12.3 Some Comments on SCG 3,1–15
12.3 Some Comments on SCG 3,1–15
One problem that some people will have with SCG 3,1–15 is its notion that nonthinking things can be thought of as acting for ends. Another problem some people will have with SCG 3,1–15 is the way it relies so heavily on the claim that evil is a privation or absence of being. So, at this point, let me say something about Aquinas on acting for ends and Aquinas on evil as privation.
According to Aquinas, all agents act with a view to an end, that is, all action is goal-directed. I have shown him maintaining this position in SCG 3,1–15, and it is one he continued to embrace in later writings. Hence, for example, in Summa Theologiae 1a2ae,1,2 we read: “All efficient causes must needs act for an end. In an ordered system of causes, strike out the first, and the others have to go too. And the first of all causes is the final cause or end.”52 In short, as well as looking for efficient or agent causes when accounting for what happens, Aquinas continually looks for final causes. Indeed, as the above quotation makes clear, he takes final causation to be somehow more fundamental than efficient or agent causation since he takes the latter to presuppose or reflect the former. He thinks that efficient or agent causes achieve what they do as acting for ends, as being goal-oriented. In his view, efficient causes are oriented to particular effects or ends. He does not mean that efficient causes act so that certain ends will come about of necessity. As I have said, he allows for the operations of things to be thwarted by the actions of other things. Yet he does believe that all things are goal-oriented in their action, whether or not they are interfered with. In his view, all things tend to certain effects as they act.
As I said above, few of us will have problems with this thesis if we take it to be confined to a comment on human beings acting with reasons. But can the thesis be reasonably extended so as to cover the activity of nonthinking or nonchoosing things? It obviously cannot if all tending to an effect is confined to rational agents. The question, however, is “Should all tending to an effect be construed as the seeking of an effect by a rational agent?” Clearly, Aquinas thinks that it should not. Or, as he says in his De Principiis Naturae, “Natural agents can tend to goals without deliberating, where tending towards is simply having a natural bias towards something.”53 But this is a position that is often denied on the ground that efficient causation only occurs just as one thing makes contact with another and modifies it somehow. The idea here is that we do not have to invoke final causality or goal-directed activity when noting efficient causality. We just have to note what changes what in some way, and it is nothing but brute fact, or even accidental fact, that some things result in certain effects coming about.
Yet, while trying to formulate what we might call natural laws concerning the behavior of things, we specify what powers various things have so as to bring about various results. And to do this is surely to note what tendencies things have. It seems to amount to noting that what is subject to human understanding, while being thought to have definite ways of acting, is, in fact, aiming in some sense and is not just pushed around by something else.
If we want to cite a cause that would refute Aquinas’s claim that nonthinking things act in a goal-directed way, we would need to note something whose effect would not come about barring intervention. Yet to note the causal powers that things have is just to note what they will bring about unless interfered with. It is to note how things in the world tend to act, activity that seems to suggest that, even in nonthinking things, there is what Aquinas calls “acting for an end.” In the long run, Aquinas takes such acting to be governed or ordered by God. But when making the claim that all things act for an end in SCG 3, Aquinas is not relying on his belief in God. He is saying, as Aristotle did, that we cannot sensibly think of acting things except as tending to ends, that we cannot understand X efficiently causing Y if we do not view X as acting in a goal-directed way given its nature, as acting so that its effect, once we have figured things out, is not surprising given the nature of its cause and its way of acting. And, to say the least, this is not an unreasonable position.
One might claim that laws of nature can be expressed only by noting regularities in the world, by noting that such and such regularly follows the occurrence of such and such. Yet appeal to regularity explains nothing, for we surely want to know “Why do the regularities occur?” and simply noting that they do occur just fails to engage with this question. We cannot explain laws of nature just by referring to regularities. Instead, it seems, we have to refer to how things act given their natures, and to do this would seem to commit us to accepting that even nonthinking things operate in a goal-directed manner. As Edward Feser observes:
If we say that a law of nature is simply a kind of regularity, then we are lead into either a vicious circle or a vicious regress, since the regularity of connection between A and B is what we’re trying to explain in the first place. For to explain regularities in nature in terms of efficient causal necessitation, efficient causal necessitation in terms of laws of nature, and laws of nature in terms of regularities, would be to go around in a circle; while if, to avoid this circularity, we say that the regularity enshrined in a law of nature is of a higher order than the sort we started out trying to explain, then we will now need an account of this higher-order regularity, and will thereby have pushed the problem back a stage rather than having resolved it.54
We do not tend to think of evil or badness as something unreal. We think of it as very much there in the world. We might readily accept that what is bad is not good, which is true enough, even if subject to the qualification that what is bad might be good in some respect. Yet can “What is bad is not good” mean that evil is always an absence of being, an absence or lack in something actually existing, a privation in Aquinas’s sense of “privation” as privatio boni? Arguably not.
For consider the occurrence of pain. This is, surely, perfectly real. People and other animals experience pain, and experiences are real since they exist in people that have them. So how can it be plausibly maintained that pain lacks real existence or is a privation of goodness? You might say that to be in pain is not to be in a good state, and it seems hard to dispute that suggestion. Yet is being in pain not being in a positively bad state? And, therefore, is Aquinas not entirely misguided in saying that badness or evil is always a privation of being? It is, perhaps, easy enough to see why he might think that, say, blindness is nothing but the absence of sight, or that lameness is nothing but the inability to walk well. But can a similar account plausibly be given when it comes to pain? And can a similar account be plausibly given when it comes to the badness of wicked people? Can someone boiling and seething with unjustified anger, someone hell-bent on unjustly inflicting retributive harm, be seriously thought of as lacking something while being angry and vengeful? Do not such persons have positively bad properties, ones that exist in them?
In response to these questions, I presume that Aquinas, who must have experienced pain, and who certainly recognized that there are people who can truly be said to be bad, would ask us to consider why we take certain things to be bad. And he would, I think, say that we would have no notion of badness if we did not start off with some notion of goodness.55
To call something bad is to deny that it is good, but we do not need some notion of badness in mind when saying that something is good. When a mother nurses her healthy newborn child, she rejoices; but not because she is looking at it as something that lacks all the various ailments that children can be born with or acquire. She might know little of these and would probably not be able to list them. She just notes how well her child is. Worries about her child come later, and are grounded in what she knows of her child as a healthy one. Without knowledge of her child as healthy, she has no basis for considering it to be ailing or in a bad way. And so, it would seem, is the case with any evaluation of something as bad. To call something bad is to say that it does not match up to certain expectations that we have, and these expectations have to be grounded in our understanding of things being good. “It’s bad” makes no sense unless some criteria for being good is provided for the “it” in question.
So if “X is bad or in a bad way” is true, that presumably has to be because X lacks what makes for goodness in it, because it lacks what we want it to have, or what we think it ought to have in order to flourish. Badness, therefore, is obviously an absence of goodness. But is it nothing but this? Again, what about pain, which seems real enough, and which makes for badness in those who endure it? You might say that pain is just an absence of pleasure, but that seems a somewhat implausible thesis if only because people and other animals really do feel pain and are, surely, not suffering from an illusion or delusion when they do so. Someone in pain is, surely, not just not enjoying pleasure but actually undergoing pain.
We must surely concede that pain is real and that it would be wrong just to describe it as an absence of pleasure. For people and other things do experience pain, and, if you wish to deny that this is so, I would not know what to say to you. That there are and have long been things suffering pain is, I would suggest, as certain a conclusion as any premises in a deductive argument that might be devised in order to disprove it. And pain cannot just be an absence of pleasure since there are things that are not even capable of pleasure that do not undergo pain. If I furiously beat my car with a stick because it is not working properly, it undergoes no pain, but it is also not being deprived of pleasure. If I beat you with a stick, however, you will feel pain, and you will feel pain if your teeth decay to a certain point without treatment, or if you break your leg.
At the same time, though, it seems odd to speak of pains as if they were substances of some kind. I can count the number of clocks in my apartment, but can I, in any comparable sense, count the number of pains there might be in that particular space? Perhaps I might be able to do so if you and I are the only sentient beings in my apartment and if both of us are suffering from a headache. There is my headache, and there is your headache. So maybe we should conclude that there are two pains. Yet pains are not substances or objects as people are. If we are going to make any sense of “There are two pains in my apartment because two people in my apartment have a headache,” that will be because we recognize that there are two people in my apartment who are in pain, each of them suffering at the same time. Pains do not exist so as to be individuated and counted. Rather, it is people in pain who can be individuated and counted.
So what is going on when people are in pain? Clearly, they are ailing in some way. Some state of well-being that we and they look for in them is somehow being knocked out. Though pains are real and are felt, it is people who feel pain, and we deem them to be in a bad way while doing so because we are lamenting the lack of a certain state of well-being in them. Yet this thought would seem to be in line with Aquinas’s claim that evil is always a privation of a certain good.
As I have noted, Aquinas does not think that his privation thesis is equivalent to “There is no evil or badness” or “Evil or badness does not exist.” He holds that “John is in a bad way” would be true if John is in pain, regardless of how he comes to be in pain. But he also thinks that there is no badness that is a substance that is present in John if he is in pain. He thinks that John is undergoing various sensations because something that is a substance or thing, in the way that a pain is not, is acting in or on him so as to bring about these sensations in him, sensations that we call bad because we have some understanding of what well-being amounts to in people considered as what they essentially are.
So, I suggest, the reality of pain does not disprove what Aquinas says when claiming that badness or evil consists only in a privation of goodness. We are not talking nonsense when we speak of the reality of pain, but “reality” is a peculiar word in that almost anything you care to mention can be thought of as “real.” The reality of God, so Aquinas would have said, is significantly different from, say, the reality of a stone. He would also have said that the reality of pain is significantly different from the reality of any spatiotemporal object or substance. Its reality, he thinks, lies in something, for whatever reason, ailing at a sensory level. And, as I have noted, he looks for some physical explanation of such a thing doing so.
Yet should Aquinas not have taken pain to be unqualifiedly bad? I do not think that he did so since in some of his writings he says that pain that we suffer might lead us to improve ourselves in some way.56 Be that as it may, though, in the SCG he denies that evil suffered is unqualifiedly bad since he takes it to be an absence of good. Yet would he have been wrong if he thought that pain is unqualifiedly bad?
Those who suggest that pain refutes the claim that badness or evil is a privation of goodness typically assume that any right-minded person would accept that pain is unqualifiedly bad, and in the last paragraph I said that someone in pain is ailing in some way. But we might also note why pain might not be thought to be bad.
We might reasonably say that pain is bad because it grieves us, because being in pain amounts to being uncomfortable to a lesser or greater degree. Physical sensations of pain amount to discomfort in those who experience them. On the other hand there would be something wrong with us if we did not experience pain given the presence in or on us of what causes us to feel pain. You might not take yourself to be thriving if you burn your hand and thereby experience pain. Yet I would not be thriving if I did not feel pain when something very hot touches me.
There is a rare medical condition called congenital analgesia, and it is a bad thing. People who suffer from it do not experience physical pain. So they daily risk the danger of doing themselves damage. Why so? Because while the rest of us immediately seek to distance ourselves from what inflicts physical pain on us, victims of congenital analgesia do not, or do not always, do so. They can fail, for example, to notice that they have boiling water pouring over their hand, or that their teeth have decayed beyond repair, or that they are on the verge of a heart attack. So while pain amounts to unpleasant sensations, it might also be thought of as natural and beneficial and not unqualifiedly bad. Pain is a reaction to what is threatening in some way, so it is good even if the experience of pain is not attractive or desirable—good because the lack of it would amount to a sentient being just not functioning well. Congenital analgesia is a defect in a human being.
You might say that, though pain often instrumentally helps us to avoid certain evils, it is still bad and is of no use at all to someone suffering pain from a terminal disease. Yet this does not mean that pain should be thought of as refuting the idea that badness amounts to privation of goodness. The badness of pain arises as something working well falls victim to something else; it does not exist as a substance or thing in its own right. People and other sentient beings suffer pain as a natural consequence of what is acting in or on them to diminish them, which is what Aquinas thinks.
One objection to this suggestion would be the claim that pain is intrinsically evil, something evil or bad by nature. It would be a substance the essence of which is to be evil. As I have shown, though, Aquinas does not think that there is anything the essence of which is to be evil. Is he right to think this? I suggest that he is, since if evil is a falling away from what is good, and if to be actual is to be good in some way, we cannot make sense of the idea that there is something the essence of which is to be nonactual. This is not to say that pain does not exist. It is just to say that if someone is in pain, which can sometimes help us to thrive, the pain that the person has can be rightly described as a privation of goodness in them.
Pain, of course, is not always a matter of sensation. We speak of ourselves as being in pain because we have lost a loved one or have failed to achieve some goal at which we were aiming. Here “pain” means an intellectual awareness accompanied by an emotion. Why do we speak of pain arising from the loss of a loved one, or pain felt when we have not succeeded in what we were trying to do? I assume that our primary sense of “pain” is physiological. When we think of pain we think first of all of someone undergoing various unpleasant physical sensations. So, in the language of Aquinas, we apply the word “pain” to talk about grief and disappointment while doing so analogically (see chapter 5, section 1 here).
For Aquinas, though, analogical predication, if it makes sense, has to rely on there being some likeness between two things described as being analogically X or Y. And there is a likeness between pain as a matter of pure sensation and pain consisting in grief or disappointment. For one thing, the pain of grief or disappointment is not totally devoid of physicality. We feel grief in our bodies, and we also feel disappointment in our bodies. Grieving people, who are not to be thought of as angels, do not just react to the death of a loved one as if it were something to be considered purely intellectually. They cry, or try to stop themselves crying. They feel tense. Their blood pressure or heartbeat is different from what it would be were they ecstatically happy. Sometimes they display symptoms of depression, and they often undergo other physical changes. Grief cannot be properly understood without reference to physiology, even though some grieving people might seem to be totally unmoved physically.
In his long discussion of emotion in Summa Theologiae 1a2ae,22–48, Aquinas argues that emotions (passiones animae) always involve some physical factor, so he thinks that, if they are painful, that is because the person undergoing the emotion is suffering in some way. Yet what would it be for someone to be suffering emotionally? Surely, it would be for them to be woundingly agitated or unhappy. To be in that state, however, would be for them to lack well-being of some kind considered as human beings. Of course, certain emotions might lead us to help ourselves. My feeling fear when I confront a bear might lead me to run and get out of danger. So emotions can enable us to thrive. Insofar as they can be thought of as being painful, however, they are what amounts to us lacking goodness of some kind, which seems to square with Aquinas’s account of evil as privation.
What I have just said, though, needs to be considered together with what Aquinas thinks about goodness in general. Abstracting from what he says about God as goodness itself, he does not think that there is any such thing (substance) as goodness any more than he thinks that there is any such thing (substance) as badness. He does not think of created goodness as being a distinct substance. He thinks that there are created substances that are good in various ways.
We know what is being said when it is said that X, Y, and Z are all yellow. But we do not, in the same sense, know what is being said when told that X, Y, and Z are either good or bad (see chapter 6, section 6.2 here). X might be a good desk, while Y might be a good pumpkin, and Z might be a good human being. X might be a bad parent, while Y might be a bad (i.e., defective or sick) dog or cabbage, and Z might be a bad human being. As I have shown, Aquinas thinks that the adjective “good” is noun-dependent in that we will only understand what “X is good” means when we know what “X” stands for. To be sure, Aquinas thinks that there is a general account of “good” to be given in terms of which “good” means “desirable” or “attractive.” But “desirable” and “attractive” are as noun-dependent as “good” when it comes to us knowing what precisely they amount to given that they can be applied to very many things and to things coming under different descriptions.
In general, Aquinas thinks that something is desirable in that it is succeeding or flourishing in some way, in that it actually displays particular properties or attributes that it needs in order to be in good shape considered as what it is essentially. Correspondingly, he takes “badness” to signify some lack of such actual properties. He is not, of course, thinking of badness as a vacuum filled with nothing. That is because he generally takes badness to be ascribable to actual spatiotemporal things, not things with holes of nonmatter in them. In speaking of evil as privation, he is referring to what is not there in something in which it should be there, the absence of being here being something for which he thinks there might be any number of reasons, though all of them based on goodness of some kind. When it comes to pain, he thinks that this is always a diminishment in something brought about by something acting in or on it.
So perhaps Aquinas’s notion of badness as privation has something to commend it. It accords with our natural inclination to say that being bad or in a bad way is to be lacking or defective. It also accords with our natural inclination to suppose that if something is in a bad way, there has to be something accounting for this. And it accords with Aquinas’s view that goodness is a matter of actuality, not a lack of form. It might be criticized for supposing that what is real is not real at all but somehow nonexistent. Yet Aquinas does not think that all that is real has to be an existing substance; nor does he think that what is real but not an existing substance cannot amount to a lack of being in something. He thinks that something can be in a bad way because of the presence in it of something that causes it to be deficient in various ways. This is obviously so since viruses can badly affect people and since glue poured into a computer will truly screw it up. In Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, the Fairy Queen chides her subjects for falling in love with mortals. This, she says, is weakness. The fairies reply: “We know it’s weakness, but the weakness is so strong.” Aquinas knows well enough that there are weaknesses that can be thought of as strong and, therefore, positive—pain being an obvious example. But this does not lead him to conclude that such weaknesses are existing substances. Accepting that they amount to weaknesses, he seeks a causal explanation for them in something that does not display weakness as it goes about its work. And why should he not do so?57
You might think that he should not, and you might completely disagree with what I have said in defense of the drift of SCG 3,2–15. Now, though, I need to try to help you to understand, and perhaps think about, SCG 3,16–25.