The Metaphysics of Good and Evil

David S. Oderberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000712506
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

The Metaphysics of Good and Evil is the first, full-length contemporary defence, from the perspective of analytic philosophy, of the Scholastic theory of good and evil – the theory of Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and most medieval and Thomistic philosophers. Goodness is analysed as obedience to nature. Evil is analysed as the privation of goodness. Goodness, surprisingly, is found in the non-living world, but in the living world it takes on a special character. The book analyses various kinds of goodness, showing how they fit into the Scholastic theory. The privation theory of evil is given its most comprehensive contemporary defence, including an account of truthmakers for truths of privation and an analysis of how causation by privation should be understood. In the end, all evil is deviance – a departure from the goodness prescribed by a thing's essential nature.

Key Features:

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• Offers a comprehensive defence of a venerable metaphysical theory, conducted using the concepts and methods of analytic philosophy.

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• Revives a much neglected approach to the question of good and evil in their most general nature.

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• Shows how Aristotelian-Thomistic theory has more than historical relevance to a fundamental philosophical issue, but can be applied in a way that is both defensible and yet accessible to the modern philosopher.

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• Provides what, for the Scholastic philosopher, is arguably the only solid metaphysical foundation for a separate treatment of the origins of morality.

Part I

A Theory of Good as Fulfilment

‘Every being, insofar as it is a being, is good’ (St Augustine)¹

1 The Basic Theory

Appetites and Fulfilment

1.1 Actuality and potentiality

Our world is essentially and fundamentally a world of act and potency. It is a mixture of determinate realities consisting of the kinds of thing there are and their actual behaviour, states, operations, functions, and so on, combined with the potentialities of those things to undergo change of various kinds. To some this might seem the most recherché of truths about our world, to others so obvious as not to need stating – but it is also the fundamental truth, and it must be confronted if we are to have any genuine philosophical understanding of the concrete reality we inhabit. In particular, it is foundational to our understanding of good and evil. That is the subject of this book.

At its most general, a potency is a way that something could be and an actuality is the way that something is. Potencies are a kind of incompleteness or indeterminacy. They are themselves a kind of being – potencies are real – but if they are unactualised then there is a further being that could obtain but is not: the seed’s potency to germination (its power to germinate) is real, but its actual germination is a further reality that constitutes actualisation of the potency. The realisation of mere possibility is also, despite what one might think, the actualisation of some potency. There might be a cat in the corner of my room, but there is not. The room is, as the Scholastic philosophers like to say, in potency to there being a cat: given its spatial dimensions and physical properties, it is capable of ‘receiving’, to use another Scholastic term, the actuality that is a cat. The appearance of a cat in the room (through natural means – leave aside miracles)² would actualise a potency of the room. Similarly, a stone’s being here rather than there actualises a potency of the stone – potency to spatial location – and my legs’ being uncrossed right now rather than crossed is an actualisation of my bodily power.

All of these actualisations of potency are a kind of proper functioning of the beings whose potencies are actualised. When I cross or uncross my legs, I function in a way proper to my nature as a certain kind of body. When a seed germinates, it functions in a way proper to it as a seed. Strange as it may sound, however, when a stone is here rather than there it too functions in a way proper to stones as physical bodies – by having some location or other. The same goes for my room – if a cat appears (again, through natural means) both the room and the cat function properly to the kinds of thing they are: cats move around and end up in all sorts of places, rooms being no exception; and rooms, assuming they are not already full to the brim, contain all sorts of things. That’s just how it is with cats and rooms, every bit as much as with seeds and human legs.

The reader will immediately balk. It is, you will object, one thing to speak of the proper functioning of a seed or an animal, but quite another to apply this concept to a stone or a room. For it’s not as though my room will malfunction if it lacks a cat, nor a stone if it is not here but there instead. The same cannot be said for a seed, or for a human being and their legs. I reply: not so fast. There is a point here, but it is not so easily made. For a room may well malfunction without any cats if it is a cattery – a room designed to hold cats. Things just do not go properly for a cattery sans cats (unless the cattery is closed for Christmas). To this you will rightly reply that a cattery is an artefact: any malfunctioning is purely derivative from the malfunctioning, qua cattery owners, of the people who own the cattery yet have no cats. (Note: the people can do badly as cattery owners – and so malfunction – even if the lack of business is not their fault.) Still, this does show that malfunctioning has at least some purchase in the world of non-living things. When it comes to the stone that is in one place rather than another, there is no room for talk of malfunction at all. The stone is in potency to many different locations, but it is in the nature of finite beings not to multi-locate: if it is here than it cannot be there. The stone’s limited powers are part of its very finiteness; but its proper functioning by being in some place or other entails no malfunction for lack of being somewhere else.

The actuality/potentiality distinction permeates the entirety of the physical world. In some cases, the actualisation of potency is such that non-actualisation does not entail any malfunction. (Witness the stone.) In other cases, non-actualisation does entail malfunction. (Witness the organism or the artefact.) We might be tempted to think that the divide between non-actualisation that entails malfunction and non-actualisation that does not is exactly the divide between the naturally inorganic on the one hand, and the organic or artefactual (artefactually inorganic) on the other. This is not quite right, however, since both organisms and artefacts can have actualities such that if they did not have them they would not thereby malfunction. I have in mind the adornments and ‘optional extras’ that are true of both. I might have a small hair growing on a tiny patch of my arm where it need not be; I would not be any worse off for the lack of it. Again, a house might have various adornments such that not having them would entail no deficiency in the house (including its architectural style). The difference between these cases and the naturally inorganic is that it is incoherent to speak of malfunction in the case of the latter, except perhaps in extreme scenarios. What could it even mean to say that a stone malfunctioned in virtue of being here rather than there? I will explore this topic further in the next two chapters. By contrast, it might be false that I malfunction if I do not have that small hair, but biologically speaking we can understand just what such a malfunction might be (less control over surface body temperature, for example).

Yet even if I do not malfunction without that extra small hair, the actualisation of the potency to have it is still a case of proper functioning, of my functioning according to my mammalian nature. Hair is just what mammals are supposed to have, so even if a particular hair is gratuitous or redundant as far as my overall health or well-being goes, its possession is still what I will call obedience to nature – doing as my mammalian nature dictates, which is having hair. As such, to have the hair is to function properly, just as the soldier functions properly by obeying the sergeant who commands him to stand to attention, doing so quicker than all the other soldiers and standing a few centimetres away from innumerable other places he could have stood within a rough but acceptable boundary. Similarly, albeit in the way in which artefacts function, the highly adorned house with one extra china vase on the mantlepiece does not malfunction without that vase, yet having the vase is still a proper function of the house – to contain pleasing adornments, in accordance with what we expect as part of the nature of certain buildings.

With that all said, my general point is that the concept of actualisation of potency as proper function applies across the board – in the realms of the naturally inorganic, the organic, and the artefactual. Whether or not a given kind of non-actualisation is in any way a case of malfunctioning, actualisation is always a case of proper functioning – of things acting according to their essences or natures. Let us explore this idea further.

1.2 Appetite as potentiality: the tendencies of things

Things have essences or natures: that is a foundational assumption I do not propose to defend here.³ For an object to have an essence is for it to have a suite of properties, both actualities and potentialities, definitive of the kind of object in question. To put it more precisely, to have an essence is to have a real – as opposed to merely nominal – definition consisting of both a proximate genus, under which the object in question falls, as well as a specific difference that marks it out from everything else that falls under a different species but the same genus. Water is a chemical substance with the chemical formula H₂O. Gold is a metal with atomic number 79. English oak is a tree belonging to the genus Quercus with specific difference robur – where both of these botanical names are shorthand for the various essential features of genus and differentia (specific difference) respectively. A tadpole is the larval stage (differentia) of an amphibian (genus). The red fox belongs to the genus Vulpes and differentia vulpes; again, the parts of the binomial classification by genus and species are shorthand for whatever it is that unifies the given genus and the differentia within the genus.⁴ Human beings are rational animals, where animal is the genus and rational the difference. The essence of an existing object is itself an actuality. In the full Aristotelian formulation, the essence of a material substance is given by that substance’s being a compound of form and matter. Matter, with all its potentiality for taking on different forms, is determined in a specific case to a definite kind of thing by the particular form that thing possesses, be it the form of a species of animal, of plant, or of inorganic substance whether as small as a proton or as large as a planet. For our purposes, form can be thought of simply as the way in which matter is configured to yield a given species of thing.

With that in place, I contend that the primal, foundational meaning of ‘good’, whether or not anyone uses the term this way, or understands the sense, or agrees with the contention even if they understand the sense, is that of actualisation of potency. To be precise: while ‘good’ refers to any actualisation of a potency, it is not qua mere actualisation that ‘good’ is to be understood. Rather, ‘good’ has a particular sense or connotation: it connotes actualisation of potency considered as fulfilment of appetite. Now this might seem strange to readers unfamiliar with, or perhaps unfriendly to, this Aristotelian-Thomistic or broadly Scholastic⁵ way of thinking. Still, much can be done to place this Scholastic theory of good (and evil) before the disinterested reader as at least a viable way of thinking about the topic. It will be surprising to many that this theory was all but taken for granted for many hundreds of years, along with the Aristotelian metaphysic underlying it. From Ss Augustine and Boethius (C5-6th BC) through St Thomas Aquinas (C13th) and even beyond, the fundamental, necessary connection between goodness and being itself was recognised as central to understanding the world. Yet how could such a connection ever have been believed by so many philosophers for so long?

In the Confessions (c.398 AD), Augustine says: ‘So long as [things] are, therefore, they are good. Therefore, whatsoever is, is good.’⁶ In the De Hebdomadibus (c.518), Boethius says: ‘Things that exist are good. For the common view of the learned holds that everything which exists tends towards good.’⁷ Aquinas famously holds that ‘goodness and being are really the same’.⁸ We can multiply quotations, but the point is the same: being, understood as existence, and goodness refer to the same thing. But as Boethius goes on to say, ‘I observe…that it is one thing to exist and another to be good.’⁹ Aquinas takes this difference to be one of sense or connotation only, not a difference in the underlying realities of being and goodness.¹⁰ In other words, goodness is the same as being itself, but considered from a particular point of view – that of fulfilment of appetite.

The Scholastic phil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I A Theory of Good as Fulfilment
• PART II A Theory of Evil as Privation
• Bibliography
• Index