Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 271 - Do As You’re Told - Ockham on Ethics and Political Philosophy.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, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Do As You're Told, Occam on Ethics and Political Philosophy. The medieval world was a world of hierarchies. Land holding and military service were organized through feudalism, with every man but the king having to fulfill obligations to his lord. The church too was hierarchically arranged with the pope at its apex. Philosophy and theology were no exception. After moving through the stratified educational system of the university, scholastics would speculate about angels arranged in descending ranks, about the subordination of all human sciences within a single system, and about the created universe itself, which was seen as a hierarchically ordered cosmos ruled by God. Yet, as we've been seeing, it was also a time of dissension and schism. There was rivalry between hierarchies, with the popes and emperors contending to be the truly supreme representatives of God on earth. And there was tension within hierarchies too, as when nobles resisted the demands of their kings, or clerics protested at the conduct or decrees of wicked popes. But how could such dissent be justified? How do we reject the leaders of our institutions without rejecting the legitimacy of the institutions themselves? A number of scholars came to grips with this question in the Middle Ages, none with more seriousness or subtlety than William of Ockham. In fact, he is sometimes called the more-than-subtle doctor to indicate that he surpassed the subtle doctor Duns Scotus. In his later years, Ockham devoted himself to polemics against a pope whom he considered to be a heretic. In the process, he developed something like a theory of principled disobedience. This is ironic, because his earlier scholastic work features an ethical theory which takes obedience as its core idea. Like the merely subtle Scotus, Ockham was inclined to think that right and wrong are generated by divine commands. Under certain circumstances, you may encourage people to depose a wicked pope, but if the ruler you're dealing with is God, you should just do as you're told. We can divide Ockham's career into two parts. Appropriately enough, the life-changing event that marks the division in his biography took place in the city indelibly associated with schism, Avignon. He went there in 1324 to defend himself against charges of heresy. Prior to that, he received his training at Greyfriars, the Franciscan convent in London, and then pursued a degree in theology at Oxford. But he returned to London without becoming a master of theology, which is why he is sometimes also called the venerable Inceptor, surely the least catchy nickname in all of medieval philosophy. It just means that he remained a beginner. Still, his time at Oxford gave him the chance to lecture on the sentences of Peter Lombard, and we have written records of these lectures, as well as many disputed questions and writings on logic from the first part of his career. So, the genres within which Ockham was working are familiar, but his ideas were sufficiently daring that they provoked intense opposition. Ockham frequently developed his ideas by criticizing Scotus, and Scotus' followers, like William of Alnwick and John of Reading, lucked to defend their master. It may have been John of Reading who asked the papal court to look into the orthodoxy of Ockham's teachings on such issues as the Eucharist. Ockham's views were criticized at Avignon, but he was not actually pronounced a heretic. Yet it was not his fate to return to his native England to live out his life writing disputed questions. Instead, he was swept up in the highly political clash between the Franciscan mendicants and Pope John XXII over that most disputed of questions in this period, the possibility of absolute poverty. Ockham threw in his lot with the head of the Franciscan order, Michael of Cizena, and they fled from Avignon in 1328. These renegade Franciscans found sanctuary with Ludwig of Bavaria, the same man who gave patronage and protection to Marcellius of Padua, which explains why, here in Munich, there is an Ockhamstrasse right near where I work. It also explains why, from 1328 until his death in 1347, Ockham devoted his writing to political topics. As I've said though, Ockham was a controversial figure long before he got to Munich. One of the teachings that raised eyebrows in Avignon gives us some insight into how radical and uncompromising he could be, and how willing he was to follow his principles to their conclusions. He claimed that God could, if he so wished, require us to commit adultery or steal, and that if he did so, it would be right for us to obey. He even speculated about God commanding us to hate him, something that was picked out by the Avignon commission as particularly problematic. Why would Ockham say these things? Well, he was a standard bearer of voluntarism, the view developed by Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus, which insisted that both divine and human will are capable of uncaused decision-making unconstrained by any outside necessity. Ockham follows in the footsteps of Scotus by making moral laws subject to God's will. It's only a natural inference from this that, if God did tell you to commit adultery, it would become morally right for you to do so. But don't get your hopes up. Ockham doesn't dream that God will actually issue any such command. It's just that, in principle, he could. There's a scholarly controversy about Ockham's ethical theory though. It's clear enough that he ascribes God great latitude in fashioning the moral law. But is it really the case that we ought to, for instance, avoid committing adultery simply because he has told us that adultery is wrong? If so, then Ockham would simply be taking forward Duns Scotus's divine command theory of ethics. But interpreters have pointed to passages in Ockham's work that suggest a more complicated position. For one thing, he often invokes the role of right reason and conscience in morality. He goes so far as to say, in fact, that no action can be virtuous unless it is guided by right reason. If you just spontaneously and unthinkingly help an old lady across the street, give money to the poor, or recommend your favorite podcast to someone in dire need of philosophical inspiration, it doesn't count as a morally virtuous act. You have to do these things because they are the right thing to do, and in fact, for only this reason. This may seem unnecessarily strict. So long as the old lady gets across the street, who cares what is going on in my mind when I decide to offer her assistance? Helping her is an intrinsically good thing to do, isn't it? Not according to Ockham. He insists that any action considered in itself is morally neutral. He gives the example of walking to church. Someone might set out towards church because of religious devotion, but then along the way, start to fantasize about seducing one of the other parishioners. Here the very same journey is at first motivated by love of God, then by adulterous lust. In Ockham's estimation, this one act thus starts out as morally praiseworthy, but becomes wicked part way through. And things could go the other way around. He asks us to consider someone who commits suicide by jumping off a cliff. Since suicide is wrong, this counts as a sinful act. But if the person changes his mind halfway down, his continued fall is no longer sinful because it no longer stems from his will. The conclusion can be generalized. Since any action can be done out of a variety of motives, a virtuous action gets its character only from the process of practical reasoning and volition that gave rise to it. There's a further reason for Ockham to stress the role of natural reasoning in ethics. Somehow, people do manage to act well despite being ignorant of divine revelation. The pagans who lived before Christ seem, in some cases, to have been downright heroic. Just consider Socrates or Cato the Younger, both widely admired for their bravery in resisting tyranny. Such characters obviously represent a serious difficulty for any divine command theory of ethics. Somehow, these virtuous pagans managed to play the game of morality expertly despite never having learned the rules. Ockham resolves the difficulty by pointing to the importance of practical rationality in our moral lives. Since pagans were often quite good at reasoning, they frequently managed to discern the right thing to do. But we should not be misled by this into thinking that virtuous actions are good because they are identified as such by reason. Only God's command makes something good. If a pagan manages to distinguish good from bad, it is because she is picking up clues to God's will by examining the created world. Ockham even speaks here of self-evident moral principles, as for instance that the needy should be helped. This is the principle that inspires you to help the old lady or recommend the podcast. But it is only evident to you, or to a pre-Christian pagan, because you live in a world with a particular moral order which is ordained by God. He might have laid down a very different order, in which case the conclusions of right reason would have to be correspondingly different. It follows from this that even if pagans sometimes made the right choices, they never really understood why their choices were right. For Ockham, morality is ultimately a matter of obeying God. This may sound rather arbitrary. Why should I do something just because God tells me to? To avoid punishment? That would be like following the laws of a king out of fear rather than in an appreciation of the justice of the laws, a rather unattractive view. But Ockham doesn't emphasize the dire consequences that face the sinner so much as the positive consideration that we should love God and want to do as He commands. In fact, some interpreters even think that, for Ockham, this is why we should do as God commands, that love for Him, for God not for Ockham, is the source from which all moral motivation must flow. A test case considered by Ockham is, what if God commands us to hate Him, or simply to neither love nor hate Him? Ockham points out that this command would yield a kind of contradiction, in which case we would need to hate God or fail to love Him precisely out of our love for Him. Thus, the commanded act of will is actually impossible. By now it is clear that Ockham's moral theory is all about what is happening within the soul of the agent. Good people perform actions that we can all observe, but the business end of their virtue is on the inside, where good reasoning and free volition form the real basis of morality. This has obvious consequences for politics. For one thing, it tends to push Ockham away from the Aristotelian idea that the state's primary aim should be training and conditioning its citizens to be good. Virtue is ultimately a matter of free choices, which can never be determined by external influence. So it makes sense that Ockham has a rather limited conception of the role of the state in our practical lives. Government can give people the opportunity to live good lives by arresting and punishing the wicked and maintaining order, but this is largely a matter of removing practical obstacles rather than positively encouraging us to strive for virtue. For another thing, it makes perfect sense that Ockham would emphasize the role of individual conscience in political life. You should do things because you understand them to be good, and believe things because you have good reason for thinking they are true. The responsibility is yours, and you cannot simply outsource your decisions or beliefs to external authorities. With admirable consistency, Ockham held himself to this demanding and individualistic ethic. It's easy to get confused and think that his flight to Munich was a direct outcome of the examination of his doctrines for heresy at Avignon. But this isn't the case. He left Avignon as a conscientious objector to the papacy of John XXII because of this pope's opposition to the Franciscan ethic of poverty. We don't need to go through the arguments for and against the mendicant's stance again. Suffice it to say that, like Peter Olivey Bonaventure and his contemporary Marcellius of Padua, Ockham was a fierce proponent of absolute poverty. But the political writings of his later career add something else to the debate that I do want to discuss, a sustained justification of dissidents against papal authority. For a man like Marcellius, this posed relatively little difficulty. He was a secular polemicist, and duly argued that the pope has no coercive authority in the first place, not over temporal rulers and not even over other clerics. Ockham, by contrast, was no secularist. He had a deep respect for the papacy and thought that a pope's authority could be resisted only in special and extreme circumstances. We've been seeing already that late medieval secularists tended to think that a king or emperor could move against a wicked pope, but that basic principles for unseating a pope had been familiar for generations, at least since that indispensable legal thinker Gratian, whose ideas were developed by the canonist Huguccio. According to this legal tradition, the pope's position within the spiritual realm is supreme. Locals often spoke of him as possessing a plenitude of power which can be challenged by no one. So, just as secular monarchs must resort to war to settle their differences, because there is no human authority above them, there is no court that can sit in judgment on a pope. This may seem to rule out any accusation of heresy in his case, but there is one exception. A pope might explicitly embrace a teaching that had already been established as heretical earlier in church history. In this case, there is no court or trial needed, since the prior decision of the church can justify action against him. In fact, a pope in this position is really no pope at all, having surrendered his spiritual authority by falling into unbelief. This was, of course, exactly the situation facing Occam, or so he believed. The church had, somewhat grudgingly, approved of absolute poverty in the 13th century. Now Pope John was overturning this decision, and thus adopting a view that had already been established as false. Worse, he was clinging obstinately to this falsehood. For Occam, this is actually part of what it means to be a heretic. In addition to holding a wrong belief, you have to insist on holding that wrong belief, even in the face of convincing arguments against it. Occam is saying that all of us, even popes, have a kind of moral responsibility for our own beliefs. We need to take criticism and refutation seriously, and change our minds if we are given good reason to do so. There's a powerful anti-authoritarian message here, insofar as reasons for abandoning a falsehood could, in principle, come from anywhere. To take a far from hypothetical example, suppose you are a pope, and a lowly Franciscan friar presents you with sound arguments that absolute poverty is conceptually possible and spiritually admirable. It's no good pulling rank on the friar, or ignoring him. You have to engage in an honest attempt to discern the truth and change your mind if the opponent's view is more compelling. Which is not to say that you have to spend your whole life weighing up all rival opinions, no matter how outrageous they may seem to be. But neither should you bow to others because they hold a position of authority. If a single individual's views receive special consideration, this is, as Occam puts it, not especially because of his greater position, but because he has a better account to give for himself, because of his better life, because he is better instructed about the case, or for some similar reason. On this basis, Occam thought that in principle, any Christian could in good conscience oppose a heretical pope, indeed that one actually ought to do so. He threw in his lot with Michael of Cizena and Ludwig of Bavaria because he was practicing what he preached. Of course a lowly friar like himself did not pose much threat to papal power, though Occam did his best by wielding his pen in a series of polemical documents. Sadly, despite rumors to the contrary, the sword is quite a bit mightier than the pen. So effective resistance to Pope John would have to come from rulers like Ludwig. Occam supported Ludwig and other such rulers, arguing along with Marsilius that they do have an independent authority of their own, rather than being subordinate to the church. Legitimacy stems from consent of the people, and once granted it cannot be withdrawn. The people just have to put up with the rulers they have chosen. But Occam did not go quite so far in the secularist direction as Marsilius. He asked the temporal and spiritual powers to keep out of each other's way, rather than trying to put the papacy under the imperial thumb. An emperor can depose a pope, only in the unusual crisis posed by papal heresy, and correspondingly, popes can intervene in temporal affairs only in a dire situation where no temporal power is adequate to the task. Otherwise, the two powers are separate and equal simply because both are unchallenged in their own respective spheres. And by the way, all of this is of course subject to the caveat that God has decreed it to be so. It is because God wills it that people may rightly choose to be ruled by a non-spiritual power. As usual, Occam remains consistent, applying his divine command theory to politics as well as ethics. I wanted to start our look at Occam with these political issues because they played such an important role in his life story, and also of course, because they situate him relative to the other thinkers of the early 14th century we've been looking at over the past few episodes. But as I guess most listeners will know, he is not famous primarily for his teaching on conscience or the papacy. If he is one of the few medieval philosophers whose name is familiar outside of specialist circles, it's because of a two-word phrase, Occam's razor. But just what was it that he wanted to trim away with this famous razor? Cut to next week's episode, in which we'll discover why he is taken to be the supreme representative of 14th century nominalism here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.