A keen point

A couple of times, St. Thomas makes use of the following analogy from Aristotle:

Understanding is to Willing
as
A Principle is to the End
as
A Conclusion is to the Means

In other words, the means are like the conclusion of an argument, given that you want to obtain the end:

1. I want a donut. ["a donut" = the end]
2. If I buy a donut, I will have a donut.
3. Therefore, I want to buy a donut. ["to buy a donut" = the means]

This is another way of showing how the means follows [logically] from the end, although we often think of the end as following [chronologically] the means. We may obtain the end after we obtain the means, but we will the means after we will the end.

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Telling 'em what I'm going to tell 'em

While I'm at it, let me do a little spadework on ST I-II, qq 8-16, a schematic of which I gave in a post the other day.

We humans can want things. We can want things we see, touch, hear, taste, or smell, and we can want things we think of. The power to want things we think of is called the will.^*

So "the will" is a power we have, and according to St. Thomas this power to want things acts in two ways: it can act immediately; and it can act by commanding other powers to do things (ST I-II, 6, 4).

St. Thomas distinguishes six different immediate acts of the will; three are in relation to the end, and three are in relation to the means:

1. Volition is the act of wanting some end. This is the "simple act of the will" we mean when we say "I want" or "I will that."^**
2. Intention is the act of wanting some end by means of something else. Where by volition I simply want something, by intention I want to do what it takes to obtain what I want.
3. Enjoyment is the act of... can I just say it's the act of enjoying some end?^***
4. Consent is the act of approving some means to an end. (The means is identified by the intellect by an act of counsel.)
5. Choice is the act of wanting a particular means to which consent has been given.
6. Use is the act of executing the chosen means by application of the appropriate powers under the will's control.

Skipping the activity diagrams for now: An act of volition ("I want a donut") precedes an act of intention ("I want to get a donut"). If the act of volition concludes successfully, an act of enjoyment may follow ("Yum!").

As for the means: Acts of consent approve of certain means identified by the intellect ("I can buy a donut," "I can make a donut"). An act of choice selects the particular means ("I can buy a donut"). Acts of use then carry out the means ("...now I'm reaching for my wallet...").

A final note: For each of these acts, St. Thomas asks whether irrational animals are capable of them, and concludes that they are not. These questions are relevant because St. Thomas considers all of these acts to be "acts pertaining to man," and therefore more closely associated with our final end than those acts that pertain to both humans and the other animals.

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* To get fancy, the power to want something is called an "appetite," the power to want something we can sense is the "sensitive appetite," and the power to want something we can think of is the "intellectual appetite." To get really fancy, we don't just sense things, we "apprehend them by sense," and we don't just think of things, we "apprehend them by intellect" or "by reason."

** A variant of volition, which St. Thomas mentions just once, is "nolition," the act of not wanting some evil end. I think I see why he mentions it, and also why he doesn't mention it again.

*** If you like, you could translate St. Thomas's "fruitione" as "fruition" instead of "enjoyment." At least that way, you can say "fruition is the act of enjoying some end," and feel like you've said something nontrivial.

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A shorter schema

I should have done this a while ago, but... well, you get what you pay for.

Anyway, what I'm trying to do is work my way through the section of St. Thomas's Summa Theologiae that deals with acts that are proper to man. (If I finish that, we'll see whether I go on to the second part of the full Treatise on Human Acts, which deals with the passions that are proper to both man and other animals.)

This two-part discussion of human acts comes immediately after the discussion of human happiness (ST I-II, 1-5). St. Thomas explains why:

Since therefore Happiness must be gained by means of certain acts, we are obliged consequently to consider human acts, in order to know by what acts we may obtain Happiness, and by what acts we are prevented from obtaining it.

There, in forty words, is the explanation for studying morality. Not to pass an examination, not to beguile the hours with a pleasant pastime, but to obtain Happiness.

He goes on:

And since Happiness is man's proper good, those acts which are proper to man have a closer connection with Happiness than have those which are common to man and the other animals.

So he starts with Acts Proper to Man.

His discussion is structured thusly (click to enlarge):


So far, I've blogged on qq 6-7. As you recall, in q 6, a 4, St. Thomas teaches that

The act of the will is twofold: one is its immediate act, as it were, elicited by it, namely, "to wish"; the other is an act of the will commanded by it, and put into execution by means of some other power, such as "to walk" and "to speak," which are commanded by the will to be executed by means of the motive power.

The "immediate act" elicited by the will is discussed in qq 8-16:



The act of the will that commands other powers -- that is, that causes you to actually do something beyond merely wishing to do it -- is covered in q 17.

As you can see from the second diagram, St. Thomas teaches that we can wish an end three different ways: acts of volition; acts of enjoyment; and acts of intention. Right now, I'm one article into the three questions that treat the will's immediate act of volition.

(And, at the risk of spoiling things, I can say that the answer to the question in the first diagram, "What distinguishes human acts?" is whether an act is good or evil.)

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Being of good will

In ST I-II, 8, St. Thomas takes up the question of what the will wills.

The first article makes the narrow but important point that we can only will what we think is good for us. This is because goodness is existence under the aspect of desirability, and we can't want what has no existence even in thought. In particular, everything we want has to have the property of somehow suiting us (though this property may exist only in our mind).

I say it's a narrow point because it's practically a tautology: I can only desire something that I find desirable.

I say it's an important point because it can help us to understand how and why people (particularly ourselves) make evil choices. Our will operates on our apprehension of things, not on the things themselves.^* To the extent we misapprehend things -- by seeing something that isn't there, or not seeing something that is there -- we are likely to will things we shouldn't or not will things we should.

The first objection to the teaching that we only will the good is that all human powers operate on opposites. Just as sight can see white and black, so the will should be able to will good and evil. St. Thomas answers this by saying that the will regards evil as a thing to be shunned. He proposes that we should speak of "volition" as the will's act of desiring good, and of "nolition" as the will's act of shunning evil (in Latin, that's "voluntas" and "noluntas").

The second objection, that rational powers can be directed toward opposite purposes, is answered by observing that the opposite purposes to which the will can be directed are things like "staying here" and "going there," but they're all desired insofar as they are good.

The third objection I've already alluded to. For a thing to be good, it has to exist, but we can want things that don't exist, or we can want to not do or not have something. St. Thomas calls such negations, privations, and future things "beings of reason;" as I put it above, they "exist only in our mind."

(Talk of "beings of reason" may strike some as a "define 9 as prime"-type dodge to excuse saying things that don't exist have existence. Actually, though, every good we will is a "good of reason," whether associated with an act or a non-act, because every good we will is a good as it exists in our own mind.)

Curiously, St. Thomas doesn't enumerate the objection I often hear, which is that people can and do will evil things because they are evil. My answer to that objection is that to will something is to desire it, and to be desired is to be perceived as good. In other words, "to desire something evil as evil" is a contradiction in terms. In the case of a person of perverse will who says he wants to do things that are evil because they are evil, then, the perversion lies in perceiving evil things as good, not in willing evil as evil.

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* The will is the rational appetite; both it and the sensitive appetite^** operate on apprehension. Our bodies also have what St. Thomas calls a "natural appetite," which includes such inclinations as falling in air and floating in water. The natural appetite operates, not on how things are apprehended, but on how they actually are -- Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner being noted exceptions. (The former's natural appetite for falling is controlled by his rational apprehension of standing in mid-air; the latter, having never studied law, never does apprehend gravity.)

** The sensitive appetite comprises the concupiscible powers of love, hatred, concupiscence, delight, and sorrow; and the irascible powers of hope, despair, fear, daring, and anger. See ST I-II, qq 22-48.

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Reviewing the circumstances

To sum up the question on circumstances:

• Anything that relates to an act, but doesn't help determine what specific type of act is done, is a circumstance. A circumstance can change without changing the type of act.
  
• Circumstances are morally relevant when they affect how aligned the act is to the actor's final end of happiness with God.
  
• Who, what, when, where, why, how, with what: Answer these questions, and you know all the circumstances. Fr. Walter Farrell, OP, in his wonderful A Companion to the Summa, goes as far as to say:

  As a matter of fact, when we have run through these circumstances and discovered who did the thing, where it was done and why, when it was accomplished and how, and who helped, we have covered all there is to know about the event. We not only have a view of the neighbourhood, we have the whole family history and a fairly accurate prediction of the future.

• If an answer to who, what, when, where, why, how, or with what does help determine the specific type of the act -- meaning that if it changed then the type of act would change -- then it's not a circumstance. Rather, it's a condition.
  
• The most important circumstances are why an act is done and what the effect of the act is.

On the second to the last point, determining whether something is a condition or a circumstance seems to be a large part of moral theology.

On the last point, it seems to me that the why and the what meet in the object, so to speak. The object of my act is the immediate end I will; but insofar as that immediate end results in a change to the way things are before I act, it is also an effect. (This further suggests, I think, that both the why and the what at least partly touch on the formal cause.)

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The most important circumstances

In the fourth and final article on the circumstances of human acts, St. Thomas explains why St. Gregory of Nyssa was right to say that "why" and "what" are the two most important circumstances. (Okay, technically he's explaining why Aristotle was right to say the same thing. But St. Gregory provides the sed contra.)

An act is human insofar as it is voluntary, and it is voluntary insofar as the will is freely moved, and the will is freely moved insofar as there is some end it desires. So the circumstance that touches on the end of the act is the one that is most closely linked to what makes the act a human act, and that circumstance is the "why."

Subsequent tradition has certainly agreed with the two Doctors. Philosophically speaking, the intention of an act is a circumstance, but in moral theology intention is promoted to a distinct component of the human act, separate from the rest of the circumstances. (For that matter, the third component, the object, is also an end, albeit one that, as St. Thomas mentioned in Article 3 ad 3, is a condition and not a circumstance.)

Second only to the end in importance is what most directly touches the substance of the act, which per St. Thomas is the "what" of the act. Again, this may be better thought of as "what is effected," so as not to confuse it with e.g. the "what we do" that is the objective component of the act in the U.S. Catholic Catechism for Adults. The importance of the circumstance "what" in moral theology is reflected no least in the importance of the principle of double effect, according to which a single unintended bad effect can put the kibosh on an act regardless of other, less important (i.e., non-end-related and non-effect-related) circumstances.

As for those other, less important circumstances, for a given act they are ranked in importance based on how closely they approach the end or the substance of the act.

The objections to this ranking seem a bit pro-forma:

• When Aristotle say that "in which the act is" is the second-most important circumstance, doesn't he mean "time and place," which aren't very important at all? No, he means "what."
• The end is altogether outside the act. How can it be the most important circumstance? Because it's the most important cause of the act.
• Aren't "who" and "mode of acting" the cause and form of the act, in which case aren't they the most important circumstances? No, in which case no.

Okay, the final reply is a little more interesting than that: While the "who" is the primary efficient cause, the efficient cause is not as important as the final cause; moreover, "who" includes a lot of circumstances that aren't very important to the act at all (which is not true of "why").

Meanwhile, it seems that students commonly took "mode of acting" to mean something more than it does. As was explained back in Article 2, it only adds certain accidental qualities to an act, and as such is not of major importance.

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Conditioned acts

As I mentioned before, St. Thomas follows Aristotle in regarding the final, efficient, and material causes of an act -- the "why," the "who," the "by what aids," and the "about what" -- as circumstances of the act. Which is to say, he sees these causes as accidents, things that could be otherwise without changing the substance of the act.

Hold it right there, says Objection 3 of ST I-II, 7, 3. What do you mean, the causes of the act don't change the substance? The person who performs the act is, as you say, the principal efficient cause, and you're trying to tell me the person who performs the act doesn't affect the substance of the act? So me spending my money and you spending my money are substantially the same act? What kind of cockamamie theory of human acts is this? (I develop the objection somewhat beyond its written form.)

In reply, St. Thomas allows that there can be conditions of the various causes that do affect the substance of the act, and that these conditions are not circumstances. Whose money is being spent, for example, is a condition of the act, not a circumstance, since it can change the act from "use of one's own property" to "theft"; the circumstance in this case would be whether a lot or a little money is being spent.

That said, the various causes can and do give rise to circumstances of acts that don't change the substance. When the act is "use of one's own property," the "who" is constrained to the owner, but when the act is "theft," the "who" could be pretty much anyone else and it would still be theft.

The final cause always has at least one condition associated with it: the object of the act, which is to say the proximate end sought that determines what kind of act is being performed. Remoter ends, though, are always circumstances, because they can't modify the substance of the act itself. This is why knowing that a person has done something only tells you that he wanted to do it, not why he wanted to.

As lagniappe, St. Thomas adds that the effect of the act, which brings in the circumstance "what,"^* can also include conditions that change the substance of the act. The example he uses is of washing someone with water: it's a condition of the act of washing someone that you wash them by the act of pouring water over them. Other effects -- he catches a chill, he gets scalded, and so forth -- are circumstances.

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* I think "what is effected" might be clearer in meaning, if less precise a translation of "quid agitur" than the "what is done" the standard English translation of the Summa uses.

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Quis, quid, ubi, quibus auxiliis, cur, quomodo, quando

Things really heat up in ST I-II, 7, 3. Who isn't dying to know whether the circumstances are properly set forth in Ethic. iii?

In the article, "Whether the circumstances are properly set forth in the third book of Ethics?," St. Thomas characterizes the different ways something can be the accident of an act and enumerates these ways as (more or less) those circumstances identified by both Aristotle and by Cicero (in On Invention):

Circumstance	What it touches	How it touches
TIME	the act itself	by way of measure
PLACE	the act itself	by way of measure
MODE OF ACTING	the act itself	by qualifying the act
WHAT	the effect	n/a
WHY	the cause of the act	final cause
ABOUT WHAT	the cause of the act	material cause
WHO	the cause of the act	principal efficient cause
BY WHAT AIDS	the cause of the act	instrumental efficient cause

"Time" and "place" are pretty straightforward.

The "mode of acting" is, you might say, the adverb of the act. It modifies the act in a way worth mentioning, but not in a way that changes what the act itself is. The examples St. Thomas provides are of a man walking quickly or slowly and of a man striking hard or softly.

The "what" of the act is the act's immediate effect. If I am baking a pie, the what of my act is (God willing) a baked pie. It may seem a bit odd to say that "what is done" is only a circumstance, an accident, of the act, and not the act itself. In fact, we do often conflate the act with its effect. We might, for example, speak of the act of saving someone from drowning, when strictly speaking "saving someone from drowning" is really the effect of the act of jumping into the lake and drawing the person out.

"Why" is just what it sounds like.

The "about what" (which, St. Thomas says, Cicero includes in the "what") is simply the material or stuff that what is done is done to; the ingredients of my pie, for example.

"Who" is who, and "by what aids" are the circumstantial tools or instruments used by the "who" upon the "about what" to effect the "what".

All good to know. But what really glitters like a diamond in this article is the reply to objection 3, which objection says that "the causes of an act seem to belong to its substance," so why, about what, who, and by what aids shouldn't count as circumstances.

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Of the circumstances of human acts, pt. 1

St. Thomas discusses the circumstances of human acts in the four articles of ST I-II, 7.

In article 1, he defines circumstances as "conditions [that] are outside the substance of an act, and yet in some way touch the human act." (This means that the circumstances of an act are its accidents -- an accident being something that belongs to something but doesn't belong to the thing's substance -- but the term "accident" probably doesn't add much nowadays to that definition.)

In particular, circumstances touch the human act by being in the actor together with the act. So, as we'll find out, when an act occurs is always a circumstance of an act, even if when it occurs plays no part in either the actor's will or in the overall morality. (A thief who steals whatever he can whenever he can, for example, takes no account of the circumstances of when he steals, nor does when he steals something affect the morality of his theft.)

But I'm getting ahead of myself, since it's not until article 2 that St. Thomas proposes that circumstances are a matter of interest to the theologian. He gives three reasons:

1. Whether an act is proportionate to the final end of man's happiness is determined in part by its proportionality to the circumstances.
2. Circumstances make human acts better or worse from a moral perspective (his proof coming later on), and this is a theological subject.
3. Ignorance of circumstances can affect whether an act is voluntary or involuntary (or non-voluntary), as was mentioned in article 8 of the previous question. An act has to be voluntary for it to be meritorious, and whether an act is meritorious is a question for the theologian.

I find it a little odd that he phrases the article around the question of whether circumstances should be considered by theologians, rather than considered by the science of theology. They're equivalent, as far as I can tell, but it seems more personal to talk in terms of persons rather than fields of study, and the Summa Theologiae is for the most part not a very personal textbook. My ignorant guess, based only on the repeated references to oratory in this question (especially objection 3 of article 2), is that the students he wrote for, having already studied circumstances in their rhetoric classes, really would ask the question that way: "Why is a theologian, of all people, talking about circumstances?"

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Fear, concupiscence, and ignorance

Sounds like the motto of my college newspaper, but actually they're the topics of the last three articles of ST I-II, 6, on the voluntary and the involuntary in relation to human acts.

In article 6, St. Thomas (following Aristotle and St. Gregory of Nyssa) teaches that things done through fear are essentially voluntary. Fear regards a future evil as something to be avoided, but we can only act in the here and now, when that future evil does not yet exist. Sailors who throw their cargo overboard in a storm do so voluntarily; given their knowledge, they genuinely wish to lighten the ship. Still, throwing their cargo overboard is contrary to their will apart from the circumstances of the storm, so he allows that acting through fear is involuntary in that respect.

In article 7, he says that, not only does concupiscence not cause involuntariness, but it makes things voluntary. Concupiscence causes us to desire evil things, thinking them good. The desire is real, even if the goodness of what is desired is not.

Article 8 introduces a threefold relationship between ignorance and the act of the will. An actor may be ignorant of something regarding his act voluntarily -- either because he wishes not to know or because he has chosen not to learn what he can and should know. If an actor weren't ignorant, he might still do what he's doing in ignorance. St. Thomas proposes the following relationships between ignorance and willing:

• When an actor doesn't know he's doing what he's doing, but would still do it if he weren't ignorant, that's concomitant ignorance, and makes the act, not involuntary, but "non-voluntary," "since that which is unknown cannot be actually willed."
• When an actor is voluntarily ignorant of something that, if he knew it, would cause him to act differently, that's consequent ignorance. Since the ignorance is voluntary, it can't make the act involuntary. (Except in respect of what would happen otherwise. This "voluntary simply, but involuntary in a certain respect" is similar to St. Thomas's treatment of fear in article 6; I usually see it talked about in terms of "culpable ignorance.")
  For what it's worth, St. Thomas distinguishes two kinds of consequent ignorance. One happens when you wish not to know something that, if you knew, would prevent you from doing something you want to do. This he calls "affected ignorance." The other, "ignorance of evil choice," happens when you will something without considering something you ought to consider before willing it; this, he says, can occur through some passion or habit, or simply because you never took the trouble to learn something you should have learned.
• When an actor is not voluntarily ignorant, and would do something else if he weren't ignorant, it's antecedent ignorance and does cause involuntariness.

I think, though it doesn't say explicitly, that concommitance trumps consequence. That is, if an actor is unwittingly doing something he would wish to do if he knew he were doing it, then he can't be acting in voluntary ignorance, since he has no particular wish to be ignorant about it.

On the other hand, voluntary ignorance of things an actor can and should know broadens the scope of his ignorance, and so increases the chance he will unwittingly do something he would do even if he weren't ignorant. So a man who kills his enemy, thinking he is killing a deer, when he should have known he was killing his enemy, is guilty of imprudence but not murder.

UPDATED with a description of affected ignorance and ignorance of evil choice.

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Violence and the will

In articles 4 and 5 of ST I-II, 6, St. Thomas addresses how violence can affect the will and the voluntariness of acts.

Violence in this context means an outside force acting against an interior inclination. A violent shove, for example, might act against your interior inclination to walk down the street.

In article 4, St. Thomas says that violence cannot be done directly to the will. He describes the act of the will as twofold: the "immediate act" of the will that we might call "to wish"; and an act of the will commanded by the act of wishing, which in turn commands a person's other powers to fulfill that wish (by, for example, walking somewhere or saying something).

While violence can certainly prevent a person from walking somewhere or saying something, it can't prevent a person who wishes to do so from wishing to do so.

(Violence can cause a person to wish something he wouldn't have wished if not for the violence, but that's not the same as preventing him from wishing something he is wishing.)

The fact that violence can't be done directly to the will doesn't, however, mean that violence can't cause involuntariness, as St. Thomas shows in article 5. The acts of the will are all voluntary, so whatever acts against the will is called involuntary. (Similarly, whatever acts against the natural appetite is called unnatural.) If I am forced by violence to sit where I do not wish to sit, then my sitting is involuntary (and therefore not an act that is either good or evil).

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The voluntary and the involuntary, pt. 1

As St. Thomas puts it, "those acts are properly called human which are voluntary, because the will is the rational appetite, which is proper to man." In ST I-II, 6, he discusses what makes an act voluntary, and what might make what would otherwise be a voluntary act involuntary.

In Article 1, he distinguishes voluntary acts and natural acts (his example of a natural act is a stone falling). Both are acting upon a principle that is intrinsic or internal to the actor, but in a voluntary act there is knowledge of the end or purpose of the act.

In Article 2, he argues that irrational animals can act voluntarily, with "imperfect knowledge" exercised "through their senses and their natural estimative power."

In Article 3, he identifies two ways in which you can speak of something as "voluntary" even when there is no corresponding act: you can perform the internal act of willing not to act (e.g., "I think I won't help him up"); or you can fail to perform even the internal act of willing in a situation when you can and ought to act. Thus, though St. Thomas doesn't mention it here, we can speak of "sins of omission," even understanding that each sin is a chosen act.

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