Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 229 - Do the Right Thing - Thirteenth Century 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, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Do the Right Thing – 13th Century Ethics. I'd like you to imagine that you're riding the London Underground at rush hour, and that you have managed to get a seat. Or perhaps you really are a Londoner who is riding the Underground at rush hour while listening to this, in which case you were no doubt already imagining that you had a seat. Now imagine that you notice a woman with a swollen belly standing right nearby. Being, like all my listeners, an outstanding and admirable human being, you hasten to offer her your seat. As it happens, another passenger standing next to you turns out to be a philosopher. She also turns out to be one of those rare philosophers who is actually socially outgoing. I did say you'd have to use your imagination. She asks you why you offered your seat to the pregnant woman. Probably you'd shrug and say that it was obviously the right thing to do. The philosopher, being a philosopher, might reply, sure, but that doesn't explain why you did it. People fail to do the right thing all the time. To which you would presumably say something to the effect that it would not have felt right to continue sitting there while someone in greater need was forced to stand. Your conscience would not have allowed it. This answer would strike the philosopher as intriguing, especially if she happened to have an interest in 13th century moral theory. Medieval thinkers devoted careful attention to the phenomenon of moral conscience. Some of them saw it as playing precisely the role just suggested. Conscience explains why you actually perform the actions you take to be good, rather than just understanding that that would be the right thing to do and then doing something else. As the medieval's would put it, conscience somehow involves the power of will and not just the power of reason. The idea that humans have such a power, the faculty of will, was not a medieval invention. The concept emerged in late antiquity and played a major role in the writings of Augustine. Its prominence in the Augustinian tradition explains why, as we saw a couple of episodes back, William of Auvergne was indignant and puzzled to find it receiving so little attention in the works of Aristotle and philosophers of the Islamic world. This is typical of the situation that gave birth to 13th century ethics. As in other areas of philosophy, new translations were making new ideas available, and these needed somehow to be reconciled with long traditional doctrines and authorities. In the case of ethics, the most important new arrival on the scene was, appropriately enough, the ethics, that is, the Nicomachean ethics of Aristotle. But in this case, it would take a few additional decades before the confrontation with Aristotle could fully emerge. This is because his ethics were not rendered into Latin in their entirety until the late 1240s. Until that time, only the first three of the ten books of the ethics were in circulation, in a translation probably executed by Burgundio of Pisa. Incomplete access didn't stop the scholastics from trying to understand what Aristotle was saying. A handful of commentaries on the ethics survive from the first part of the century. As usual, they are mostly anonymous. The commentators had plenty of material to make up for the unavailability of the last seven books of Aristotle's ethics. Not only did they bring to the text all the traditional ideas of Augustinian ethics, but they also made use of other new sources like Avicenna. Among Avicenna's bequests to the Latin philosophers was his claim that the soul is two-faced. Not like a hypocritical politician, or for that matter a Batman villain. Rather, the point is that the soul has one relation to the body, which is inferior to it, and another relation to a principle superior to it. For Avicenna, the superior principle would have been a celestial intellect, but the medieval's could easily adapt his point by saying that the soul's two faces look down to the body and up to God. Of course, their recommendation is the same you'd hear from a tightrope walking instructor, don't look down. When they turned to Aristotle, the commentators saw that they could use the two-faced soul idea to expound his understanding of happiness. The first book of his ethics explains that happiness must be something self-sufficient and complete or perfect. For Aristotle, as for so many other ancient authors, this goal can be achieved by living a life of virtue. But the medieval readers saw that he recognized two kinds of virtue, practical and intellectual. Here was a chance to invoke the two faces. A practical life demands that the soul pay heed to the body, whereas the perfect intellectual life means that the soul focuses on contemplating God. In spelling out the details of these two lives, the early commentators wind up straying rather far from their source material. As it happens, the last book of Aristotle's ethics praises the life of contemplation as the most happy of all. But of course our commentators couldn't read this final book. So when they likewise give contemplation first prize as the most perfect life, they must be getting the idea from somewhere else, for instance Avicenna. They also describe contemplation as a sort of mystical union with God which would be totally foreign to Aristotle. It would not be until the commentary of Robert Kill would be that this tendency was corrected. When it comes to the practical side of things, the divergences are even more striking. Aristotle envisioned the excellent man as leading a life of civic engagement, his virtues displayed by fighting bravely in war, participating in government, and showing generosity to friends. The commentators instead reflect the ascetic impulse that began in ancient Christianity and lived on in medieval monasticism. They see practical virtue primarily as the soul's resisting bodily desire, with each soul attempting to bring itself closer to God rather than to seek collaboration with fellow humans. Moreover, they dismiss virtue in this life as inadequate for true happiness. Didn't Aristotle himself say that true happiness is perfect? And don't we all know that our worldly existence, like a rush hour tube journey, is bound to be imperfect? Only the prospect of an afterlife together with God can satisfy Aristotle's ambitious criteria. This may all sound like a theological distortion of Aristotle's ethics, such as we might expect from a bunch of medieval commentators. But remember, we're in the 13th century. The scholastics are increasingly distinguishing between the remit of theology and the remit of philosophy, with Aristotle of course personifying the philosophical side of that contrast. So it is here. The commentators talk of two complementary approaches to ethics. For Aristotle and other philosophers, virtue is a matter of hard-won habit acquired through moral education and repetition of good actions. Theologians don't deny that such habitual virtues exist, but they add that God infuses us with another kind of virtue, a tendency to prefer good to evil. This tendency survives in us even in our current fallen state of sin. I see a parallel here to another 13th century debate in the field of epistemology. Some thinkers of the period, for instance Bonaventure, believe that humans have knowledge through illumination from God. Others, such as Aquinas, instead emphasize the role of sense experience, adopting Aristotle's broadly empiricist approach. Similarly in ethics, the theological line is that we should open ourselves to God's assistance, whereas the philosophical or Aristotelian stance is that we need to improve through experience. The inborn tendency to choose the good, which we would call moral conscience, is discussed not so much in the commentaries on Aristotle as in commentaries on the sentences of Peter Lombard. In a characteristically concise and authority-strewn discussion, Lombard had posed the question of why the will does not always steer us towards what is good. He cited the Latin Church Father Jerome, who referred to a spark of reason which could not be extinguished even in Cain. This more or less set the terms of the debate. On the one hand, we have a spark within us that urges us to be righteous. On the other hand, we nonetheless fall into sin. Both are everyday features of our moral life, and both stand in need of explanation. The passage that Peter Lombard cited from Jerome supplied another ingredient to the conversation. There, the medieval's could find a Greek-derived term which they wrote as synderesis. It isn't too far wrong to think of this as a kind of innate ethical conscience, except that the 13th century authors routinely distinguish between synderesis and conscience in Latin conscientia. Before we get into the mechanics of synderesis and conscience, let's go back to your imaginary conversation with the philosopher on the tube. Initially, you told her that it just struck you as obviously right to give up your seat to the pregnant woman. The philosopher pointed out that there is a difference between seeing that one ought to do something and actually deciding to do it, perhaps even wanting to do it. Where should we put our feelings of obligation and remorse in this story? The medieval's speak of the murmurings of guilt we experience when we do something wrong. Are these murmurings helping us to realize something to form knowledge about good and bad? Or are they instead helping to motivate us, giving us a kind of push towards what we already know to be good and a desire to do it? From a medieval point of view, the question here is whether conscience and the spark of synderesis have more to do with reason or will. If they are connected especially to reason, they must be intended to help us to know the good. If they are connected to the will, they are meant to help us choose the good. An early treatment of this problem can be found in the treatise On the Good by Philip the Chancellor, the same text that introduced us to the topic of transcendentals. Which I can't resist pointing out is a great example of why it is worth doing the history of philosophy without any gaps. Most likely you'd never heard of Philip the Chancellor before, but he turns out to have played a pivotal role in both the history of metaphysics and the history of ethics. Plus, he's got a cool name. Philip the Chancellor's view is that synderesis is a disposition, in other words an inborn tendency, and one that straddles the divide between reason and will. It is, as he says, superior to our power of reasoning, and should instead be called by the more exalted name of understanding. Philip seeks to have his cake and eat it too, by presenting synderesis as a power that produces both motivation and knowledge. It is a supreme moral power, not only because it has this overarching influence upon us, but also because it can never go wrong. The catch is that synderesis isn't enough, because it only guides us to very general moral precepts. When you select a specific action that you take to be good, you have gone past synderesis and come to what Philip calls conscience. Conscience is engaged when your base-level sense of right and wrong, which is given by synderesis, is supplemented by the power of choice, so that you make up your mind to do something specific here and now. Even well-meaning people can go wrong at this stage, something Philip illustrates with an example we've seen before in Peter Abelard. The people who put Christ to death were acting, as we might put it, in good conscience. Philip puts it by saying that their synderesis was in good working order. It allowed them to see that someone who pretends to be the Son of God should be executed. Their mistake, fallible as they were, was to think that Christ was a mere pretender and therefore someone who fell under this general rule. We can change our example on the tube slightly to provide a parallel case. Suppose you give up your seat to the woman with a sympathetic smile at her bulging belly, but she's not pregnant after all, just overweight, and when she realizes why you've offered your seat, she is mortified. This kind of situation, where someone unwittingly does something bad, you know, like offending someone on public transport or putting to death the Son of God, is also raised in Bonaventure's commentary on Peter Lombard's sentences. Specifically, he asks whether people should always try to follow their conscience. His answer is a qualified yes. Scholastics hardly ever answer a question with an unqualified yes. You should never do something you believe to be wrong, nor should you fail to do something you believe to be right. But following your conscience isn't a moral get-out-of-jail-free card. It doesn't excuse you from blame when you get things wrong. As Abelard already pointed out when he discussed the example of Christ's killers, people following deeply and sincerely held beliefs can commit grievous sins. The upshot is that if you want to do what is good, what is pleasing to God, as Bonaventure puts it, you need to satisfy two conditions. You have to believe that what you're doing is right, and it actually has to be right. This is compatible with what Philip the Chancellor said about the same issue, though Bonaventure's discussion is more detailed and illuminating. When it comes to the role of reason and will in conscience though, Bonaventure has a view that is quite different from Philip's. He exploits the by-now traditional distinction between sinderesis and conscience to give due weight to both rational belief and motivation. For Bonaventure, conscience operates at two levels. First, it gives us a sense of general moral rules about which we can never be wrong. These rules, he suggests, could be equated with the natural law. Second, conscience is also involved in determining how to apply those rules, and as in Philip, this sort of applied conscience can go astray. For Philip, of course, the unerring and general grasp of moral precepts was the function of sinderesis, but Bonaventure has reserved another role for this power. For him, sinderesis is precisely the motivational power that pushes you to do what your conscience has judged to be right. Let's go back one more time to our imaginary example and suppose that it had been Bonaventure who struck up a conversation on the tube with you. To make this possible, let's also imagine that you speak Latin. Bonaventure would say that when you realized you should give up your seat, this was because you used your conscience to understand the general rule that people in need should be given assistance. A further use of conscience determined that this woman was in need because she looked to be pregnant. However, it is sinderesis that made you actively eager to give up your seat, and that would murmur with recriminations in your soul if you refused to budge. In other words, it would help move your will towards the right choice. The upshot is that conscience is an intellectual power, a tendency to form beliefs, whereas sinderesis has to do with what Bonaventure calls the desiring part of the soul. Here we have what could be called a volitionalist account of moral feeling. For Bonaventure and many other medieval thinkers, intellectual judgments about the good could remain idle, without some distinct power to explain why we are actually motivated to act on those judgments. But many other medieval thinkers would disagree. Those who adopted a more Aristotelian line can be called intellectualists. They tended to think that the will simply follows and puts into action the judgments reached by practical reason. Their idea is that believing something to be good already involves having a reason to do it so that judgments about right and wrong have motivational force built into them. It would probably have been impossible for the earliest commentators of the 13th century to develop a reading of Aristotle along these lines because their access to the text was so partial. But when the whole Nicomachean ethics came into circulation in the middle of the century, the opportunity was there, and it was taken by Albert the Great. Albert was the first master to lecture on the complete ethics in the year 1249 and in the city of Cologne. The student who took the notes on these lectures was a young Thomas Aquinas. We'll get into Aquinas's views on these matters in a future episode. For now I just want to glance at Albert's way of understanding Cinderasis. He is happy to make it a faculty for knowing something along the lines I've just sketched, rather than a faculty for desiring or wanting something. So he gives it more or less the function that Philip the Chancellor had assigned to Cinderasis, it is the power to grasp general ethical precepts. The difference is that it is no longer an overarching power that governs both reason and will, but a source of rules to use as a basis for moral reasoning. So, what Cinderasis gives you is akin to the first principles that we use in the non-practical sciences. A convenient, though slightly anachronistic, analogy might be the axioms of geometry or arithmetic. This is only one respect in which Albert shows himself to be a more faithful Aristotelian than earlier commentators on the ethics. Like them, he continues to see contemplation of God as the sole source of perfect human happiness, something Aquinas too will accept. But Albert makes space for genuinely civic virtue in his ethical teaching on the basis that this sort of practical goodness is an important step along the way to ultimate beatitude because it prepares the soul for contemplation. As I've said, Albert's more profoundly Aristotelian approach was only possible because he was able to read the whole of the ethics. So, some of the credit should go to the man who produced that complete Latin translation from the Greek original. Important though this contribution was, it would be a gross injustice to see this translator as nothing but a transmitter of texts. He was a philosopher in his own right, and the author of interesting ideas about science, notably concerning the subject of light. So, join me next time for an illuminating episode about Robert Grossetest, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.