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Varieties of Voluntarism in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy
This book considers different forms of voluntarism developed from the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries. By crossing the conventional dividing line between the medieval and early modern periods, the volume draws important new insights on the historical development of voluntarism.
Voluntarism places a special emphasis on the will when it comes to the analysis and explanation of fundamental philosophical questions and problems. Since the Middle Ages, voluntarist considerations and views played an important role in the development of different theories of action, ethics, metaethics, and metaphysics. The chapters in this volume are grouped according to three distinct kinds of voluntarism: psychological, ethical, and theological voluntarism. They address topics such as the threat of irrationality as the standard objection to voluntarism, incontinent actions and their explanation, the nature of the will as rational appetite, the relationship between intellect and will, the implications of conceptions of the will for political freedom, and the relations between divine freedom and the modal status of eternal truths. The chapters not only consider towering figures of the Middle Ages—Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, William of Ockham, Francisco de Vitoria—and early modern period—René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Samuel Pufendorf—but also engage with less well-known figures such as Peter John Olivi, John of Pouilly, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, and Christian August Crusius.
Varieties of Voluntarism in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in medieval philosophy, early modern philosophy, the history of ethics, and philosophy of religion.
Sonja Schierbaum is currently leader of the Emmy Noether research group “Practical Reasons Before Kant (1720-1780)” at the University of Wiirzburg. She is the author of Ockham’s Assumption of Mental Speech (2014) and has co-edited a volume on late-medieval conceptions of self-knowledge (with Dominik Perler, 2014).
Jorn Miller is Professor of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy at the University of Wiirzburg. His research focuses on practical philosophy, anthropology, and philosophical psychology. His publications include monographs on Aristotle’s ethics, Albert the Great and Henry of Ghent, as well as on weakness of will from Socrates to Duns Scotus.
Acknowledgements
This book is the outcome of an online conference on medieval and early modern varieties of voluntarism held in July 2021, in which almost all of the contributors to this volume participated. The original plan had been for an in-person conference at the University of Wurzburg in July 2020, which of course was delayed because of the pandemic; but we decided to hold the conference online the next summer in order not to postpone it for too long. We are grateful to the participants for supporting this change to an online format.
We would also like to thank the contributors for their excellent work and their patience, without which it would not have been possible for this volume to take its present form. The volume could not have been realized without the assistance, expertise, and support of further people. We warmly thank our copy editor, Ian Drummond, for his rigour and precision, which greatly contributed to the quality of the present volume. The patience and perseverance of Andrew Weckenmann from Routledge was also central. The book project could not have been realized without the support and generous funding of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (project no. 417 359 636).
Contributors
Sebastian Bender is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Georg August University of Gottingen. His research focuses on early modern philosophy (especially rationalism). He also has strong interests in metaphysics (especially the topics of modality, causation, and persistence). He currently works on a project on early modern theories of causation as well as on several papers dealing with early modern philosophy (authors include Spinoza, Conway, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant). He has published in journals such as Philosophers’ Imprint, Archiv fiir Geschichte der Philosophie, Ergo, and Hume Studies.
Ruth Boeker is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at University College Dublin. Her research focuses on early modern philosophy and lies at the intersection between metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and ethics. She has worked extensively on John Locke’s account of persons and personal identity. Her other work has focused on Catharine Trotter Cockburn, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, David Hume, and Scottish Enlightenment philosophy. She is the author of Locke on Persons and Personal Identity (2021) and Catharine Trotter Cockburn (2023). She has, moreover, published several articles in journals such as History of Philosophy Quarterly, Hume Studies, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Locke Studies, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, and Philosophy Compass.
Christophe Grellard is Professor at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE, PSL) in Paris, in the Department of Religious Studies, and a fellow of the Laboratoire d’Etudes sur les monothéismes (CNRS). His chair is entitled “Medieval Systems of Thoughts and Beliefs.” He specializes in the anthropology of faith, nominalism and theology, and the history of scepticism in the Middle Ages. He is the author of La possibilita dell’errore: pensare la tolleranza nel Medioevo (2020), De la certitude volontaire: debats nominalistes sur la foi a la fin du Moyen Age (2014), and numerous articles in journals such as Vivarium, Freiburger Zeitschrift fiir Philosophie und Theologie, and Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévales.
Heikki Haara is a University Lecturer in Political History in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki. His research interests have principally been early modern moral and political thought. He has published articles in academic journals such as the Journal of the History of Ideas, Political Theory, British Journal for the History of Philosophy and Journal of Scottish Philosophy. He is the author of Pufendorf’s Theory of Sociability: Passions, Habits and Social Order (2018), and the co-editor of Rights at Margins: Historical, Philosophical and Legal Perspectives (2020) and Passions, Politics and the Limits of Society (2020). He is also co-editor-in-chief of the book series Helsinki Yearbook of Intellectual History.
Eric W. Hagedorn is Associate Professor of Philosophy at St. Norbert College (USA). His research is concentrated in the fields of philosophy of mind, language, and logic (especially that of the later medieval period). His dissertation was written on William of Ockham and the role his theory of mental language plays in his broader logical and ontological views. He has published work on Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy of mind and personal identity, and is working on bringing some largely forgotten medieval approaches to the mind to bear on open questions in contemporary philosophy of mind. He is the author of William of Ockham: Questions on Virtue, Moral Goodness, and the Will (2020), which includes translations and a scholarly introduction. He has published articles in journals such as Oxford Studies of Medieval Philosophy and Proceedings of the of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.
Tobias Hoffmann is Professor of Medieval Philosophy at Sorbonne Université. His research interests encompass ethics, moral psychology, and metaphysics, especially in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. His recent work focuses on theories of free will. He is the author of Free Will and the Rebel Angels in Medieval Philosophy (2021), and he has edited several volumes such as A Companion to Angels in Medieval Philosophy (2012). He has also published numerous articles in journals such as Vivarium, Philosophers’ Imprint, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Archiv fiir Geschichte der Philosophie, and History of Philosophy Quarterly.
Dominik Perler is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy and History of Philosophy at the Humboldt University of Berlin and Co-Director of the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities “Human Abilities”. In 2006 he was awarded the Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz-Preis. His research focuses on medieval and early modern philosophy, mostly in the areas of philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ontology. He is the author of numerous articles and several books, the most recent of which are: Eine Person sein. Philosophische Debattten im Spatmittelalter (2021) and Feelings Transformed. Philosophical Theories of the Emotions, 12701670 (2018).
Thomas Pink is Professor of Philosophy at King’s College in London. His main interests are in ethics, philosophy of mind and action, philosophy of law, and in medieval and early modern philosophy. He has published an edition of Francisco Sudrez’s moral and political works, and is editing The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance for the Clarendon Edition of the works of Thomas Hobbes. He is the author of Self-Determination: The Ethics of Action, Vol. 1. He has published widely in journals including Philosophical Explorations, Organon, Quaestio, Thomist, and Inquiry, and in edited volumes such as the Oxford Handbook of Medieval Philosophy (2012) and The Cambridge Companion to Natural Law Jurisprudence (2017).
Ursula Renz is Professor for the History of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, University of Graz, as well as Head of the Section History of Philosophy and Director of the Alexius Meinong-Institute. Her research focus lies on early modern philosophy, especially epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and moral psychology as well as philosophy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She has also published on the history of analytic philosophy and on systematic questions of theoretical philosophy, in journals including European Journal of Philosophy, Kant-Studien, Archiv fiir Geschichte der Philosophie, British Journal of the History of Philosophy, and Synthese. Her systematic interests touch upon conceptions of self-knowledge, identity, emotions, and the relation of descriptive and revisionary metaphysics. She has received several awards, among them the Journal of the History of Philosophy Book Prize 2011, a Humboldt fellowship for senior researchers, and a shortlisting of her book Was denn bitte ist kulturelle Identitat for the Tractatus-Essay-Prize in 2019.
Stephan Schmid is Professor for the History of Philosophy at the University of Hamburg and Co-Director of the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies (MCAS). He is interested in Late Medieval and early modern philosophy, where he focuses mainly on metaphysical questions (about causality and modality), epistemological questions (scepticism), and questions concerning the philosophy of mind (theories of intentionality and mental faculties). He has edited the volume Philosophy of Mind in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Routledge, 2018) and coedited several other volumes and special issues, such as “Final Causes and Teleological Explanations,” Vol. 14 of Logical Analysis and the History of Philosophy (with D. Perler); and Sceptical Paths: Essays on Scepticisms from Antiquity until the Early Modern Period and Beyond (2019). He has also published in journals including Ergo, Zeitschrift fiir philosophische Forschung, and Logical Analysis and History of Philosophy.
Ariane Cacilie Schneck is Research Associate (“wissenschaftliche Mitarbe-iterin”) at the Chair of History of Philosophy and Practical Philosophy at the University of Bielefeld. Her research focuses on Early modern philosophy (esp. Descartes and Elisabeth of Bohemia), the philosophy of mind (especially philosophy of the emotions), and ethics. She has published an article on Elisabeth of Bohemia in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy.
Michael Szlachta is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at St. Francis Xavier University (Canada). His research is focused on the controversies concerning human freedom and the causal relationship between cognitive powers and the will in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. He is also interested in how the different conceptions of freedom held by philosophers and theologians in this period map onto the contemporary free will debate. He has published articles in History of Philosophy Quarterly, Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy, and Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie médiévales.
Sarah Tropper is Assistant Professor in the Section History of Philosophy at the University of Graz. After her master’s degree in philosophy at the University of Graz, she earned her PhD at King’s College, London, with a thesis on Leibniz’s notion of simplicity. Before she joined the Department of Philosophy at Graz, she was a postdoc in a project on Spinoza. Her research focus lies on early modern rationalism and late medieval philosophy.
Introduction
Voluntarism: Central Philosophical Issues and Problems
Sonja Schierbaum and J6rn Miiller
1 The Topic of Voluntarism and Its Philosophical Significance
“Voluntarism” is an umbrella term used to designate a variety of approaches which attribute a special role to the will (voluntas in Latin) in the analysis and explanation of fundamental philosophical questions and problems.! One area in which this comes to the fore is the question of actions and their ascription to agents. It is a basic voluntaristic intuition (though its appeal is not restricted to voluntarists) that in order for an agent’s acts to be properly imputable to the agent, it must be possible for one to act differently from how one judges one ought to act.” At the heart of voluntarism lies the idea of freedom of indifference as the power to do otherwise, which is rooted in the mode of action of the will. That is to say, freedom of indifference presupposes not only freedom of action, but also freedom of decision or choice: the voluntarist idea of freedom of indifference entails the possibility of different decisions in the same circumstances, but in a way that does not undermine the rationality of choice.?
In this respect, voluntarism differs crucially from rationalism, or intellectualism, since rationalists like Leibniz and Wolff also defend freedom of action but deny freedom of decision. They argue that although the choice of an agent is psychologically determined by what the agent conceives to be best in a given situation, the action is not necessary but contingent and free, insofar as the alternatives are possible at least in a logical sense: the agent could have acted differently if he had decided otherwise.* It should be emphasized that Leibniz and Wolff conceive of contingency in terms of a kind of necessity, namely, hypothetical necessity, such that free will is consistent with the psychological determinism underlying their theories of action. For an action to be contingent and hence free, it is sufficient that it be not “absolutely” (i.e., logically) necessary, though it can be hypothetically necessary.’ By contrast, the idea of freedom of indifference presupposes a strong modal conception of contingency that does not collapse into any form of necessity. Put in causal terms, the idea of a power to do otherwise implies the strong notion of acontingent cause. At least since the later Middle Ages, voluntarists have usually been committed to strong metaphysical assumptions about the will, which in the final analysis is conceived of as a contingent cause in the guise of a self-moving power in control of its own acts.°
The connection between the core idea of freedom of indifference and a strong modal conception of contingency underlying the use of this power explains the wide range of the areas in which voluntaristic approaches have been applied, such as theory of action, ethics, metaethics, and metaphysics. This connection also gives a certain family resemblance and unity to the wide variety of views that are usually considered voluntarist. The close connection between the will and the modal concept of contingency becomes even clearer if one considers the fact that, at least since the Middle Ages, God has been conceived of as an agent with the powers of intellect and will. It is not just that if the divine agent is to will something freely, there must be a strong conception of contingency in place; the same applies to human agents and their freedom of indifference.’ What is special about the divine agent, in contrast to the human agent, is that the way the divine intellect and will are characterized has implications for both the modal space and the modal makeup of the actual world.* In a weak sense, contingency is a feature of the actual world because the divine will’s act of creating the world is contingent: the world is contingent because it is created contingently.’ In a stronger sense, contingency is a feature of the actual world insofar as it includes human freedom of indifference as a contingent cause. In both senses, contingency as a feature of the world is grounded in the conception of the divine powers. Contingency in the first sense follows immediately from the (free) use of the divine power of will, whereas contingency in the second is entailed by the requirement that creation be consistent with God’s powers. The voluntarist idea is that this consistency requires human freedom of indifference as a feature of the actual world. As noted earlier, the voluntarist intuition is that moral responsibility and imputation presuppose freedom of indifference.
God’s power of will is also important for voluntarists in a metaethical respect, insofar as the moral goodness or badness of entities such as actions is determined by their relation to the divine will. This metaethical conception is commonly called theological voluntarism.’° Very roughly, the idea is that divine will is crucial to explaining the obligatory character of actions, while the content of obligations (i.e., which actions are obligatory) is also determined in relation to the divine intellect insofar as moral truths are located in God’s intellect.1! The idea that God’s intellect is the domain of logic and modalities in general (i.e., everything that is possible or necessary) comes into full bloom in the early modern period with Leibniz.
We would therefore like to suggest that two factors are crucial to voluntarism. The first is the conception of the will as a self-determining power.
Note that the conception of the will as a free power is typically connected with a highly positive evaluation or appreciation of the will. Also, the will is usually identified as the “locus” of the (acting) self and as the seat of our personality. This strong appreciation of the will rules out a similarly strong, positive evaluation of the intellect according to the voluntarist.’* Equally important, and closely connected with the strong conception of the will as a free power, is the second factor, a strong modal concept of contingency. Given that these two features are, in our view, jointly constitutive of voluntarism, it is not surprising that in medieval philosophy, the dividing line between voluntarism and other positions (most notably, intellectualism) is somewhat unclear. There are many views that include only one of these features. This is why the crucial - but not uncontroversial — conceptual distinction between voluntarism and intellectualism captures only some important dividing lines between different authors and schools of thought, especially in medieval and early modern philosophy.'’ Speaking generally, however, positions are classified as either voluntarist or intellectualist according to whether they take the intellect or the will to be more “in charge” and in control of one’s choices and actions.'* If the intellect is taken to be more important, then the position can be called intellectualist; if the will is taken to be the main power that is ultimately in control of choice and action, then the position can be classified as voluntarist.
Against this backdrop, it is easy to understand why it has been suggested that we should distinguish among different kinds of voluntarism: a psychological voluntarism, an ethical one, and a theological one.
This classification is made according to differences in focus among different theories, but in our view, it becomes even more plausible in light of the two characteristics of voluntarism and their connection.'* In psychological voluntarism, there is a focus on the volitional and affective aspects of human nature. This psychological voluntarism is crucial, for instance, in theory of action and philosophical psychology. It also touches upon central philosophical problems such as how incontinent (i.e., weak-willed) actions are possible.’” In ethical voluntarism, there is a focus on the will’s indeterminacy as a presupposition of moral responsibility, which has serious consequences for the understanding of moral normativity and the virtues, which are then conceptualized as “virtues of the will.”!*
Lastly, theological voluntarism is central to the metaethical question of the grounding of morality, insofar as God’s will is considered crucial to determining the moral status of at least some classes of entities, such as states of affairs or actions. This form of voluntarism emphasizes that divine omnipotence is the freedom to will anything that is consistent with the principle of non-contradiction. These forms of voluntarism were developed in fullfledged form in the thirteenth century,” though medieval voluntarism can be traced back to the twelfth century.”° Due to the close connection between the will and contingency, and the fact that God is conceived of as an agent, the divine powers are conceived of as both the modal space and the ground of morality.
In contemporary scholarly investigations, there is a tendency to focus on just one kind of voluntarism.*! In the present volume, however, we intend not only to cover these three kinds of voluntarism, but also to make clear the extent to which they are connected to each other through the two general features of voluntarism that we have identified, as well as to what extent they might be logically independent of each other. The volume is therefore much broader in scope than other investigations of voluntarism, which are usually focused on specific aspects of its significance in various areas such as action theory, freedom, moral psychology (e.g., the concept of virtue), and the normative status of moral laws. This more encompassing perspective also applies to the historical scope of the investigation: the volume is designed to cover a period from the thirteenth century to the eighteenth, thus going against the grain of historical scholarship, which customarily stays within the limits of pre-defined eras (e.g., antiquity, the Middle Ages, the early modern period) in treating a subject. We think that these conventional historical dividing lines can sometimes be an obstacle to new insights into the development of philosophical problems.
In this way, not only will the development of voluntarism be outlined in a continuous way across the two periods in the history of philosophy, but we will also be able to better understand different voluntarist views through the reciprocal illumination of the two periods that this presentation offers. For since the treatment of issues in early modern philosophy is in many cases rooted in medieval discussions, their full philosophical scope becomes clear only when both periods are considered; as well, early modern philosophy developed categories and principles which can be applied to medieval texts in a non-anachronistic way.
We provide here an example to help demonstrate the benefits of this eracrossing approach. It could be argued that the opposition between medieval intellectualists and voluntarists is not as clear-cut as it appeared in Leibniz’s time. Usually intellectualists are taken to be opponents of indeterminism, not least because they lack a strong concept of contingency, while voluntarists usually champion the idea. In the thirteenth century, however, this distinction seems blurred, because both intellectualists and voluntarists reject ethical determinism.” The intellectualist explanation of human action depends on the idea that practical deliberation involves a certain kind of indeterminacy. Thus, at least some medieval intellectualists are not committed to the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), which they did not formulate explicitly in the way it was by Leibniz, who gave the principle its name. This raises the question of whether adherence to the PSR constitutes a clear dividing line between voluntarists and intellectualists. One decisive factor in the lack of clarity could be the fact that God’s intellect was explicitly conceived of as the domain of logic and modalities only with Leibniz in the early modern period.
Thus, the present volume aims to detect and make clear central historical and systematic developments and changes, such as the possible shift in commitment to the PSR by the voluntarists’ opponents. In our view, it is only through this era-crossing approach that it is possible to explain why the distinction between indeterminism and determinism came in the early modern period to correspond entirely to the distinction between voluntarism and intellectualism.
2 Varieties of Voluntarism in Their Historical Development
In the following, we will sketch the development of three varieties of voluntarism in medieval and early modern thinking, namely psychological, ethical, and theological (or metaphysical) voluntarism, which also serve to determine the main parts of the whole volume. The main purpose is not to provide an overview of the scholarly literature available on these topics, but to lay out the general framework in which the individual chapters of our volume are arranged. The contributions are outlined in a more substantive and detailed way than is typical in introductions to volumes such as this, so that the overall historical development is characterized in a more fine-grained way and so that the links between the chapters emerge more clearly.
2.1 Psychological Voluntarism
The first four chapters are centred on issues which are crucial to the psychological variety of voluntarism. Theologians and philosophers in the late Middle Ages mostly relied on a model of the human soul according to which it either is divided into different parts (following Plato) or contains different faculties (in the wake of Aristotle’s De anima), ranging from the sensory powers to intellectual cognition and from brute appetites to higherorder reasoned volition. In general, this psychological picture involves both the attribution of certain powers and the activities enabled by them to the soul, and an analysis of how these powers interact. Both cognition and appetition are understood as involving a sequence of internal acts by different powers; thus, a question which naturally arises concerns the causal connections between these powers. In the case of human action, nearly all authors agree that the observable external act is preceded by multiple internal acts, and that these internal acts are produced by a complex interplay of intellect and will, for otherwise intentional human action could not be distinguished from mere animal behaviour. But when it comes to the form of causality which is involved in this interplay, there are enormous differences among the various late medieval accounts, especially with regard to the relationship between intellect and will. Is one of them subordinated to the other in a kind of “chain of command,” so that its activity is causally dependent on the activity of the other? And if so, which of them is ultimately in charge, intellect or will? Psychological voluntarism focuses on the idea that the will is the most “noble” power in the human soul; this superiority is often explained in terms of the will’s pre-eminent causal contribution in the production of actions.
Dominik Perler picks up the thread of such considerations in juxtaposing two models of the psychological interplay between intellect and will (Chapter 1). One model is exemplified by Siger of Brabant, who conceptualizes the production of the internal act as involving a chain of efficient causes. The intellect forms a judgement about what is best in the situation and hands it to the will, which executes it because of the efficient causality exerted by the judgement. Siger thus advocates a conditional determinism: if the intellect provides the judgement p, the will has to produce a corresponding volition. This does not include the idea that the intellect necessarily produces exactly this judgement, and therefore this analysis does not lead to an unrestricted determinism. Henry of Ghent rejects this analysis by turning the judgement of reason from a “cause on account of which something is the case” (causa propter quam) into a “cause without which something cannot be the case” (causa sine qua non), which is an occasional cause on which the will might act or not, since the ultimate decision rests with the will, which is causally indeterminate and moves itself. In invoking these different forms of causation, Henry does not fall prey to the standard objection against voluntarist account of actions, that they inevitably lead to irrational action. For human action is triggered by the will on the basis of occasional causes (and not randomly), and these causes are related to intellectual judgements about what is good; thus, the will still operates sub ratione boni, that is, “under the guise of the (cognized) good.” By this move, Henry wants to safeguard the idea of the will as an autonomous two-way power which is able to reject any judgement of reason instead of acting on it without alternative. This also involves other causal relationships of the will with the intellect which can be explained in terms of efficient causality: the will can direct the intellect’s attention and even trigger the production of new judgements. Thus, the will is ultimately the king of the human soul, and the intellect acts as an adviser, or as a servant taking its orders from its master.
But as Perler emphasizes, the significant point here is not simply the psychological hierarchy of the rational powers, but rather an indirect rejection of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (as later articulated by Leibniz). Basically, late medieval voluntarism involves the idea that the will is a free non-natural cause, the activity of which cannot be fully explained by antecedent causes or reasons. The will itself must be regarded as the ultimate cause of action: in its ability to move itself, the will must provide the ultimate explanation of every rational action, for otherwise we end up in a kind of infinite regress of explanations.” In order to make his case, Henry refers to two examples: the fall of the rebel angels, which cannot be explained rationally, and so the ultimate explanation for it is their own devious wills; and the phenomenon of weakwilled actions by human beings who intentionally go against their better judgement, although they could have done otherwise. In general, weakwilled action is a test case for models of human agency and intentional action, and this also holds for medieval discussions of voluntarist and intellectualist accounts. These controversies involve the validity of two basic principles which are deeply rooted in the intellectualism handed down in the Socratic-Platonic tradition (and maintained by, e.g., Thomas Aquinas):
Judgement-Volition Conformity: Willing conforms to what reason judges as what is to be willed. Socratic Deficiency: Deficient willing presupposes deficient cognition.”
Intellectualists usually subscribe to both Judgement-Volition Conformity and Socratic Deficiency, whereas voluntarists battle fiercely against them.
One major battleground of these debates was the Aristotelian analysis in book 7 of the Nicomachean Ethics of akrasia, that is, weak-willed action. The next two chapters form a kind of companion piece, highlighting the controversies in the interpretation of Aristotelian akrasia in the opposing camps in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Jorn Miiller focuses on the use by voluntarist authors in the second half of the thirteenth century of Aristotelian akrasia in their arguments for a will-centred account of human action (Chapter 2). He diagnoses a development which seems to be connected with the famous condemnation of 1277, many of the articles of which have a voluntarist flavour. Before 1277, authors such as Walter of Bruges and Henry of Ghent tried to accommodate the Aristotelian analysis of akrasia in their own voluntaristic picture of human agency and used it to subvert intellectualist account of actions. Their main claim is that Aristotle would also accept another thesis:
Augustinian deficiency thesis: Deficient cognition presupposes deficient willing.”°
After 1277, however, voluntarists portray Aristotle no longer as a potential ally, but as an enemy of their cause who ultimately did not overturn Judgement-Volition Conformity or Socratic Deficiency because he saw as the root of the problem an intellectual failing caused by an upsurge of recalcitrant passions. Consequently, authors like William de la Mare and Peter John Olivi turn away from the Aristotelian model of weak-willed action to more radical cases in which the agent acts against a present and conscious judgement that it is wrong to perform this action. The stock example is the fall of Adam and Eve in paradise, which, like the sin of the rebel angels, ultimately defies rational explanation and goes beyond the framework of Aristotelian akrasia in the direction of clear-eyed wrongdoing. This radicalization in the voluntaristic view of weak-willed actions is not just significant as a historical development; it also relates to a new understanding of two forms of practical judgements and to the importance of “affective knowledge,” which is backed by the will, in contrast to the purely speculative knowledge of the practical intellect. Finally, the voluntarists emphasize the externalist character of intellectual judgement to such an extent that the possibility of acting against it is no longer a serious problem in need of an explanation, since one is already provided by the causal power of the will.** Thus, in “weak-willed” action, the will is not weak at all in its action-guiding capacity, but very strong indeed.
While Miller highlights developments within the voluntarist camp, Tobias Hoffmann takes a closer look at how intellectualists reacted to the challenge (Chapter 3). An important but understudied figure in this context is John of Pouilly, who denies the idea of clear-eyed incontinence so cherished by voluntarists after 1277. According to John of Pouilly, one cannot act contrary to one’s all-things-considered judgement about what it is best to do ina situation (as long as one maintains that judgement). Consequently, he provides a reading of Aristotelian akrasia which rules out any voluntarist reading and makes it rather a fundamental support for JudgementVolition Conformity and Socratic Deficiency, of which he gives a deepened analysis. Furthermore, he tries to show that even figures of the Christian tradition such as Augustine, Anselm of Canterbury, and Bernard of Clairvaux, who are usually regarded as forerunners of the voluntarist tradition, provide examples of wrongdoing which can be reconstructed in Aristotelian fashion as practical syllogisms. John of Pouilly proves quite clever in turning reluctant actions into weak-willed actions in order to make his case. While Henry of Ghent thought (at least in the wake of the condemnation of 1277) that one had to turn one’s back on what he calls “Aristotle’s prophecy about incontinence” and return to a Christian voluntarist understanding of evil action (rooted in the idea that a bad human will is the cause of all morally wrong actions), John portrays the Christian tradition itself as supporting an intellectualist understanding of human action.
The two chapters by Miller and Hoffmann not only provide ample evidence (1) that weakness of will was a major bone of contention between the intellectualist and voluntarist understandings of human action, and (2) that considering psychological voluntarism against the backdrop of incontinence as a limit case makes it possible to bring out more clearly what is specific to psychological voluntarism. They also take a step towards a closer analysis of ethical voluntarism. By reflecting on the relationship between cognition and volition in human action, medieval authors also address fundamental questions of human responsibility. Lurking in the background is the question of the origin of evil action and human culpability. Does moral evil begin in the will or in the intellect? This question pertains to the issue of free choice (liberum arbitrium), which will be treated in greater detail in Part II of this volume, on ethical voluntarism.
The debate on the exact relationship between the will and its causality in relation to reason (which, as seen earlier, was at the centre of late medieval discussions) continued well into the early modern period. A particular focus was the understanding of the nature of the will. In the concluding chapter of Part I on psychological voluntarism, Stephan Schmid highlights the differences among views on this topic by comparing those of Descartes and Leibniz (Chapter 4). Descartes conceives of the will as a faculty of the soul, thus partly following the medieval consensus, but he criticizes a reificationist conception of faculties which turns them into homunculus-like inner agents. He offers instead an instrumentalist account, according to which the soul makes use of the faculties. In his account, the will is understood as the basic capacity by which the agent assents to or denies ideas perceived by the intellect. He is thus a representative of doxastic voluntarism, according to which our beliefs are ultimately caused by the will. As Schmid shows, this is the major point of divergence for Leibniz, who does not share the idea that our beliefs are up to us; according to him, they depend not on our will but on external objects and our mental representations of them. He also offers a sweeping critique of the whole idea of faculty psychology (which was aimed at Suarez but also applies to Descartes’s conception). Leibniz sees faculties not as indeterminate dispositions which can be used by the soul, but as collections of already determinate activities or endeavours. In other words, the will does not produce volitions in any causal sense, but is constituted by them; the will is simply the tendency to be motivated by what our intellect perceives to be good or bad. Against the background of this conception, Leibniz develops a picture of freedom and free agency that is completely different from Descartes’s and ultimately reductive: the free agent is viewed as a “spiritual automaton” which unfolds over time. As Schmid points out, this view also has some intriguing implications for the understanding of Leibniz’s philosophy of mind.
The debate between Descartes and Leibniz about the nature of the will thus turns on how the ontological status of the psychological faculties and their modes of agency are understood. Once the medieval faculty psychology was massively transformed (Descartes) or even left behind (Leibniz), new conceptions of human freedom arose; this trend is analysed in greater detail in Part II on ethical voluntarism.
Another aspect of the psychology of faculties in which the complex interplay between intellect and will comes to the fore is the act of faith. There is a general consensus in theology that the assent of faith is not a purely cognitive activity, but that the will has a crucial role to play in it; however, it is a bone of contention at exactly what point the will intervenes. Similarly, the question of the intertwining of natural and supernatural elements in the act of faith is disputed. In Chapter 5, Christophe Grellard shows that in Francisco de Vitoria’s account, the necessary starting point for this act is reason, since it involves an initial opinion which is usually built on trust in a personal or institutional authority. An act of faith still comes about by a natural process, but this can be turned into a supernatural one by the will, free choice (liberum arbitrium), and pious affection — that is, the disposition of the will to love God - which ensure that mere opinion is transformed into firm and certain confidence from which all hesitation and doubt are removed. Vitoria thinks that the will perfects the intellect, which is the subject of the act of faith, by a movement that is ultimately due to the infusion of the theological virtues. He thus follows a middle path between an extreme voluntarism of faith, according to which the efficient cause of the act of faith is the will alone (as seen in William of Ockham), and a strict naturalism, according to which the production of belief is ultimately unfree (as advocated by Robert Holcot). Vitoria’s account of voluntarism is thus twofold, in that it involves fides in its two dimensions of credulitas (the moral virtue of fidelity) and confidentia (a supernatural form of trust). Ultimately, the act of faith rests on a free decision; thus, the moral culpability for refusing to believe lies clearly with the will.
2.2 Ethical Voluntarism
Ethical voluntarism, the topic of the next five chapters, is closely connected with the idea that the source of our freedom is not reason (i.e., the intellect) but the will. The basic issue here is the understanding of free choice (liberum arbitrium), which was a major bone of contention in scholastic discussions.?’ The understanding of this concept is of primary importance when it comes to the moral dimension of human actions. Discussions of the causality of human actions and how they are free necessarily involve complicated questions about moral accountability for our actions. Thus, the debate between voluntarist and intellectualist theories of action in the Middle Ages is not only about reason or will as the causal locus of agency, but more specifically about them as possible sources of moral responsibility. This debate is usually embedded in the question of how free choice and human freedom are to be understood.
Famously, Thomas Aquinas saw the will as only the (material) seat of freedom and the intellect as the (formal) cause of it, so that the “root of freedom” is firmly located in the intellect.2* As Michael Szlachta shows (Chapter 6), this intellectualist grounding of freedom was contested by voluntarists such as Henry of Ghent. Henry argues that the will can freely choose the lesser of two goods against the judgement of reason; but in line with the chapter by Dominik Perler, Szlachta proves that this claim does not amount to understanding free choice as an arbitrary act or event: Henry still maintains that we will “through choice” (per electionem), which necessarily involves more than a pure “ostensive” causality on the part of reason; rather, there is a significant causal influence (influx) from reason on the will in the act of choice. According to Szlachta’s reading, the voluntarism inherent in Henry’s notion of free choice is considerably more nuanced than is sometimes acknowledged, in at least two respects. First, despite Henry’s catchy metaphor that the will is the king who directs the intellect as a servant carrying the lamp in front of him, he does not portray the will as a “blind” force (as was later done by, for example, Arthur Schopenhauer, who took up the metaphor). The will itself must have cognitions so that it can be influenced by the intellect in eliciting its choices. Second, according to this analysis, choice is more of a kind of “joint venture” between intellect and will; there is no real “gap” between the will and practical intellect, contrary to what the polarizing distinction between voluntarist and intellectualist accounts of human freedom seems to presuppose.
If we take the findings of Perler and Szlachta (and partially also Miller) together, Henry of Ghent, one of the leading protagonists of the voluntarist movement in the second half of the thirteenth century, appears in a new light. Indeed, when it comes to the central question of free choice, the line between intellectualists and voluntarists is not drawn as clearly as is sometimes suggested in earlier scholarly literature. That the strict distinction between intellectualist and voluntarist accounts of human freedom deserves more than a question mark is also highlighted by Ariane Schneck in her discussion of Descartes’s conception of freedom (Chapter 7). She takes her cue from the scholarly controversy about Descartes’s seemingly inconsistent conception of human freedom, as there seem to be textual grounds for ascribing to him a (libertarian) voluntarist conception of freedom of indifference, as well as a (compatibilist) rationalist conception, according to which freedom is a kind of intellectual self-determination. According to the two-aspect model that Schneck develops, these tensions can be alleviated or even resolved; for it is possible to reconcile the rationalist element of intellectual self-determination and the voluntarist element of the will as a genuine two-way power if they are read as pertaining to two different levels (conceptual or otherwise). The highest degree of freedom is reached when the will follows the judgement of reason informed by certain knowledge about good and bad.
Schneck provides novel insights into the question of why the will as a faculty is so important in Descartes’s understanding of freedom. Part of the background here is the fact that in actual situations requiring a practical moral decision, we are seldom in possession of entirely clear and distinct perceptions, which are of course the basis of certain knowledge for Descartes. In other words, moral matters usually involve a degree of uncertainty which cannot be resolved by the intellect on its own. On the basis of this idea, Schneck outlines the crucial role of the will in attaining certainty by considering two ethical issues in Descartes’s later writings (in particular, The Passions of the Soul): his understanding of “generosity” (or magnanimity) as a key virtue, and his account of “weak” and “strong” souls. In both areas, the will as the mental basis of mastering bodily affections is essential to Descartes’s idea that human freedom excludes both external and internal determinism.
Bringing together the chapters by Stephan Schmid and Ariane Schneck, it may not be overstating the case to say that Descartes, who is usually labelled a rationalist (at least in epistemological matters) deserves closer scrutiny with regard to the voluntarist strains in his thought. He not only adheres to doxastic voluntarism and its consequences for free agency, but also views the will as a crucial factor in ethical matters pertaining to human freedom. Thus, as in the case of Henry of Ghent, the contributions of Schmid and Schneck offer a nuanced picture of Descartes’s conception of freedom as well as the (alleged) conflict between intellectualist and voluntarist ideas in general.
Up to this point, it has become clear that in both late medieval and early modern authors, while there were different conceptions of human freedom and the exact causal contribution of the will (and of reason) to free action, there was a general consensus that human beings possess a capacity for rational self-determination which issues in acts of free choice (liberum arbitrium). Thomas Hobbes, however, opposes this basic idea, as Thomas Pink shows (Chapter 8). Based on a materialist and mechanistic account of psychological powers as physical motions which affect other motions, he flatly rejects the idea of rational self-determination. His basic criticism is that the idea that the will can determine itself leads to an infinite regress;”? he also takes issue with the underlying metaphysical idea that there is a power of free will which acts contingently (a presupposition taken for granted by voluntarists such as John Duns Scotus). Hobbes denies contingent causation and argues that there is no opposition between freedom and necessity, thus paving the way for a compatibilist understanding of human freedom, which defies the central intuition shared by many medieval authors that “where there is necessity, there is no freedom.”*°
As Pink demonstrates, this fundamental change is accompanied by a completely different understanding of willing in Hobbes. The will is not treated as an internal agent or faculty which somehow elicits its own act freely, but strictly as a cause of voluntary external action. This reduces the will’s role to that of an action-guiding desire, and this role can just as well be played by passions such as greed and fear. Human freedom is thereby radically transformed: it is not based on an internal interplay of psychological forces which possess a kind of contingent “freedom of indifference” (libertas indifferentiae), but consists simply in the unimpeded exercise of outward action. For Hobbes, freedom is to be equated with libertas a coactione, that is, freedom from external compulsion: it is no longer a freedom of choice, as it was understood in the various versions of liberum arbitrium in the medieval and early modern authors before him, but a pure freedom of action. Needless to say, this position has far-reaching consequences for the understanding of moral responsibility; indeed, it seems to be a kind of death blow for any form of ethical voluntarism.
But that voluntarism was not dead after all in early modern philosophy even after Hobbes’s fervent attack on liberum arbitrium is amply proved by Samuel Pufendorf, whose theory of freedom is examined by Heikki Haara (Chapter 9). Although Pufendorf was deeply influenced by Hobbes in many respects, he departs from him significantly when it comes to the will. In particular, he takes issue with the idea that the will is ultimately nothing more than a kind of action-guiding desire such that there is little (if any) difference between animal and human action. At least in part, Pufendorf returns to basic ideas of scholastic faculty psychology and argues for freedom of the will as a kind of liberty of indifference, enabling human beings to choose between alternatives. Haara focuses on the relationship of the will to the passions (also highlighted for Descartes in the contribution by Ariane Schneck). He shows that according to Pufendorf - who seems to be influenced by neo-Stoic thought in this respect — passions are not able to overpower a firm will. This mastery over the passions does not mean that the will can bend them in any direction, but it can prevent them from gaining motivational force to produce external actions going against natural or civil law. Thus, there is no necessary physical determination of the will by the passions, although Pufendorf acknowledges that human beings are naturally prone to being moved by the unlawful inclinations of their passions; fear of punishment is therefore still a useful means of ensuring (civic) obedience to the law. But Pufendorf also thinks that the ethical cultivation of the passions may play a significant role in furthering one’s freedom.
Along these lines, Haara unfolds the consequences of Pufendorf’s moral psychology and theory of action for the guidance of citizens by political governance, for which the internalization of moral and civic norms through habituation is crucial. He thus offers a new line of interpretation, connecting Pufendorf’s moral psychology, theory of action, and theory of political governance. Pufendorf’s account of free will is clearly centred on the idea of responsibility, of which he gives a nuanced picture, even drawing on Aristotle’s conception of “mixed” actions (hovering between the voluntary and the involuntary) in order to explain the idea of diminished culpability. Although Pufendorf sees natural-law morality as pertaining mainly to external actions (and not to inner attitudes), the idea of the free will as a contingently operating causal power underlies his treatment of ethical norms.
Part II closes with a kind of case study which throws considerable light on the voluntarist notion of freedom. Eric Hagedorn (Chapter 10) points to a dilemma presented to voluntarists by the Christian tenet that the blessed in heaven (as well as the good angels) no longer possess the ability to sin. This is combined with the claim that they are nevertheless free, or indeed, even more free than humans in the present life. An intellectualist ethics is not fundamentally threatened by this idea: if one sees freedom as the ability to follow willingly what one judges to be best, it is easy to imagine that this ability is heightened in the afterlife, at which point perfect cognition becomes possible so that error as the main cause of wrongdoing drops out of the picture. But for voluntarist authors, it is much more difficult to come to terms with this concept of heavenly freedom, since they usually consider the ability to do otherwise (including diverging knowingly and willingly from God’s command) to be the hallmark of freedom. If, however, the will is essentially a two-way power, how can one still speak of its freedom when one of these ways — namely, the ability to sin — is no longer possible for it?
Hagedorn discusses some fourteenth-century voluntarists and their reactions to this dilemma, starting with Peter John Olivi, who regards the ability to sin not as a defect of the will but even as one of its noble features. Consequently, Olivi portrays the ability to sin rooted in the will as an essential feature of human freedom. In order to square this idea with the inability of the blessed to sin, he argues that the will in heaven has not lost its status as a two-way power, but that one path is effectively blocked by God. This sets the tone for many later voluntarist authors, who differ on the exact explanation of heavenly freedom but concur that man’s sinlessness in heaven is due not to some individual feature of the created will itself but to divine activity and interference.
As Hagedorn remarks, this is a rather problematic answer to the puzzle they want to solve. As often, the one ready to bite the bullet here is William of Ockham, who argues that if the ability to do otherwise is the essential feature of free will, then the restrictions placed on willing in the afterlife amount to the idea that heavenly “freedom” is an equivocal concept and that the blessed lack freedom in any philosophical sense of the term. The bottom line is that within the framework of a coherent psychological and ethical voluntarism, the idea that freedom remains intact (or is even heightened) even though it can no longer act otherwise must remain an unsolvable enigma. But Hagedorn finally points to another fourteenth-century voluntarist, Marguerite Porete, who offers an unorthodox escape route based on her mystical thought. She assumes that the blessed completely lose their creaturely will, and along with it the power to sin, and that their will is replaced by the divine will. The idea that the possession of divine freedom necessarily entails the inability to sin cannot be doubted, so that the puzzle of heavenly freedom is removed. But this comes at a high price which few voluntarists are likely ready to pay, for in Porete’s model, the ultimate goal of earthly life is to lose one’s will as a source of human personhood and to annihilate every volition that is not God.
2.3 Theological Voluntarism
The last four chapters in this volume discuss various issues related to theological voluntarism. As mentioned earlier, crucial to the metaethical question of the grounding of morality are the divine agent and the modal implications of the conception of divine will. The underlying assumption of theological voluntarism is that at least some of the acts of divine will that determine the moral status of entities such as actions are not necessary, since otherwise divine freedom would be undermined, according to the voluntaristic presupposition of contingency. According to intellectualists, however, the fact that the moral status of entities should depend on nonnecessary divine acts of will jeopardizes the non-contingent status of morality. The threat of morality being rendered arbitrary by its dependence on contingent acts of divine will is one of the most perennial objections raised against theological voluntarism by intellectualists. Notwithstanding their criticism, late medieval intellectualists do not question the idea that God is a person whose authority plays a central role in the explanation of morality and its grounding. The debate between theological voluntarists and intellectualists takes place within the framework of the authority of the divine person. They disagree only on the precise role of divine will and intellect. It is therefore no coincidence that in both late medieval and early modern theological voluntarism, a central conception is obligation, which continues to be central in contemporary versions of theological voluntarism.*! Obligation is based on an asymmetrical relation that can obtain only between persons, because only persons can be obliged to perform actions, and only a person can oblige another person to perform an action.”
A radical change in the conception of God as a person probably started only with Spinoza in the early modern period, with consequences for morality and its grounding. It is therefore useful also to distinguish more broadly between approaches (whether voluntarist or intellectualist) according to which morality and its grounding necessarily involve persons and their authority, and those that deny that the grounding of morality necessarily involves persons. Given these fundamental conceptual changes in the early modern period, Part III of the volume focuses on well-known authors of the era, such as Spinoza, Leibniz, and Descartes, but also on less well-known ones such as the German pre-Kantian pietist Christian August Crusius and the British woman philosopher Catherine Trotter Cockburn.
In addition to issues concerning morality and its grounding, Part III also addresses questions about early modern conceptions of modality, for necessity, contingency, and possibility are explained in relation to the divine powers of intellect and will. This overall approach can be found in both early modern intellectualists and voluntarists. In general, modal conceptions, logic, morality, and metaphysical issues are considered within the framework of the divine intellect and will. This general approach is considered by Sebastian Bender in his contribution on Descartes’s moral and modal voluntarism (Chapter 11). Bender shows the close connection between conceptions of modality and morality, and in particular how the moral conceptions bear on the modal ones. Descartes is a voluntarist concerning moral truths. Moral (theological) voluntarism is the view that the moral quality of at least some entities depends on acts of divine will, at least some of which are not necessary. It seems to be a weaker view than modal voluntarism, since according to modal voluntarism God freely creates all the eternal (i.e., necessary) truths, including for instance mathematical truths, which are traditionally taken to be true in all possible worlds; that is, Descartes’s God is even able to change the modal status of a truth by turning necessary truths into contingent ones and vice versa. The problem is that whereas moral (theological) voluntarism is not such an uncommon doctrine and has both opponents and proponents, modal voluntarism is rather uncommon or even exotic. The question, then, is why Descartes would commit himself to such a seemingly strange and far-reaching view.
Bender shows that Descartes’s commitment to modal voluntarism in fact follows from his commitment to moral voluntarism. To support his argument, Bender draws attention to Descartes’s conception of the divine powers, which combines voluntarist and intellectual elements in a specific way. As to the voluntarist element, the divine will is undetermined by anything in the sense that it can become active without or prior to the intellect presenting any object to it; in this sense, the divine will is a self-moving power. Once an object is presented to the will, however, it is no longer wholly undetermined. God freely creates the non-divine essences, but once these essences are created, God’s decisions are determined by what follows from these essences. When God creates an essence, he thereby establishes all kinds of eternal truths, such as moral truths and mathematical ones, with which he henceforth has to comply. This is the intellectualist element. The point is that from Descartes’s assumption that God creates all non-divine essences, it follows that all the eternal truths that necessarily follow from these essences are on a par with moral truths as regards modal status. Thus, Bender concludes, it is due to Descartes’s peculiar conception of the divine powers that modal voluntarism follows from his commitment to moral voluntarism, since in Descartes’s view the modal status of moral truths and all other eternal truths must be the same insofar as all eternal truths follow from essences.
Ursula Renz and Sarah Tropper also focus in their contribution (Chapter 12) on central aspects of modality by contrasting Spinoza’s and Leibniz’s views on two basic metaphysical principles, namely, the Principle of Plenitude (POP) and the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), and their relation to each other. Crucially, Renz and Tropper show that unlike Spinoza, Leibniz is able to avoid a tension that results from an equal commitment to both the PSR and the POP, although it is somewhat controversial whether it is correct to ascribe to Spinoza a commitment not only to the PSR but also to the POP. The problem is that the ontological parsimony of the PSR does not fit well with the ontological prodigality entailed by the POP. Tropper and Renz discuss a prominent recent solution to this tension that is based on a shift from the ontological level to the conceptual. The upshot is that in relation to finite things, the modal notions of possibility and necessity are considered only in terms of conceivability and not in terms of essences. Renz and Tropper argue that this conclusion might succeed in resolving the tension between the two principles, insofar as modal claims are thus grounded in conceptual relations and not in ontological facts or entities. The problem remains, however, that Spinoza is unable to account for the intuitive and widely accepted distinction between actually existing and thus possible things, and possible things that do not actually exist and so are merely possible.
Against this backdrop, Renz and Tropper present Leibniz’s solution to the problem. Although Leibniz in his early writings shares many metaphysical commitments with Spinoza, he rejects Spinoza’s non-personal conception of God, according to which God is a merely metaphysical entity devoid of will. Rather, Leibniz conceives of God as a person with the powers of intellect and will, and hence the powers of spontaneous action; for this very reason, God is not identical to the world, as he is according to Spinoza. Leibniz distinguishes between merely possible things and actually existing possible things in terms of his conception of the divine will. Crucially, he conceives of the divine will in the light of divine perfection: if the notion of the divine agent acting in the best possible way is to be meaningful, there must be real alternatives that God can evaluate. It should be emphasized, however, that Leibniz is not a voluntarist merely in virtue of conceiving of God as a person with intellect and will, for given his strong commitment to the PSR, God’s will is necessarily guided by what is best. The chapter thus illustrates that one can be committed to a personal conception of God without being a voluntarist in any sense.
Chapter 13, by Ruth Boeker, is also to be located on the argumentative battlefield between theological voluntarists and intellectualists who share the conception of a divine person. Boeker focuses on the still undeservedly neglected woman philosopher Catharine Trotter Cockburn and presents Cockburn’s moral theory as regards both its underlying metaphysics, that is, the grounding of normativity, and the practice of morality, that is, moral motivation. Cockburn rejects theological voluntarism because it is inconsistent with her own teleological view, according to which morality in general and obligation in particular are grounded in human nature, from which relations of “fitness,” or suitability, arise. In Cockburn’s view, fitness is a matter of what is suitable for beings with a certain nature, where the idea of fitness or suitability is itself normative: if it is suitable for a human agent to do X because doing X fits his nature, then he ought to do X. She thus rejects the central idea of theological voluntarism that good and evil depend on (contingent) acts of the divine will, for divine commands are guided by what is fit for human beings. It is worth noting that in this respect Cockburn’s account bears some interesting and relevant resemblance to her contemporary Christian Wolff (1679-1754), who also presented a nature-based notion of obligation that was, in his view, innovative and groundbreaking.*?> Cockburn emphasizes that all three components of human nature — sensibility, rationality, and sociability — are jointly important. Compared to Wolff’s theory, which is taken by some commentators to be deficient in its explanation of why we should care about the welfare of others, Cockburn’s account of human nature has the advantage that it can explain why we care about and act for the sake of the welfare of others. Most importantly, Cockburn’s account nicely illustrates the role divine will can play in moral motivation within a more intellectualist framework. Although obligation is grounded in the nature of things, the divine will can provide the motivation needed for human agents to comply with their obligations. The chapter thus presents the debate from the perspective of a remarkable woman philosopher with rationalist inclinations and a strong emphasis on the essentially sociable character of human beings.
In the last chapter, Sonja Schierbaum continues the discussion on the argumentative battlefield between theological voluntarists and intellectualists from the perspective of (the also still undeservedly neglected) Christian August Crusius (Chapter 14). Schierbaum argues that Crusius’s account of moral obligation does not qualify as a variety of theological voluntarism, since all the relevant acts of divine will are necessary: the grounding of moral obligation does not presuppose any sort of freedom of indifference that applies to God. (This might be surprising given that Crusius clearly is a voluntarist with respect to human freedom of indifference.) Thus, Crusius agrees with intellectualists at least on the necessity of moral obligation. Unlike Cockburn, however, Crusius still insists that obligation is grounded in the divine will.
According to Crusius, it is not an intrinsic property of actions to be morally good or evil, since they are good or evil only in relation to divine will. Schierbaum emphasizes that in Crusius’s original theory of divine action, human beings and their way of acting are themselves part of God’s own end in creating the world, namely, that free rational agents act as they ought to act. According to Crusius, a moral reason — that is, a reason why something ought to be done — is created only in relation to an end, and something is an end only in relation to a will. Thus, the divine person’s willing that human beings act in accordance with perfection creates a moral reason why human beings ought to act in accordance with perfection. Schierbaum shows that ultimately, human freedom of indifference is entailed by the metaphysical account of divine action. The chapter thus highlights the crucial difference between relational, interpersonal accounts of moral obligation on the one hand, and non-relational, non-interpersonal accounts on the other, by focusing on the different roles of the divine will and its necessary acts. As the example of Crusius shows, an account of moral obligation based on divine will differs importantly from a rationalist account in that the former conceives of obligation as an asymmetrical, will-based relation between persons, regardless of whether the acts of divine are necessary. There is thus a crucial difference between will-based accounts of moral obligation, and others that are not based on divine will, beyond the question of the modality (necessity or contingency) of the central acts of will.
3 Concluding Remarks
The historical development in the three areas of voluntarism as mirrored in the chapters of this volume cannot be easily summarized because of the richness of the material. Nevertheless, a general observation is appropriate concerning the extent to which the three kinds of voluntarism are connected to each other through the two general features, and to what extent they might be logically independent from each other.
Concerning the connection between the kinds of voluntarism, we can say that historically, there was indeed a kind of transition from one kind to another, starting with psychological voluntarism and ending with theological voluntarism. This transition may be outlined roughly as follows: Psychological voluntarism is based on the assumption of a kind of preeminence or dominance of the will in the soul with regard to specifically human activities. This leading and active role of the will is frequently cashed out in terms of different forms of causality which contribute to human activity. Voluntarists usually emphasize the causal role of the will at the expense of the intellect, although some of our chapters (in particular those of Perler and Szlachta) show that voluntarists do not thereby eliminate the causality of the intellect altogether, but keep it in play in order to avoid the threat of completely irrational activities. In general, the will is viewed as an indispensable element in explaining evil actions that cannot be accounted for by purely rational models (see the chapters by Miiller and Hoffmann on incontinent actions).
Thus, voluntarism appears first at the level of the psychology of action in order to describe and analyse how humans act. This perspective is mainly action-theoretical (in modern parlance), but it gives rise to a fundamental ethical question about human agency: How is it that we are responsible for our actions such that we can be justly praised or blamed and rewarded or punished for them? The answer to this question marks the transition from psychological to ethical voluntarism, in that it involves an account of human freedom of decision. Henry of Ghent emerges in this volume as a key figure and a prototypical example of this development at the end of the thirteenth century. Again, the will is basically pitted against intellect as the main root of freedom, but as the chapters in Part II of the volume show, there is a complex interplay between the two faculties, which is acknowledged even by staunch voluntarist authors. Nevertheless, in the wake of ethical voluntarism, the will becomes the focal point both of personal selfhood and of moral worth: the state of the will determines both our personality and our moral state. The transition to theological voluntarism is marked by the idea that morality — in the guise of the conception of obligation — is grounded in God. Medieval intellectualists and voluntarists share the assumption of a personal God, and hence have in common an approach to obligation based on divine authority. The fundamental question that divides them is whether moral obligation is grounded in divine will or divine intellect. The contributions in this volume show that alternative, non-personal approaches to obligation become possible only with the groundbreaking changes in the conception of God in the early modern period. From a historical and developmental perspective, it is interesting to note that it is only with the rise in the early modern period of self-consciously unified and complete philosophical systems that we find fully developed accounts of all three varieties of voluntarism together, with their respective psychological, ethical, and metaethical issues and their interrelations in the work of one and the same author, as for instance in Crusius.*4
Against the backdrop of this presentation, then, we can say that authors who are committed to a kind of ethical voluntarism are also very likely to be committed to a kind of psychological voluntarism, simply because the voluntarist intuition that moral responsibility and imputability require freedom of indifference. It should be clear, however, that psychological and ethical voluntarism are logically independent, since one can be committed to a kind of psychological voluntarism without being committed to a particular ethical approach. For instance, one can be committed to a strong conception of the will as freedom of indifference with respect to action theory, and yet take a consequentialist view on the moral value of actions, since the moral value of an action being determined by its outcome does not necessarily depend on the power to do otherwise (i.e., freedom of indifference). In other words, the will can be understood as the pre-eminent causal factor in human action without the entirety of the ethical architecture (including the basis for how moral actions are evaluated, the seat of the ethical virtues, etc.) being linked to this idea. Lastly, one can be committed both to a kind of psychological voluntarism and to ethical voluntarism without also being committed to theological voluntarism, as is seen in the case of Crusius. The present volume thus aims to contribute to the further understanding of voluntarism in these three areas and their interrelations, both historical and systematic.
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