Chapter 12. Agents, Ends, Evil, and Good (SCG 3,1–15)
CHAPTER 12. AGENTS, ENDS, EVIL, AND GOOD (SCG 3,1–15)
1. ND, 3/1, 31 [1].
2. ND, 3/1, 31 [2].
3. ND, 3/1, 32 [3].
4. ND, 3/1, 33–34 [10].
5. Aquinas does not deny that an active agent can be thwarted in bringing something about. Nor does he think that an active agent always acts on other things so as to produce the same effect in all of them. So, he does not, for example, think that cocaine has the same effect when injected into a dead cat as it does when sniffed by a human being. Nevertheless, Aquinas does think that agent causes typically have predictable effects as they act.
6. ND, 3/1, 34 [2].
7. ND, 3/1, 35 [3].
8. ND, 3/1, 36 [4].
9. ND, 3/1, 36–37 [6].
10. ND, 3/1, 37 [7]. The Latin word peccatum can be translated into English as “fault,” “error,” or “mistake.” It can also be translated as “moral failure” or “sin.” In SCG 3,2 Aquinas is using peccatum as meaning failure in a general sense. I can hardly convict my cat for being sinful if it vomits after eating some food that I have given it. But there is a fault or an error or a mistake or a failure occurring in my cat if it ends up vomiting after having eaten. Something is going wrong with my cat if it vomits having been given good food to eat.
11. Aquinas takes it as obvious that explanation in terms of an end or goal has to be invoked in the case of artifacts since these are constructed by people with a definite aim in mind. But he also thinks that nonthinking things act with (analogically construed) aims since they have natures that reflect what they are insofar as they act.
12. ND, 3/1, 38 [1].
13. The Latin word conveniens means “appropriate,” “fitting,” “suitable,” “seemly,” or “becoming,” and its meaning is as vague as are these English words (more on this in chapter 18). In SCG 3,3 Aquinas seems to be saying that if agents incline to a particular end, that end is one that matches their needs or tendencies so that there is a fit between end and agent.
14. ND, 3/1, 38 [3].
15. ND, 3/1, 39 [6].
16. ND, 3/1, 40 [9]. This argument strongly resembles part of the so-called Fifth Way of demonstrating God’s existence that Aquinas presents in Summa Theologiae 1a,2,3. Notice that in neither the Fifth Way nor SCG 3,3 is Aquinas claiming that things in the world exhibit design as, say, artifacts might be thought to do. He is saying that things lacking intellect regularly strive for, and regularly, if not always, end up arriving at what is good for them in some way.
17. Accidental since, though it is normal for people to be able to see, I survive as a human being even if I become blind.
18. I derive the “evil suffered” and “evil done” terminology from Herbert McCabe, who seems to have invented it. See Herbert McCabe, God Matters (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987), chapter 3. By “evil suffered” and “evil done” McCabe was trying to flag a distinction that Aquinas draws between malum poenae (evil of punishment) and malum culpae (evil of fault), and there is something of a mismatch between what McCabe calls “evil suffered” and what Aquinas calls malum poenae. That is because behind Aquinas’s use of malum poenae lies the view that pain and suffering are to be viewed as a punishment on the heirs of Adam for his primordial sin (see Genesis 3). On the other hand Aquinas certainly does take malum poenae to be evil as suffered by creatures by virtue of the actions on them of other creatures. And, though in SCG 3,4–15 he does not refer to malum poenae, he does make it clear that he has in mind what McCabe, and I now, refer to as “evil suffered.”
19. By “evil that merely affects the agent” I mean badness or evil that arises only in the agent willing it. Aquinas would certainly have said that my freely committing suicide, while of sound mind and not overwhelmed by emotions beyond my control, amounts to me harming only myself. Of course, a person who commits suicide might cause psychological pain to his or her friends or family, should he or she happen to have any friends or family. Yet, in an obvious sense, to commit suicide is to perform an action that terminates only in harm to oneself. Again, Aquinas would say that willingly harboring hateful thoughts against someone is an evil in an agent, even if the agent does not act on the hateful thoughts so as to harm anyone else.
20. In the SCG and elsewhere, Aquinas regularly employs this understanding of badness or evil while focusing on naturally occurring substances (entia per se) rather than artifacts or what he refers to as entia per accidens. Yet he would certainly invoke the same understanding when it comes, say, to products of human engineering. He would say, for example, that a computer is bad because it fails to function in the way that we expect it to, whether or not this is due to its lacking a part or to its being interfered with by something spilled into it.
21. Here remember Aquinas’s connection between being and goodness that I noted in chapter 6.
22. I should note that, in the case of X murdering Y, Aquinas allows for there being success in X to some extent. Obviously, successful murderers have to have sufficient power so as to bring about the death of people they kill. So they succeed as physical agents able to bring about certain effects. Yet, thinks Aquinas, their physical success is displayed at the expense of a deep malfunction in them considered as moral agents.
23. Let us suppose that a mother accidentally stumbles on a balcony and that her baby ends up tumbling from it so as to die when landing on concrete below. It might seem absurd to say that the demise of the baby arises because the concrete is doing well at the expense of the baby and to think of this scenario along the lines of the cheetah and zebra example that I have noted. Yet I do not think that Aquinas would deny this. I think he would be saying: (1) the death of the baby is to be accounted for in terms of gravity and what concrete is; (2) it is the concrete that accounts for the death of the baby when falling on it; (3) so there is a scientific explanation for the baby’s death to be given in terms of what it has landed on and what, by virtue of what it is as having the reality that it does, resulted in the death of the child. We might be uneasy with talk about concrete doing well. But should we be uneasy to think that concrete, given what it is when not interfered with, might be expected to have certain effects on things dropped on it? If it did not, would we not wonder whether it is really concrete but, say, a bed of feathers disguised as concrete?
24. ND, 3/1, 41 [1].
25. ND, 3/1, 41 [2].
26. ND, 3/1, 41 [3].
27. ND, 3/1, 42 [4].
28. ND, 3/1, 42–43 [5].
29. ND, 3/1, 45 [4].
30. ND, 3/1, 45 [5].
31. An actor might limp while trying to portray a limping person on stage. But such an actor will only be pretending to limp and will not be limping because of a genuine problem or deformity inhibiting power to walk, a problem or deformity that someone who has it would prefer to be without as he or she tries to walk. Or so Aquinas thinks.
32. ND, 3/1, 47 [9].
33. ND, 3/1, 47 [10].
34. ND, 3/1, 48 [11].
35. I am now going to pass over in silence the objections to SCG 3,7 that Aquinas lists in SCG 3,8. I am also going to say nothing about his replies to these objections to be found in SCG 3,9. My intention is to try to make clear why Aquinas wants to defend the thesis of SCG 3,7.
36. ND, 3/1, 48 and 49 [2 and 6].
37. ND, 3/1, 48 [3].
38. ND, 3/1, 48 [4].
39. ND, 3/1, 49 [5].
40. ND, 3/1, 55 [1] and 61 [18].
41. ND, 3/1, 55–56 [3].
42. ND, 3/1, 57 [8]. Here Aquinas seems to be thinking of bad effects brought about by something good acting on what is not itself in a good way. He provides an example that appears to depend on antiquated biology, but his point, I think, would be illustrated by the example of someone reacting badly to medication because of weakness or injury of some kind.
43. ND, 3/1, 57 [9].
44. ND, 3/1, 58 [11]. Here Aquinas is emphatically denying that I am a bad person just because of what I bring about. I might be thought to be a bad author because I write bad books, or a bad painter because I produce aesthetically worthless pictures. But my badness as a person is, thinks Aquinas, something in me, not in my effects. So Aquinas’s moral evaluation of people is not a consequentialist one. It does not depend on noting what they have managed to bring about. It rests on a recognition of what they are as willing agents, regardless of whether or not what they aim to bring about comes about.
45. ND, 3/1, 59 [13].
46. ND, 3/1, 60–61 [16].
47. ND, 3/1, 61 [17].
48. ND, 3/1, 62 [3].
49. ND, 3/1, 62 [5].
50. ND, 3/1, 67 [5].
51. ND, 3/1, 67 [1].
52. I quote from volume 16 of the Blackfriars edition of the Summa Theologiae (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 7.
53. I quote from Thomas Aquinas: Selected Philosophical Writings, translated by Timothy McDermott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 72.
54. Edward Feser, Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (Heusenstamm: Editiones Scholasticae, 2014), 96. For another good defense of Aquinas on final causation, see Paul Hoffmann, “Does Efficient Causation Presuppose Final Causation?: Aquinas vs. Early Modern Mechanism,” in Metaphysics and the Good: Themes From the Philosophy of Robert Merrihew Adams, edited by Larry Jorgensen and Samuel Newlands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
55. Some philosophers have suggested that we have no more reason to say that badness is an absence of goodness as we have to say that goodness is an absence of badness. Yet Aquinas, rightly, I think, would say that this suggestion seems to leave unexplained why we lament what is bad. We do so, he thinks, because we have some standard or desire or expectation in the light of which we complain that something is bad or in a bad way; and he thinks that this has to lie in our awareness of what something we call bad would be if it were good.
56. See Eleonore Stump, “Biblical Commentary and Philosophy,” which is chapter 10 of The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, edited by Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
57. For criticisms of the view that evil amounts to privation, see Todd C. Calder, “Is the Privation Theory of Evil Dead?,” American Philosophical Quarterly 44 (October 2007); John F. Crosby, “Doubts about the Privation Theory That Will Not Go Away: Response to Patrick Lee,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 81 (2007); H. J. McCloskey, “God and Evil,” in God and Evil, edited by Nelson Pike (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1964). For defenses of the view that evil amounts to privation, see M. B. Ahern, “The Nature of Evil,” Sophia 5 (1966); Bill Anglin and Stewart Goetz, “Evil Is Privation,” International Journal of Philosophy of Religion 13 (1982); Brian Davies, The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil (Continuum: London: 2006), and Thomas Aquinas on God and Evil, chapter 4; Patrick Lee, “Evil as Such Is Privation: A Reply to John Crosby,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 81 (2007); Herbert McCabe, “Evil,” which is chapter 3 of McCabe, God Matters; Herbert McCabe, God and Evil in the Theology of St Thomas Aquinas (London: Continuum, 2010).