Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 262 - On Command - Scotus on Ethics.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. You can sign up at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode ... On Command, SCOTUS on Ethics. My parents knew a minister who spent a week living on a few dollars a day to draw attention to the plight of the poor. At church, a member of the parish came up to her and said she had seen a picture of the minister's family having dinner in the paper and was shocked. Why shocked? inquired the minister. The parishioner's response? No matter how poor one is, or is pretending to be, one can still serve one's ketchup from a bowl. You have to admire this sort of unwavering commitment to right and wrong. Some things are just not acceptable under any circumstances. Okay, perhaps serving ketchup out of a bottle is not one of them, but here's a different example. What about killing your own child? I'm glad to say my parents don't have a story about that. There is one in the Bible though. In chapter 22 of the book of Genesis, we are told how God instructed Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac on a mountaintop. Abraham dutifully obeys and prepares his son upon an altar. But just as he is grasping hold of the knife to do the terrible deed, an angel is sent to tell Abraham to stop. He has passed the test and need not kill his son after all. Despite the happy ending, this passage can easily provoke theological and philosophical perplexity. How can the same God who sent down the Ten Commandments, including thou shalt not kill, demand that Abraham slay his own son? And if we accept that Abraham was right to obey God, does that show that any action, even the murder of one's own family members, could be righteous in sufficiently extreme circumstances? The mere thought may seem to throw the whole of morality into question. To see how, go have a look at Fear and Trembling by the 19th century Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard. He uses the case of Abraham and Isaac to show that we may have duties higher than the requirements of ethics. Within the ethical realm, it is wrong to kill one's child, but a divine command can trump ethical considerations. Another way of thinking about it might be that the rule against killing still holds, but not under just any circumstances. Just think back to our discussion of Medieval Just War theory when we saw the Medievals explaining exactly that thou shalt sometimes go ahead and kill after all, and this on supposedly good Christian principles. There is yet another way of thinking about the Abraham case, and it's this third way I want to talk about in today's episode. Instead of thinking of God's commands as extraordinary events that override or change our moral duty, we might see divine commands as the source of all moral obligation. We should do whatever God wants us to do, and because He wants us to do it. While you might not find this a particularly tempting idea, you can probably see why Medievals would be attracted to it. We've regularly seen them saying that God is the highest good and source of all good, just as He is the highest being who is the source of all being, and highest truth who is the source of all truth. At the very least, Medievals would find it plausible that our knowledge of moral duty comes from God, since on the popular illumination theory, our knowledge in general comes from God. So, we find Hugh of St. Victor saying that our understanding of good and evil is a kind of command given to the heart of man. Of course, the Bible itself might also encourage this way of thinking. Abraham is praised for his willingness to sacrifice his son, if it is the will of God, and all of us are bound by the Ten Commandments given to Moses. Modern day philosophers call this the divine command theory of ethics. According to this theory, God is a kind of legislator of morality, whose decrees establish right and wrong. Of course, this means that had God legislated differently, right and wrong would be different. He does not look to some objective set of ethical standards when He tells us what to do, but makes up His own divine mind what He wants us to do. Within a religious framework, this actually makes a lot of sense. It would explain obligations to follow certain dietary laws, or to carry out certain rituals in certain ways. One might be able to come up with independent reasons for going on pilgrimage to Mecca, avoiding pork, or remaining chased outside the bounds of marriage, but it's far simpler for religious believers to say that they do these things because God told them to. Likewise, why not just say that we are to avoid murder and theft because God's commandments forbid them? The downside is that if God commands us to commit murder, as He did with Abraham, then we will have a moral duty to perform an apparently immoral action. Yesterday's wrong will be today's new right. Even if we suppose that God never actually changes the moral laws, the mere fact that He could do so is already quite troubling. It seems irresistible to think that in such a case God would be evil. To see this, just consider how you would react to the Abraham story if God had let him go ahead and kill Isaac. Could you really believe that this was the right thing for Abraham to do? And could you really believe that God was being just rather than cruel and tyrannical? Well, maybe you could if you were done Scodas. We can see immediately why he might like the divine command theory. As we saw in the last episode, Scodas is a voluntarist who lays great emphasis on God's untrammeled freedom. Even the natures of things are, for him, ultimately grounded in God's will. Before God creates giraffes, He first grafts their natures and so creates them in intelligible being. So, even when we are doing non-moral reasoning, like when we undertake scientific inquiry into the nature of giraffes, in a sense we are just exploring the choices made by God. It wouldn't be at all surprising if Scodas thought the same is true of moral reasoning. And this is indeed pretty much what he thinks. We do find earlier thinkers, such as Philip the Chancellor, making moves in the direction of ethical voluntarism or divine command theory, but Scodas's new ideas about the contingency of the created order allow him to develop such a theory with unprecedented sophistication. God could have created the world differently, so that there might have been no giraffes, or murder might have been morally acceptable. It's hard to see which of those would be more horrifying. You wouldn't be surprised that Scodas develops this idea by drawing a subtle distinction. If you've lost track of how many such distinctions we've seen Scodas make, I don't blame you. He'd probably tell you that the number depends on exactly how you count distinctions. In this case, he contrasts the absolute and ordained power of God. God's absolute power is His ability to do anything whatsoever that can be done. On Scodas's understanding of possibility, this means that God has the absolute power to do anything that is not repugnant to itself or self-contradictory. We can see immediately why this fits the divine command theory. Since there is no contradiction in, say, allowing sex outside of marriage, God could have allowed it had He chosen to do so. But once God has laid down a natural and moral order, He can continue to act within that order. Because it involves adhering to such an established order, this is called ordained power. So far it sounds like morality for Scodas would be determined solely by God's choices, with no constraints whatsoever on those choices. But actually this isn't quite right. For one thing, there is the constraint I just mentioned. God's absolute power doesn't enable Him to do or command things that are just incoherent. As we saw last time, God cannot create a chimera, because chimeras are intrinsically impossible, since nothing with the nature of a lion can also have the nature of a snake and a goat. Similarly, Scodas believes that God cannot release us from the responsibility to love Him. This is because God is the highest good, and what is good is intrinsically lovable. So a kind of contradiction would be implied if God told us to hate Him. This emerges in Scodas's discussion of the Ten Commandments, a key text for his moral theory. He thinks that the commandments of the first table, namely the first four which regard our duties to God, are just a spelling out of the inevitable requirement to love God. The remaining commandments have to do with our relations to created things, and these are subject to God's will. With this move, Scodas has radically rethought the traditional idea of natural law. Prominently mentioned in Gracian's Decretum, the concept of natural law was expounded by numerous 13th century theologians, including Aquinas. For him, morality is promulgated by being written into our very nature, giving us the ability to use our inborn reason to discern right from wrong. This means that, for Aquinas too, the moral law does stem ultimately from God, but only in the sense that it is God who created us and gave us our human nature and capacity for reasoning. For Scodas, natural law in the strict sense includes much less. In fact, it includes only the inevitable requirement to love God, and the further obligations that stem directly from this, such as not worshiping graven images, the third commandment. The rest of the commandments are consonant with this fundamental moral principle, but do depend on God's voluntary decree. This is why they can be revoked, as when Abraham was suddenly commanded to kill instead of not killing. Here we come to another constraint on what God can command. We may be able to accept that He can change the rules and tell Abraham to sacrifice his son, but surely God cannot command Abraham both to kill and not to kill. That would be another case of incoherence or self-contradiction. The same applies to the moral order more generally. The laws must be coherent. Indeed, that's why they merit the name of an order. This could help Scodas respond to an obvious complaint against his ethical voluntarism. If God just freely decides what is good and what is bad, then there will be no point at all in moral reasoning. All we could do is consult Scripture and follow the rules. But if the moral order is consistent and coherent, as Scodas insists, then there is a place for such reasoning after all. Once God has laid down the contingent order that prevails in our world, it is possible for us to study that order and understand our place within it. This is an eminently rational enterprise, and again it is not unlike what we do in natural science, where we use reason to understand the created world that God chose to bring into existence. Nonetheless, Scodas is departing radically from the sort of ethical doctrine we find in Aquinas and above all in Aristotle. For Aristotle, human nature is the foundation of ethics. To be a good person is to be an excellent human, which means making excellent use of reason, the distinctively human faculty. The habit of excellent reasoning that gives rise to excellent action is called virtue. For an Aristotelian, virtue is like a second nature, an acquired disposition to do the right thing in each circumstance. Thus a person who has the virtue of generosity will, upon seeing someone in need, judge that they are to be helped and perform a generous act, perhaps by giving them money or recommending a good podcast. Moreover, someone who really has this virtue is going to have other virtues as well, like courage, temperance, and wisdom. All the virtues are bound together by a capacity for good practical reasoning, which Aristotle calls furnesis and the medieval's called prudencia or prudence. Last but not least, for Aristotle, having and exercising the virtues is what makes humans happy, the end towards which his entire ethics is directed. The ultimate end of happiness moves us to act as we pursue the most excellent and blessed life possible. Scodas modifies or rejects every aspect of this Aristotelian picture. For starters, human nature cannot be the ultimate ground of ethics because human nature itself is contingently created by God. Furthermore, while Scodas agrees that virtue is the disposition to choose well, he denies that virtue explains morally good choice. This is because virtue always points the way towards the good. In this sense, virtue is not a properly rational cause, which has the ability to pick between different alternatives, but like a natural cause such as fire, which always gives rise to heat. If choice is involved, then we need more than virtue, we need the will. Even if you have the virtue of easily and consistently discerning the right thing to do, your will must still make the right choice on each occasion. And of course, good actions are not good because they proceed from virtuous dispositions, as an Aristotelian might think, or because they conform to the ends of human nature. A good action is good because God commanded it. Scodas is no more satisfied with the Aristotelian story when it comes to prudence and the unity of the virtues. He thinks it's obvious that you can have some virtues and lack others. For one thing, you might find yourself in a situation where you cannot practice or exercise virtue in a certain sphere. A person who grows up stranded on a desert island might be resourceful, moderate, and wise, but is not going to have much chance to work on generosity or sociability. And in any case, the will's inviolable power to choose well or badly on each occasion means that there is no guarantee that tending to choose well in one sphere will mean doing so in another. For the same reason, Scodas cannot accept the notion that good practical reasoning, or prudence, will guarantee good action. For prudence belongs to the intellect, not the will. Someone might understand perfectly well that they should not commit adultery, but go ahead and do it anyway. A final, in every sense of the word, disagreement with the Aristotelians concerns the question of happiness. We saw that Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, seeking to hold onto as much of Aristotle's ethical teachings as they could, distinguished two types or levels of happiness. We can attain a degree of happiness in this life through virtuous activity, with a higher happiness secured through a vision of God in the afterlife. In both cases, the final end of happiness moves us to engage in practical action or to pursue understanding. Scodas thinks this is wrong. Obviously we are not moved by any end to choose that end, not even by God. For Scodas, the will is a self-mover, since otherwise our willing would be constrained and unfree. Besides, no human activity can secure happiness, since we can be happy only through the greatest of goods which is God. Though it may be reasonable to pursue created goods in this life, we cannot be satisfied with them, nor should we forget that, as Scodas puts it, everything other than God is good because it is willed by God and not vice versa. This God-centered moral theory may sound like a reassertion of Augustine against Aristotle. It certainly banishes any prospect that we might naturally attain or merit happiness and salvation, and in that respect Scodas is on the same page as Augustine. But Scodas disagrees with Augustine on a different point. Having demoted natural virtues so far, he sees no problem with the idea that we can in fact be naturally virtuous without the help of God, something Augustine denied. For similar reasons, he has no use for Aquinas's idea that there are divinely infused as well as natural virtues. All of this may seem to leave a gap in Scodas's moral theory, and you know how I feel about gaps. If virtue doesn't, as it were, spontaneously give rise to good action, then how and why do we act rightly? Of course, part of the answer is that we choose to do so through the will, but on what basis? Is it just random luck? Here Scodas looks back to an early medieval predecessor, namely Anselm. He likes Anselm's idea that we have two kinds of motivation which often come into conflict with one another. On the one hand, we want what is useful to ourselves. On the other, we have an inclination towards justice that remains intact even in our state of original sin. As we saw, prudence doesn't guarantee that we will choose justice over our own advantage, but it has an important role to play nonetheless in helping us to see which actions are and are not just. When you deliberate about the right thing to do, you are engaging in this kind of reasoning, and thanks to your inborn affection for justice, you have a motivation to choose in accordance with the advice that results, even if the freedom of your will means that there is no guarantee you will do so. One lesson to draw from all this might be that morality really has to do only with the choices made by the will. If you choose in accordance with the moral law laid down by God, then you have acted rightly. The action that results from the choice would really be only a byproduct with the moral value residing solely with the choice. This is the view that was taken in the 12th century by Peter Abelard, who taught that actions in themselves are neither good nor bad. What is good or bad is the intention to perform an action, as shown by the fact that one and the same action could be performed out of a good intention or a bad one. I might donate money to charity to help others, or to impress my friends. While Scotus's voluntarism might seem to fit nicely with Abelard's idea, he doesn't go as far as he might have in this direction. For that, we have to wait for William of Ockham, who also enthusiastically embraces voluntarism, and does say that morality concerns only the interior act of the soul, which gives rise to an outward physical action. So, for example, Ockham will say that God rewards and punishes people for their interior choices, and not for what they actually do. Scotus takes a more moderate view. He certainly agrees that interior choices can be morally good or bad. But following other Franciscan thinkers like Bonaventure and Richard of Middleton, he also emphasizes that the outward act acquires a moral character of its own by flowing from a good or bad choice. This helps him explain something else about the biblical commandments. If you look over the list, it won't take long, there are only ten of them, you might notice that we are instructed not to covet another person's spouse, and also not to commit adultery. In a view like Abelard's or Ockham's, this might seem redundant. The problem is the coveting, not the adulterous act to which the coveting leads. For Scotus, though, the exterior act of adultery has a wrongness of its own, despite being caused by an act of will that is already wrong in and of itself. The name of Peter Abelard happily gives us a nice transition to the next topic I've chosen to tackle from among the many subtleties of Scotus. If you do remember Abelard, you will probably recall three things about him. The moral theory I just mentioned, his nominalist stance regarding universals, and the fact that he regretfully separated from Heloise after being forcibly separated from an intimate part of himself. The good news for Scotus is that it's not the last of these that will be relevant next time. Instead, I want to look at how Scotus dealt with the issue of universals. This will help set up the return to nominalism we'll see in 14th century figures who reacted against the qualified realism of Scotus's metaphysics. So here is something you shouldn't do under any circumstances. Miss the next episode of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.