Franciscan Studies

Restricting the range of divine power

Scotus is so widely believed to be some sort of voluntarist and divine command theorist that it is difficult to present a reading of Scotus's ethical thought without situating it in relation to the logical space of voluntarism and divine command theory.¹ This situating task is harder than it might seem, however, both because Scotus's views as I understand them do not comfortably bear these labels, and because the concepts of voluntarism and divine command ethics are complex and contested, lacking consensus definitions which would, if we had them, provide criteria for picking out the right views.² I could craft my own definitions of 'voluntarism' or 'divine command ethics' which are tailor-made to allow me to apply them to or withhold them from Scotus, but that would not be philosophically interesting. Instead, my project here is to read Scotus without the hermeneutic crutch of anachronistic labels like 'voluntarism' and 'divine command theory.' [End Page 159]

I do not think scholars have thought hard enough about Scotus's position that there are necessary moral truths over which God has no control. Just about everyone who writes on Scotus's ethics has noted this position, but none has paid sufficient philosophical attention to it. It turns out that necessary moral truths are logically necessary (in Scotus's sense of logical modalities), and the fact that they are logically necessary significantly alters how we should understand radical-sounding claims in Scotus to the effect that God can do whatever is logically possible.³ Demonstrably, what Scotus means is that God can do whatever it is logically possible for God to do, and this class is rather smaller than the class of the logically possible simpliciter.⁴

Scotus thinks that some moral truths are necessary and some are contingent. The contingent are those over which God has some control, and the necessary are those over which God has no control. His personal favorite necessary moral truth is that God must be loved above all things, so I will start with this.

That God must be loved is a practical necessity which constrains even God's willing and acting. Scotus expresses this practical necessity in the maxim: Deus est diligendus, God must be loved. It is "a practical truth preceding any act of the divine will," and the divine intellect apprehends the truth of the maxim and the divine will non potest discordare with the intellect—cannot be at odds with the intellect, cannot wish things were otherwise—regarding the truth of the maxim.⁵ But Scotus also says, "God can do, and so will, whatever does not include a contradiction,"⁶ [End Page 160] and says elsewhere, "God can do anything that does not include a contradiction."⁷ From these we can infer that Scotus thinks that God's doing or willing anything in any way contrary to Deus est diligendus "includes a contradiction" and is therefore impossible. Thus, that God must be loved is both practically necessary and necessary in a much stronger sense.

Since Scotus thinks that God can do anything which is not contradictory and thinks God can't make it false that God must be loved, the sort of stronger-than-practical necessity attaching to the maxim that God must be loved is logical necessity. Scotus does not explicitly discuss logical necessity. But, famously, he does discuss logical possibility, and we can define a Scotistic notion of logical necessity from his notion of logical possibility.

Logical modalities as Scotus understands them

As Scotus understands logical modalities, they are properties sentences have precisely in virtue of the opposition or non-opposition, or repugnance or non-repugnance, of the meanings of their relevant terms. Logical possibility, Scotus tells us, is "a certain way in which terms can be combined by the mind because of the relationship of the terms in a proposition, namely that they are not opposed to one another."⁸ Scotus contrasts logical possibility with what he calls 'real' possibility in the following way: real possibility refers to actual active and passive powers that...