Scholars of the Roman Empire divided philosophy into logic, physics, and ethics, giving ethics pride of place. The main purpose of philosophy as a whole was the same as the purpose of moral philosophy: to articulate a conception of the highest or supreme good (summum bonum) - that which makes us happy and which we seek strictly for its own sake - and to explain how we can attain it. In order to explain how we can attain it philosophers had to specify the role of virtue. Is virtue constitutive of, partly constitutive of, or instrumentally related to the happy life? Equally important, philosophers were expected to present their view of God (or the gods) and spell out the implications for human life. While they were free to claim, as Epicureans did, that the soul dies with the body and that the gods take no interest in human affairs, it was incumbent upon them to argue for these points.
Augustine (d. 430) suggested that pagan thinkers got the big questions right but usually got the answers wrong.
For him the supreme good was God, not happiness, virtue, or any other human state of mind. In Book VIII, Chapter 9 of City of God (De civitate Dei) Augustine praised ‘‘the Platonists’’ - meaning Neoplatonists - for recognizing that the soul is immortal, that God is the supreme Good, and that our own happiness lies in the enjoyment of God. Nevertheless, he faulted all pagan philosophers for teaching that we can make ourselves good and happy. For Augustine, both virtue and happiness are gifts of God’s grace, not natural consequences of human selfdevelopment.
Augustine’s idea of moral philosophy survived well into the twelfth century. Consider, for example, Abelard’s Dialogue (Collationes) between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian. Describing ethics as the branch of learning at which all others aim, the Christian suggests that there are differences only about how to name it. Christians call this discipline ‘‘divinity’’ because it aims at reaching God, whereas philosophers call it ‘‘morals,’’ because people come to God by means of good behavior. Not only does Abelard’s Philosopher agree, he also agrees that ethics concerns the supreme good and how we attain it, that the soul is immortal, and that philosophers look forward to happiness in the afterlife.
The thirteenth century witnessed striking changes in the intellectual milieu. With the rise of universities came conflicts between two newly created professional classes: the faculty of theology and the (lower) faculty of arts, dedicated to the study of logic, grammar, and rhetoric, and Aristotle’s works. to the labors of translators, a vast body of material about natural philosophy, psychology, and ethics became available in a fairly short time - not only works by Aristotle but also works by various commentators, including and especially the Muslim commentator Averroes. While this new material attracted interest in all universities, members of the Paris arts faculty embraced it with exceptional enthusiasm. Bonaventure (d. 1274), Aquinas, and other theologians soon began writing and preaching against doctrines circulating in arts: the denial that the individual soul is immortal, that humans have free choice, and other doctrines many considered ruinous to moral philosophy.
The controversy at Paris came to a head in 1277, when the bishop condemned over 200 theses as ‘‘obvious and loathsome errors.’’ Among them were the claims that ‘‘Happiness is had in this life and not in another,’’ that ‘‘After death a human being loses every good,’’ and sundry theses either denying or limiting the will’s free choice - all propositions the bishop believed members of the arts faculty had declared ‘‘true according to philosophy.’’ The condemnation did not imply that philosophy proved the condemned propositions false, only that it did not prove them true, and no mention was made of Aristotle. In theology as well as arts, at Paris and elsewhere, Aristotle remained the most heavily cited philosophical authority until the end of the Middle Ages.
Some masters continued the Neoplatonic pattern, treating as central to moral philosophy the immortality of the individual soul and happiness in the afterlife. Others, convinced that we cannot know these truths by natural reason unaided by grace, conceived of moral philosophy along different lines. The study of Aristotle’s works raised important new issues and generally transformed the language of debate. In substance, though, medieval ethics remained heavily eclectic. Most scholars, even masters of arts, had at best a weak sense of the historical Aristotle. Sometimes their distortions of his Ethics arose from efforts to interpret it charitably; sometimes they probably owe more to ignorance of what the text actually says.
One should not assume that most medieval scholars studied Aristotle’s Ethics in the period after 1246-1248, when they had access (in theory) to a complete Latin translation of the work. While virtually all students of arts and theology heard lectures on some books of the Ethics, many never heard lectures on all of it, let alone read the text. The references to Aristotle with which they embroider their works often come from collections of excerpts, works by other masters, or a combination of the two.
In a way, the Ethics did less than the Posterior Analytics to shape later medieval discussions of ethics as a ‘‘science’’ or area of knowledge. (Scientia, the Latin word often translated as ‘‘science,’’ can equally be translated as ‘‘knowledge.’’) Following Aristotle, masters distinguished between theoretical sciences, practical sciences, and mere arts or skills, such as medicine and navigation. Where theoretical sciences aim at truth for its own sake and practical sciences guide us in choosing actions, arts and skills aim at producing some external result beyond the action itself. Nobody doubted that ethics is practical; but is it a science in the strict sense? Despite Aristotle’s references to ethics as a science, one might wonder how it could satisfy the stringent requirements set forth in Book I, Chapters 1-4, of the Prior Analytics. There Aristotle argues that someone can have unqualified knowledge or science (episteme) only of self-evident propositions and conclusions deduced from them through a demonstrative syllogism.
Are at least some moral principles self-evident (per se nota)? Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham all agreed that some are. By the same token, all singled out some first principle of practical reason - a very general one, such as ‘‘Good is to be done; bad is to be avoided’’ - and presented it as the foundation for precepts of natural law. Natural law figures no less prominently in the works of Scotus and Ockham than it does in the works of Aquinas (Mohle 2003; McGrade 1999). All three believed that ordinary people can, and often do, recognize the truth of basic moral principles.
Why, then, are Scotus and Ockham sometimes seen as proponents of divine command theory? Confusion arises partly from comparisons between nontechnical discussions by Aquinas and highly technical discussions two or three generations later, by masters preoccupied with Aristotle’s requirements for unqualified knowledge. For example, Aquinas claims that all other precepts of natural law are ‘‘based on,’’ or ‘‘flow from’’ from the first, foundational principle. God could add new precepts, but even God cannot dispense from such basic principles as the one that prohibits killing an innocent person. Aquinas grants that God can command such a killing, as he did in ordering Abraham to sacrifice Isaac; yet Aquinas denies that this was really a case of dispensing from the prohibition against killing.
As Scotus sees it, the command to Abraham shows that God can dispense from the prohibition against killing, and indeed, from all precepts of the Decalogue except the first three. Scotus, however, divides the first three precepts from the others with reference to requirements more stringent than Aquinas’. The first group consists of principles either true by the very meaning of their terms or that follow necessarily from such principles. Although precepts of the second group fail to meet these high standards, Scotus describes them as evidently true and immediately recognized to be greatly in accord with principles that do meet the standards.
Ockham takes a more expansive view of self-evident moral principles. He includes not only principles true by the meaning of their terms but also principles evident from experience, such as ‘‘An angry person is to be mollified by fair words.’’ Ockham shares Scotus’ view that God’s command can override a moral principle that the agent would otherwise be obliged to follow, as it did in the case of Abraham. But what modern authors usually mean by ‘‘divine command theory’’ involves a more radical thesis, attributed to Ockham in the seventeenth century by Francisco Suarez (d. 1617): no act is bad except insofar as it is prohibited by God. There is no persuasive evidence that Ockham defended this view (Kilcullen 1993).
On the whole, divine command theory represents a concern for early modern thinkers, not for their medieval predecessors. For examples of issues that did interest later medieval thinkers readers might consult a work by John Capreolus (d. 1444): the Defenses of the Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas (Defensiones theologiae Divi Thomae Aquinatis). The leading Dominican at Paris in the early fifteenth century, Capreolus labored to defend Aquinas against criticisms raised by Scotus, Durand, Gregory of Rimini, and other fourteenth-century authors. No objections connected with divine command theory were among them. Instead Capreolus included arguments about the natural desire for happiness, about the connection of the cardinal virtues, and about ‘‘whether naturally acquired virtues (virtutes habituales) are necessary for human beings.’’ Disputes on the first two topics began in the early Middle Ages. The third did not emerge as an area of concern until the fourteenth century, when scholars began arguing about the place of virtues in ethical theory.
World History
