Reason and Habits

Abstract

How do the norms of sociability come to guide action in social life effectively? The answers often centre on the question of whether reason may somehow motivate our actions without directive desire or whether some sort of external desire, such as fear of punishment or self-love, is necessary to make our actions conform with moral norms. In recent scholarship on Pufendorf, two strands of interpretation can be discerned. First, Jerome B. Schneewind, for instance, argues that because of his strict separation between moral and physical entities, Pufendorf cannot explain moral actions as a consequence of desires and “therefore needs a separate faculty of free will to explain how moral entities can be effective in human life even though they possess no causal strength”. He continues that Pufendorf “offers no account of how recognition of a moral entity can have effects in the physical world”. Thus, Pufendorf fails to explain how moral norms become effective in social life because he is unable to explain how reason may motivate the will. Second, Ian Hunter’s “Epicurean” interpretation maintains that the question of how reason may move the will has no role in Pufendorf’s theory, because “man possesses just enough reason to know that his passionate and dangerous nature is incapable of attaining sociability through reason”. Instead, Pufendorf bases the social contract on men’s “chastened recognition of their own incapacity for rational self-governance”. According to this line of interpretation, the division between man’s reason and desires plays no role in Pufendorf’s natural law theory. People are turned into political and social animals merely through political coercion and the fear of punishment.