in Harald E. Braun, Erik De Born, and Paolo Astorri (eds), The Companion to the Spanish Scholastics (Brill's Companions to the Christian Tradition) (Leiden: Brill, 2022), 2022
Explanation in terms of final causes is explanation in terms of ends or goals. Is such explanatio... more Explanation in terms of final causes is explanation in terms of ends or goals. Is such explanation essential to the theory of nature in general, or only to the theory of rational nature – in so far as outcomes are aimed at and produced as the goals of deliberate agents? Do final causes operate in natural processes in themselves, or only in and through the mind?
Some claim that the early modern Jesuit restriction of final causation to rational nature anticipated an ‘enlightenment’ retreat from appeals to teleology in metaphysics. Not so. The Jesuit theory of general nature remained robustly teleological, but final causation was largely reserved for something metaphysically distinctive - goodness as a productive force of practical reason. This theory of power in normative form - power as a force of reason - was not an anticipation of the ‘enlightenment’ but the development of a very traditional metaphysics of humanity as bearing the image of God - as created rational nature. This theory was vital to Jesuit moral and political theory, and to theology. Its metaphysics of normative power met the systematic opposition of Thomas Hobbes.
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Books by Thomas Pink
Self-Determination looks at whether action involves distinctive powers or capacities – such as a power to determine for ourselves what we do – that might give action a special place in moral life. Do we have control of how we act, so that we are free to act in more than one way, and does it matter to morality whether we do? At the heart of Self-Determination is the problem of what kind of power we have over our action, and of the ethical significance of power.
Self-Determination argues that what matters to morality is not in fact the freedom to do otherwise, but something more primitive - a basic capacity or power to determine for ourselves what we do. This capacity might or might not take the form of a freedom to act in more than one way, and it might or might not be compatible with causal determinism. What really matters to morality is that it is we who determine what we do. What we do must not simply be a function of powers or capacities for which we are not responsible, or a matter of mere chance.
A second volume Normativity, to be published later, will examine the ways that moral standards make a call on us to meet them; in particular, can there be kinds of standard – such as duty or obligation – that peculiarly address and govern action? Central to the book is David Hume’s attempt to make sense of normativity apart from reason. Can Hume’s project succeed – and what might its success or failure imply, both about the role of reason within normativity and about the place of action in ethics?
Papers by Thomas Pink
Is the Church the only legitimate coercive legal authority or potestas for religion on this earth?—and does she have the right to call on a Catholic state to assist as her agent or minister in the exercise of her legal authority, including through punitive state sanctions in defence of religious truth? The paper shows that this conception of the Church has been clearly taught by the Magisterium and embodied in canon law, and that Vatican II introduced no doctrinal correction to this teaching. Kevin Vallier objects that this teaching is unjust. But the justice of the teaching can be defended and explained, provided we abandon the modern philosophical conception of legal authority as essentially coordinative. We must return instead to the older and historically Catholic conception of coercive legal authority as educative, with the formation and even the direct coercion of belief as a central concern.
Thomas Hobbes defends the consistency of freedom with necessity against
the Anglican bishop John Bramhall.
According to Hobbes, freedom does not entail contingency, the absence of necessity, but consists rather in the absence of constraint. And human action is performed freely because an absence of constraint follows from the fact that human action is voluntary; whenever we act, we do so voluntarily or willingly. We are morally responsible for our wrongdoing even if we are causally necessitated so to act, because we nevertheless act willingly.
Hobbes claims in this to be defending the Protestant theology of Luther and Calvin. But in fact he is replacing their theology, which had much philosophically in common with Catholicism, with a radically new account of Protestantism, of freedom and of agency.
Rivoire argues that Traditionis Custodes, the motu proprio of Pope Francis restricting the traditional Roman rite, lacks morally binding force because the Church's liturgical rites lie beyond the legislative authority of the pope. Furthermore the original Pauline liturgical reform of the Roman rite, which Traditionis Custodes continues and enforces, was based on a defective conception of the Church's law - on voluntarism about law.
Against Rivoire I suggest that the church's legislative authority must extend to liturgical rites, and that the Pauline liturgical reform was not at all an expression of legal voluntarism. Rather the Pauline liturgical reform expressed a very traditional view of the Church's legislation, and of her liturgy, as modes of teaching. If Traditionis Custodes and the Pauline liturgical reform are faulty, perhaps to the point of lacking moral force, that is because they are defective in their teaching.
But the theology of papal legislative infallibility is still false. Laws made by popes can perfectly well conflict with faith and morals, and actually have done. The evidence lies in the church law that over many centuries governed the conduct of Catholics towards the Jewish people. The article examines the implications of this both for Pastor Aeternus and for the current duty of Catholics to the pope, such as in relation to recent legislation on the liturgy.
Is it simply the theory that substances, in the form of agents, can be causes, and not just events? The paper argues that this is not so. Our conception of freedom is of a power radically unlike ordinary causation, not simply in respect of the bearer of the power, but in the way that the power determines outcomes. A cause determines an outcome only when its power excludes alternatives. But freedom is a power that far from excluding alternatives, makes them available. The paper explores this difference between the two kinds of power, and the implications of Hume’s failure to distinguish them.
Some claim that the early modern Jesuit restriction of final causation to rational nature anticipated an ‘enlightenment’ retreat from appeals to teleology in metaphysics. Not so. The Jesuit theory of general nature remained robustly teleological, but final causation was largely reserved for something metaphysically distinctive - goodness as a productive force of practical reason. This theory of power in normative form - power as a force of reason - was not an anticipation of the ‘enlightenment’ but the development of a very traditional metaphysics of humanity as bearing the image of God - as created rational nature. This theory was vital to Jesuit moral and political theory, and to theology. Its metaphysics of normative power met the systematic opposition of Thomas Hobbes.
In another paper on The Josias Thomas Storck objects that I employ what was at best a political theology of the counter-reformation, the theology of Suarez and Bellarmine. According to Storck this theology was not shared by Leo XIII, was never magisterially taught, and had nothing to do with the drafting of Dignitatis Humanae.
Storck’s claims are false. From 1964 the drafting commission explained Dignitatis Humanae by appeal to Leo XIII's teaching that the church alone was the sovereign legal authority over religion on this earth. This view of church authority came to Leo XIII from Suarez, and dominated official theology within the Catholic church up to Vatican II. It was common property to a Vatican II conservative such as Cardinal Ottaviani, to the progressives who were preparing and explaining the declaration in its final draft, to Paul VI under whose authority this final draft was being prepared, and to Jacques Maritain, to whose theology Paul VI adhered.
To be moral is to be moved to act by reason; and to be moved to act by reason is to be moved by the good. But if reason moves us, what is the nature of its power to move? And what role does goodness play?
These questions about rational motivation became a matter of fierce contention in the early modern period. An established theory of how reason moves us – the theory defended by late scholastics such as Suarez – met destructive opposition, from Hobbes, and this opposition eventually put the very possibility of rational motivation in doubt. Two questions were debated. The first was about power. Was there a power of reason to move us or was all power ordinary causation? The second was about the relation between morality as a motivating source of direction, and morality as a set of appraisive standards. Is one of these two aspects of morality primary and explanatory of the other as secondary to it? Or is one of these aspects even an illusion? Hobbes’ answers to these two questions threatened a complete ethical scepticism. Hume avoided this complete ethical scepticism, but at the price of a scepticism about practical reason in particular.
Published in ‘Dignitatis Humanae Colloquium’ Dialogos Institute Volume 1, eds Thomas Crean OP and Alan Fimister, (Dialogos Institute 2017) pp105-46.