Action, Will and Law in Late Scholasticism

Abstract

In what follows I wish to discuss a distinctive natural law-based conception of obligation—and the intimate relation which that conception of obligation bears to an equally distinctive theory of human action. I shall concentrate my attention on two early modern thinkers in particular, Francisco Suarez (1548–1617) and Gabriel Vasquez (1549–1604). How widely their conception was shared by other thinkers in their tradition is a question for another time. When it comes to obligation, Suarez and Vasquez might sensibly be contrasted. For Vasquez, obligations could arise prior to and independently of any act of will or intellectual judgement, of any being, God included. In particular, then, obligations need not be the creations of any law-maker or legislator, whether human or divine. Thus, in Vasquez’s view, existed the pre-political obligations of the natural law—moral obligations not to kill and the like. These did not arise through any form of legislative act. Whereas for Suarez, all obligations, all moral obligations included, did presuppose some legislative act. There was no exception to this. For someone to be under an obligation to perform an action, that person must always be subject to a superior; and the superior must have willed that the action be obligatory on the person obliged and have promulgated to that person his will to that effect. In the case of moral obligations of the natural law, the required legislative superior was God.