 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode? It's the Thought That Counts, Abelard's Ethics. I was recently at a gathering of historians of philosophy—yes, that's the kind of jet-set exciting life I lead—when someone made a general observation about medieval philosophers. Someone else mentioned Peter Abelard as an exception. The first historian replied that Abelard doesn't count because he was not a medieval philosopher but a modern philosopher who time-traveled to the medieval age. And indeed, when you read Abelard, you notice how easily he would fit into a modern-day department of analytic philosophers. All the traits are there—the sardonic tone of voice, the confidence in his own sharpness of mind, the bold and original theoretical claims, and the relentless defense of those claims by anticipating and undercutting all possible objections. Like modern-day philosophers, Abelard loved to work with examples—the more vivid and thought-provoking the better. Here are just a few drawn from his writings on ethics. Two men want to build a house to serve the poor, but only one of them can do so because he is wealthy whereas the other is himself destitute. A servant is pursued by a lord who has lost his mind and is forced to kill him in self-defense, even though the servant's active insubordination will certainly bring terrible consequences. A monk is trapped in a bed with a group of affectionate women and cannot escape sexual pleasure as a result. A poor woman smothers her own baby by rolling over on him in the night. Or, if those examples aren't controversial enough for you, what about the men who were adamantly convinced that it was morally right for them to execute Jesus Christ? Just as the story of Abelard and Heloise needed no introduction, so Abelard's use of examples is hard to improve upon, and I won't be replacing them with scenarios about giraffes or classic film stars. In fact, I'm even more tempted than usual to tell you to forget about listening to this podcast and just go read Abelard instead. Well, that might be going a bit far. The best thing is if you do both. The work I recommend to you is called The Ethics, or alternatively Know Thyself, and it makes use of all the examples I just mentioned. Let's start by considering the case of sponsoring a house to shelter the poor. I think we can all agree that this is a good thing to do. But what exactly does the goodness consist in, and where is it to be located? The answer seems obvious. The building of a poor house is a good thing, which is why we praise the sponsor who arranges for the house to be built. The same would be the case with a sinful action. For instance, if someone commits adultery, we blame him for doing so because engaging in adultery is wrong. Apparently then, it is actions that are good and bad, right and wrong. So it is by performing actions that people are good and bad, righteous or sinful, praiseworthy or blameworthy. Abelard denies this however, and with his example provides a powerful reason for doing so. He asks us to imagine not one, but two people who want to sponsor a poor house. Abelard doesn't give them names, so let's just call them Groucho and Harpo. You have to let me have a bit of fun. They are equal in their moral zeal, their sympathy for the plight of the poor, and their desire to do something to help the indigent. Both of them decide to have a poor house built, but with differing results. In Groucho's case, everything runs smoothly, but poor Harpo is robbed by a thief before he can donate the money, leaving him unable to sponsor a dollhouse to shelter church mice, never mind a real house to shelter people who are as poor as church mice. Now Abelard asks us, do we really give Groucho more credit, morally speaking, than Harpo? The only reason Groucho has the house built, and Harpo does not, is that Groucho can do so and Harpo cannot, but this seems to be a matter of luck, not of moral character. What this shows is that the action, in this case sponsoring the house, cannot actually be the thing we care about when we are considering right and wrong. Abelard has a battery of other examples to prove the same point. Suppose that Chico and Zeppo are judges who both condemn men to be executed. The two condemned men really are criminals who deserve to be put to death, so in both cases the judgments can be considered just. However, in passing down his sentence, Chico is motivated simply by the desire to make the right decision, whereas Zeppo harbors a secret vendetta against the man he is condemning. He would have sentenced the defendant to death no matter what. Even though our two judges performed exactly the same action, it seems clear that Chico has done right, whereas Zeppo has done wrong. Again, we see that actions in themselves are not morally decisive. Abelard also uses the more theologically loaded example of handing over Jesus Christ to be crucified. This is an action that was performed by God the Father who allowed his son to be sacrificed, but also by Judas who was betraying Christ. Obviously, we don't make the same moral judgment concerning God that we do in the case of Judas. Actions by themselves, then, are neither good nor bad. So, we need to look somewhere else to find right and wrong. An obvious place would be the desires and motivations that bring people to perform their actions. Think of the examples we've already considered. The reason we admire both Groucho and Harpo, it seems, is that both have the right sort of desire, namely to help the poor. It's just that being poor himself, Harpo can't fulfill this desire, whereas Groucho can. And the reason we admire Chico the judge and not Zeppo is that Chico is genuinely trying to pass down the right verdict, whereas Zeppo is motivated by revenge. Likewise, Christians admire God the Father but curse Judas because they believe God gave his son for the sake of redeeming mankind, whereas Judas was motivated by greed and resentment. Plausible though this may seem at first blush, it is problematic to say that motives and desires are the proper objects of moral judgment. After all, can you really be blamed for having wicked desires, the sort of motivations that Abelard calls a bad will? Perhaps you are powerfully tempted by opportunities to overeat, betray your friends, and cast aspersions on the Marx Brothers. But we wouldn't and shouldn't judge you harshly just for having these desires so long as you manage to resist them. In fact, Abelard goes so far as to say that it is more admirable to avoid sin when temptation is powerful. It's easy to avoid wrongdoing when you have no urge to do wrong. The difficult thing is resisting sins you would very much like to commit. This is why we admire those who struggle against their own bad wills and prevail more than we admire those who have no bad will in the first place. Indeed, you might wonder whether someone who is just lucky enough to have a good will is admirable at all. If you are simply the sort of person who gets a kick out of helping old ladies across the street and volunteering for charities and never feels the compunction to do anything wrong, then we might describe you as fortunate rather than morally outstanding. Abelard is putting his finger on a deep philosophical quandary here, one that is often framed in terms of a contrast between Aristotle and Immanuel Kant. Aristotle was convinced that virtuous people take pleasure in doing virtuous things and have a strong desire to do so, in part because they have the habit of acting well and people enjoy whatever is customary for them. Kant instead is going to argue that people must be acting out of moral duty if their actions are actually to count as morally good. If they happen to desire and enjoy virtue, that's fine, but it has nothing to do with morality. Abelard is an important forerunner of Kant's position in this controversy. In fact, he seems to be suggesting an even more radical view than Kant's, namely that you must have bad desires and resist them if you are to be rightly congratulated for being virtuous. As Abelard puts it, people who are born with a tendency towards sinful lusts have been given material for a fight so that victorious over themselves through the virtue of moderation they might obtain a crown. Though he doesn't quite come out and say so, it seems that for him, the most admirable people would be the ones who have the worst desires while managing to prevail in the struggle against those desires. While this aspect of Abelard's moral theory is, to say the least, open to dispute, he has an almost irresistible argument against the idea that desires and motivations make all the difference between good and bad. This is that people sometimes do wrong while acting against their desires. As usual, he offers a vivid example. This is the case of the servant who kills his feudal lord in self-defense. It's certainly something he would not want to do, given the reprisals that will certainly be meted out to any medieval servant who kills his lord. But he does it nonetheless, because if he doesn't, his lord is going to murder him instead. Of course, usually when people sin, they are acting on a sinful desire, but this example shows that that can't always be the case. Perhaps then, we could say something slightly different, namely that the sin consists in enjoying a wrongful action. The servant example is unusual, in that it is a case where such an action is committed reluctantly, but usually people take pleasure in wicked behavior. So it might be this reveling in sin that marks people as sinful. But yet again, Abelard argues that this cannot be right. It's here that he gives his example of a man who has taken a sincere vow of chastity, but who is chained down and forced to enjoy sex with women. As we know from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, this is the sort of thing that happened from time to time in the Middle Ages. Again, it's hard to argue against Abelard's point once he has given you the example. Clearly there is a difference between sinning and taking enjoyment in sinning. So now, we seem to be stuck. If morality isn't a matter of which action you perform, nor a matter of what motivations lead you to act the way you do, nor a matter of taking pleasure in wrongdoing, then where do the wickedness of sin and the righteousness of virtue reside? Abelard's answer is that they lie in consenting to a desire, in other words in forming an intention to act in a certain way. Consider again the man who is chained down and forced to abandon his chastity. Don't worry, or for that matter get your hopes up, because this won't be getting graphic. The reason he is not to be condemned for the sinful activity that ensues, or for the pleasure he gets out of it, is that he is not consented to what is happening. If he were released from his chains, he would immediately flee from this temptation. His case, then, is entirely different from that of someone who intentionally breaks a vow of chastity. In light of this observation, we can now see that there are four stages involved in any action, whether sinful, virtuous, or morally neutral. First, we have a desire, or will, that motivates us to perform the action. We do not necessarily have any control over whether or not we have a certain desire, we may simply find that we have it. What we can control is whether or not we consent to a desire, as opposed to resisting it. Giving consent then is a second stage, which consists in forming an intention to act on the desire in question. Then, the action itself is a further third stage. Just as the desire does not guarantee consent, so consent to the desire does not guarantee acting on it, something might prevent the action from occurring, as when Harpo's poverty stops him from performing an act of charity. Fourth and finally, if one does succeed in performing the action, there will come the results of acting, which could include taking pleasure in sin. Abelard's theory, then, amounts to the claim that morality has to do only with the second stage of consent. Good and bad lie with the intentions we form, not the desires we have, the actions we perform, or the pleasure we take in them. Like any interesting philosophical claim, Abelard's idea not only has some good arguments behind it, but also some difficult objections to face. The most obvious one, perhaps, is this. What makes good intentions good and bad ones bad? The natural thing to say would be that an intention is good if it intends a good action, and bad if it intends a bad action. But Abelard is telling us that all actions are in themselves morally neutral. So it can't be, for instance, the sinfulness of committing adultery that makes it wrong to intend to commit adultery. Rather, it must be the other way around. Whereas Abelard's position so far has, like his writing style, been one that would not be out of place in contemporary philosophy, his solution to this problem is one that strikes a more medieval note. He thinks that sinful intentions are the ones that show contempt for God by consenting to desires that God wants us to resist. Conversely, good intentions are the ones that would please God, though we don't hear much about these because Abelard's ethics breaks off just after the start of the second book, which was planned to cover goodness. This does not mean, though, that Abelard is telling us that morality is just a matter of following biblical commandments. Though he doesn't say much about this issue, he seems to think that natural reason is capable of discerning good from bad, that is, of telling which desires ought to receive our consent. So, he is convinced that pagans, especially pagan philosophers, were capable of virtue. And, historically speaking, Abelard is right to claim common ground with non-Christian thinkers. His ethical theory is similar to one we saw a long time ago in the Stoics. They also thought that human action involves giving consent to a motivating impression that one ought to do something. Abelard is especially close to Roman Stoics like Epictetus, who likewise argued that the morally decisive thing is the exercise of one's power of choice, or pro heiressis. However, Epictetus argued for this by pointing to the fact that choice alone is completely under our power. Abelard, by contrast, reaches the same conclusion by showing that we do not really blame or praise people for their desires or even for the actions they perform, but for the fact that they consented to do such and such an action. Another objection arises here though. We often reward and punish people for their actions, whereas we hardly ever do this because of their intentions. Consider, for instance, the fact that we send people to jail for murder, but don't imprison people for merely forming the intention to kill. If a would-be murderer doesn't even get to the stage of attempting the murder, then he is guilty of no crime. This seems to show that it is actually the action we care about after all. You'll never guess how Abelard meets this objection. Yes, with an example. He asks us to imagine a poverty-stricken woman who takes her child into her bed to keep him warm and tragically smothers him in her sleep. Here, the desire and the intention to kill the baby are very much absent, yet she might be told by a priest to do penance for what has happened. Why is this? For purely pragmatic reasons, says Abelard. We want to discourage other women from doing the same thing, so we make a lesson of the woman even though she is morally innocent. This is a good answer, I think, and it can be generalized. The reason we spend so much time evaluating, punishing, and praising actions is that they are our only guides to finding out what intentions people had, even if they may be imperfect guides. Actions are public and observable, whereas intentions are not. So, we must look to the things people do to find out what they chose to do, but strictly speaking, we judge them on their choices, not on their actions as such. It's also worth emphasizing that even if actions are in themselves morally neutral, on Abelard's theory, that doesn't mean that they are morally neutral in every respect. Rather, they become good or bad precisely by stemming from good or bad intentions. But the road to hell is famously paved with good intentions. What if someone does something truly appalling while intending to carry out God's will? In that sort of case, wouldn't we condemn the appalling action despite the fact that the person was doing their best to act well? Abelard discusses this problem too. In a passage that he must have known would shock his readers, he comments that those who crucified Christ were acting in ignorance and doing what they thought was right. On this basis, he maintains that what they did was not really a sin, which is why Christ said, Forgive them, for they know not what they do. Abelard even remarks that they would have been more blameworthy if they had failed to persecute Christ given that they thought it was morally right to do so, because it is always a sin to fail to do what you think you ought to do. Yet, he still wants to say that what they did was somehow wrong. This makes most sense if we take Abelard to be thinking that intentions have to tick two boxes in order to be good. Firstly, the person involved must believe that what they are intending is right. Secondly, the intention must in fact actually be right, that is, actually be what God would want. Let's close by considering whether all this really is as pioneering as I've suggested. Was Abelard a kind of conceptual time traveler? Just by itself, his emphasis on intention fits rather well into the landscape of 12th century moral theory. In particular, Abelard's enemy Anselm of Léon had already said that merely forming an intention to sin is itself sinful. But Anselm also assumed that the subsequent action is sinful. What was unique and genuinely radical about Abelard was that he denied this and insisted on the moral neutrality of actions in themselves. Some scholars have traced this development to the influence of Heloise, or seen it as a joint effort by the two lovers. In one of her letters to Abelard, Heloise looks back upon their earlier dalliance and says that she is both wholly guilty and wholly innocent. For, sinful though her actions were, they were done out of sincere love. At which point she adds, It is not the doing of the thing, but the condition of the doer, which makes the crime. And justice should weigh not what was done, but the spirit in which it was done. But this does not really show agreement between Heloise and Abelard. In fact, thinking that it does, runs the risk of underestimating the sophistication and interest of Heloise's letter. She sees her former self as illustrating the paradox that, someone can do wrong precisely because of a motivation that is itself good, namely love. Elsewhere in her letters, she uses her current self to illustrate the flip side of the same paradox. In her soul, she still yearns for Abelard even though her outward comportment is chaste. Where Abelard insisted that good actions become good because of their good intentions, Heloise insisted that an innocent soul is compatible with exterior sin. While a tormented soul may lead an outwardly blameless life. We should not fall into the trap of thinking that Heloise's interest as a moral thinker is exhausted by the impact she may have had on Abelard. Medieval women could have minds of their own, and Heloise certainly did. There's more to say about how Abelard compares to his contemporaries, especially two other leading figures of 12th century intellectual life, his chief antagonist Bernard of Clairvaux and Hugh of St. Victor, the most influential theologian of the age along with Abelard. But before broadening our view of this period, I want to focus on Abelard himself for one more episode. For that purpose, I'll be joined by a guest who is becoming something of a fixture in this podcast series, and who is one of the world's leading Abelard scholars, John Marin Bon. Why not form the intention now to join me for an interview with him next time on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.