Dispositions of the Will

Jean Porter

Received: 1 June 2012 /Accepted: 10 September 2012 /Published online: 5 April 2013# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Abstract According to Aquinas (1888–1906), the virtue of justice is a habit, that isto say, a stable disposition of the will. Many commentators have found this claim tobe puzzling, since it is difficult to see what this might entail, beyond a simpletendency to choose and act in accordance with precepts of justice. However, thisobjection does not take account of the fact that for Aquinas, the will is the principle ofhuman freedom, and as such, it is expressed through, but not limited to a capacity forparticular choices and actions. It therefore needs stable dispositions, towards charac-teristic aims, in order to function effectively. This paper sets out a case for thecogency of Aquinas’s overall account of the will and its dispositions, by way of anexamination of familiar expressions of human freedom which cannot be reduced to aseries of individual choices and acts. It then turns to a closer examination of Aquinas’analysis of the will, arguing that Aquinas’ claims about the orientation of the willtowards some overarching and comprehensive good can fruitfully be understood interms of this expansive conception of human freedom.

Keywords Justice . Virtue . Habit . Disposition . Choice . Freedom

According to Aquinas, justice is a moral virtue, implying for him that it is adisposition of a natural appetite—in this case, the distinctively human rationalappetite, the will (Summa theologiae I–II 59.4,5). Even in Aquinas’s own time, andindeed, for some time previously, this virtue was regarded as more or less anomalous,seen in comparison to the other traditional moral virtues (Annas 1993, pp. 291–325;Kent 1995, pp. 199–245). Initially, Aquinas’s claim that justice is a virtue of the willseems to sharpen these difficulties, rather than resolving them. Aquinas analyzes thewill, voluntas, as the capacity through which we are capable of voluntary actions

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J. Porter (*)Department of Theology, University of Notre Dame, 431 Malloy Hall, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USAe-mail: Jean.Porter.3@nd.edu

(ST I–II 8.2). As such, it is characteristically expressed through our choices andparticular acts, although these are not the only or the most fundamental activities ofthe will (ST I 83.4; I–II 8.2). Moreover, as the distinctively rational appetite, the willpresupposes some judgment of the intellect to the effect that this or that aim oractivity is in some way good (ST I 82.3; I–II 9.1). The processes of deliberationleading to a final judgment are complex, as Aquinas makes clear, but it would seemthat the will itself is quite simple—being presented with some judgment regard-ing the good, it chooses accordingly. How can we characterize this kind of choicein terms of a mode of activity? One simply chooses, and that would seem to beall there is to say—unless, indeed, we want to argue that choice is illusory,because the will is compelled by whatever the intellect discloses as its supreme good(Kent 1995, pp. 252–4).

Yet matters are more complex than that. As Aquinas’s analysis of the will makesclear, the scope of human freedom is not limited to discrete actions. We also commitourselves to projects, ideals, or ways of living that can only be pursued over time.These long-term commitments cannot be identified with any one free act or even aseriatim sequence of such acts, and yet it makes perfect sense to regard long-termcommitments of this kind as expressions of human freedom. Indeed, to a greater orlesser degree, almost all human acts presuppose some such context. The choice of adiscrete action typically presupposes an ongoing context of experiences and judg-ments regarding the value and strength of diverse considerations, and ideally, it willalso depend on some assessment of the overall purposes or ideals in terms of whichthese considerations can be brought to bear here and now (Millgram 1997, pp. 43–66,68–71). This context is shaped by the specific contours of one’s social location, and tothe extent that the individual has taken ownership of his own desires and judgments,it also extends over time, out of a memory of past judgments and evaluations,combined with the anticipated pursuit of projects and ideals which the agent seeshimself as enacting over time (MacIntyre 1984, pp. 204–25). Human freedom cannotadequately be analyzed in terms of acts taken in isolation from an ongoing sequenceof activities—and by the same token, the will cannot be reduced to the power tochoose particular acts.

Aquinas is aware of these complexities, and that is why he analyzes the will as theprinciple of voluntary actions. As we would expect, voluntary actions are free, butthat does not imply that they are uncaused. Rather, a voluntary act is caused by theagent him or herself, in the sense of stemming from the agent’s own proper principlesof activity, rather than external or accidental causes (ST I 82.1, 83.1; I–II 6.4, 9.3).Correlatively, he identifies the causal principle of voluntary actions with the will, thecharacteristic inclination of a rational creature which elicits and directs its activities ina more or less coherent way, in accordance with some reasoned conception of thegood (ST I–II 1,2; I–II 8.1). As this formulation implies, his theory of the will is alsoinformed, and to some extent motivated, by his overarching metaphysical commit-ments (Pasnau 2002, pp. 200–9). But we should not lose sight of the fact that hisanalysis of the will is most fundamentally one key component of an overall theory ofaction. The complexities of agency and freedom motivate his theory of the will, andby the same token, they open up a space for a robust analysis of the virtues of the will,among which justice holds pre-eminent place with respect to the other cardinal virtues(ST I–II 66.4).

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In what follows, I will try to make a case for the cogency of Aquinas’s overallaccount of the will and its characteristic virtues. More specifically, I want to show thatit makes sense to understand the will as a kind of capacity which can, and indeedmust, be shaped through dispositions inclining it to operate in characteristic ways. Inorder to do so, I will first of all look more closely at expressions of freedom whichcannot be reduced to one or a series of particular choices, in order to draw out what itcould mean to identify the will as a capacity for freedom that extends beyond thepower of choice in individual acts. I will then return to the specifics of Aquinas’saccount, keeping this expansive interpretation of freedom in view. It will be apparentthat for Aquinas, the will is by no means a simple, undifferentiated causal power. Likeevery other natural appetite, it is a structured inclination towards a characteristic, andyet relatively undifferentiated kind of good; as a rational appetite, it cannot operateproperly, apart from some reasoned specifications which give direction to the initialmovements of desire and deliberation (ST I–II 50.5). Thus, like every other appetiteof a rational creature, it stands in need of habitus, that is to say, stable, structuringdispositions, in order to function properly as a principle of action (ST I–II 49.3, 4).Aquinas does not say much about how these might take shape, but I argue that hisoverall conception of freedom as grounded in, and yet going beyond the power ofchoice points the way towards understanding how the will might be shaped in theneeded ways through its acts.

I began by noting that even though human choices and acts provide the startingpoints for thinking about the will, Aquinas claims that they do not constitute the only,or even the most characteristic operations of the will. On his view, particular choicesand actions stem from free judgment, which should be distinguished analytically fromthe will, even though it is not actually a distinct faculty (ST I 83.4). In its most properand characteristic operation, the will is directed towards one supreme, comprehensivegood, which the agent grasps and pursues as her end, directing all her specific acts insome way towards this final end (ST I 82.2; I–II 1.6). At this point, I want to bracketthe specific claim that the will is necessarily oriented towards one final and compre-hensive good. Aquinas’s analysis of freedom and its relation to particular choicesimplies a more general claim, which I want to focus on now—the claim, namely, thathuman freedom cannot be reduced to a capacity for specific choices, because ourchoices themselves presuppose overarching commitments or goals which we activelypursue, yet cannot be reduced to particular acts.

There is nothing particularly abstruse about the idea of an overarching aim, whichgives shape and direction to a pattern of activity—on the contrary, almost everyonelives in accordance with aims of this kind, even though we may seldom think aboutthem in these terms. They are basic to our experience and central to much of what wevalue in our lives. I want to try to make this point by reflecting on a particularexample, taken from fiction but similar, I would expect, to experiences that many ofus will share. In his recent novel, A Happy Marriage, Rafael Yglesias (2009) in-troduces us to Enrique and his wife Margaret, alternating between the first days oftheir relationship when both were in their twenties, and the present, some 30 yearslater, comprising the last week of Margaret’s life. She is dying of stomach cancer, andchooses to forego treatment in order to be able to spend a last peaceful week withfriends and family, and ultimately with Enrique himself. The novel is told fromEnrique’s point of view throughout.

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We are left in no doubt that Enrique loves his wife: he falls in love with her almostat first sight, and he clearly loves her as a mature, dying woman. Yet Enrique has byno means been a consistent or faithful lover: we see him at an early stage of hismarriage, just after the birth of his first child, when he tells himself (perhaps truly)that he loves Sally, not Margaret. Yet he finally decides to remain with Margaret, whonever discovers the affair, and over the years following, their love returns, settles intocomplacency, and is then brought to a new level of explicitness, intensity anddevotion by the harsh realities of Margaret’s illness and ultimate death. Once Mar-garet chooses to forego treatment, Enrique takes on the excruciating tasks of arrang-ing and managing her final visits with numerous family members and friends, all thewhile hoping desperately that they will have the opportunity for one final conversa-tion as husband and wife, in which they can say all that has so far been unsaidbetween them. In fact, an unanticipated complication deprives them of that opportu-nity, and Enrique’s love for his wife then takes the form of keeping a vigil beside thedying woman, until, at the point of her death, they share one last moment ofconscious, mutual love.

Enrique’s love for his wife is so clearly portrayed that it might seem pointless toask what it means to say that he loves her. Yet precisely because Yglesias succeeds sowell in portraying the complexities and ambiguities of a long-standing maritalrelationship, his account itself suggests the question. Clearly, Enrique’s love for hiswife cannot be equated with the desire and longing he felt for her as a young man.These passions fade, to be replaced with the complex web of desire, affection, angerand indifference that constitutes most married relationships. At the lowest point oftheir marriage, Enrique’s feelings for Margaret are mostly hostile and negative—he isaware above all of anger, disappointment, and disgust for his exacting wife, who hasrecently borne their first child. At the end of her life, his desire and longing return, butnow they are different—sexual passion and the yearnings of a needy young man havegiven way to an overwhelming desire for her ongoing presence and a longing for onelast opportunity to express their shared love together. Yet throughout, even during hisaffair, Enrique loves his wife, as his judgments and choices make clear.

So should we say that Enrique’s love is a choice that he makes, or perhaps thesequence of actions that he chooses as expressions of that love? Yet this does notseem to be quite right either. Yglesias leaves us in little doubt that Enrique’s love forMargaret is not in itself a choice. Not only does he fall in love at first sight, but evenmore tellingly, when he ends his affair with Sally he does so reluctantly, with no feltsense of love for his wife, but with a strong sense that he cannot let go of the sharedlife they have begun to build. He does make choices, many choices, to act inaccordance with his love for Margaret, and yet we can scarcely say that his love forher consists in these seriatim choices. For one thing, at many points he might haveexpressed his love through different choices, without calling the love itself intoquestion. What is more, his choices and acts would hardly count as loving at all,had they consistently been carried out without any particular feelings, out of a senseof duty or impartial benevolence. We cannot separate his choices from his feelings,and for that very reason, neither is simply equivalent to the love Enrique bears for hiswife. Most importantly, the particular choices that Enrique makes would very oftenmake little sense, apart from their place in an ongoing array of felt responses,judgments, actions and reactions, all the elements of a shared life.

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Might we say that Enrique’s love is a commitment? Initially, this seems a morepromising suggestion. At some point—Yglesias does not show us precisely when, orhow—Enrique commits himself to undertaking a shared life with this woman, whomhe desires and cherishes. He reaffirms that commitment at key points, after the crisisof his affair and in the final crisis of her impending death. This commitment isinitially motivated by deep feelings and it elicits others, and it is expressed andsustained through a series of choices and acts. Yet this complex, interrelated pattern ofactions and reactions in itself does not exhaust Enrique’s love. Rather, these particularresponses and choices stem from and express his overall commitment in diverseways, and they can only be fully understood in terms of their place in the temporalexperience of an ongoing relationship.

Yet it is not clear that we add much to our understanding of Enrique’s love bydescribing it as a commitment. After all, what do we mean by being committed tosomeone, beyond the disposition to respond, choose, and act in such a way as topromote her well-being and preserve the relationship between them? One furtherelement does come to mind—that is, we tend to think of a commitment as somethingthat is freely chosen. Yet we cannot choose our commitments in just the same way aswe choose our actions. The temporal element, once again, complicates matters. In theprocess of acting, someone chooses to exercise her causal powers in a specific anddelimited way, with a more or less definite sense of what she does in the process. Incontrast, someone who takes on a commitment of this kind—in contrast to a simplepromise or resolution—takes up a stance towards someone or something, which by itsnature is open-ended. We almost never know all that a serious commitment will askof us, and what is more, we will seldom be able to say that this or that specific act isnecessitated by this commitment.

Nonetheless, the connection between commitment and freedom does call attentionto a key point. That is, a commitment is free, even if not, strictly spoken, chosen.Enrique is not coerced to love his wife, nor does he assume the role of a married manmechanically, without at any point (in this case, indeed, almost continuously)reflecting on what he is doing, or why. The latter point is critical—we think of acommitment as free because we undertake our commitments knowingly, with anelement of self-reflection. It is true that we sometimes find ourselves committed tosome person, pursuit, or ideal, without fully realizing when or how we made thiscommitment. Enrique’s love for Margaret seems to have overtaken him in this way.And yet, through an ongoing process of memory, reflection, and projection into thefuture, he comes to think of himself as someone who has undertaken love for hiswife, understood as an overarching, active stance towards her and towards theirlife together. The knowing and self-reflective character of a commitment distin-guishes it from a sequence of reactions and actions, because it renders itaccessible to what Jesse Couenhoven (2009) describes as deep ownership—whichis not to say that it can necessarily be taken up or set aside through simplechoice. Our deepest experiences of freedom can often bring us at the same timeto a profound awareness of necessity, of all the ways in which we are not theauthors of our own lives.

Given these qualifications, we can describe Enrique’s love for his wife as acommitment, that is to say, a freely embraced stance towards her and towards theirrelationship, which is experienced and expressed over time and sustained by memory,

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hope, and acceptance. This commitment cannot be separated, practically or logically,from Enrique’s specific choices. To anticipate a later point, it emerges out ofEnrique’s reflection on his actual choices, taken together with his desires and feelingsabout Margaret and their life together, and it can only be expressed in and through thefurther choices and acts which stem from it. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake tothink of Enrique’s commitment as being itself the object of a choice, on a par with thespecific actions stemming from the commitment. Enrique does not commit himself toMargaret by way of consciously making a resolution to respond and act lovinglytowards her. Rather, his commitment to Margaret just is his stable, deeply rooteddisposition to respond and act in loving ways towards her, a disposition which isrooted in an intelligent, self-reflective sense of what it means, and why it is worth-while, to direct his activities in this way. As such, it shapes his feelings, sensibilities,and choices without being limited to any or all of these. In Aquinas’ terms, it is ahabitus, a contingent yet deeply rooted and stable disposition.

At this point, the scholastics would ask what it is that this habitus disposes. Wemay well be tempted to regard this question as a relic of faculty psychology.Enrique’s love is a disposition of Enrique himself, the whole person, which unifiesand integrates his feelings, judgments, and actions over time, in such a way as tosustain a loving life. Yet even on our own terms, there is something not quitesatisfactory about this answer. After all, we all exhibit long-standing dispositions toact and react in certain ways, but not all of these are equally important, nor do we givethem the same significance. We tend to give particular weight to those dispositionswhich are grounded in our freedom as self-reflective agents, either through initialchoices to act in some ways rather than others, or, perhaps more often, by identifyingourselves with our deep desires and tendencies as these manifest themselves overtime. This way of thinking lends credence to Aquinas’s claim that our freedom canbest be analyzed as a distinctive capacity of the rational creature, the will, and hisfurther claim that our long-standing commitments reflect dispositions of the will. Wewill come back to these claims in the next section. At this point, we can at leastconclude that our capacities for freedom cannot be analyzed reductively in terms ofour capacities for deliberation and choice. In order to be adequate to our experiencesas free and responsible agents, we need in addition to take account of a morebasic kind of freedom: the freedom to dispose of oneself through projects andcommitments, which bring order and consistency to a whole range of diversereactions and actions.

I have spent some time with this example of committed love, because the freedomengaged in this case exemplifies the distinctive kind of freedom Aquinas associateswith the will, understood as the first principle of voluntariness in human acts. Wenoted earlier that Aquinas distinguishes free will properly so called from freejudgment, although he adds that this is only a rational distinction: free judgmentrefers to the will as directed to specific choices, whereas the will as such is directedtowards some overarching aim, to which these choices are in some way related. Theexample of Enrique’s love for Margaret helps us to see more clearly what he means,and why he is motivated to make this claim. As we observed, Enrique loves Margaretfreely—and yet, he does not choose to love her, in the same way as he chooses, forexample, to help her arrange final meetings with loved ones in the last days ofher life. Enrique’s love for Margaret provides him with a basis for the specific

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choices that he makes, and for that reason, it cannot itself be an object ofchoice in just the same way as these.

To generalize the point, Aquinas draws a distinction between free judgment andfree will in order to track a distinction between two interrelated aspects of humanactivity. The thought is that in addition to specific choices, our freedom is expressedin another way through overarching commitments, through which we devote our-selves to persons, ideals, or projects comprehensive enough to structure a wide rangeof sensibilities and actions. These commitments are not choices, even though theytake shape through processes of discernment and choice—rather, they are disposi-tions to choose in certain characteristic ways. It is telling that we speak so naturally inthese contexts in terms of devoting oneself—the freedom in question takes the formof a kind of self-determination, through which we take possession of ourselves byorienting our lives towards some larger aim. This self-determination, in turn, emergesout of, and is expressed and safeguarded through, the specific choices that we make inview of whatever it is that informs our deepest commitments. As Aquinas puts it, thewill moves itself to act at the level of specific choices by willing the end informingthose choices—since willing a general end necessarily implies willing some means tothat end (ST I–II 9.3). Freedom at this level is thus foundational for, and thereforedistinct from, the freedom of judgment expressed in specific choices.

This brings us to a critical point. We began by observing that it is difficult to seewhat it might mean to speak of a virtue of the will, understood as a disposition whichcannot simply be reduced to a tendency to choose and act in given ways. It nowbegins to appear that we cannot make sense of our choices and actions, except inrelation to the dispositions to pursue overarching aims of some kind. These disposi-tions are not chosen, and yet neither are they imposed from without. Rather, they takeshape in and through the natural, spontaneous operations of the will, workingtogether with practical reason in self-reflective processes of choice. At the same time,considered precisely as freely embraced commitments, these dispositions can onlyemerge over time, through processes of formation and reasoned reflection on one’sown desires and choices. Otherwise, these commitments, and the acts stemming fromthem, would not be free in Aquinas’s sense—that is to say, they would not stem fromthe agent herself, considered as the proper cause of her own actions.

This line of analysis presupposes that we can say something about the processesinvolved, and this is one point at which the analysis of virtues of the will hastraditionally faltered. On Aquinas’s view, the will is a rational appetite, implying thatit is reason-dependent in some fundamental way, and not just reason-responsive (asare the sensual appetites (ST I–II 56.4)). More specifically, the inclinations of the willare dependent on some kind of reasoned judgment to the effect that this or thatdesideratum is good, not just generally or in the abstract, but desirable and attainablein some way for the agent himself. This implies, and Aquinas repeatedly says, that thewill depends on the intellect to present it with its object (for example, at ST I 82.3:I–II 9.1). We cannot devote ourselves to some overarching aim, unless we knowsomething about it. By implication, some kind of intellectual apprehension wouldseem to be both necessary and sufficient, in order to orient the will towards itsoverarching aims. And this brings us back by another route to the suspicion aboutdispositions of the will mentioned at the beginning of this paper—namely, the worrythat dispositions of the will, so-called, are too simple to call for any kind of extended

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formation. Given an intellectual grasp of an attainable good, the will respondsstraightaway with rational desire—or so it would appear.

Yet as the example of Enrique’s love for Margaret clearly illustrates, this is not arealistic way to think of the relation between intellect and desire. Enrique’s love forMargaret presupposes that he knows certain things—he knows that Margaret exists, tobegin with, he has a general idea of what it would mean to relate to her in a loving way,and he knows that such a course of activity is possible and appropriate for someone likehimself. Without some such starting points, we could not even begin to make sense ofthe claim that he loves Margaret, or to interpret his choices as in some way reflectingsuch a love. And yet, there is no one point at which he can be said to arrive at a fullyformed, articulate conception of what it means to love Margaret. Rather, he comes torealize that he loves Margaret through a process that Elijah Millgram would describe aspractical induction—that is to say, he comes to see that he loves this woman throughreflection on his spontaneous desires and choices, which reveal that he deeply wants,and can hope to be happy in, a certain kind of relationship with her (Millgram 1997,pp.43–66). He sees more fully what it means to love Margaret after the decisive crisis ofhis affair, and even after that point, he still has to learn, repeatedly and painfully, what hislove really means. These reflective processes are genuinely intellectual activities—theyare grounded in Enrique’s knowledge of what he is doing, as he chooses and acts inrelation to Margaret, and they take shape through his ongoing reflections on theirsignificance for his own self-understanding and his future course. Aquinas would addthat at every stage, Enrique’s will is also engaged, spontaneously desiring, pursuing, anddelighting in Margaret, wanting to benefit and please her, and shrinking from causingher harm or distress. At every stage, his capacities for insight, reasoning, and desire areengaged in tandem, leading eventually to a commitment to love Margaret, which isgiven stability through an extensive, integrated grasp of what this love means.

It is important not to be misled at this point by a slippage between the grammar ofchoice and the wider idea of freedom. According to Aquinas’s analysis, the will isfree because it is an interior principle of motion which operates through the agent’scognition (ST I 82.1). Yet this does not imply that the will is completely indetermi-nate in its operations—it is a natural appetite, and as such, it is structured by itsinclination towards a distinctive kind of object (ibid.; also see I–II 50.5) Morespecifically, the will is naturally inclined towards the agent’s good, generally andcomprehensively considered—which, as we come to see in his analysis of happiness,is equivalent to the agent’s full and completed development, her perfection, asattained and enjoyed through characteristically human activities (Porter 2005,pp.141–63). Human freedom is thus characteristically expressed through the agent’sinclination towards her own comprehensive happiness and perfection, and yet, shecannot be said to choose her ultimate end. On the contrary, the will is nothing otherthan an appetite which is naturally oriented towards this end, and will incline towardsit so long as it is operating at all. It is true that a rational agent’s orientation towardsher final end will be necessarily mediated through some intellectual grasp of what heroverall good is, but again, this does not imply any kind of transcendental choice, inwhich the will is presented with a rational vision of the good, and orients itselfaccordingly. Human freedom is expressed in and through the particular choices andacts which stem from the agent’s overall inclination towards a comprehensive good,and at this level freedom is connected to rational indeterminacy, because the overall

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good which motivates these choices could always be pursued in some other way(ST I–II 8. 2,3; I–II 10.1,2).

Of course, the general human capacity for freedom is integrally connected to ourparticular free choices and acts. These choices and acts presuppose and express a freeorientation towards one’s overall good, understood in some way or other. What ismore, these choices and acts play an integral role in the formation of the will throughongoing processes of practical induction, in which the human agent reflects on thedesires which motivate his choices and the wider aims that these represent, affirmingor rejecting these, and choosing accordingly on subsequent occasions. The agentperceives and desires certain aims, acts accordingly, and discovers further, morecomprehensive objects of desire and love in the process. These objects, in turn,inform the will’s choices but do not necessitate them. The will plays an active rolein these processes, aiming towards some possibilities for action and turning fromothers, in the process opening up some further lines of inquiry and shutting downothers. In this way, the will is habituated, in much the same way as the other facultiesof desire are habituated, through processes of activity and reflection, in which rationalself-reflection is both informed by, and guides and shapes, the desires, sensibilities,and activities of one’s natural inclinations. At some point, the individual is able totake command of herself, as it were, through an explicit and self-referential sense thatshe, herself, is committed to these wider purposes, which have informed her choicesin the past, and which she hopes to continue to pursue in the future. This is thepoint—not necessarily a well-defined moment in time—at which the individualcan be said to desire and to pursue a good presented to her by her intellect.

This way of construing human freedom raises an obvious question. If the agent’sfreedom depends on a rational, self-reflective grasp of the ends for which he acts,ends which govern and motivate his choices, then how can he be said to choose, andto act freely, before he arrives at this point? How does this process get started? This isnot such a difficult problem as we might initially think. Keep in mind that forAquinas, the will is a natural appetite, that it to say, it is a principle of activity whichprovides both motive force and direction to the operations of a creature. Morespecifically, the will as a rational appetite is the characteristic, distinctively humanappetite which directs all the other natural appetites of the human organismtowards the agent’s overall (real or perceived) good, comprehensively considered(ST I–II 10.1). The critical point here is that the will is necessarily orientedtowards those natural goods which constitute the goals of more specific capac-ities, including all the natural aims of animal life. It is important to add that noone instance of these natural desiderata necessarily compels choice, as if wesimply cannot help ourselves when confronted by a tasty cookie. Nonetheless, thewill is structured in such a way as to incline towards certain kinds of activities andobjects, and from the beginning it elicits choices and actions oriented towards thesekinds of aims.

There is nothing mysterious or abstruse here. From infancy, the human creaturespontaneously desires and pursues certain activities and satisfactions, which canreadily be seen to be natural to the human organism. These kinds of desires andactivities go on throughout life, so long as the individual remains even minimallycapable of sentient activity, and they need not presuppose any kind of reflective senseof one’s overall aims and purposes. At this point, we are at the level of the imperfectly

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voluntary, characterized by spontaneous activities stemming from one’s more or lessunformed apprehensions of the desirable and worthwhile—the realm of animals andinfants, children, and perhaps also of immature or unreflective adults (ST I–II 6.2).The natural inclination of the will towards such objects sets the processes of activityin motion, and it also provides starting points and context for the reflective processesthrough which the individual arrives finally at some comprehensive grasp of heroverarching aims.

At first, a small child simply wants what he wants, without much thought about theconsequences. But he quickly learns from experience, with (ideally) wise guidancefrom his caretakers, that the unreflective pursuit of the sweet and shiny is likely tohave unpleasant consequences, immediately or over time. At first, both his pleasuresand his sufferings are likely to be focused on his own immediate needs and satisfac-tions, which are then transformed over time into a reflective sense of what he findsgenuinely satisfying, comfortable, and sustainable over time. At the same time, as asocial animal naturally oriented towards others, he will quickly be drawn into the webof social relations natural to creatures of his kind. He will care about others, and abouthis own standing in relation to them. His own experiences, informed by naturalcapacities for empathy and shame and shaped by the ideals of his caretakers andcommunity, will lead him over time to a reflective sense of himself as one amongothers, someone who participates in an ongoing reciprocal dynamic of mutual claimsand dependencies. If he is at all well-disposed, he will begin to reflect on and to takeownership of the ideals and expectations of others, transforming these as he maturesinto his own distinctive set of ideals, expressing his sense of how he—as a humanbeing, or a man, or an occupant of this or that social role or status—ought to live.

At this point, it makes sense to say that his will is governed by an overarching,rationally informed conception of the good. This conception reflects the judgments ofhis intellect, and yet, there is no point at which the will somehow makes an act ofchoice directed towards the good, thus conceived. Rather, the agent freely affirmslarger aims and purposes which take shape through a series of choices, informed byongoing reflection about the contexts and consequences of what he does. Theseprocesses presuppose that the agent naturally desires some things and finds othersunpleasant or fearful, and it also presupposes that his activities are directed, sponta-neously and then reflectively, towards pursuing the one and avoiding the other. Inaddition, they also presuppose that the human agent is naturally oriented towards akind of practical integration, through which diverse aims and values, perhaps incom-mensurable in themselves, can be pursued in a more or less consistent way. This kindof integration is necessary (at least at some level) in order to sustain one’s practicalidentity as a free agent, capable of sustaining a coherent course of activities inaccordance with self-determined aims (Millgram 1997, pp. 51–66). More fundamen-tally, without some formal notion of what it means to function as a whole, to flourishas a whole, the individual would not have the basic structures necessary to begin tomake comparative judgments—to prefer anything to anything else, much less tobegin to combine preferences and aversions over time in some coherent way(Millgram 1997, pp. 68–85). Ongoing practical reflection and free action thuspresuppose both a tethering in natural desires, and a kind of formal structure givenby an orientation towards one’s overall well-being, over and above the objectsof the natural desires.

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This is the context in which to place Aquinas’s controversial claim, central to histheology as well as his theory of action, that each individual necessarily acts for onefinal end, in accordance with some reasoned grasp of her overall good, in such a wayas to direct all her actions in some way towards this end. Aquinas insists on this point,in the first instance, because he is committed on both theological and philosophicalgrounds to defending the unity of form—the claim that the human creature is anintegrated substance, whose dynamic existence comprises bodily and sensate, as wellas rational and intellectual components (Pasnau 2002, pp. 126–30). At the same time,however, he is also motivated by convictions that are not all that different from thosemotivating much recent work on practical reason and agency. If our contemporariesdo not typically speak in terms of a final end, or much less interpret this in terms of ametaphysics of agency, they do nonetheless give considerable attention to the ways inwhich practical reason itself cannot operate, apart from some overarching commit-ments, or some broad conception of what is good overall, all things considered.Without some such unifying criteria, the familiar operations of practical reasoning—applying general norms to specifics, resolving incommensurable values and commit-ments, judging when to set aside one obligation in view of another—cannot proceedin orderly, discursively defensible ways. Thus, without some overarching principlesof interpretation, application, and judgment, practical reason, so called, would notreally be a form of reasoning. These general principles are given by the agent’s corecommitments, by his sense of the duties incumbent on him as a rational agent, bysome reflective sense of what she cares about and why it matters, his inductive senseof what gives him the deepest happiness—these represent diverse (not incompatible)recent proposals for understanding the overarching conception that gives structureand point to practical reason, and renders the actions chosen intelligible as actsof one unified agent.

Admittedly, this unity of aim represents an ideal which we may approximate, butwhich we probably cannot attain completely. But then, most of us cannot claim thatwe are always rational and consistent in our actions, either. I believe that Aquinascould admit as much, by way of qualifying his claim that every agent necessarily actsfor some one end. At any rate, his analysis does not depend on showing that eachagent necessarily desires and pursues some one substantive object, clearly recognizedby the individual him or herself as the final aim governing all one’s actions. Hisanalysis does, however, depend on the claim that the formal structure of the will issuch that the agent spontaneously, and necessarily, reflects on his desires andsatisfactions in terms of some broad conception (not necessarily formulated as such)of the desirable or satisfying, overall—otherwise, he would have no logical basis formaking judgments among more and less satisfying activities, more or less preferableoutcomes, present versus future sufferings, and the like. This is what Aquinas meanswhen he says that every rational individual necessarily desires his or her ownhappiness—with the important qualification that this is formally equivalent tosustained activity of a kind that the individual considers to be suitable or worthwhile,not necessarily what is immediately gratifying or in accordance with one’s morelimited interests and desires.

Aquinas believes that rationality and freedom depend on acting for some oneoverarching end, which is understood by the agent in terms that are intrinsicallyconnected to his or her own activities—not that these need to be mapped out in

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advance. What we said above about Enrique’s love for Margaret, that it impliescommitments to act in certain ways, applies as well to the overall aim which bringscoherence to the processes of practical induction. We cannot embrace something asour final end unless we can envision, in broad terms at least, what it would mean topursue this aim through our activities. This implies further that whatever the agentregards as supremely good must in some way comprehend all the diverse aspects of ahuman life, in such a way as to direct and integrate activities in every sphere ofhuman existence.

This is the point at which Aquinas’s conception of justice as a virtue, that is to say,a perfecting disposition of the will, begins to come into view. Justice on his showingis a complex and comprehensive virtue, incorporating the diverse normative consid-erations which stem from our relations to other agents, individual, corporate, anddivine. These considerations are integrated through a comprehensive conception ofthe truly human good, as attainable by the agent herself, in and through right relationswith these diverse others—rendering to each what is due, in the way and to the extentpossible and appropriate in each case. Clearly, it would go well beyond the scope ofthis paper to develop an account of what this would mean, but I hope I have at leastindicated why such an account is both possible and potentially illuminating.

Acknowledgements This paper was delivered as a plenary address at the 2012 Central Meeting of theSociety of Christian Philosophers, Hendrix College, Conway, Arkansas, March 23, 2012; in addition, anearlier version was delivered at Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey, October 4, 2011. Iwould like to thank those present at both talks for many helpful comments and questions.

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D.C.: Catholic University of America Press.MacIntyre, A. (1984). After virtue (2nd ed.). Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.Millgram, E. (1997). Practical induction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Pasnau, T. (2002). Thomas Aquinas on human nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Porter, J. (2005). Nature as reason: A Thomistic theory of the natural law. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Press.Yglesias, R. (2009). A happy marriage. New York: Simon and Schuster.

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