“Moralists from the late middle ages onwards, and particularly since the sixteenth century, have seen the characteristic human act as one flowing from the free will, viewed as a separate faculty from intelligence. For Aristotle and for Aquinas, the characteristic human act is one done for a reason, the product of practical intelligence. In such practice, desire and understanding interact at all stages: we desire what we consider good, and we consider when we want to. The pattern of moral thinking for the later thinkers consisted of two sharply divided stages: first the understanding assembled all the facts and worked out what would happen if we did and worked out what was in accordance with moral law and presented all these findings to the will. At this stage you know what is right and proper to do. Then comes the crucial question. After all the reasoning has been done, we still have to find out whether you will act on these findings or not. This is the sacred province of the free will: your will to go one way rather than the other.
“This is the theory of decision making that is satirized in the BBC comedy show Yes Minister. Humphrey, the civil servant, is supposed to be a pure intellect and fact-gathering machine with no policies of his own; when he has delivered his findings, Jim Hacker, the minister, will exercise his will and action will follow. The point of the programme, of course, is to show that it is actually Humphrey who makes the policy decisions, for there is no such thing as pure will. How you act depends on how the facts are presented and this itself comes from an interplay of desire and understanding. Once this is done, Jim Hacker’s alleged decision is a foregone conclusion. This is as true of individual personal decisions as it is of politics. There is no practical intelligence standing neutrally above the fray. How you think about a situation, even how you identify a situation, crucially depends on your policies or, as we say in the personal case, your virtues or vices.
“The consequence of the sixteenth-century ‘voluntarist’ view of the moral life was that the work of the intelligence was seen as something that could be detached from the actual moments of decision. You could think of a solution to moral problems in the abstract, in the quiet of your study, and you could write your conclusions in books — thus we got the handbooks of so-called moral theology giving you the solution to each problem. Of course it was recognized that in the concrete no two moral problems are exactly the same, so as time went on more and more complicated qualifications were added, and the science of casuistry was born. In the face of conflicting reasons for thinking an action lawful or not, principles of decision called systems of casuistry were devised — ‘It is OK to follow the most probable view’, or even ‘any probable view’, and so on. I will not deter you with these. The important point is that when with the aid of your handbooks and your casuistry you had seen the light, there then remained the decision for Jim Hacker, your free will.
“It is, as always, a relief to turn from all this muddle to the sanity of Aristotle and Aquinas. For them, acting in terms of reasons is of course free because thinking is free. The way you interpret the world through language and concepts is not determined by your bodily structure, your nervous system and brain, as is the way you and other animals interpret it through your senses. Thinking is creative interpretation. But how you interpret your world will depend on what kind of person you are, what virtues or vices you have developed. In what, in this tradition, is called the ‘practical syllogism’, an action follows from premises in a way parallel to the way a conclusion follows from premises in a theoretical syllogism. Practical reasoning is not just thinking about what means are the best way of achieving this end; it is much more crucially thinking what sort of action follows from the kind of person I am.
“As Aristotle said, in a remark which has puzzled modern moralists, you have to have a character in order to make a decision. To make a decision is to make an action your own, one that really flows from you, flows from the dispositions that have made you the person you are. Just plumping for one thing rather than another, as a child might, just being persuaded by the handsome canvasser on the doorstep or threats from the pulpit, is not to make a decision of your own. Of course when it comes to praise and blame, when it comes to deciding whether you are engaged in leading the good life, carrying on your life-story in a human way, not making a decision may be as blameworthy as making a bad decision.
“The basic point is that teaching morality (or anything I could recognize as morality) must be a matter of enabling people to make good decisions which will be their own decisions. And this is done by helping them to acquire dispositions both of heart and mind. I suppose this might sometimes be done by story-telling — not telling moral tales, but entering imaginatively into the life-stories of interesting people, and also by imaginative dramatic reconstruction of situations of decision and so on. That is just a suggestion I throw out. I am, however, sure that the task is not to be achieved by getting people to read handbooks of moral theology.
“But perhaps the most important conclusion of all follows from the recognition that morality is about doing and making and not first of all about explaining. The modern philosopher who has done more than anyone else in recent years to re-habilitate the Aristotelean idea of morality as based in virtue is surely Alasdair MacIntyre. For him all philosophical thinking is a kind of traditional craft that has to be handed from generation to generation, so that if the sequence is broken certain disastrous results follow. Whether or not this is in general true it seems to me quite obviously true of moral philosophy. Of its practical nature it must be traditional, that is to say deriving from and criticizing and modifying a tradition. If your aim is to teach the craft of making violins, you do not give your student some wood and some tools and tell him to get on with it. You show him how violins have been made — and this is part of showing him what a violin is. He will copy the work and techniques of skilled men of the past, and after several years or nearly a life-time of this he may be ready to add to and modify the tradition into which he has been introduced. And now I leave it to you to consider whether the craft of making human beings, or human becomings, is likely to be any quicker and easier to acquire than the making of violins. For me, I think to imagine you can read it all up in a book (Teach Yourself Human-Making as it might be named) must be crazy; though that is what they sometimes call being traditional. It is just as crazy to imagine that the beginner is somehow automatically competent to decide or even understand or even recognize what human decisions are, off his or her own bat. Learning morality is, it seems to me, learning to be free; and doing that in any depth has to take most of a life-time, most of a life-story.
— from Herbert McCabe, O.P., The McCabe Reader (Bloomsbury, 2016)
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