12.1 Agents and Ends (SCG 3,2–3)
12.1 Agents and Ends (SCG 3,2–3)
The notion of governance seems bound up with the notion of intention. Governors govern with ends in mind. Thus, for example, parliaments or monarchs go about governing their countries while seeking to bring about definite results. They act in order to achieve what they, rightly or wrongly, take to be good. Given that in SCG 3 Aquinas is concerned with God’s governance of creatures, therefore, he has to bear in mind that creatures can be led to certain ends by God. Since he does not think that God can be fallible when it comes to what is good, he also has to think that God leads or governs things so as to result in what is truly good.
Yet how is God supposed to do this? One can readily understand how parliaments or monarchs might govern a country: by setting up laws and putting into place people and organizations able to enforce them, or by providing money for the welfare of various individuals. As I have shown, however, Aquinas does not think of God as a spatiotemporal being acting as something within the created order, which would seem to mean that he needs to think of God as governing things by creating them as the things that they are, which is what he does indeed think. According to Aquinas, God governs creatures by acting in them creatively, by making them to exist in various ways. So he holds that God brings about what is good partly by making creatures geared to what is good, though he recognizes that some creatures might reach what is good for them at the expense of others. As I have shown, Aquinas thinks that everything that exists is to some extent good. So he holds that even an ailing creature, whose ailing might contribute to the good of another creature, is still somehow good. Nevertheless, Aquinas views God’s governing of creatures in terms of God’s leading them to a range of goods by making them to be what they are and sometimes by helping them in special ways.
This point of view commits Aquinas to the view that all created things must have a divinely inbuilt tendency to what is good. Aquinas accepts that people often freely aim at what is morally wrong. Yet he also thinks that even a vicious person is acting so as to achieve what he or she takes to be good in some sense, and he takes nonthinking created agents always to act for a good end.
It is not, perhaps, hard to see why Aquinas might think that people always act for ends that they take to be good. If it makes sense to ask someone “Why are you doing that?” then it makes sense to suppose that the person is acting so as to achieve some desirable end or goal. Yet it might not seem so obvious that nonthinking creatures act for an end. We can, perhaps, happily concede that cats chase after mice while acting for an end. What, however, of other nonthinking things in the world? What about plants? What about stones?
Aquinas thinks that plants are living things and, therefore, have a principle of movement within them (see chapter 8, section 2 here). Yet he also thinks that plants, left to themselves and suitably provided for, consistently act in predictable ways, and he wonders why that should be so. He does not think that a physical analysis of plants will entirely explain why they act as they do since such an analysis will just describe what plants are materially. Nor does he think that the activities of plants can always be explained in terms of agent causes other than them. To be sure, plants grow from seeds, and Aquinas believes that agent causes are needed to account for the seeds being there; but he does not think that the agent cause or causes accounting for a particular plant can explain why the plant acts as it does. He holds that plants act as nonthinkingly aiming at what they strive for as existing plants. And he takes the same line when it comes to stones. We might, he supposes, be able to explain why a particular stone came into existence. And we might provide a scientific account when it comes to what a stone is. But then, thinks Aquinas, we might ask why stones in certain contexts bring about certain effects and were potentially able to do so beforehand. His answer to this question is twofold and is not confined to questions about plants or stones. It is an answer that he takes to apply to anything at all that can be thought of as acting, as moving from being potentially thus and so to becoming actually thus and so. And his answer is that (1) every agent acts for an end, and (2) every agent acts for a good (the theses defended in SCG 3,2 and 3).
Yet why should we believe that every agent acts for an end? Aquinas’s answer is that every agent acts in ways that reflect its substantial form, and that things with substantial forms have tendencies to operate in particular ways, tendencies to move toward certain ends rather than others. Aquinas does not think that all substances tend to ends as things with intellect recognizing ends and gravitating toward them accordingly. He recognizes, for example, that while people can set about aiming for a good that they want and reason about how to obtain it, nonthinking things are incapable of acting in this way. However, he also thinks that it is not by accident that acting things actualize potentialities in themselves or others. He would say, for example, that it is not accidental that the motions of hearts produce circulation of blood, or that it is not accidental that sulphuric acid burns skin onto which it is poured. Aquinas’s view is that acting things, given their natures, whether intellectual or not, have inclinations or tendencies to operate in various ways and to bring about certain effects that reflect their natures.5 As he says in SCG 3,2: “Every inclination of an agent tends towards something definite. A given action does not stem from merely any power, but heating comes from heat, cooling from cold.”6 Aquinas goes on to observe that “in the action of all agents, one may find something beyond which the agent seeks nothing further. Otherwise, actions would tend to infinity, which is impossible. … Therefore, every agent acts for an end.”7 He means that acting agents act as directed not to an infinity of ends but to some end, one that they are actually capable of reaching. So, he reasons, “There must be something which satisfies an agent’s desire when it is attained. Therefore, every agent acts for an end.”8
Aquinas is not here saying that every agent that acts always achieves the end or ends with respect to which it acts. The operations of anything created, whether intellectual or not, can, he accepts, be thwarted. He does, however, think that agents, both with and without intellect, tend to ends and arrive at them unless prevented from doing so by something else, something acting for an end in its own way. So, he argues:
Just as the entire likeness of the result achieved by the actions of an intelligent agent exists in the intellect that preconceives it, so, too, does the likeness of a natural resultant pre-exist in the natural agent; and as a consequence of this, the action is determined to a definite result. For fire gives rise to fire, and an olive to an olive. Therefore, the agent that acts with nature as its principle is just as much directed to a definite end, in its action, as is the agent that acts through intellect as its principle. Therefore, every agent acts for an end.9
If this were not the case, Aquinas suggests, we would never be complaining that something has gone wrong when it comes to the actions of created agents. If we think that something has gone wrong as an agent acts, that is because we have unfulfilled expectations when it comes to the agent and its action. If my cat tries to feed, but ends up vomiting and expiring, then something seems to have gone wrong. But wrong with respect to what? Presumably with respect to an end that we expect when it comes to functioning cats. Or, as Aquinas says: “There is no fault (peccatum) to be found, except in the case of things that are for the sake of an end. A fault is never attributed to an agent, if the failure is related to something that is not the agent’s end.”10
If you believe that the only kind of causation there is amounts to what Aquinas calls “agent” or “efficient” causation, you will reject what I have just reported as his thinking. For in SCG 3,2 he is saying that final causality is all-pervasive in the created order, that there are final causes as well as efficient ones (see chapter 2, section 1 here). In his view (see chapter 2, section 1 here), we might try to explain what something is by noting what it is made of, what its substantial form is (if it has one), what brought it into being, and what it aims at (where “aims” is obviously to be construed analogically). And in SCG 3,2 Aquinas is ramming home his conviction that final causality has to be acknowledged when it comes to all created substances.11
In SCG 3,3, however, he goes a stage further while developing this thesis. Here he argues that “every agent acts for a good.”12 In defense of this thesis he offers these arguments:
1. What agents tend to “in a definite way” must be something appropriate (conveniens) to them. Yet what is appropriate for something is good for it.13
2. When arriving at an end an agent is at rest. Now, “good” means a terminus for appetite since “the good is that which all desire.” So “every action and motion are for the sake of a good.”14
3. Action and movement are somehow directed to being either for the preservation of the agent or its species or for the acquisition of something. Being, however, is good in and of itself, which is why all things tend to or desire it.
4. Action is for some perfection, yet perfection is good.
5. “Every agent acts in so far as it is in act, and in acting it tends to produce something like itself. So, it tends toward some act. But every act has something of good in its essential character.”15
6. Agents with intellect always act as pursuing ends thought of by them as good. Agents without intellect act on the basis of inclination drawing them to certain ends desirable in some way for them.
7. Everything shuns evil, which means that, when acting, things move to what is good in some way.
8. “What happens in the workings of nature is either always, or mostly, for the better.” This does not come about by chance since chance events are not ones that occur always or for the most part. “Therefore, the natural agent tends toward what is better, and it is much more evident that the intelligent agent does so.”16
9. Whatever is moved ends up as it is because of a mover or agent. So movers and things moved tend to the same thing. Yet movement involves a progression from potentiality to actuality, which is good.
In presenting these arguments, Aquinas is not denying that bad things can happen because of what agents or movers do. He is not, for example, denying that people suffer when wolves prey on them. Rather, he is commenting on action in general and suggesting that agents always act as drawn to some good, something they find desirable in some sense. They do this, he believes, as governed by God providentially.