, the implications of incorrigibility that Brandom is unfolding here offer a very important lesson.

“It will be useful … to consider an elaboration of this account of how practices of issuing reports on one’s inner states can become incorrigible. The elaboration is suggested by Sellars’ account of the ‘looks’ and ‘seems’ idiom…. [T]he practice of making seems-reports arises out of a situation in which there are sufficient regularities perceivable in the mistakes that users of the language make in their ordinary reports of their surroundings…. In such a case one makes the weaker claim ‘it seems to me that I see X’ which is understood to be noncommittal as to whether X in fact holds…. The ‘seems’ statements are so used that whenever a report is incorrect, the corresponding ‘seems’ statement is correct” (pp. 46-47).

I have always thought of “seems” phrasing as an acknowledgement that other perspectives may be possible. It honestly never occurred to me to think of it as a way of always being right. But the logic here is impeccable.

“Thus ‘seems’ is a non-iterable sentential operator — one cannot say ‘It seems to me that it seems to me that X’. Because of this feature of the ‘seems’ idiom, there are things, namely ‘seemings’… about which we cannot be overruled, and we are hence incorrigible. The social practices of using the expression are such that there is no way to overrule the statement ” (pp. 47-48).

With this argument about non-iterability, we have a case of linguistic analysis yielding an interesting and important conclusion that most likely could not have arisen by other means. It has long “seemed” to me that consciousness as such is a syntactic variant on appearance, rather than a kind of knowledge as Descartes and many others have taken it to be. But this link between non-iterability and incorrigibility is entirely new to me.

One thing that stands out about incorrigibility is that it is the very opposite of a condition for ethical dialogue abundantly illustrated by Plato, and more recently made explicit by Gadamer, Habermas, and Brandom. Real polar opposites are rare, but this is one of them. Incorrigibility has absolutely no place in what Habermas would call an ideal speech situation. All participants in genuine dialogue are corrigible. But Descartes and other bad authorities have tried to make incorrigibility a condition of knowledge. We ought to respect other people’s first-person reports. But that is a social grace, not a key to truth.

“Mental events are those which we report with expressions which fit into the same linguistic niche that seemings do. The notion of a linguistic niche is here to be taken as parallel to that of an environmental niche which an evolving organism can occupy. The particular property which I have in mind as specifying the linguistic niche which ‘seemings’ define for other mental events is the inappropriateness of embedding such things inside ‘seems’ operators. Thus ‘It seems to me that I am thinking of a red bear’ is a peculiar utterance in that ‘I am thinking of a red bear’ is already an incorrigible utterance. I am suggesting that the mark of incorrigibility is not being appropriately qualified by a ‘seems’ statement…. Thoughts and sensations are kinds of entities which are reported by expressions which cannot appear embedded in ‘seems’ statements” (pp. 48-49).

Next he explicitly draws the conclusion that incorrigibility has no place in inquiry about the nature of knowledge.

“[T]here is nothing epistemologically useful about incorrigibility in the account we have given of it. The ‘seems’ operator which creates the linguistic niche within which mental events and processes thrive must be added to a language which already has more basic sentences which can be embedded in ‘seems’ contexts. And we have seen that those more basic sentences cannot have the incorrigibility characteristic of ‘seems’ statements. The ‘seems’ idiom can be added only to a language that already has other sentences in use which are not incorrigible. Given ordinary, corrigible reports, the ‘seems’ idiom offers a way of producing trivially incorrigible reports from them. Sellars and Rorty have developed this line of thought in considerable detail, to show the error of traditional epistemological programs which seek to ground the authority of ordinary claims in the incorrigibility of these ‘seeming’ analogues. When once the priority of ordinary, corrigible utterances has been understood, there will be little desire to ‘justify’ them in terms of the incorrigible utterances that are derivative from them” (pp. 49-50, emphasis added).

“Seems” talk in effect syntactically adds a wrapper around simple assertion that must therefore already be understandable on its own if the “seems” talk that modifies it is to be understandable.

“Further, the line of thought we have just considered completes the pragmatist’s refutation of the Cartesian view of the mental as the medium of cognition, by showing that the specially criterioned realm of things which was Descartes’ first legacy will not support the sort of epistemological justification demanded by his second legacy. The incorrigibility of the mental is no ground on which to base claims about the correctness of ordinary corrigible claims” (p. 50, emphasis added).

The correctness of ordinary corrigible claims is what we ought to be concerned with. In A Spirit of Trust, Brandom talks about “semantic descent” from the lofty abstraction of philosophical metaconcepts back to ordinary life. The idea is that their real meaning lies in their consequences for how we live our life. Klaus Vieweg’s outstanding new biography of Hegel suggests to me that Hegel himself would have appreciated this.

Brandom has already characterized “seems” talk as presupposing ordinary simple assertion. Earlier, he suggested that the whole project of modern epistemology — including pragmatist approaches to it — is historically shaped by what are essentially Cartesian questions. More specifically, he has suggested an analogy between the Cartesian problem of relating the mind to reality and the task he has set for himself of relating a pragmatist account of social practices to what we mean by “real” and “reality”.

Initially I wanted to resist this analogy. But Brandom suggests that the project of epistemology is itself specifically post-Cartesian, and there is a level of specificity at which this is undoubtedly true. I must acknowledge that Pierce’s account discussed further below, which I find attractive, does address recognizably Cartesian kinds of questions, even if his answers stand in opposition to those of Descartes.

Nonetheless the implicit contrast presupposed by seems-talk has been approached in other ways. The notion of appearance and something standing in contrast to it goes back at least to Plato, if not into the hazy prehistory of philosophy. In Plato we do not find hypostasized concepts of “the mind” and “the external world” confronting one another as they do in Descartes, but something more like a contrast between appearance and deeper truth. My own way of approaching such questions is broadly Platonic in this sense, and doesn’t owe much to modern notions of subject and object. Plato and Aristotle ask about “our” knowledge — meaning, for Aristotle at least, the knowledge available to rational animals — not about “the mind’s” knowledge. In medieval terms, knowledge belongs to the whole human being.

“In the rest of this section I will seek to show that the classical notion of the real serves the function of constraint of our fancy. This function requires an aspect of the Cartesian notion of the mind which we have not yet considered, that of the will. We will present a pragmatic reconstruction of that characteristic, parallel to the pragmatic reconstruction of incorrigibility we have derived from Rorty and Sellars” (p. 54).

This development of a parallelism between incorrigibility and Descartes’s voluntaristic notion of will is of great interest. The connection between the real and Cartesian will is initially not clear at all (especially to an anti-voluntarist such as myself), but Pierce’s remarks quoted by Brandom below implicitly suggest a relation through a double negative.

“So far, the notion of the real has been exhibited by means of a distinction between things which can be changed merely by the activity of ‘Thinking about X’ and those which cannot. What is it about thinking which makes a classification based on its capacity to alter things more significant than any other classification in terms of some human activity which differentiates the thing classified? Thus we can consider those things which I can alter merely by digging a hole with a spade, and those which I cannot so alter. In the former category would be holes, tunnels, graves, and so on, and in the latter would be the square root of seventeen, Plato’s Republic, and the interior of distant black holes. For what problem is the classification induced by thinking illuminating (and that induced by digging not)?” (p. 55).

The orientation through asking what problem is at issue is commendable. The comparison with digging a hole has a nice pragmatist flavor, but also would not be out of place in Plato or Aristotle. Now we get to Pierce’s point.

“I think the key may be found in some other passages of Pierce, echoed by Russell. Pierce says: ‘… the real is that which insists upon forcing its way to recognition as something other than the mind’s creation’. [Brandom continues] That the real is other than the mind’s creation is implied by the previous definition…. That this otherness is ‘forced’ upon us is an element we have not encountered, however” (ibid).

He quotes Pierce again, “…reality is insistency. That is what we mean by reality. It is the brute irrational insistency that forces us to acknowledge the reality of what we experience” (ibid).

He continues, “What is important here is … the constraint on our thinking which the real, external world exerts on our thoughts. Russell characterizes the realm of fact in terms of the same two elements: that facts don’t depend on what we think about them and that what we think is constrained by the facts…. This element of constraint of the mind, stubbornness to volitions, seems to me to be the key to understanding the role reality played in the classical philosophical tradition. The fact of being forced to think one thing rather than another suggests an answer to our question” (p. 56).

The conclusion to A Spirit of Trust memorably mentions the world’s “stubborn recalcitrance to mastery by knowledge and agency” (Spirit of Trust, p. 689). The “stubbornness to volitions” above is central to Pierce’s notion of reality, and the reference to volitions ties it back to Descartes.

“I think the picture which is being appealed to involves a distinction of two sorts of activities with respect to our control or dominion over them. On the side of fancy are things like imagining a red bear, or thinking of Vienna. These are activities in which we cannot be thwarted. We can simply do them. No effort is required, because there is no gap between trying and succeeding. Contrasted with this, we find activities like digging, which require the special circumstances (the presence of a shovel, sufficiently soft materials, etc.) for their performance, and over which we do not have total control. The point of defining as real a class of things which are in the relevant sense independent of what we think of them is that we do not have dominion over these things in the same sense in which we do over the creations of fancy. Reality is that in virtue of which there are activities like digging, in which we are constrained by circumstances beyond our immediate control. The role which the real is to play in our understanding of things is captured in the explanation it is to provide of why we cannot do whatever we want to do simply by wanting to do it” (pp. 56-57).

In the terminology Brandom will shortly introduce here, the real is that which constrains and resists our “trying”. He illustrates this by returning to the example of digging a hole.

In the terminology of A Spirit of Trust, we could say here that Descartes is overly impressed with our “mastery” over our fancy. The error of many is to treat this relation to our fancy as paradigmatic or programmatic for our relations in the world, when it is our relations in the world that come first. (I do not say “to” the world, because that does implicitly invoke a Cartesian parsing of everything into hypostasized categories of mind and world.)

“Once again, moving the arms and back in this way is something people can be trained to just do, but once again it can be asked ‘How do you move your arms and back in this fashion?’ At this point it is so far from being the case that one must know the answer to such a question in order to engage in the specified activity that we do not know what an answer should look like” (p. 57).

“Our inability thus to describe further what counts as trying to move a ‘voluntary’ muscle marks the end of possible explanations of such movement…. The fact that such explanations of activity… must stop at the attempt to produce ‘voluntary’ muscular activity is the basis for the classical doctrine of volitions. This is the doctrine that there are mental activities called volitions which are the first source of all human activity” (p. 58).

In this tradition, volition serves as the unexplained explainer of “voluntary” actions. By contrast, we have recently seen how Aristotle explains the difference between willing and unwilling actions without hypostasizing a separate faculty of will.

“We now seek a story about indefeasible dominion which will describe the function which the mind plays in Cartesian stories about acting. The mind has an active role here as the medium of activity. This means that anything which is not itself a mental activity is accomplished by means of the immediate mental activity of willing” (p. 59).

The Cartesian hypostases of mind and will have sovereignty and mastery over a hypostasized private domain of fancy. And just as we are incorrigible in our reports of “seeming”, we are the sovereign masters of our pure willing and “trying” . But as Brandom points out, in both cases this is true only in a trivial way. It is rather to ordinary activities that we should look as a paradigm.

“I want to claim that indefeasible domain over inner, mental activities is of the same trivial, stipulative nature and origin as we have seen the property of incorrigibility which characterizes our knowledge of inner, mental events to be…. Our approach is to account for dominion over the realm of fancy in terms of the ‘tries’ idiom in a way formally analogous to that in which we accounted for incorrigibility in terms of the ‘seems’ idiom” (p. 62).

“The basic point of the analogy is that just as the ‘seems’ operator forms a report such that there is nothing in the language which counts as sufficient evidence to contradict it, so the ‘trying’ operator forms a description of an action for which nothing counts as significant evidence that the action was not performed. The important formal point is that just as ‘seems’ operators cannot be iterated…, neither can ‘trying’ operators (‘I am trying to try to do X’)” (ibid).

“The second ‘trying’ is redundant…. We use the ‘trying’ operator in such a way that one can always succeed at trying to do X, whatever troubles one may have actually doing X” (p. 63).

“For ordinary activities like digging, one can actually say what the trying consisted of — e.g., certain movements of the back and arms — and why it failed, just as one can often say why it is that things seemed a certain way. The extension of these operators to cases in which no activity was successfully engaged in which can be described by the language without the operators of the mental expressions they epitomize is linguistically straightforward. So we can explain how we could come to talk about reports which are incorrigible and activities over which we have indefeasible dominion by starting off only talking about ordinary corrigible reports and activities in which we may be frustrated” (pp. 63-64).

“The reason for that non-iterability is the way the conditions under which it is appropriate to say ‘I am trying to do X’ relate to the conditions under which it is appropriate to say ‘I am doing X’. And this relation is to be understood by analogy to ‘seems’ ” (p. 64).

“For any activity which we can try to engage in and fail, such as signaling a bus, there must be some conditions of success which are not dependent merely on our tryings (else we could not try and fail” (p. 65).

“Now the important thing for Pierce, as for the empiricists and the Cartesian tradition in general, is that what we believe is constrained in this fashion. Within our framework, this is just to say that believing is not one of the things one can do simply by trying to” (ibid).

We do not “choose” to believe X. Others may have conflicting beliefs about the same thing, but that does not mean that belief is arbitrary. We believe things for reasons that are not simply plucked out of thin air.

“[T]he ‘trying’ operator must be introduced into a language which already talks about things which we can try to engage in and fail (such as signaling a bus). The primary and essential role of the ‘trying’ operator is to make this distinction between ‘doing X’ and ‘trying to do X’. It is a relatively trivial consequence of the performance of this role that the ‘trying’ operator is non-iterable” (p. 66).

“In sum, activities which can be done just by trying to do them are a by-product of activities which one can try to do and fail, not the other way around” (ibid, emphasis added).

“Once we have seen how ‘tries’ works, we can no longer maintain the Cartesian stance in which we take activities over which we have indefeasible dominion for granted and find others problematic, requiring a further notion of ‘the real’ to explain them…. Insofar as the notion of the real involves merely the idea that we are constrained, of course, it is as unobjectionable as it is unilluminating” (p. 67, emphasis added).

“It is interesting to note that in showing that the notion of a realm of unconstrained fancy over which the subject exercises an indefeasible dominion presupposes the existence of constrained activities (with respect to which alone the ‘trying’ operator can be sensibly introduced) we have provided a pragmatic version of Kant’s Refutation of Idealism in the Critique of Pure Reason…. For Kant may be understood as trying to show that the notion that we have of a faculty of spontaneity (the realm of our dominion) must be extracted from a notion of its function in concert with a faculty of receptivity (the source of constraint), and cannot be coherently described out of all connection with that receptive faculty” (ibid).

Next in this series: Pragmatics of Inquiry

Spirit of Trust

“At the very center of Hegel’s thought … is a radically new conception of the conceptual…. This way of understanding conceptual contentfulness is nonpsychological” (Brandom, A Spirit of Trust, p. 2).

“[W]hat confers conceptual content on acts, attitudes, and linguistic expressions is the role they play in the practices their subjects engage in…. [M]eaning is to be understood in terms of use” (p. 3).

“Hegel thinks that we cannot understand [the] conceptual structure of the objective world … except as part of a story that includes what we are doing when we practically take or treat the world [in a certain way]” (pp. 3-4). “[I]n knowing how (being able) to use ordinary concepts, one already knows how to do everything one needs to know how to do in order to grasp and apply the metaconcepts…. The categorial metaconcepts are the expressive organs of self-consciousness” (p. 5).

“In reading [Kant and Hegel] it is easy to lose sight entirely of ordinary empirical and practical concepts…. Yet I believe that the best way to understand what they are saying about their preferred topic of concepts operating in a pure, still stratosphere above the busy jostling and haggling of street-level judging and doing is precisely to focus on what these metaconcepts let us say about what is going on below…. If the point of the higher-level concepts is to articulate the use and content of lower-level ones, then the cash value of an account of categorial metaconcepts is what it has to teach us about ordinary ground-level empirical and practical concepts” (pp. 5-6).

“The process of experience is accordingly understood as being both the process of applying determinate conceptually contentful norms in judgment and intentional action and the process of instituting those determinate conceptually contentful norms. It is the gradual, progressive finding of what the content has been all along” (p. 6).

“So [Hegel] takes it that the only way to understand or convey the content of the metaconcepts that articulate various forms of self-consciousness … is by recollectively rehearsing a possible course of expressively progressive development that culminates in the content in question. And that is exactly what he does” (p. 7). “We can understand [the metaconcepts] in terms of what they make it possible for us to say and understand about the use and content of those ground-level determinate concepts” (p. 8).

“The second master idea of Kant’s that inspires Hegel’s story is his revolutionary appreciation of the essentially normative character of discursive intentionality. Kant understands judgments and intentional doings as differing from the responses of nondiscursive creatures in being performances that their subjects are in a distinctive sense responsible for. He sees them as exercising a special sort of authority: the authority that discursive subjects have to undertake commitments as to how things are or shall be. Sapient awareness, apperception, is seen as a normative phenomenon, the discursive realm as a normative realm” (p. 9).

“But concepts are now understood as ‘functions of judgments’. That is, they are understood in terms of their functional role in determining what one makes oneself responsible for or commits oneself to in judging. At the center of what one is responsible for is having reasons for judging or acting as one does. Concepts are rules that determine what counts as a reason for (or against) applying them, and what applying them counts as a reason for (or against)…. Discursive beings live and move and have their being in a normative space of reasons…. Where the Early Modern philosophical tradition had focused on our grip on concepts, Kant shifts attention to their grip on us” (ibid).

“That is to say that he understands representational purport, the way in which its acts show up to the subject as representings, as intentionally pointing beyond themselves to something represented by them, in thoroughly normative terms. Something is a representing insofar as it is responsible for its correctness to what thereby counts as represented by it” (p. 10).

“What one makes oneself responsible for doing in judging is rationally integrating the new commitment one undertakes with one’s prior commitments so as to yield a constellation of doxastic commitments that exhibits the sort of rational (‘synthetic’) unity distinctive of apperception. For concepts to play their functional role as rules for doing that, their contents must determine what would be reasons for or against each particular application of those concepts in judgment, and what those applications would be reasons for or against” (ibid).

“I have already gestured at Hegel’s nonpsychological conception of the conceptual as what is articulated by relations of material incompatibility and consequence…. Descartes understood the distinction between minded creatures and everything else in terms of a distinction of two kinds of stuff: mental and physical. Kant’s normative reconceiving of sapience replaces Descartes’s ontological distinction with a deontological one. Discursive creatures are distinguished by having rational obligations. They are subject to normative assessment of the extent to which what they think and do accords with their commitments or responsibilities” (p. 11).

“Kant’s insight into the normative character of judging and acting intentionally renders philosophically urgent the understanding of discursive normativity” (ibid).

“[Hegel’s] generic term for social-practical attitudes of taking or treating someone as the subject of normative statuses is ‘recognition’ [Anerkennung]. He takes it that normative statuses such as authority and responsibility are instituted when recognitive attitudes have a distinctive social structure: when they take the form of mutual or reciprocal [gegenseitig] recognition” (p. 12).

“[N]orms or statuses must be intelligible as having a certain kind of independence from practitioners’ attitudes toward them if they are to be intelligible as serving as authoritative standards for normative assessment of the propriety or correctness of those attitudes” (p. 13).

“But however it is with Wittgenstein, Hegel’s invocation of the social character of discursive normativity, in the form of the claim that normative statuses are instituted only by reciprocal recognitive attitudes, works quite differently” (ibid). “In Hegel’s terms, what a self-consciousness is in itself (its normative statuses) depends on both what it is for itself and what it is for others” (p. 14).

“Which others matter for the institution of a subject’s normative statuses is determined by the subject’s own recognitive attitudes: who it recognizes, in the sense of granting (attributing to) them the authority to hold it responsible. But it is not determined by those attitudes alone. Communities do come into the picture. What Hegel calls social ‘substance’ is synthesized by mutual recognition…. But Hegelian communities are constellations of reciprocal-recognitive dyads. The recognitive attitudes of others, who hold one responsible, are equally as important as the normative attitude of one who acknowledges a commitment. Hegel’s version is second-personal, perspectival ‘I’-‘thou’ sociality, not first-personal, ‘I’-‘we’ sociality” (pp. 13-14).

” ‘Dependence’ and ‘independence’, when applied to knowing and acting subjects, are Hegel’s way of talking about normative statuses of responsibility and authority, respectively” (p. 14).

“But corresponding to the reciprocal dependence of normative statuses and attitudes on the side of pragmatics, Hegel envisages a reciprocal dependence of meaning and use, of the contents of concepts and the practices of applying them…. Hegel balances Kant’s insight that judging and acting presuppose the availability of determinately contentful norms to bind oneself by and hold others to, with the insight that our practical recognitive attitudes of acknowledging and attributing commitments are all there is to establish the association of determinate conceptual contents with those attitudes — and so all there is to fix determinate norms or normative statuses they are attitudes toward. The issue of how to make sense of normative attitudes as genuinely norm-governed once we understand the norms as instituted by such attitudes, and the issue of how to understand normative attitudes as instituting norms with determinate conceptual contents are two sides of one coin” (pp. 15-16).

“As the most common misunderstanding of the social dimension sees individuals as bound to accord with communal regularities, the most common misunderstanding of the historical dimension sees the present as answerable to an eventual ideal Piercean consensus. Both are caricatures of Hegel’s much more sophisticated account” (p. 16).

“Viewed prospectively, the process of experience is one of progressively determining conceptual contents in the sense of making those contents more determinate, by applying them or withholding their application in novel circumstances…. Viewed retrospectively, the process of experience is one of finding out more about the boundaries of concepts that show up as having implicitly all along already been fully determinate…. It is of the essence of construing things according to the metacategories of Vernunft that neither of these perspectives is intelligible apart from its relation to the other, and that the correctness of each does not exclude but rather entails the correctness of the other” (p. 17).

“Hegel explains what is implicit in terms of the process of expressing it: the process of making it explicit…. This account of expression in terms of recollection grounds an account of representation in terms of expression” (p. 18).

“Finally, the new kind of theoretical self-consciousness we gain from Hegel’s phenomenological recollection is envisaged as making possible a new form of practical normativity. The door is opened to the achievement of a new form of Geist when norm-instituting recognitive practices and practical attitudes take the form of norm-acknowledging recollective practices and practical attitudes. When recognition takes the magnanimous form of recollection, it is forgiveness, the attitude that institutes normativity as fully self-conscious trust” (p. 19).

“Along the way we can see Hegel using the discussion of the experience of error to introduce the basic outlines of the positive account of representation that he will recommend to replace the defective traditional ways of thinking about representation that lead to the knowledge-as-instrument and knowledge-as-medium models” (p. 21).

“It is widely appreciated that the origins of Wilfrid Sellars’s critique of what he calls the ‘Myth of the Given’ are to be found in Hegel’s Sense Certainty chapter. Sellars himself points to this by opening his essay with an explicit acknowledgement of the kinship between the line of argument he will pursue and that of ‘Hegel, that great foe of immediacy’. By this he means that Hegel, like Sellars, denies the intelligibility of any concept of knowledge that is purely immediate, that involves no appeal to inferential abilities or the consequential relations they acknowledge (Hegel’s ‘mediation’)” (pp. 21-22).

“One conclusion that emerges is that the incompatibility-and-consequence relations that articulate the contents of both theoretical and observational concepts must be understood to be subjunctively robust. By engaging in inferences tracking those relations, experiencing subjects practically confront not only facts, but the lawful relations of consequence and incompatibility that make those facts both determinate and cognitively accessible” (p. 23).

“What self-conscious individual normative subjects are ‘for themselves’ and ‘for others’ are understood as normative attitudes: attitudes of acknowledging responsibility or claiming authority oneself, and attitudes of attributing responsibility or authority to others, respectively…. According to the reciprocal recognition model, one subject’s attitude of acknowledging responsibility makes that subject responsible only if it is suitably socially complemented by the attributing of responsibility by another, to whom the first attributes the authority to do so. The attitudes of acknowledging and attributing are accordingly interdependent. Each is responsible to and authoritative over the other, because only when suitably complementing each other do those attitudes institute statuses” (p. 24).

“One of the principal lessons of the discussion of pure independence, in the allegory of Mastery, is that the normative statuses of responsibility and authority are two sides of one coin. The point is not the trivial one that if X has authority over Y then Y is responsible to X, and vice versa. It is that X’s authority always involves a correlative responsibility by X. Independence always involves a correlative moment of dependence, and dependence always involves a correlative moment of independence” (pp. 24-25).

“The argument for the metaphysical defectiveness of the idea of pure independence (that is, authority without responsibility) in the allegory of the Master and the Servant is, inter alia, Hegel’s argument against the traditional subordination-obedience model of normativity. The crucial move in that argument is the claim that such a conception denies essential necessary conditions of the determinate contentfulness of the authority the Master claims” (p. 25).

“The recognitive community of all those who recognize and are recognized by each other in turn is a kind of universal order under which its members fall…. Self-consciousness in Hegel’s sense is practical awareness of oneself as such a recognitively constituted subject of normative statuses. It is accordingly a social achievement and a social status. Not only is it not the turning on of a Cartesian inner light; it is not even something that principally happens between the ears of the individual so constituted…. As such, it is an important point of reference wherever Hegel invokes the holistic structure of identities constituted by differences” (p. 26).

“The tradition Hegel inherited (endorsed by many philosophers since) understands agency in terms of a mental event of intending or willing causing a separate bodily movement, which in turn has various distinct causal consequences in the wider world. Hegel … thinks rather of doings as unitary things (processes …), which can be variously specified” (p. 27).

“Hegel understands those different kinds of description in normative terms of authority and responsibility…. Intentional specifications are those under which the agent in a distinctive sense acknowledges responsibility, while consequential specifications are those under which others, in a complementary sense, attribute responsibility and hold the agent responsible…. What the doing is in itself is the product of what it is for the agent and what it is for the others….Judging shows up as a limiting special case of practical doings understood in this way” (ibid).

“As the doing reverberates through the objective world, as its consequences roll on to the horizon, new specifications of it become available. Each of them provides a new perspective on the content of the doing, on what doing it is turning out to be. That the shooting was a killing, that the insulting was a decisive breaking off of relations, that the vote was a political turning point for the party are expressions of what was done that only become available retrospectively” (p. 28).

“A phenomenology is a recollected, retrospectively rationally reconstructed history that displays the emergence of what becomes visible as having been all along implicit in an expressively progressive sequence of its ever more adequate appearances (pp. 28-29).

“Hegel thinks that the most fundamental normative structure of our discursiveness underwent a revolutionary change, from its traditional form to a distinctively modern one. This vast sea change did not take place all at once, but over an extended period of time. The transition began with the ancient Greeks and proceeded at an accelerating pace. It was still incomplete in his time (and in ours), but with the main lineament of its full flowering just becoming visible. It is, he thought, the single biggest event in human history. ‘Geist’ is his term for the subject of that titanic transmogrification” (p. 29).

“The essence of the traditional form of normativity is practically treating norms as an objective feature of the world: as just there, as are stars, oceans, and rocks. [Normativity] is construed as having the asymmetric structure of relations of command and obedience that Hegel criticizes in his allegory of Mastery…. In any case, there are taken to be facts about how it is fitting to behave” (ibid).

“What is required to overcome alienation is practically and theoretically to balance the modern insight into the attitude-dependence of normative statuses with a reappropriation of the traditional insight into the status-dependence of normative attitudes. At the end of his Spirit chapters, Hegel tells us how he thinks that can and should be done. His account takes the form of a description of the final, fully adequate form of reciprocal recognition: the recollective recognitive structure of confession and forgiveness for which I appropriate his term ‘trust’ [Vertrauen]” (p. 30).

“It is, remarkably, a semantics with an edifying intent. The effect of theoretically understanding the nature of the conceptual contents we normatively bind ourselves by in our discursive activity is to be to educate and motivate us to be better people, who live and move and have our being in the normative space of Geist in the postmodern form of trust. For Hegel’s pragmatist, social-historical semantics makes explicit to us what becomes visible as our standing commitment to engage in the ideal recollective norm-instituting recognitive practices that are structured by trust — a commitment to practical magnanimity that is revealed to be implicit in talking and acting at all” (p. 32).

Willingness, Deliberation, Choice

In Nicomachean Ethics book III, Aristotle with marvelous clarity, simplicity, and well-rounded good sense discusses what things we are and are not morally responsible for, without ever referring to or needing anything like the “free arbitration” (liberum arbitrium) that came to be widely assumed in the Latin tradition. I will continue to use Joe Sachs’s admirable translation.

“Now since virtue is concerned with feelings and actions, and praise and blame come about for willing actions, but for unwilling actions there is forgiveness and sometimes even pity, it is no doubt a necessary thing for those who inquire about virtue to distinguish what is a willing act and what is an unwilling act, and it is a useful thing for lawmakers as well, with a view to honors and punishments. Now it seems that unwilling acts are the ones that happen by force or through ignorance, a forced act being one of which the source is external, and an act is of this sort in which the person acting, or acted upon, contributes nothing, for instance if a wind carries one off somewhere, or people do who are in control. But with respect to those things that are done through fear of greater evils, or for the sake of something beautiful — for instance if a tyrant who was in control of one’s parents and children were to order one to do a shameful thing, and in the case of one’s doing it they would be saved but as a result of one’s not doing it they would be killed — there is some dispute whether they are willing or unwilling” (p. 36).

Aristotle’s positive regard for feeling and his early mention of it in this context are noteworthy, as is his explicit early mention of forgiveness. Equally important is the fact that from the very beginning, he focuses on the difficult cases in which we experience conflict or ambiguity between different values that we recognize. Characteristically, he does not aim to authoritatively lay down rules for every situation, but rather to encourage us to be thoughtful and understanding in our appraisals both of situations and of others’ responses to them.

“Something of this sort happens also in connection with things thrown overboard in a storm, for no one simply throws them away willingly, but all those who have any sense do so for their own safety and that of the rest of the people aboard. Such actions then are mixed, but they are more like willing acts, since at the time when they are done they are preferred, and the end for which an action takes place is in accordance with the occasion. So one has to say what is willing or unwilling at the time when someone does it; and one does things of this sort willingly, for the source of the moving of the parts that are instrumental in such actions is oneself, and anything of which the source is in oneself is also up to oneself either to do or not. So things of this sort are willing acts, though in an unqualified sense they would perhaps be unwilling acts, since no one would choose any such thing for itself” (pp. 36-37).

Even more than Plato, Aristotle addresses “mixed” cases and highlights their importance. Again characteristically, he qualifies what he says about the unqualified sense with a modest “perhaps”.

“Sometimes people are even praised for actions of this sort, when they endure something shameful or painful in return for things that are great and beautiful, and conversely they might be blamed, since enduring things that are exceedingly shameful for no beautiful object, or for one only moderately beautiful, belongs to a person of low moral stature. For some things, while no praise is forthcoming, there is forgiveness, when one does what one ought not to do on account of motives of this sort, when they strain human nature too far, and no one could endure them. Yet some things perhaps it is not possible to be forced to do, but one ought instead to die suffering the most terrible things, for the things that force the Alcmaeon of Euripides to kill his mother seem ridiculous. But it is difficult sometimes to distinguish what sort of thing should be chosen in return for what, and what should be endured for what, and still more difficult for those who have discerned it to abide by what they have chosen, since for the most part the things one anticipates are painful and the things they force one to do are shameful, which is why praise and blame come about according as people are or are not forced” (p. 37).

Again he mentions forgiveness. Again an otherwise more categorical-sounding statement is qualified by a “perhaps”. Again the focus is on difficult cases. A more general and abstract evaluation is called “difficult”. He notes that it is “still more difficult” to abide by what we have chosen.

Sachs’s glossary says for choice (proairesis): “Desire informed by deliberation, or thinking infused with desire, and hence an act of the whole human being, in which neither the rational nor the irrational part is superior. If desire predominates, one merely takes one thing in preference to others, as an animal or small child might, but deliberation allows one to take a course in the light of alternatives not immediately present and of long-term consequences not obvious at the moment…. [T]he only ‘rule’ that can make choice be right is the judgment of a person of good character, whose desires are neither excessive nor corrupted” (pp. 202-203).

This is very clearly not an arbitrary “choice”. It is the Latin tradition’s interpolation of a notion of arbitrary choice into the Aristotelian text that Boulnois rightly objects to.

Back to Aristotle, “So what sort of thing ought one to say is forced? In an unqualified sense, is it not what is done whenever the cause is in external things and the one acting contributes nothing? But with those things that are in themselves unwilling acts, but are chosen in the present circumstances and in return for these particular ends, and their source is in the one acting, while they are unwilling acts in themselves, in the present circumstances and in return for these particular ends they are willing acts. But they are more like willing acts, since actions are in the particulars, and with respect to these they are willing acts. But it is not easy to give an account of what sort of things one ought to choose in return for what sort of ends, since there are many differences among the particular circumstances” (p. 37).

Up to now, Aristotle has focused on examples that are somewhat extreme. Here he returns to the broader scope of all action.

“Actions are in the particulars”, which is why, once again, “it is not easy to give an account” of the more general case. In general, we cannot adequately say what the sense of an action is — or indeed what action it is — until we take its context appropriately into account.

In the very same way, there is no way we can adequately say, for example, what Kant’s categorical imperative would have us do in an unspecified particular situation x, based on the categorical imperative alone. Applying it only begins to have meaning as the situation begins to be specified.

Boulnois would have us avoid translating proairesis as “choice”, on the ground of the very real concern that the Latin tradition strongly identifies talk about choice with so-called free arbitration. But in the Aristotelian text we see a repeating pattern already, in which Aristotle focuses on difficult situations that require us to make tradeoffs between values that we genuinely accept, and which seem to require us to be unfaithful to one of them. These could hardly be construed as arbitrary choices. It is the sense given to the words rather than the bare words themselves that matters most.

Though Boulnois’s preferred translation of proairesis as “resolution” definitely has points in its favor, as at least possibly capturing the sense of its dependence on deliberation (which “choice” tends to obscure rather than highlight), the case is less compelling here, where the syntax doesn’t line up and it would be necessary to speak instead of a resolution of the tradeoff. We could still say we “resolved upon” one of the alternatives, but that still doesn’t capture the specific sense of making a judgment based on a comparative evaluation of definite alternatives.

As long as we are speaking of a comparison of definite alternatives rather than a decision that is allegedly made ex nihilo, the comparison basically defines the context, and we are clearly speaking of a normative judgment rather than an arbitrary choice.

It is arbitrary choice that has no applicability to the discernment of what would be a right action. Normative judgment (or for that matter, any kind of comparison between definite things), insofar as it has validity, is precisely not arbitrary, but rather — to a degree we can also assess — “right” for the situation.

Aristotle continues, “But if someone claims that things that are pleasant or beautiful are sources of compulsion (for they exert force even while being external), everything would be forced according to that person, since everyone does everything for the sake of these ends. Also, those who act by force and are unwilling act with pain, while those who act on account of what is pleasant and beautiful do so with pleasure. And it is ridiculous to blame external things but not oneself, for being easily caught by such things, and to take credit oneself for beautiful deeds but blame the pleasant things for one’s shameful deeds. So it appears that what is forced is that of which the source is from outside, while the one who is forced contributes nothing” (pp. 37-38).

For now I will skip to the summary of the immediately following part, which concerns unwillingness that is due to ignorance.

“So since ignorance is possible about all these circumstances in which the action takes place, the person who was ignorant of them seems to have acted unwillingly, and especially in the case of the most controlling circumstances; and the most controlling ones seem to be the things in which the action consists and for the sake of which it was done. And if an action is to be called unwilling as a result of this sort of ignorance, it is also necessary that it be painful to the one who does it and held in regret” (p. 39).

Then he summarizes the whole discussion of willingness and unwillingness. We are responsible for our “willing” acts, and are not responsible for unwilling acts.

“Since an unwilling act is one done by force or on account of ignorance, a willing act would seem to be one of which the source is in oneself, when one knows the particular circumstances in which the action takes place. For things done on account of spiritedness or desire are probably not rightly called unwilling acts. In the first place, none of the other animals would any longer do anything willingly, nor would children. And then, of the things that result from desire and spiritedness, do we do none of them willingly, or do we do the beautiful ones willingly and the shameful ones unwillingly? Or is this ridiculous when one thing is responsible for them? And perhaps it is absurd to call things toward which one ought to extend oneself unwilling, and one ought to get angry at some things and to desire some things, such as health and knowledge. And while unwilling acts seem to be painful, those that result from desire seem to be pleasant. Also, what difference does it make to whether things that are wrong are unwilling acts, that they result from reasoning or from spiritedness? Both kinds of error are to be avoided, and irrational feelings seem to be no less human than reasoning is, so that actions that come from spiritedness and desire belong to the human being too. So it is absurd to set those down as unwilling acts” (pp. 39-40, emphasis added).

Feeling and reason are equally human. Unlike the Stoics, Aristotle does not regard all feeling as an impediment, or as necessarily a source of unfreedom.

Next he turns to an explicit discussion of “choice”.

[Chapter 2.] “Now that willing and unwilling acts have been distinguished, it follows next to go through what concerns choice, for this seems to be what belongs most properly to virtue and to determine one’s character more than one’s actions do. A choice is obviously something willing, but they are not the same thing, as what is willing covers a wider range, since children and the other animals share in willing acts but not in choice, and we speak of things done on the spur of the moment as willing acts, but not as things done as a result of choice. Those who say that choice is desire, or spiritedness, or wishing, or some sort of opinion do not speak rightly. For choice is not shared by irrational beings, while desire and spiritedness are. And a person lacking self-control acts while desiring something but not choosing it, while a person with self-control conversely acts while choosing something but not desiring it. And while desire sets itself against choice, desire does not set itself against desire. And desire is for what is pleasant and painful, while choice is of something neither painful nor pleasant.”

“Still less is it spiritedness, for things done out of spiritedness seem to be the ones least in accord with choice. But surely it is not wishing either, even though that appears a close approximation to it, since there can be no choice of impossible things, and if anyone were to claim to choose something impossible, that person would seem to be foolish; but there is wishing even for impossible things, such as deathlessness. And there is also wishing for things that can in no way be done by oneself, such as for a certain actor to win an award, or for an athlete to win a contest, but no one chooses such things, but only those things one believes could come about by one’s own act. Also, wishing is rather for an end, while choice is of things that are related to the end; for example, we wish to be healthy, but we choose those things by means of which we will become healthy, and we wish to be happy and say so, while it would not fit the meaning to say we choose to be happy, since, universally, choice seems to be concerned with things that are up to us” (pp. 40-41).

Here he is saying not that choice is the efficient cause of action, as the Latin tradition would have it, but rather that it evaluates and compares possible efficient causes, with respect to how well they would serve as means to realize the ends we wish for.

“So it could not be opinion either, since there seems to be opinion about all things, and no less about things that are everlasting or things that are impossible than about things that are up to us; and opinion is divided into the false and the true, not into the bad and the good, while choice is divided into the latter two kinds. Now no doubt no one even claims that choice is the same as opinion as a whole, but it is not even the same as some particular opinion, for by choosing good or bad things we are certain kinds of people, but not by having opinions. And we choose to take or avoid something from among those alternatives, but we have an opinion about what it is or whom it benefits or in what way, while taking or avoiding is not at all what we have as an opinion. And choice is praised for being a choice of what it ought to be, more than for being rightly made, while opinion is praised for being as something truly is. And we choose what we most of all know to be good, but have opinions about things we do not know very well, and it seems not to be the same people who choose best who also have the best opinions, but rather some people seem to have better opinions but to choose what they ought not, on account of vice. And if an opinion comes before a choice or comes along with it, that makes no difference, for we are not considering this, but whether it is the same as any sort of opinion” (pp. 40-41).

Even though Aristotle does not follow Plato’s categorical devaluation of opinion, we can still hear echoes of Plato’s radical contrast between opinion and knowledge.

“What then is choice, or what sort of thing is it, since it is none of the things mentioned? It is obviously something willing, but not everything that is willing is something chosen. But might it just be the one that has been deliberated about first? For choice is involved with reason and thinking things through. And even its name [pro-airesis] seems to give a hint that it is something taken before [pro] other things”

In saying here that choice is involved with reason and thinking things through, and in suggesting that it “might just be” the outcome of deliberation, Aristotle anticipates what will be his eventual conclusion. Quite the opposite of being exercised in a vacuum, Aristotelian choice is the rational outcome of deliberation.

[Chapter 3.] “But do people deliberate about all things, and is everything a thing to be deliberated about, or about some things is deliberation not possible? Perhaps one ought to mean by a thing to be deliberated about, not what some fool or insane person might deliberate about, but those things that people with sense would deliberate about. Now no one deliberates about everlasting things, such as the cosmos, or about the diagonal and side of a square, that they are incommensurable; but neither does one deliberate about things that are in motion but always happen according to the same pattern, whether by necessity or else by nature or by means of some other cause, such as solstices and the risings of stars; nor about things that are sometimes one way and sometimes another such as drought and rain; nor about things that are by chance, such as finding a treasure; but not about all human things either, as no Spartan deliberates about how the Scythians should best be governed, for none of these things could happen through us. We deliberate about things that are up to us and are matters of action, and these are the ones that are left. For the causes responsible for things seem to be in nature, necessity, and chance, and also intelligence and everything that is due to a human being. And among human beings, each sort deliberates about the things to be done by its own acts.”

“And there is no deliberation about the precise and self-contained kinds of knowledge, such as about letters (for we are not in doubt about how something ought to be spelled), but as many things as come about by our act, but not always in the same way, about these we do deliberate, for example about the things done by medical skill or skill in business, and more so about piloting a ship than about gymnastic training, to the extent that the former is less precisely formulated, and similarly also about the rest of the skills but more about those that are arts than those that are kinds of knowledge, since we are more in doubt in connection with the former. Deliberating is present in things that happen in a certain way for the most part, but are unclear as to how they will turn out, and in which this is undetermined. And we take others as fellow deliberators for large issues, not trusting that we ourselves are adequate to decide them. We deliberate not about ends but about the things that are related to the ends, for a doctor does not deliberate about whether he will cure someone, nor a rhetorician about whether he will persuade, nor someone holding political office about whether he will produce good order, nor does anyone else deliberate about ends, but having set down the end, they consider in what way and by what means it would be the case.”

“When it appears that the end would come about by more than one means, people examine through which of them it will come about most easily and beautifully, but if the end will be accomplished by only one means, they examine how it will come to be through this means, and this in turn through some other, until they come to the first thing that will be responsible for the end, which is the last thing in the process of discovery” (pp. 40-42, emphasis added).

“What is deliberated about and what is chosen are the same thing, except that the thing chosen is already determined, since the thing chosen is what is decided out of the deliberation” (p. 43).

Aristotelian choice is the rational and feeling evaluative outcome of a well-rounded and multi-dimensional deliberation, not a power of arbitration or an arbitrary power that would allegedly be superior to reason and human feeling.