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11 Scotus and Kant: The Moral Will and Its Limits Overview. This chapter argues that medieval critics of Thomism began to see the free will in which virtues develop as having the power to generate moral motivation. Kant inherits from Scotus this idea of projective motivation in the moral realm. Although the chapter is primarily historical and accessible to nonspecialists, the analysis of Kant’s conception of the motive of duty reconstructs key arguments as natural deductions that may be useful in teaching the Groundwork. The discussion of libertarian freedom in Kant presupposes some knowledge of Kant’s metaphysics. 1. The Medieval Shift away from Eudaimonism: Scotus and the Moral Will The positive existential idea of volitional strength described in the previous chapter suggests the possibility of conceiving virtuous character in ways that, unlike Aristotle’s Apollonian conception of virtue (chap. 10, sec. 1), contrast directly with radical evil on its own volitional level. As accounts of the virtues of justice and charity developed in medieval philosophy, a fundamental shift away from the Apollonian conception occurred; it became clearer that to will the good wholeheartedly requires something more than the right disposition of sense appetites. A radically good will is not just a corrective to strong or misdirected passions and habits that can lead to cowardly, ungenerous, dishonest, or intemperate actions. Thus the key insight in this medieval turn away from eudaimonism is that the virtues of a good will are not all structurally analogous to temperance ; in some cases, virtue requires bringing ourselves to care more than we are naturally inclined to about selfless ends of several kinds rather than just desiring self-interested goods less strongly. That the former will not automatically follow the latter was not emphasized by Socrates and Plato, 371 372 Will as Commitment and Resolve whose psychological and ethical analyses were primarily focused on the problem of government. They rightly saw that the polis is ruined by leaders who are too timocratic, avaricious, or intemperate to control their own selfish lusts or to place justice and the common good above their private pleasures, profit, and glory. The practical philosophy of Socrates and Plato was from first to last a response to this great disaster for the state, which still haunts us today. But being a good person turns out to require more than the character traits that we need to cultivate in future leaders in order to ensure that they will tend away from tyranny and toward philosophy and ideal guardianship. It extends to radical generosity beyond concern for harmony in one’s own soul. 1.1. From Aquinas to Scotus: Kent on Virtues of the Will The move toward a positive volitional conception of virtue has some roots in the Roman Stoics and St. Augustine, but it begins in earnest in postThomistic medieval philosophy. In her invaluable study, Bonnie Kent explains that Aquinas’s placement of temperance and courage in the sense appetite as opposed to the will (where he placed justice) was hardly universal : ‘‘In the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, more than a dozen thinkers,’’ including ‘‘Bonaventure, Henry of Ghent, Peter Olivi, Gonsalvus of Spain, and Duns Scotus,’’ defended the view that only ‘‘habits of will,’’ as opposed to dispositions of sense appetites, can count as virtues.1 Initially, these authors still conceived the will, in contrast to the irrational or sense appetite, as the faculty of prohairetic choice flowing from intellectual appetite. But as Kent points out, following Augustine, ‘‘will’’ in this bouletic sense (voluntas in Latin) was no longer restricted to good persons: ‘‘Augustine presented voluntas as the potential expression of either virtue or vice and so helped lay the foundation for later conceptions of voluntas as a faculty of the soul.’’2 As we’ll see, this provides the basis for one of Scotus’s arguments for the autonomy of volitional motivation. Augustine attributed libertarian freedom to voluntas and employed this concept in explaining how the will can pursue ends with different moral values. Since virtue and vice are the basis of moral worth, and moral worth is now related to libertarian freedom, virtues must rest in the faculty endowed with such freedom: ‘‘It is by the will that we lead and deserve a praiseworthy and happy life, or a contemptible and unhappy one.’’3 This line of thought is developed by Bonaventure, for example: ‘‘Because merit is rooted in free decision, Bonaventure argues, the cardinal virtues must belong to those powers that share...

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