HoP 455 - Tom Pink on Francisco Suárez
35:26 Share

Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Francisco Suarez and his ethical theory with Tom Pink, who is professor of philosophy at King's College London. Hi, Tom. Hi, Peter. Thanks for coming back on the podcast. Not at all.

We are going to be talking about Suarez, and I thought maybe you could just begin by reminding the listener who Suarez was and saying something about the main influences on his ethical thought.

Suarez was from a very well-connected Spanish family who becomes a member of the Jesuit order in the early days, 16th century days of that order. Like many members of the Jesuit order, he has a certain degree of choice about who he will follow.

He's not a Dominican who has to give a special place to Thomas Aquinas. He's not a Franciscan who has to give a special place to Duns Scotus. He is therefore quite eclectic. At a big picture level, you can see him as combining various elements of the Thomist and Scotist traditions, but he's a much more deeply grounded thinker than that, in that, to a very extraordinary extent, he combines...

a wide range of influences that come from outside ethics as we would understand it nowadays. For example, he's a considerable legal thinker. He had a very great mastery of both civil law, the law of the state, and canon law, the law of the church. And he integrates his mastery of legal theory with his ethical theory to provide a general theory of how we live the ethical life

within the framework of divinely instituted governing bodies, church and state. He died, in fact, in Lisbon in 1617, trying to sort out a case of turf war between church and state, where the local papal representative had put an interdict on the city of Lisbon because clerics were being hauled up in front of the civil courts. And that shows that there is a practical dimension to a lot of Suarez's work.

He's writing at a time where we've had the Reformation, what his own Catholic tradition would have seen as undirected state intrusion into the world of religion. And he's attempting to create a better understanding of how our supernatural destiny in heaven can be negotiated alongside our pursuit of natural happiness on earth with cooperation between church and state to enable that. Okay. Well, before we move on to

the content of his ethical teaching and how the law relates to morality and so on, which is what we're mostly going to be talking about, I thought perhaps we should say something about what we might call his moral psychology. What I mean by that is what has to happen in the person, maybe Suarez would say in the soul, in order for someone to perform a morally significant action. So let's say, for example, that I'm a good

Christian living in the 16th, 17th century, and I decide to give some money to charity. So how does he think that that would actually come to pass in terms of the mechanisms of the faculties in the soul? Excellent question. When I perform a morally significant action like giving alms, it's helpful to look at it first of all in terms of modern philosophy, and then in terms of the very different theory that Suarez is going to put forward.

In modern philosophy, certainly within the English language tradition, the action of giving alms is going to involve a physical component, handing the money over, and that is going to count as an action because it's an effect.

of something in my mind that is not itself an action like a desire to give alms as a means to say preventing someone starving to death or maybe a belief that giving alms is a good thing to do or that it's a good thing to do but these beliefs and desires are content-bearing psychological attitudes as philosophers put it they are mental states with kind of content

that provide the action, which is the effect that they produce, with its goal or goals, that someone receives the money, that a good deed is done, or that they are saved from starving. So actions are effects, a case of ordinary causal power exercised by prior mental states that are not themselves actions. It's very important that Suarez doesn't have this theory of action at all.

The first thing to say is that central to action, both I think in modern philosophy and in his day, is the idea of doing something as a means to an end, goal direction. And goal direction involves having a kind of object. The object to someone's action is a way we might describe the goal. For Soares, that goal isn't provided by causes in the head.

The goal is internal to the action itself. An action is itself a kind of psychological content-bearing event that occurs in the will. It's a decision to give alms in order to do a good action, in order to prevent someone starving. So goal direction is intrinsic to action as a distinctive kind of psychological event or attitude that occurs in the will.

The will, not bodily action, is the locus of action. So that's what an action is. Sorry, can I just come in there and make sure I understand this? So what you're saying is that giving alms, so giving to charity, is an action. But in addition, there's another action which happens in the soul. And this is the action which is the choosing action.

of the will to do this. And of course, Suarez isn't going to deny that the actual handing over of the money is also an action, but it's an action in a derivative way as an effect, an intended effect of a prior action in the mind, your decision to hand the money over.

He will talk about the actions and the will as elicited actions, and he will talk about the further bodily movements or other actions decided on as commanded actions. This is perfectly standard scholastic action theoretic terminology, but it's important to see that that is exactly what action is in its primary form, an eventual exercise of the will.

We now need to look at how reason and freedom get involved in these actions of the will, because again, we're going to have a theory that's very unlike modern philosophy. We look at the modern philosophical view of action. The only counter power that we've given as involved in it so far is just ordinary causation, an ordinary causal power attaching to mental events and states in your head.

For Suárez, that doesn't come into it at all, except when it's exercised by the act of will to produce the act decided upon or intended and get your hand to move. The powers that really are important to action for Suárez are forms of power that are not ordinary causation. They are very different from ordinary causation. One is freedom. This is a power we exercise to control whether or not we perform an act of the will.

And this involves a form of efficient causation, which might make it look a bit like ordinary causation. When a brick hits a window and breaks it, that's efficient causation for Soiré's. But for Soiré's, efficient causation as freedom is very different from ordinary causation. It's a special kind of efficient causation, which he calls a form of contingent causation. When a brick hits a window, there's only one thing it can do, break the window. But

But we can exercise our power to produce actions in more than one way, and we control how we exercise it. So its mode of exercise is contingent, not necessitated by its very nature, like the behavior of a brick hitting a window is necessitated. So it's a highly unusual kind of efficient causation.

Is it actually unique? It's unique to rational agents indeed. But there's nothing like this in nature. Absolutely not. God, humans, angels. There is absolutely no concern to give a reductive account that establishes a metaphysical continuity between us and wider nature in this respect. Quite unlike, for example, Thomas Hobbes, who we'll be coming to.

The other power is not a power we exercise. It's a power that we are subject to, but again, it's quite unique to rational nature. We might call it the power of reason.

In modern philosophy, we often say, just as a platitude, that reason moves us, that we can be moved by justifications. But it probably shouldn't be a platitude. For Suarez, it wasn't a platitude. It's an idea that he took with deep metaphysical seriousness. A whole section of the Metaphysical Disputations is about this very topic. He thinks that when we reason or deliberate,

we can be moved by justifications. The more rational we are, the more reliably we're moved by them to do what is indeed justified. What are these justifications? They attach to objects of thought. When you deliberate or reason, you consider various objects by way of possible objects of belief or decision and action. And you consider them by reference to whether they seem to be true in the case of belief.

or whether they would be good things to bring about in the case of decision and action. Would it be good to give alms? There are two forms of justification as far as this system: truth-related ones that address the intellect, get us to form beliefs, and goodness-based ones which get us to take decisions. These actually exercise a form of power over us. The truth-related justifications are a form, he thinks, of efficient causation.

The force of the evidence moves you to believe something. The goodness-related justifications move the will. The goodness of an offer moves you to decide to accept it and then to accept it. The goodness of giving alms moves you to decide to give alms. And we, as rational beings, we are susceptible to the power of truth and the power of goodness.

So whereas in modern philosophy what moves you to take a decision is the ordinary causal power attaching to a prior passion and then before that to other things in the world, in Suarez what moves you to take a decision is not ordinary causation at all attaching to a prior mental state, it's the force of goodness objectively attaching to an object of thought.

And in the case of goodness, Suarez thinks that we have here what in the Aristotelian tradition is called a form of final causation. This raises very many interesting metaphysical problems because it looks as though until you actually perform the action, the object to which the force of goodness attaches doesn't actually exist. Until I actually give the arms, arms giving hasn't happened.

So the object of thought that I give the arms is just an object of my thought. It's like something you imagine yourself doing. It's an intentional object of some sort, but yet it's meant to exercise power over me. One of the reasons he denies it's a case of efficient causation is because it's not actual.

where that efficient causes have to be action. Okay, so that was obviously a very complicated story there, and I could ask many more questions about that, but I wanted to get on to the question of what he actually thinks we should do using these powers. And what you just said,

might make us expect him to say something like, oh, well, there's all these things out there we could be doing and they intrinsically have good or bad features and we just respond to them and act accordingly. But actually he has what you might

think of as a kind of legislative model of morality, wherein he follows the natural law tradition and insists that, in fact, we must be following moral guidelines that are quite literally laid down by a legislator, namely God. So why does he think that? Let's come back to the idea of freedom, which is very important here. The only reason we need legal direction

is that we have a control over our actions that we might misuse. And it's very important that the force of goodness that comes to us in the practical sphere isn't determining

He thinks that the force of truth, when the object is clearly presented, determines the intellect. But even when the option is clearly understood by us, we are never determined by the force of goodness. It's always left open to us to decide to do something we think less good.

So you can realize that giving money to charity would be a good thing to do, but decide not to anyway. Yes. So we have this ability to do the bad thing, freedom to do the bad thing or the less good thing, because everything is a bit good, as well as the better thing. And we need...

special kind of direction, but won't be determining. It will never take away our freedom, but it will be kind of forceful. It will be kind of specially directive. And to see how law is specially directive, I think we need to just stand back and look at how what modern philosophers call the normative works, and then how Suarez and his tradition unpack this general structure.

When we think of ethical standards as normative, we mean by that that they make some kind of call on us to meet them. And they also provide a basis for us to appraise people, better or worse, morally speaking, depending whether or not they meet them. And this is a very important distinction. Modern philosophy very naturally sees obligation

Duty as a very directive part of morality. And then the morality of virtual vice, moral admirability or disadmirability, as a sort of appraisive part of morality. And they very often in modern philosophy fall apart. If you look at modern virtue theory, people like Bernard Williams or Elizabeth Anscombe see the morality of obligation as one thing. The morality of the vices and the virtues is quite a different thing.

And they may think that vice and virtue is really more important than all that dodgy Kantian obligation. This is not the way Soiree's natural law tradition looks at the matter. They tie the directive feature of obligation and the appraisive feature of the aspect of the virtues and vices very closely together.

Fundamental thought in this tradition is that obligation is distinctive from mere advice. When I say to you, you're under an obligation to do it, I'm directing in a very forceful way. I'm not just saying it will be a good idea. And it's very, very strongly directive by bringing in standards of good and bad. An obligation is really a moral standard that it will be bad of you to disregard.

When I was small and I hit my little sister, my parents communicated the idea of obligation to me, not by using the word obligation, but they said to me, "It will be very bad of you to hit your sister like that again." That's exactly the thought you get in Aquinas. And right through this tradition, that's the big picture. So, what we have is that obligation is a normative force. It really is a force. It's not determining, but it's a force of goodness.

linked to a very distinctive kind of moral appraisal of people. It's an appraisal of them and their actions as bad to have disregarded it. That's what everyone, I think, thinks within Suarez's tradition. But of course, once you think of it in those terms, it's not obvious where God comes in.

So, quite a lot of Catholic thinkers at this time, particularly, for example, in the Franciscan tradition, influenced by Scotus's view of the first table of the Decalogue as independent divine commands, say something like this. You don't need a divine lawgiver to understand moral obligation, because whether or not God commanded you not to kill people, it would be very bad of you to go around killing people. And that means that there's a natural law telling you not to do that. It's a standard of goodness and badness.

Suarez is not happy with that. He says, if you're just saying that a standard is one that it would be bad of you to breach, you're still in the land of appraisal. You haven't got the full directiveness of moral obligation.

For that, you need a superior willing the obligation and declaring his will, promulgating his will to you, rather like a king promulgates a law in a country, but at a cosmic level. It strikes me as almost like he's saying, well, like if you go back to Aristotle, so Aristotle would say, well, a vicious person is just kind of a rubbish person, like not good.

doing a very good job at being a person, but that doesn't give you the notion that they violated a rule or an obligation. You only get the obligation if someone who's in a position of authority comes in and says, you must do this and not do this other thing. Is that right? That's exactly the idea. It's very controversial. I think Suarez is a minority at that date in thinking this, but it's a very, very

He's very, very strongly convinced of this. But it's very significant that when he's putting the case against his opponents, for example, Gabriel Vasquez, which is contemporary in the Jesuit order, and thought that the moral law didn't require divine commands in this way, he still uses the basically appraisal-centered model to argue his case. He says, without a divine command willing the obligation on you and promulgated to you

Your breach of moral obligation wouldn't have the peculiar quality of badness, moral badness, that breach of moral obligation has to have. He uses the word prevaricatio or transgressions.

You've got to be capable of being bad in a transgressive way for you to be governed by what's a genuinely directive standard of moral obligation. So what he's really doing is he's going back into the tradition that appeals to verdicts of moral goodness and badness to explain moral obligation and trying to get a very special kind of moral badness to get the peculiarly directive character of moral obligation. Okay, so one question that...

Again, a lot of questions arise there, actually. But one question that arises is what the relationship is between these obligations, these laws that God lays down on us and the laws that humans lay down. Because I'm also obligated, for example, to drive on the left in the UK and drive on the right in other countries, right? Which is not a moral obligation, but...

Does he think that those are completely different kinds of obligation that we have? Or does he think that humans can actually create moral obligations for other humans? I think he thinks that moral obligation or obligation under natural law is the primary form of obligation. And all other cases of obligation in relation to human positive law have got to be explained in terms of it.

But I think there is also the thought that obligation under human positive law has certain peculiar characteristics. It's not just a further form, a derivative form of moral obligation. It involves a structure that's parasitic in moral obligation, but involves metaphysically distinctive features. Let me quickly explain. The first thing about

moral law, obligation under natural law, is that it's immediately directive on the will.

And this, I think, is not a common way of understanding obligation in modern philosophy. Remember Herbert Hart and the concept of law. It's very, very concerned and worried about how medieval and early modern natural law thought that we were bound by obligations on the will. So if our obligation is to take certain decisions, like decisions to give arms, as opposed to perform certain actions decided upon, like actions of actually giving arms. Why do they think that?

Well, the reason they think that is they think that, as I said, obligation is a force of goodness. It's a kind of justificatory force.

And the force of practical reason immediately addresses and is responded to us at the point of taking decisions. I see all these justifications for doing things, and for them to move me at all, they've got to support and move me to take a decision that they support. And so Suarez is very open about this. He says the force of natural law is the force of reason and immediately governs the will. So our immediate moral obligation might be to decide to give arms.

And of course, then if we're under an obligation to decide to give arms, we had better give arms as well as a result of that decision. But the point at which we obey or disobey is going to be at the point of the will. We're immediately exercising our control. If I fail in my action, like I send the check in the mail and it doesn't arrive, I've still fulfilled my moral obligation. Because you took the right decision. Because I took the right decision. It doesn't matter if I managed to perform the right external decision. Absolutely. And of course, it's also true that the features of the action decided upon...

are going to be very important to generating this moral law. It's because of what giving arms, the action you're going to decide to perform, actually involves, helps people in need, for example, that it's so morally obligatory. So it's going to possess various things that we might call reason-giving features that generate this force of obligation that make it not only advisable but mandatory or demanded to perform the action.

So that's natural law. You've got lots of reason-giving features attaching to possible objects of decision that make them good, good in this very demanding way, a form of goodness that would be bad of you to disregard. They immediately justify your deciding to perform those actions. One of the things we've got to do is to behave in a way that enables us to live together in a flourishing community because we're social animals.

And for that to be possible, there has to be a degree of organization. So we're going to be under general moral obligations to cooperate with one another. It's going to be just an aspect of our more general obligation to love one another. And that's going to require a degree of organization. So we are going to need things like traffic rules.

So what human lawgivers are going to do is to attach further reason-giving features to possible options by way of action. So driving on the left might have various advantages to it. Perhaps the view from that side of the road is more pleasant. But in addition, suddenly one day, the traffic controller, the state traffic controller says, and that's what we're all going to do to prevent fatal traffic accidents and enable people to get from A to B in an orderly manner.

So it's going to have the feature of being commanded by a human lawgiver and then that will engage the force of our general obligation to be cooperative with one another and that will lead us to come under an obligation to decide to drive on the left. The positive legal obligation only attaches

as a sort of kind of reason-giving feature to the object of the decision, but it generates a further moral obligation that attaches to the agency of the will. Okay, so that explains why British people are under an obligation to drive on the left, but French people aren't. But there is this other category of person that Suarez thinks about, which is Christians.

He thinks that Christians are under a further source of obligation because they have to follow the laws of the church. So what would he say about non-Christians and their relationship to this kind of obligation? Because on the one hand, you might think, well, he'd think that everybody should be a Christian, right? And so in some sense, everybody has an obligation to follow the laws of the church. But on the other hand,

Some people aren't Christians, and so it seems kind of strange to think that they should be following the rules laid down by the church. I think to answer this question, we've got to look at his general view of church and state and certain aspects of it that are very different from modern political thought.

So far, I've been treating the state as if it were just an institution for coordinating human activity. And maybe if states do that, and they also prevent people doing really nasty things, so they lock murderers up and that sort of thing, that will be the modern view of the state. It's the sort of view of the state you get in Hobbes. It's a sort of protection and coordination agency that guides our motivations to cooperate and our desire for protection and assures them of satisfaction.

Soares has a very different conception of what we might call apotistos, coercive authority, which he thinks the state is, but he also thinks the church is. And in addition to doing these things, he doesn't disagree that states coordinate at the level of traffic rules and not murderers up and all that sort of thing.

He thinks that church and state and these forms of potter's staff, so coercive authority generally, are vital to human life because they enable us to exercise and respond to forms of reason that we're not naturally capable of doing, exercising or responding to just as individuals. Let's take the state first.

As individuals, we're perfectly good at responding to the force of goodness in relation to our own private interests and the private interests of people we know, friends and neighbours. What we're not capable of doing, just as private individuals, is responding to the force of reason at the level of truth or goodness as it concerns the welfare of an entire community, a bonum commune in its most general form. For that, we require political institutions.

And it's in the framework of those political institutions that we first, for example, are enabled to think about property, not simply in terms of whether it would benefit you or a friend or some other person we know, but how it would benefit an entire community to have certain laws of property rather than others. So what the state does is enable us to understand goodness as it concerns the bonum commune and

and respond to it, because we're not naturally capable of being impartial in our responses as private individuals. So you can look at the state as a teacher on behalf of, and a conduit for the force of, or channel for the force of, goodness as it concerns the welfare of an entire community. You might look then at the state as a kind of coercive teacher,

It actually informs our reason and has the backup of coercive force for those of us who are a bit retarded or a bit malign. The church is doing exactly the same job, but not in relation to our natural happiness or the natural happiness of the human community.

Christ has come and offered us a destination that transcends what human nature is naturally capable of, which is the beatific vision of heaven. This is happiness at the supernatural level, above nature. And this the church equips us to attain by enabling us to understand and respond to the force of goodness at the supernatural level. The force of goodness at the supernatural level is, of course, grace.

But Suarez very significantly often refers to it as the force of a higher reason. And so the church is a coercive teacher in relation to supernatural reason, we might say. Justice State is a coercive teacher in relation to natural reason. And in both cases, they utilise a framework of law.

to guide us on our way with backup punishments if we fall under their jurisdiction, insufficiently responsive immediately. To fall under the jurisdiction of a state, you've got to be there essentially. To fall under the jurisdiction of the church, you have to be baptised. Baptism is a juridical notion

It still is actually in modern Catholic canon law. It subjects you to a coercive authority, which authority has the right within the limits of the supernatural good to use backup punishments, including temporal ones, to get you to respond. Suarez actually thought that before the coming of Christ, the state was actually the church. He thought it was the church of natural religion.

Religion as it concerns us simply as bearers of reason, because we can know by reason that God exists. We have a natural duty to love him and worship him communally as our creator. And he thought the state ran that. But what happens is that Christ comes offering a supernatural end, which radically changes the nature of religion and removes religion from the authority of the state completely and gives it to another new authority, that of the church.

You can see now why the Reformation is such an interesting event in this relation, because in a sense, one of the problems of the Reformation is that you have rulers who still think that actually they're in charge of religion, even within a Christian framework. So he thinks they're trying to undo the change that came with Christ. Yes, yes. So I guess it follows from this, though, that if you're not baptized, then you don't fall under the church law. Absolutely. So what happens if you're not baptized? Supposing you're a Jew or a Muslim.

You're not within the jurisdiction of the church because you're not baptized. Your religion is, Suarez thinks, perfectly all right under natural law because you are a rational monotheist, whatever other aspects that he disagrees with. So the state have no quarrel with it, even if it were still running natural religion.

So you have a right to religious liberty. You have a right to the free public practice of Judaism and Islam. The only limitation, and it's of course a considerable one potentially, is that the Christian community can be protected against your intrusions into it.

So just as, for example, the United States can limit undesirables from entering into the United States, they're not originally within its jurisdiction, but it has a sort of indirect or direct defensive jurisdiction to keep them out.

So the church has an indirect or defensive jurisdiction in relation to Jews and Muslims to prevent them from intruding into Christendom, into the Christian community. So they've got to be allowed mosques and synagogues, but they must be well away from Christian churches. They must be of a lesser size. Jews and Muslims are not going to be allowed to wander around on Good Friday. They might have to wear marks of recognition, but they cannot be forced to be Christian and they cannot be prevented from practicing their religion.

So we have here a theory of the kind of religious liberty that's not a liberal one at all. And it's a product of the following thought. We come into the world as natural equals with other people. That means that we have no right to be told what to do unless someone has legitimate authority in relation to us.

And then it depends on the nature of the authority and the function it serves. So we have a radical view of an individual right to liberty based on our metaphysical freedom, if not something that happens in modern philosophy. It has interesting implications as well. But it's not a liberal right.

It's very much constrained by the existence of various kinds of authority that have an ethical and metaphysical guiding function that simply wouldn't exist among political theory. Okay, that's really interesting. I'm almost tempted to wrap it up there, but I did want to ask you one last thing, because you mentioned Hobbes a few minutes ago. And in a lot of your publications on Suarez, you pair the two of them, Suarez and Hobbes,

And part of the reason for that is that Hobbes is directly or indirectly responding to Suarez. But I mean, it's obviously a big, complicated question. But can you say just quickly, what is the sort of core reason why you think that Hobbes and Suarez make such a good contrast? Both of them are contractarian thinkers. Both of them think the political authority is not natural, but depends on some form of contract or agreement of set of conventions to set it up.

Some people think that that establishes a great deal of continuity. Not so. The big difference with Hobbes is that he thinks there are no powers in nature other than ordinary causation. So we have no power of freedom over our actions. All our actions are

effects produced by ordinary causation of our passions. We go back to the modern theory of action that we started off with. And he's really the father of that theory. He's the father of that theory. So there is no power of freedom that law can address.

and by and by obligation in that sense, there is no power of reason that the state or any other kind of institution can enable us to understand and respond to in a way that we couldn't as private individuals understand and respond to. All the state is doing is guiding desires for security and various forms of cooperation and goods to their satisfaction with threats of sanction and directives.

So the state is not a coercive teacher. It's simply a coordination and protection agency. And for various reasons, I'm going to... Hobbes thought there could only be, in any area where humans live, only one such organizing institution. So the state is going to be the only pot of stars. The church seems to have existed as a pot of stars. It's gone completely. And I think all the differences between Hobbesian political and normative theory and Soiree's

come out from that. Again, there is no justificatory force of goodness tied to a distinctive form of appraisal. So actually, in Hobbes, the primary notion in ethical theory is not a theory of appraisal tied to a theory of human rationality. It's a brute theory of direction backed by threats of coercive sanctions.

So I think all the differences between Hobbes and scholastic predecessors can come out of the change in the theory of power. Okay, that's a great example, actually, of why we need to understand this less studied period of philosophy that I've been looking at in recent episodes in order to understand these more famous figures like Hobbes and Kant, for that matter, who come along later. Thank you very much to Tom Fink for helping us do just that. Thanks, Peter.

Glad to talk to you. And please join me next time right here on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.