Christian

[4.15.11] John Duns Scotus on Natural Law

A. L. KomáromiLeave a comment

John Duns Scotus (the “Subtle Doctor,” 1265/66–1308 AD), in his work “Ordinatio” writes about the natural law in the context of the Decalogue (Ten Commandments):

  • Natural law, in the strict sense, contains only the self-evident moral propositions, along with those that can be derived from them deductively. These are necessary, non-contradictory propositions, unchangeable even by God’s will. These are the commandments I, II, and probably III.
  • The natural law in the wider sense contains moral propositions that agree with those in the strict sense, but their opposites not. These are the commandments from the second tablet (VI-X).
  • The natural laws in the wider sense are contingent; they depend entirely on God’s free will.
  • Some commandments prescribing ceremonies and customs belong to the positive law.

The following UML Use Case diagram presents Scotus’s model of natural law:

Scotus on natural law
ClassDescriptionRelations
LawLaw
NaturalLaw“The ‘nature’ appealed to by classical and medieval theories of natural law – however it might have been conceived by any particular thinker – was invariably associated with two criteria: it represented an authoritative standard, with determinate content, that was understood as both universal (that is, not prescriptive for just one individual) and accessible to human beings through their natural powers. Because natural law rests on a nature that cannot be changed by human action, it has universal validity. Because human beings themselves belong to that nature, they are in principle capable of knowing the corresponding law. […]
This linking of natural law to eternal law does not merely place the natural law beyond the power of human beings to change. It also raises most pointedly the question of whether, and in what way, the natural law can be changed by divine action. […]
Scotus follows the main thread of this way of posing the problem when he devotes Ordinatio 3, d. 37, the central text in which he develops his conception of natural law, to the question of whether all the commandments of the Decalogue belong to the natural law. […]
Scotus understands all the commandments, both those that belong to natural law in the strict sense and those that belong to it only in the wider sense, as practical truths (vera practica): the former because they are self-evident, the latter because of their accordance or agreement (consonantia) with the former”		subkind of Law
NaturalLawStrictSense“Scotus first offers a purely formal criterion for belonging to natural law: a commandment belongs to natural law in the strict sense if, simply on the basis of the content expressed in the commandment, it is conceptually necessary that the commandment be valid. Nowhere in his work does Scotus trace the content of the natural law back to the eternal law; in fact, the doctrine of eternal law has
no importance in his system. […]
Neither the context in which a commandment is operative, nor the intention with which it is laid down, is relevant to its validity, if it is to count as belonging to the natural law in the strict sense. Scotus then makes clear what he means by this conceptual necessity when he goes on to discuss whether following the commandments is necessary for attaining the ultimate end. Only for these self-evident principles, he concludes, is it the case that what they prescribe is unqualifiedly necessary in order to attain the ultimate end. ‘Unqualifiedly necessary,’ as the context makes clear, means that it is inconceivable that one could repudiate the goodness prescribed in these commandments without thereby also repudiating the goodness of the ultimate end itself. Since the ultimate end of all action is the attainment of the highest good, and the highest good is identical with God, the only commandments that can belong to natural law in the strict sense are those that have God himself as their object. As far as the Decalogue is concerned, the result of Scotus’s reflections is that only the commandments of the first table belong to natural law in the strict sense. So only the first two commandments – Scotus is uncertain about the third – belong to the natural law in the strict sense, since only ‘these regard God immediately as object.’ The content of the natural law in the strict sense can be summarized in the formulation that ‘God is to be loved’ or rather, in the more precise negative formulation, that ‘God is not to be hated.’ This commandment meets the formal criterion of self-evidence because in essence (as Scotus emphasizes in Ord. 3, d. 27) it simply states that ‘what is best must be loved most.’ On this interpretation it becomes obvious that the commandment to love God is a self-evident practical principle and therefore meets the formal criterion for belonging to the natural law. […]”
A natural law in the strict sense is necessary.		subkind of NaturalLaw
NaturalLawWiderSenseNatural law in a wider sense: “The criterion in virtue of which they belong is not their conceptual necessity but their broad agreement (consonantia) with natural law in the strict sense. […] As Scotus makes clear in another context, this conception of consonantia allows for two interpretations. On the one hand, there are commandments that accord with general commandments but whose opposites would also be compatible with those same general commandments; on the other hand, there are those whose opposites are not compatible with the overarching general principles. Only the latter belong to the natural law in the wider sense. […] The commandments of the second table can be counted as belonging to the natural law only in a looser sense.”
These laws are contingent.		subkind of NaturalLaw; in agreement with NaturalLawStrictSense
FreedomFrom Contradiction“The only limit is the limit of God’s absolute power itself; there can be no dispensation from commandments whose validity is outside the domain of God’s absolute power. And the only constraint on God’s absolute power is the requirement of freedom from contradiction. […] Applied to the doctrine of natural law, this means that the natural law in the strict sense comprises all commandments that are such that any dispensation from them would involve a contradiction.”characterizes NaturalLawStrictSense
Agreement”‘Scotus’s concept of agreement is defined negatively insofar as it implies that there is no strict deductive connection that would permit a necessary inference from overarching self-evident principles.
More positively, these commandments can be understood as elaborations (declaratio) or explanations (explicatio) of some overarching general commandment – as Scotus makes clear in an example. Commandments with this sort of consonantia extend general commandments by making them applicable to specific cases.”		relates NaturalLawStrictSense with NaturalLawWiderSense
DivineWillGod’s Will
PositiveLaw“As Scotus makes clear in another context, this conception of consonantia allows for two interpretations. On the one hand, there are commandments that accord with general commandments but whose opposites would also be compatible with those same general commandments; on the other hand, there are those whose opposites are not compatible with the overarching general principles. Only the latter belong to the natural law in the wider sense; the former belong only to positive law. On this understanding, a commandment prescribing certain ceremonies or customs belongs to positive law, since a comparable commandment prescribing other ceremonies – and perhaps even forbidding the practice of ceremonies of the first sort – can also be conceived as being in accordance with natural law in the strict sense.”subkind of Law
  • All citations from: Möhle, Hannes, “Scotus’s Theory of Natural Law”, The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus, Cambridge University Press 2003, ed. Thomas Williams
  • Williams, Thomas, “John Duns Scotus“, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

First published: 24/6/2021

[4.15.9] John Duns Scotus on Logical Possibility and Possible Worlds

A. L. KomáromiLeave a comment

John Duns Scotus (the “Subtle Doctor,” 1265/66–1308 AD), in “Ordinatio” writes about modal theory, logical possibility, and how these concepts influence the state of affairs in the world. According to his ideas:

  • God’s divine intellect includes all the simple notae, which are necessary and true propositions, like logical, mathematical, metaphysical truths.
  • Logical possibility is a non-repugnant or non-contradictory relation between two (or more) simple notae. E.g., the simple notae “animality” and “rationality” are non-repugnant since together define “man”.
  • The simple notae related by logical possibility are combined in the divine intellect in contingent divine ideas. E.g., “man”
  • Some divine ideas are necessary and true by definition; these are the necessary propositions. E.g., a priori truths, like “A triangle has three angles.” Others are contingent, with undefined truth value; these are contingent propositions.
  • The divine intellect presents the contingent propositions to the divine will, which decides for some of them by making them true, and with the same act creating them in the world. These are the true propositions. It is noteworthy that the freedom of the divine will is limited to the realm of the contingent propositions.
  • The maximal consistent collection of all the true propositions describes possible worlds, from which one is our real world.

The following OntoUML diagram presents Duns Scotus’s theory of logical possibility and possible worlds:

Duns Scotus’s theory of logical possibility and possible worlds

ClassDescriptionRelations
DivineIntellectGod’s intellect
DivineWill “The divine intellect presents these contingent propositions to the divine will as not yet having a truth value, and the divine will then (in a second instant of nature) contingently determines each to be true or be false.” (Normore, 2003)

“Since God’s [divine] will is the only root of contingency, it follows that ideas necessarily have their content and cannot ground a representation of contingent states of affairs. Conversely, suppose that God’s knowledge of future contingents were based on ideas, then he would not be omniscient, for he would know that Socrates could be either sitting or standing up at T, not that he is sitting at T. Finally, there would be no more difference between God’s knowledge of what is actual and of what is simply possible.” (Anfray 2014) 		presents contingent propositions to DivineWill
SimpleNotae“The first stage is God’s natural knowledge of all necessary propositions. These are logically simples and are sometimes called by Scotus [simple] notae. Such notae are related to others according to repugnance or compossibility, independently of any power to bring them about. However, they are not self-subsistent entities, but are the products of God’s intellectual activity, which thus endows them with an ontological status, as intelligible beings. But the logical and modal properties of these entities are not constituted by God’s intellectual activity. Scotus summarizes this by claiming that the possibilia are formally such from themselves (formaliter ex se), but “principially” from God (principiative ab eo). All logical, mathematical, and metaphysical truths, in general all necessary truths, are known at precisely the instant when God produces, thinks things, and produces them in an esse intelligibile. Moreover, since the relations of compossibility [non-repugnance] and repugnance are independent from God’s intellectual activity, any modal truth is necessarily so. This entails that anything possible is necessarily possible.” (Anfray 2014) shared part of DivineIntelect Possibility and DivineIdea
LogicalPossiblityFor Scotus logical possibility is a fundamentally relational idea: “We can intelligibly speak of it only when we are dealing with several notae. Similarly, we can only ask whether notae are consistent when we are dealing with more than one. Thus, in the typical cases the question of whether some possible is possible of itself reduces to the question of the status of a relation among its metaphysical constituents: Are they related of themselves, and in what sense does that relation presuppose its relata?”
Simple notae are true and necessary.		relates between SimpleNotae; defines DivineIdea
Non-repugnance“Scotus articulated a notion of logical possibility as the nonrepugnance of terms and claimed that there is a real power corresponding to every logical possibility.” (Normore, 2003)

We can understand the concept of non-repugnance as the contratry of repugnence: the concept of ‘chimera’ is internally incoherent in the sense that the metaphysical constituents out of which the common nature of chimera would be composed (the notae) simply cannot be combined, and that is why there is a further repugnance between ‘chimera’ and ‘being something’. But this repugnance presupposes that ‘chimera’ is itself a complex term in which several notae are combined.Achimera is perhaps an animal with the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a serpent. These notae are themselves complex and could be analyzed in the same way. On Scotus’s view, we eventually reach simple notae. Suppose we ask then whether all simple notae are possible – and further, whether they are possible of themselves.” (Normore, 2003) 		characterizes LogicalPossibility
DivineIdea“According to Scotus, all combinations of compatible [non-repugnant] notae are objects of God’s knowledge, which he calls also [divine] ideas. Scotus is less explicit on the content of ideas than on their ontological status, but it is likely that an idea is an intellectual representation of any object, either of an individual like ‘Socrates’ or of a common nature like ‘man’ and that it contains everything that can be grasped by God through his intellect alone. An idea would be something like the deductive closure of all necessary truths concerning a given object. For instance, God’s intellect produces the notae of animality and rationality and these, being intrinsically nonrepugnant, can be combined in a single subject, man. And man can be combined with an individual differentia to produce a possible individual, say ‘Socrates.’ The idea of Socrates contains all the properties grounding necessary truths concerning him: that he is a man, that he is a rational animal, and that it is possible that he is sitting at T, and so on. However, it does not include the property of sitting at T, because it is a contingent truth. This leads Scotus to reject theories that ground God’s knowledge of future contingents on his ideas. First, they can ground only analytical, thus necessary truths. Moreover, ideas are intellectual representations, excluding any volitional element. They are therefore purely natural occurrences in God’s mind.” (Anfray 2014)
Necessary Proposition“Scotus has as a basic notion in his modal picture that of a nonepugnant collection of notae. Second, he claims that having thought the notae, the divine intellect naturally and in a single instant of nature considers all nonrepugnant combinations of them. Some of these combinations are such that it would be repugnant for their elements not to be so combined. These correspond to necessary propositions.” (Normore, 2003)
Necessary propositions are true and necessary. 		subkind of DivineIdea; shared part of DescriptionOfPossibleWorld
ContingentProposition“Scotus has as a basic notion in his modal picture that of a nonepugnant collection of notae. Second, he claims that having thought the notae, the divine intellect naturally and in a single instant of nature considers all nonrepugnant combinations of them. […] Others are such that it is not repugnant for their elements either to be so combined or not. These correspond to contingent propositions.” (Normore, 2003)
Contingent propositions are contingent and have undifined truth value. 		subkind of DivineIdea; shared part of DescriptionOfPossibleWorld
TrueProposition“The divine intellect presents these contingent propositions to the divine will as not yet having a truth value, and the divine will then (in a second instant of nature) contingently determines each to be true or be false. The divine will thus contingently determines a maximal consistent collection of contingent propositions to be true. Such a maximal consistent collection of [true] propositions is a description of (or, on some views, is) what both Leibniz and twentieth-century modal theorists would call a possible world.” (Normore, 2003)
True propositions contingent and true.		subkind of ContingentProposition; shared part of DescriptionOfPossibleWorld; defines and creates Thing
ThingAn object, a substance, a state of affairs in a possible world.exclusive part of PossibleWorld
DescriptionOfPossibleWorld “The divine will thus contingently determines a maximal consistent collection of contingent propositions to be true. Such a maximal consistent collection of [true] propositions is a description of (or, on some views, is) what both Leibniz and twentieth-century modal theorists would call a possible world.” (Normore, 2003) defines PossibleWorld
PossibleWorldA possible world, our world is an instance of that.

Sources

  • Normore, Calvin G., “Duns Scotus’s Modal Theory”, The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus, Cambridge University Press 2003, ed. Thomas Williams
  • Anfray, Jean-Pascal Anfray, “Molina and John Duns Scotus”, A Companion to Luis de Molina, Brill, 2014
  • Williams, Thomas, “John Duns Scotus“, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

First published: 27/5/2021