Thomas Pink

Power and moral responsibility

Our moral responsibility for our actions seems to depend on our possession of a power to determine for ourselves what actions we perform – a power of self-determination. What kind of power is this? The paper discusses what power in general might involve, what differing kinds of power there might be, and the nature of self-determination in particular. A central question is whether this power on which our moral responsibility depends is by its nature a two-way power, involving a power over alternatives or a freedom to do otherwise. Criticism is made of various attempts to understand self-determination in one-way terms, whether as a capacity for rationality (McDowell) or as a form of voluntariness (Frankfurt). It is argued in particular that Frankfurts arguments to show that moral responsibility does not depend on a freedom to do otherwise beg the question against his opponents.

Thomas Hobbes and the Ethics of Freedom

Abstract Freedom in the sense of free will is a multiway power to do any one of a number of things, leaving it up to us which one of a range of options by way of action we perform. What are the ethical implications of our possession of such a power? The paper examines the pre-Hobbesian scholastic view of writers such as Peter Lombard and Francisco Suárez: freedom as a multiway power is linked to the right to liberty understood as a right to exercise that power, and to liberation as a desirable goal involving the perfection of that power. Freedom as a power, liberty as a right, and liberation as a desirable goal, are all linked within this scholastic view to a distinctive theory of law as constituting, in its primary form of natural law, the normative recognition of human freedom. Hobbess denial of the very existence of freedom as a power led him to a radical revision both of the theory of law and of the relation of law to liberty. Law and liberty were no longer harmonious phenomena, but were left in essential conflict. One legacy of Hobbes is the attempt to base a theory of law and liberty not on freedom as a multiway power, but on rationality. Instead of an ethics of freedom, we have an ethics of reason as involving autonomy. The paper expresses some scepticism about the prospects for such an appeal to reason as a replacement for multiway freedom.

Normativity and reason

Moral obligation is a demand of reason—a demanding kind of rational justification. How to understand this rational demand? Much recent philosophy, as in the work of Scanlon, takes obligatoriness to be a reason-giving feature of an action. But the paper argues that moral obligatoriness should instead be understood as a mode of justificatory support—as a distinctive justificatory force of demand. The paper argues that this second model of obligation, the Force model, was central to the natural law tradition in ethics, is truer to everyday intuition about obligation, and also changes our understanding of the problem of moral rationality. A new account is given of why it might be irrational to breach moral obligations. The Force model also sheds new light on moral responsibility, our responsibility for meeting moral obligations. Moral obligation is a standard of reason; but moral responsibility is shown to involve far more than ordinary rational appraisability, precisely because moral obligation involves a distinctive justificatory force of demand—one which specifically governs how we act.

Natural Law and the Theory of Moral Obligation

The chapter explores theories of moral obligation from those of late scholastics such as Francisco Suarez and Gabriel Vasquez to those of Samuel Pufendorf and John Locke. The theories of Pufendorf and Locke are contrasted. Although these two theories appear similar, there is a profound difference between them. In Pufendorf as in a scholastic such as Suarez, practical reason is seen as involving two distinct kinds of justificatory force or modes of justificatory support, recommendation and demand; and moral obligation is identified, not as a reason-giving property of actions, but as one of these justificatory forces, the force of demand, a force that directly binds the will. Whereas in Locke there is only one justificatory force, that of recommendation; and moral obligation is no more than a reason-giving property, the property of being commanded by a punitive God, among the many that generate this force. In Locke as in subsequent English-language philosophy, moral obligation ceases to be a justificatory force that directly binds the will, and comes to be no more than a reason-giving property of the voluntary actions that the will causes and motivates. The chapter expresses doubts about whether this development has been a genuine conceptual advance, and explores the problems it raises.

Action, Will and Law in Late Scholasticism

In what follows I wish to discuss a distinctive natural law-based conception of obligation—and the intimate relation which that conception of obligation bears to an equally distinctive theory of human action. I shall concentrate my attention on two early modern thinkers in particular, Francisco Suarez (1548–1617) and Gabriel Vasquez (1549–1604). How widely their conception was shared by other thinkers in their tradition is a question for another time. When it comes to obligation, Suarez and Vasquez might sensibly be contrasted. For Vasquez, obligations could arise prior to and independently of any act of will or intellectual judgement, of any being, God included. In particular, then, obligations need not be the creations of any law-maker or legislator, whether human or divine. Thus, in Vasquez’s view, existed the pre-political obligations of the natural law—moral obligations not to kill and the like. These did not arise through any form of legislative act. Whereas for Suarez, all obligations, all moral obligations included, did presuppose some legislative act. There was no exception to this. For someone to be under an obligation to perform an action, that person must always be subject to a superior; and the superior must have willed that the action be obligatory on the person obliged and have promulgated to that person his will to that effect. In the case of moral obligations of the natural law, the required legislative superior was God.

Agents, Objects and Their Powers in Suarez and Hobbes

The paper examines the place of power in the action theories of Francisco Suarez and Thomas Hobbes. Power is the capacity to produce or determine outcomes. Two cases of power are examined. The first is freedom or the power of agents to determine for themselves what they do. The second is motivation, which involves a power to which agents are subject, and by which they are moved to pursue a goal. Suarez, in the Metaphysical Disputations, uses Aristotelian causation to model these two forms of power. Freedom is efficient causation, but in a special form that I explain as involving something that ordinary causation does not – the contingent determination of outcomes. Motivating power is final causation, which Suarez characterizes as the power of a goal or end to move us to attain it through its goodness or desirability. Suarez regards these two forms of power as consistent – we can be moved by the goodness of a goal freely to determine for ourselves that we act in order to attain it. Hobbes denied the existence of all forms of power beyond ordinary causation, the power of one motion in matter to determine another. So he denied the very existence both of freedom and of any form of motivating power beyond the ordinary causal power of desires as materially based psychological states to produce actions. The goodness itself of a goal never moves us, whether to desire the goal in the first place or to act in order to attain it. The paper examines Hobbes’s arguments and their consequence – establishing the foundations for Hume’s scepticism about practical reason.

Samuel Moyn - Christian Human Rights

According to Samuel Moyn’s Christian Human Rights, it is in the middle of the twentieth century that human rights become important in public politics and international law. But they enter the public world as conservative or Christian human rights, principally through Catholicism. Authoritarian regimes have become discredited as a Catholic political form. The way forward is to espouse democracy, but within a morally conservative framework. Recognition is given to the rights, liberty and dignity of the individual, but so understood as to oppose secularism—and especially to oppose communism. These individual rights are understood in personalist terms, as based on human dignity. They are rights to liberty and especially rights to religious liberty. But the person is understood as spiritual and directed at spiritual ends, and liberty is understood in terms of natural law—as subject to the moral constraints of a divine order, not as directed at human emancipation or autonomy or preference satisfaction. This Catholic personalism is increasingly taken up by the official Church, and eventually involves ecumenical cooperation with Protestantism. This is a process that begins under Pius XI and Pius XII and is completed in Dignitatis Humanae, the declaration of an individual moral right to religious liberty by the Second Vatican Council. This espousal of human rights as rights of individuals, Moyn claims, is not really faithful to earlier Christian tradition, which especially as Thomism or in earlier intellectual forms was never friendly to human rights, as neither were the nineteenth-century popes. It is a hijacking or an exploitation for conservative ends of elements that come from outside the older Christian tradition.

Law and the Normativity of Obligation

philosophers, or rather divines under that disguise, treating all morals as on a like footing with civil laws, guarded by sanctions of reward and punishment, were necessarily led to render this circumstance, of voluntary or involuntary, the foundation of their whole theory ... but this, in mean time, must be allowed, that sentiments are every day experienced of blame and praise, which have objects beyond the dominion of the will or choice, and of which it behoves us, if not as moralists, as speculative philosophers at least, to give some satisfactory theory and explication.1