Medieval Philosophy – Prof. Dr. Robert C. Koons

http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/philosophy/faculty/koons/phl349/syllabus.htm

Lecture # 21: Aquinas on the Freedom of the Will

As rational beings, human beings have two special faculties: the intellect (which enables us to know and
understand truth) and the will (which enables us to pursue and choose what is good). These correspond to
two capacities that we share with irrational animals: sense perception (by which physical things reveal
themselves to us as real) and sensual appetite (by which sensible objects present themselves as desirable or
as dangerous). Irrational animals can only respond to particulars: they do not grasp universals as such.
Consequently, they cannot reason or deliberate, nor can they learn from experience except by way of
Pavlovian or behavioral conditioning (they can “learn” not to press a certain lever by being conditioned not
to with electric shocks, for example). Such animals cannot act freely: whenever they act, they act as their
natural instincts direct them, in response to the irresistible pressure of perception and appetite.

Human beings, in contrast, are free and, therefore, morally responsible. As we have seen, we are not free to
choose our ultimate end: of necessity, we must aim ultimately at true happiness. However, in this life at
least, we are never presented with a choice where one of the two alternatives is accompanied with the
irrestible judgment that “through this door lies perfect happiness”. Instead, we always find ourselves
confronting choices between actions that seem to offer partial, particular goods (so much knowledge, so
much friendship, so much health, and so on). A particular good is in some respects good (which is what
makes it a “good”) but also in some respects bad or “evil” (since, by being a partial good, it falls short in
some respects of perfect happiness).

It is the job of the intellect to make judgments about what options we have, and how good each of these
options is, and in what ways it is good and not good. It is the job of the will to make the final choice. The will
cannot choose an action unless the intellect has first made the judgment that this action might be a means to
the ultimate end of perfect happiness. Moreover, if the intellect makes the unambiguous judgment that
choice A is better in every possible way than choice B, the will cannot choose B.

For Aquinas, the will is limited in a second way: it cannot choose whether to will at all, nor when to will and
when not to will. The intellect periodically presents the will with the judgment that it must will now: that
willing now is unambiguously better than not willing now. Without this judgment moving the will into
action, the will can do nothing. However, the intellect can make the judgment that the will must choose now
between A and B, without also making the judgment either that A is better in all respects than B, or that B is
better in all respects than A. In such cases, the will chooses “freely” between A and B. Nothing about the
chooser’s nature or circumstances necessitate that the chooser make one particular choice. When we choose
freely, we can be morally responsible for the choice.

The main difficulty with Aquinas’s account is that it excludes the possibility of absolutely perverse choice: a
person’s choosing what he knows to be absolutely the worse of two options. It would seem that whenever
we choose wrongly, on Aquinas’s account we always have recourse to a kind of ignorance as an excuse. We
can say that we didn’t know that what we did was the wrong choice: our intellect presented us with
uncertain and incomplete information, and this is what made possible our mistaken choice. How, then, can
anyone be held responsible for wrong choices? Isn’t to understand the wrong choice necessarily to forgive it
(even, to excuse it)?

Aquinas would respond in something like the following way. To sin, to commit an action worthy of blame
and guilt, two things are needed: (1) we must have acted freely (in the sense explained above), and (2) we
must have acted knowingly against a valid law of some kind (whether natural, human or divine). For the
reasons given above, it does seem to be impossible for us to act against the natural law (whose fundamental
principle is “choose the good”) with perfect knowledge that we are doing so. However, it is possible to act
against a human or divine law with perfect knowledge. I can know perfectly well that I am violating the
humanly established law against speeding. What happens in such a case is that my intellect presents the
violation of the law as good in some respects, in fact, as better than keeping the law in some respects (I arrive
at my destination earlier, able to accomplish more good as a result). However, the fact that my intellect
rationalized to some extent my violation of the law in no way constitutes a valid excuse. I won’t be able to

convince a court to waive the fine simply because I mistakenly believed that breaking the law was the best
thing for me to do in the circumstances.

Similarly, Adam and Eve knew that they were violating a specific divine law in eating the forbidden fruit. It
is true that their intellects must have presented this act of disobedience as good in some respect, better in
those respects, even, than continued obedience. I think it is easy to see how this could happen: they
convinced themselves that by choosing disobedience, they were becoming more god-like, and since it is
better to be more rather than less god-like, disobedience was better than obedience. However, this
intellectual confusion on their part in no way constitutes a valid excuse for their sin. The fact remains that
they knowingly disobeyed God, and that this disobedience necessitated a number of regrettable
consequences, including a real measure of guilt and blameworthiness.

There is one more issue to consider: how to reconcile human freedom with divine foreknowledge. Aquinas
accepts Boethius’s reconciliation: since God is timeless, it is, strictly speaking, improper to speak of God’s
“foreknowing” anything. God simply knows things timelessly, whether the things are past, present or
future.

However, there is another complication. We have seen that Augustine was probably a soft determinist: he
apparently believed that all human choices (even free ones) were predetermined by the chain (within
creation) of causes and effects set in motion originally by God. Like Boethius, Aquinas rejects this kind of
determinism, which I will call “secondary determinism”. The word “secondary” refers to the the
“secondary” kind of causation that is exercised by all created things. They have a real causal efficacy, but
their efficacy is always dependent on God’s “primary” causation of the created world.

Although Aquinas rejects secondary determinism, it seems that he accepted what we could call “primary
determinism”: every fact in the created world necessarily happens according to God’s will. If Adam freely
chooses to eat the fruit, it must be that God wills that Adam freely choose to eat the fruit. Moreover, it is false
to think that God’s willing of Adam’s choice was caused in any way by God: the direction of causation
always goes from God to the world, never vice versa. However, this kind of determinism seems even worse
than Augustine’s secondary determinism: how can God hold Adam accountable for his sin if it was God
who is primarily responsible for the fact that Adam sinned? Given Aquinas’s primary determinism, we can’t
weasal our way out by saying that God merely “permitted” Adam to sin, leaving the choice entirely up to
Adam, and taking himself entirely out of the picture. According to Aquinas, the connection between the
specific content of God’s will and what happens in the world is a very tight and metaphysically unbreakable
one. God could no more leave a specific fact to chance or to autonomous creaturely determination than He
could choose to cease to be God altogether.

I don’t have time here to spell out fully what I think the best defense of Aquinas’s view would be. I have,
however, done so in a recently published paper of mine, to which I will provide a link on the website. Very
roughly, I think the answer should go like this: the fact that Adam chose freely to sin and the fact that God
willed that Adam should freely choose to sin are one and the same fact. It is an error to think that either one
caused the other. If God’s will caused Adam to sin, then Adam wouldn’t be free, and if Adam’s sin cause
God’s will to be what it was, then God wouldn’t be God. However, since these facts are identical, neither one
caused the other. I call this view the theory of “dual agency”: each free action of a human being is
simultaneously a free action of God. God’s sovereign freedom does not deprive us of freedom: in fact, we
can be free precisely because God’s will with respect to our choices is itself free (undetermined,
unnecessitated by prior conditions). I agree with Aquinas that some such view as this is needed to reconcile
those scriptures that teach human freedom and responsibility with those that teach God’s absolute
sovereignty.