The Libertarian Foundations of Scotus’s Moral Philosophy

The Thomist 62 (1998): 193-215 THE LIBERTARIAN FOUNDATIONS OF SCOTUS'S MORAL PHILOSOPHY THOMAS WILLIAMS The University ofIowa Iowa City, Iowa CONTEMPORARY LIBERTARIANS typically claim that their conception of freedom is necessary to safeguard our commonsense understanding of moral responsibility, but beyond that claim little is said about the implications of libertarianism for moral philosophy. Perhaps philosophers generally do not think it has any other such implications. Duns Scotus, however, made his libertarianism the cornerstone of his system of ethics. Unfortunately, commentators have failed to show how his theory of freedom unites various elements of his thought. They have failed to trace (and consequently, they have failed to defend) the inferences that Scotus drew from his account of freedom. They have, in short, failed to treat Scotus's moral philosophy as a system at all, and have written as if Scotus had nothing more to offer than disjointed observations about the will and a few other subjects of interest to moral philosophers.1 1 Not only have commentators sometimes written as if they believed this, they have occasionally stated it outright. In the recent Scotus number of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly (67 [1993]), for example, Mary Elizabeth Ingham says flatly that "It is well known that Scotus presents nowhere in his writings a full-blown ethical theory" (128). Gilson says of his book on Scotus, "On n'y trouvera pas non plus un 'systeme' de Duns Scot ... la seule raison est que nous ne l'avons pas trouve nous meme"