Honestum to Goodness

Abstract

This chapter traces some of the ancient and medieval history of the debate about whether there are distinct and potentially conflicting true goods or genuine tension between the pursuit of self-interest and the pursuit of what has intrinsic value. Much modern moral theory posits that morally good agents are prepared to restrain the pursuit of even their enlightened self-interest when it conflicts with what is intrinsically good or is good for others. This puts Morality at odds with a long Ethical tradition that is especially indebted to Aristotle and his followers and that proposes the ultimate aim of any rational agent to be that agent’s flourishing or happiness. The chapter concludes, pace Elizabeth Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre, that while the view embedded in much modern moral theory reached its full development in the context of a theologically infused medieval tradition, which involved Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard and John Duns Scotus, its roots are earlier, and its metaphysical underpinnings are independent of that context.

1 Introduction

Much of the material presented in this chapter has been worked and reworked for some 40 years, and along the way I have incurred more intellectual debt and received more intellectual help than I can reference or even recall. I am, however, particularly indebted to Juhana Toivanen, whose comments on an earlier draft of this chapter not only improved its presentation but forced me to clarify the moral of the story that the paper tells.

This chapter traces a strand in the history of the debate about the unity of the Good and suggests that it was in this strand of the history that Morality became separated from Ethics and there emerged the view that to be a morally good agent, I must forego aiming directly at some of what are nevertheless genuine goods for me and aim at an impersonal or a common good instead.

Ethics, as I propose to understand it here, concerns how to live well in the sense of achieving what is good for me. On the other hand, Morality, as understood here, aims at achieving a Good that can be identified without any reference to me and that on some accounts is identified with a public good from which each benefits from the pursuit of that good by others and to which each contributes by their own pursuit of it.¹ On this understanding of Morality, the description under which the rational moral agent acts is not “to achieve my own good”, though they may hope that sufficiently broad adherence to the morality in question will yield or facilitate their own good. Ethics and Morality thus understood seem concerned with different goods and invite the question whether these goods can conflict.

Can the existence of one good interfere with the existence of another? We often seem to choose between goods for ourselves, and we often seem to choose between a good for ourselves and a good for another. However, there is a long tradition that claims that this appearance is deceptive – that there is no plurality of real goods and hence that any apparent need to make such choices merely shows that we do not really understand the options we face. Let me call the thesis that no true goods can ever conflict the “Principle of the Compatibility of Goods”, PCG for short.

Here is an argument for the PCG: Suppose that although one may seem to desire whatever appears to be good, one really desires only what is really good. Suppose that informed choice is only between items one really desires. Suppose there is just one item which is truly good and suppose it is neither rival nor excludable. Then the appearance that true goods might conflict, or that one might have to choose between them, is deceptive, and the PCG is true.

2 Ancient Views: Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and the Stoics

What are we to make of the argument just sketched for the PCG? Leaving aside the relation between desire and apparent desire, let us focus on the good. For Plato, the Good is unitary.² Moreover, he insists that nothing outside one’s soul can harm one’s soul.³ It would seem then that my participation in the Good cannot exclude or rival yours. Hence, if participation in the Good is my good, and my good is what is good for me and is what I desire, then it would seem that my good can never conflict with any other. Moreover, although there may be different ways one might come to participate in the Good, these ways are not themselves goods, and so our choice between them is not a choice between goods but merely between ways to achieve the Good.

For Plato, participation in the Form of the Good comes in degrees, and one can aspire to a higher degree of it, but Plato’s Form of the Good has no more essential connection with you or with me than with anything else in the realm of souls – and perhaps nothing more to do with souls than with anything else in the realm of Becoming. This is a focus of Aristotle’s famous criticism of it in the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics.⁴ On Aristotle’s view, “good”, like “being” and “one”, is an equivocal term (pros hen) and “good” is equivocal not only across the categories but also across species. The good of the goose need not be the good of the moose. In particular, Aristotle identifies a good of humans, which he calls eudaimonia, and he regards this as intrinsically most pleasant for us and sets out in his works on ethics to identify it more precisely. He concludes that it is the exercise of the highest human functions over a complete life, thereby inviting the question whether it is a composite of several items, each of which might be regarded as good and the proportions of which might vary from human to human and with the circumstances. Gavin Lawrence has argued, convincingly in my view, that Aristotle thinks that fulfilling the ergon, or proper function of a human – exercising one’s rational capacities appropriately – is the good of a human and is, non-instrumentally, what is good for a human. Thus, for each of us, what is good for us is such exercise over a complete life.⁵

We have, on Aristotle’s view, two kinds of rational capacity, theoretical and practical, and he suggests that the highest human good is the exercise of our theoretical reason by contemplation. However, he considers also whether it might be truly good to exercise one’s practical reason by statecraft.⁶ He seems not to settle whether these might conflict. Statecraft is intimately connected with involvement in one’s community, and Aristotle hints that contemplating too is best done with friends.⁷ He also considers the good of another entity, the polis, and suggests that its good may be higher than an individual citizen’s good, and he suggests that the good of a citizen (qua citizen) may not be that of the human who is that citizen.⁸ However, to the best of my knowledge, he never considers whether the proper exercise of either practical or theoretical reason by one human, and so the good of, or for, that human, might conflict either with such exercise by other humans or with the goods of and for non-humans. He seems to take the PCG for granted.

Aristotle’s division of Plato’s Good into the good of this kind and the good of that raises a possibility that cannot arise within the Platonic conception – the possibility that the good of one species may not be the good of another, and that in the extreme case what constitutes (not merely what contributes to) the flourishing of one kind may be the undoing of the flourishing of another. We are still far from the modern concern that one individual of a kind may flourish only at the expense of others of that kind, but a frame in which such concerns could arise is now available.

However, these concerns did not arise at once. Lurking in the background of Peri-Platonic thought is an issue that becomes overt in Epicureanism – that of egoism. Plato’s Socrates has it that we seek the good, and that we are both the better and the better off for participating in it. What he seems less clear about is whether we seek the Good because it is the Good or because it is our good.

Aristotle contends that we each seek our own good – which is the human good – and that it is intrinsically pleasant (though not good in virtue of being pleasant). He seems also to think that the human good is intimately connected with the good of our community (the polis), but he leaves obscure whether the good of the polis is our good or instrumental to it. In the next generation, Epicurus claimed that the Good is Pleasure (hedoné), by which he seems to have meant what he called “static pleasure”, the state of satisfied desire, but he also seems not to have denied that what he called “kinetic pleasures” – associated with the satisfying of desires rather than their having been satisfied – are also pleasant.⁹ Moreover, while he contrasts the short-sighted satisfaction of desires with the long-term balance of pleasure over pain, he seems not to have distinguished real and apparent desires.

The consideration of pleasure brings one more factor into play. If there is anything that we are inclined to think of as perspectival, it is sensation. I can empathize with your pain, we are inclined to think, but I cannot literally feel it. Suppose now that you have your hand on a hot stove and are feeling pain.¹⁰ You have a reason to move your hand – the pain gives you a reason. Does the pain give me the same reason to move your hand?¹¹ One of the things at stake in this example is whether whatever reason there is for moving your hand from the hot stove is perspectival – so that it can be your reason without being mine – or whether it is objective, in the sense that it is (other things being equal) a reason for any agent to act.

For Epicurus and his followers, the good seems clearly to be perspectival (in the sense just introduced) and agent-related. On this view, it is contingent whether the good of one human or animal conflicts with that of another.

Although Epicureanism was popular in antiquity, it seems also to have been often regarded as not quite respectable. This was precisely because it was considered egoistic. Although Epicurus insisted that consideration of the good of others was a part of one’s own good, his doctrine seemed to require that this was because of its positive effects on one’s own pleasure (which, being perspectival, could not be another’s) and so on one’s own good.

The other major Hellenistic philosophical school, Stoicism, took a different tack. For the Stoics, the Good was Virtue. Their view seems to have been that the good was in the first instance the good for rational nature as such. Since on their view the universe as a whole was a rational being – as was each adult human – one might have thought that there would have been ample conceptual space for raising the question whether the good of the universe was the good of each human being. However, since it was in some sense the same rational nature that animated both the universe and each individual human being, that space was illusory. The Stoics were providentialists, believing that everything that happened was in accord with the best possible rational order. For the Stoics, only that was good which would under no circumstances harm. They concluded that living completely in accord with nature – that is, in accord with the rational providential order of the universe – was what was kalon and that this was the only good. The Stoics were happy to admit that the precise contents of the life in accord with nature was usually unknown to a limited being such as the human, and their view was that in that case we ought to select that for which we had a natural impulse – such items being what they called “preferred” (proēgmena). What was preferable might be instrumental in becoming good but was not in itself kalon.

3 Conflicting Goods: Honestum and Utile

The next and crucial step in my story is the separation of different and possibly conflicting goods. Cicero translates kalon as honestum, and he treats many of the items that the Stoics considered preferred (proēgmena) as goods (bona). Like most of the ancient schools, he asserts that nature has implanted in us a desire for self-preservation and for what is useful for it – what is advantageous or useful (utile). He recognizes all these as different sorts of goods, rather than as the good and what is instrumental for it, and he treats the issue of potential conflict between them as that of a conflict between goods. Cicero raises this possibility in his critique of the Stoic identification of the Good with Virtue alone,¹² and therefore in the Latin tradition after Cicero, there was precedent for seeing a possibility of conflict not only between different species or individuals but between two sorts of good for an individual.

Meanwhile, within the Platonic tradition, Aristotle’s arguments against a single form of the Good were largely ignored. The Platonic view that there was such a Form, and that it was indeed a Master form, was given new impetus by a late antique identification of the form of the Good with the Demiurge of the Timaeus. This idea that Goodness itself was also the fashioner of the Universe was taken up by Christianity very early and suggested identifying the Form of the Good (as we see it in late Platonism) with the Christian God. It is this identification that we find clearly in Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. Boethius follows Plato in arguing that every substance is good because of its participation in Goodness – that is, on his view, in God. He draws the conclusions that for a human to become better is to participate more in God and therefore to be more divine; and that to become worse is to participate less in God and come closer to being a “mere” animal.¹³ In Boethius’ conception, each kind has a degree of Goodness or a range of such degrees. When humans become better, what they are doing is changing their metaphysical status – they are rising on the great chain of being – and as they become worse, they sink.

Furthermore, Boethius takes up the Platonic theme that what we really desire is what is really good, and that if what we think we desire, tyrannical power, say, is not really good, then in getting it we are removed ever further from being as we really want to be. In Boethius’ view, becoming worse is becoming more subhuman, and becoming better is becoming more divine. How could one not want that, and how could getting it not be what is good for one?¹⁴

4 The Early Medieval Development of Incommensurable Forms of Goodness

The next major step in this narrative may have been taken already by Augustine, but it was certainly taken by Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109). It is to recognize the honestum and the utile as two incommensurable forms of goodness and at the same time to identify the honestum with the Platonic and Boethian idea of goodness and the utile with the Aristotelian notion of eudaimonia (translated as beatitudo). Anselm does this in the context of developing an account of how two agents who are superbly cognitively and affectively endowed and without any prior history could, when presented with the same alternatives, choose differently, and in particular how the one who is, if anything, the better endowed chooses badly and sins while the other does not.¹⁵

Anselm begins by supposing that at least each living created substance has an innate God-given will (voluntas) or affection of the will (affectio voluntatis) to seek its own fulfilment – to seek what is advantageous or useful for it. All rational substances (humans and angels) are also created with another will – a will for justice, which is the keeping of uprightness for its own sake. As the utile is related to the will for happiness (beatitudo), so the honestum is to the will to keep justice for its own sake. Anselm’s concern is to explain how a creature, which has received everything that it has from an all-good God, is able to sin. His explanation is that because a rational creature has these two fundamental wills, even the most cognitively perfect but finite creature may face a situation in which the two wills seem to conflict. That is, there could seem to be a situation in which a rational creature could seek to increase its own happiness only at the price of being unjust.

Anselm focuses on the case of the Fall of Satan. He imagines angels – purely rational creatures without the passions of the flesh – who face a situation in which it seems to them that they could be happier if only they did something that is incompatible with remaining upright. They realize that they might be punished were they to act unjustly, but they also believe, reasonably, that given God’s mercy they might not. The risk is not unreasonable. Some of them, Satan and his cohort, act on their will to happiness and so abandon justice; others act on their will to justice and so restrain their will to happiness. As Anselm imagines the situation, those who sought their happiness at the expense of justice are indeed punished, justly punished, and therefore they not only fail to get the happiness they sought but they lose whatever happiness they already had. Those who sought to remain just even at the expense of their own happiness are justly rewarded with the happiness which they forewent and are confirmed in the justice they preserved.¹⁶

There are two aspects of Anselm’s picture to which I especially want to draw attention. The first is his account of justice as keeping uprightness for its own sake. Anselm quite consciously insists that what is essential to keeping justice is the sake for which it is kept. I cannot, on his view, be just for the sake of avoiding hellfire or, more generally, for the sake of my own happiness, as an Epicurean or even an Aristotelian might think. Were I to perform actions (even upright actions) for the sake of my happiness, I would not be keeping justice.

The second feature that I wish to make salient is Anselm’s insistence that seeking one’s own happiness and keeping justice can be (and indeed, as given by God, are) ultimate motives for the action of rational creatures. We have just seen that on his account, one cannot be just for the sake of happiness. By contrast, one can be happy for the sake of justice – that is, one can be happy because that is what uprightness requires, but Anselm seems to think that one cannot be happy unless one also wants to be happy. This ‘wanting to be happy’ need not be an ultimate motive, but it can be. As I read Anselm, to take the motive for happiness as ultimate is precisely to sin – indeed, it may be the only way to sin. If I am right about this, we now have a stark contrast between two ultimate ways of approaching the world practically.

Anselm sharply distinguishes between (1) one’s own happiness and (2) justice as ultimate motives, and he defines justice as keeping the uprightness of the will for its own sake. However, he has little to say about what uprightness of will consists of. He suggests that acting justly involves acting in accord with God’s will but, again, has little to say about what that involves. When we turn to the generation after him, we find quite a bit of attention being devoted to what exactly constitutes uprightness of will. One particularly striking picture is that proposed by Peter Abelard (1079–1142).

Abelard is very sensitive to the logic of the word “good’ (bonum). At the end of the first book of his Dialogue of a Philosopher with a Christian, where the Christian and the Philosopher seem to have just about arrived at a consensus, Abelard has the Christian say that when it is used adjectively (as in “a good horse” or “a good thief”), the word bonum has its signification affected by the noun to which it is attached. Thus, to be a good human is not the same thing as to be a good thief, even if it is the same thing that is human and a thief. The Christian points out that we apply the term bonum both to things (res) and to various sorts of what he calls “non-things” – such as statuses (like being a human), what he calls dicta (that is, the significates of that-clauses), and to actions – and we apply it rather differently in these different cases. We could say, for example, that it is bad that there exists a good thief, and that it is good that there be bad things.

Abelard has the Christian say that good humans are good “because of their morals” and that is a matter of their intentions.¹⁷ To be a good human is to have good intentions. I have suggested elsewhere that this account of moral goodness introduces a difficulty.¹⁸ On Abelard’s view, the moral goodness or badness of an action derives from the intention with which it is performed, but an intention is an intention to perform an action. If the moral value of an intention does not derive from the value of the act, which it is an intention to perform, then from what does it derive? Our deeds are morally good if they proceed from morally good intentions. Our intentions are morally good if they are intentions to do what we believe to be, and what in fact is, pleasing to God. But if something is pleasing to God only if it is morally good, then we seem to have a small and vicious circle. Abelard escapes the circle (1) by adopting the Stoic criterion for a good as that which under no circumstance can interfere with the being of anything and (2) by accepting the PCG.¹⁹ These taken together give us a test independent of our intentions and so of what constitutes morality. Non-moral goods are items that necessarily can coexist together. God, the Supreme Good, always and necessarily acts for the non-moral (or as I shall call it metaphysical) best on Abelard’s view. For a human to act well is for it to intend to do what it believes is pleasing to God, that is, for it to intend to bring about a situation (an eventus rei in Abelard’s terminology) which it believes is part of this metaphysically perfect world. For an action to be morally good, it must both follow from a morally good intention in this sense and objectively be a cause of an aspect of this metaphysically perfect world. Metaphysical perfection is specifiable independently of intentions.

By now, the forest may be disappearing behind the trees, so let me rehearse what I take to have argued so far. Goodness in the Platonic tradition is unitary, and no distinction is drawn between what is good in itself and what is good for a particular being. Aristotle begins to draw this distinction by distinguishing the goods of (and so for) different species. He is happy enough to say that there is a sense in which the Prime Mover is the best thing, and he is happy enough to use that fact in figuring out what is good for a human, but he thinks that the good of and for a human is not Goodness itself but a state of peculiarly human flourishing. He seems to think that this flourishing does not interfere with the flourishing of other beings but does not argue that point. In the Stoic tradition, a distinction gets made between what is good in itself and what is to be preferred in making a choice but not good in itself, and Cicero canonizes it in the distinction between the honestum and the utile.²⁰ Anselm suggests that the utile is to be understood as what is sought for the sake of one’s own beatitudo or flourishing, while the honestum is what is sought for the sake of justice – that is, for the sake of keeping the uprightness of the will for its own sake. Abelard develops this last idea, arguing that to act well is to intend an action because it is the morally right action to intend – that is, because it is the action that will fit into the best of all metaphysically possible worlds.²¹

Notice that at this point the idea that what we should seek as our good is our own happiness has disappeared from view. Abelard and Anselm do think that we will be happy if we act well, but they are adamant that acting well is never aiming at one’s own happiness. Indeed, on both accounts, to act for the ultimate sake of one’s own happiness is sinful.

The idea that morality reduces to ethics as the study of what will make one flourish or be happy returns, of course, with the recovery of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and it is worked out in a particularly rich and subtle form by Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), in whose work the bonum honestum appears as a virtue conducive to union with God and hence to happiness. Aquinas, however, accepts the PCG, and for him it is incompatible with the nature of God and simply impossible that one’s own happiness ever be incompatible with the happiness of others. Thus, he never has to confront the question of what to do if it did. Henry of Ghent (d. 1293) does confront that question and concludes that if that situation were to arise, one should choose one’s own happiness even at the cost of the eternal damnation of everyone else.²² Over the following half-century, the English Franciscans, explicitly heirs of Anselm and, I suspect, implicitly of Abelard and the Stoics as well, develop Anselm’s idea that there are two affections of the will – one for happiness and one for justice – and they combine it with a theory of love to produce a picture according to which finite rational agents, that is, humans and angels, are motivated both by self-love and by love of what is metaphysically good for its own sake. Since in this tradition, God is thought of as an infinitely metaphysically good thing, this duality can be rephrased as one of self-love and love of God, where love of God is partially operationalized as willingness to obey God’s commands.

In “Modern Moral Philosophy”, one of the most influential works of recent moral philosophy, Elizabeth Anscombe argued that the idea of morality as a system of rules to be obeyed not only arose as a morality of divine command but depended essentially upon it for its justification and should be abandoned. Alasdair Macintyre agreed with her.²³ This seems to me, however, not to get the history quite right. It is true that as the influence of the tradition in which I have located Anselm and Abelard develops, the role of God’s will expands. John Duns Scotus (d. 1308), for example, thinks that the motivation to love metaphysical goodness plus the fact that God is an infinitely good thing, while everything else is finite, entail that one should love everything else for the sake of God.²⁴ He draws the further conclusion that love is manifested in obedience, and he reasons from the infinite gap between God and creatures that God is not required by his own love of metaphysical goodness to love anything but Himself. Thus, where it is our behaviour with respect to ourselves and each other that is concerned, God is not constrained to require our obedience to one set of commands rather than another. From this, Scotus draws the further conclusion that what is morally required of us is not only contingent but may well vary over time and place. Having at most one spouse is required of us but was not required of Abraham, for example.

However, it would be a mistake to suppose that we have in Scotus, or later in William Ockham (1285–1347), a divine command morality as it is often understood nowadays. According to such a contemporary conception of a divine command morality, what is moral is what God commands – and so far Scotus and Ockham would agree – but the contemporary conception does not offer any further basis for the requirement to obey God’s commands, and here Scotus and Ockham would disagree. They, like Abelard, would insist that what we ought to do is to love metaphysical goodness. It is because they maintain that God is the metaphysically best thing that they hold we are to love (and so obey) God.²⁵

What I suggest is the lesson to be learned from the history I have barely sketched is that once it is recognized that choosing one’s own good is at least intensionally different from choosing what is objectively best, the PCG is thrown into doubt. Then, as Anselm’s Satan supposed, there may be real tension between one’s own good and the metaphysically or objectively best. If so, the form this tension takes depends upon what is the good for oneself and what is the objectively or metaphysically best. To think that the good of one’s neighbour is as important as the good of one’s self because a metaphysically best God commands it is not to think that the good of one’s community or the human species is more choiceworthy because it is what is most valuable in itself.

Most modern moral theorists no longer believe in the great chain of being – at least not in its upper reaches – and to them, the Franciscan development of the motivation to love what is metaphysically good for its own sake into a motivation to obey a code that a God formulates and reveals no longer seems plausible. Still, the fundamental thought that morality is concerned not with my own interest but with what is valuable in itself remains and is the ground of the intuitions to which we appeal when we attempt to work out moral theories. It is plausible to think that what is most valuable in itself is what we identify with the common good, and if we have trouble finding common ground on which to settle our moral disputes, it is not because our moral concepts no longer have the backing of the theologically infused metaphysics in which they grew but because we do not agree metaphysically and so not about what is the common good. We do not agree about what things there are, or about how to rank their metaphysical value. Some think only persons have metaphysical value and deserve respect, while all the rest is bare extension. Others see the non-personal world as nature – rich and variegated and commanding our love and respect. Our moral disagreements are due to our metaphysical disagreements. We can and should aim for metaphysical consensus in part because, if morality is the practical reflection of our fallible capacity to appreciate what there is for its own sake and not merely in relation to ourselves, our metaphysical disagreements will have moral consequences.