The Pufendorfian Doctrine of Moral Beings and Its Consequences

To start with, here is Pufendorf’s definition of moral beings:

We seem able, accordingly, to define moral [entities] (entia moralia) most conveniently as certain modes (modi), added to [natural] things or motions (rebus aut motibus physicis), by intelligent beings, primarily to direct and temper the freedom of the voluntary acts of man, and thereby to secure a certain orderliness and decorum in civilized life.^[868]

Who are these �intelligent beings' who �super add' moral beings to natural beings?

You may justly call the Great and Good God their maker, who surely did not will that men should spend their lives like beasts without civiliza­tion and moral law, but that their life and actions should be tempered by a fixed mode of conduct, which was impossible without moral enti­ties.

The most fundamental moral beings are superadded to natural beings by God: this is natural law. Afterwards, men �superadd' to natural beings a second layer of moral beings, which are, to Pufendorf, more numerous but less funda­mental: this is positive law.

What is then the way of producing moral beings? �Now as the original way of producing [natural] entities (entia physica) is creation (creatio), so the way in which moral entities (entia moralia) are produced can scarcely be better expressed than by the word imposition (impositionis).'^{[870] [871] What does Pufendorf mean by �imposition'?}

[Moral entities] do not arise out of the [intrinsic properties of the natu­ral things] (non ex principiis intrinsecis substantiae rerum proveniunt), but they are superadded (superaddita), at the will of intelligent entities, to things already existent and [naturally] complete (rebus Jam existentibus & physice perfectis), and to their natural effects, and, indeed, come into existence only by the determination of their authors.

We can observe that, for Pufendorf, the term �imposition' is simply the substan­tive denoting, for intelligent agents, the fact of superadding by their own will a moral being to a natural being. Moreover, we wish to draw attention to one of Pufendorf's statements which does not have the scope it seems to have, as we will later on argue: �[Moral entities] do not arise out of the [intrinsic properties of the natural things].'

Having examined how moral beings appear, let us analyze how they dis­appear. The jurist Pufendorf logically applies what jurists call the principle of �congruent forms'. Since the origin of moral beings is due to imposition, this same imposition regulates their duration and their changes. If the imposition is revoked, moral beings disappear as suddenly as they had appeared. Moral beings that have been produced by divine imposition can only disappear according to God's will. Those that stem from human will disappear accord­ing to human will. Pufendorf makes it clear that the disappearance of moral beings does not in any way impact the substance of natural beings. A moral being could never have the virtue of a natural quality, he says. On this issue, a somewhat controversial passage is worth quoting:

Hence it is folly to believe, that, if any [public role] (persona) is imposed (imponatur) upon an individual, by this mere imposition (nudam impo­sitionem moralem) a permanent moral character has been given him (characterem aliquem indelebilem imprimi). Thus, if a commoner become a noble, he acquires merely new rights, but his substance and [natural] qualities (substantia & qualitates physicae) are changed not one whit. If a noble be expelled from his order, he loses merely his rights; all of his natural endowments remain unimpaired.^{[872] [873]}

Here Pufendorf first attacks a mythical conception of nobility, according to which noblemen would have a different natural constitution from common­ers (for instance, they would have blue blood).

Against these ontological conceptions of the nobility and clergy, Pufendorf advocates a purely functionalist conception: the nobility and the clergy are only social functions, nothing more. Thus Pufendorf's ontological innovations here take on a very significant ideological tinge, preparing the ground to Kant's criticism of the �groundless prerogative' (grundloses Prarogativ) represented by hereditary nobility.^{[874] [875] [876]}

If we summarize what we have discussed so far, God first creates all nat­ural beings, then divine will â€?imposes' on them a first layer of moral beings, before human will â€?imposes' a second layer of moral beings. The imposition of moral beings, just like their abolition, produces no natural alteration in natu­ral beings, at least no direct and immediate alteration?⁵ Eventually and above all, â€?[moral entities] do not arise out of the [intrinsic properties of the natural things]'.

These excerpts from the first chapter of Dejure naturae et gentium may give the impression that divine will and then human will arbitrarily impose moral beings on natural beings. This impression of arbitrary voluntarism can still be reinforced by the statement, in the following chapter, of the famous Pufendorfian theory of the moral indifference of natural acts: for instance, the natural movements constituent of adultery are devoid of any intrinsic moral qualification and only acquire some - a negative one, in this case - by the imposition of the law prohibiting adultery. It is this theory, above all, that brought down on Pufendorf the wrath of quite a few Lutheran theologi­ans from Northern Europe, for its suggestion that adultery was not naturally vicious.i⁶ Yet that is precisely what Pufendorf wishes to emphatically deny.

[S]ince good repute (honestas), or moral necessity, and turpitude (tur­pitudo), are affections (affectiones) of human actions arising from their conformity or non-conformity (convenientia aut disconvenientia) to some norm or law (norma seu lege), and law is the bidding of a superior (lex vero sit jussum superioris), it does not appear that good repute or turpi­tude can be conceived to exist before law, and without the imposition of a superior (ante legem & citra superioris impositionem). And, indeed, they who set up an eternal rule (aeternam regulam) for the morality of human actions, beyond the imposition of God (extra impositionem divinam), seem to me to do nothing other than tojoin to God some co-eternal extrinsic principle (principium aliquod coaeternum extrinsecum) which He Himself had to follow in the assignment of forms of things.^{[877] [878] [879]}

In these lines, implicitly aimed at Grotius, not only do we find an allusion to the Cartesian doctrine that God created eternal truths^⁸ but also a hint at Plato's demiurge - acting as a foil - since he has to follow the ideas by assigning things their forms, contrary to the real God.

Pufendorf continues:

All, furthermore, admit that God created all things, man included, of His free will (liberrima voluntate); it must follow, then, that it lay within His own pleasure (beneplacito) to assign whatever nature He wished to this creature whom He was about to create. How, then, can an action of man be accorded any quality (affectio), if it takes its rise from an extrin­sic and absolute necessity (ex necessitate intrinseca & absoluta), without the imposition and pleasure of God (extra Dei impositionem et beneplaci­tum)? On this argument, in very truth, all the movements and actions of man, if every law both divine and human be removed, are indifferent?⁹

The statement that natural acts are morally indifferent until the imposition of law is in line with Pufendorf's voluntaristic conception of God: in the act of creation, far from being subject to �some co-eternal extrinsic principle', as Grotius and the Stoics believe it to be, God gives each being the quality he judges appropriate, according to his free will.

The Pufendorfian doctrine on the moral indifference of natural acts prior to the imposition of law, added to the notes of the first chapter about the division between natural and moral beings, (in particular the assertion according to which �[moral entities] do not arise out of the [intrinsic properties of the nat­ural things]'), tends to suggest that the arbitrary voluntarism operating in the act of creation of physical beings is also to be found in the act of imposition of moral beings.

This is indeed what the above-mentioned authors seem to assume. It is what other authors also think, starting with Leibniz, in his Opinion on the Principles of Pufendorf (1706).

Neither the norm of conduct itself, nor the essence of the just, depends on his free decision, but rather on eternal truths, objects of the divine intellect and it is right that our author is reproached by theologians when he maintains the contrary;. So that no one will maintain that jus­tice and goodness originate in the divine will, without at the same time maintaining that truth originates in it as well: an unheard-of paradox by which Descartes showed how great can be the errors of great men; as if the reason that a triangle has three sides. is that God has willed it so. ^{[880] [881] [882] [883]}

Craig McFarlane echoes Leibniz's criticism: �God could have imposed a differ­ent set of laws on the world - indeed, he could have imposed the complete opposite set of laws on the world. For instance, rather than commanding soci­ality, God could have commanded sociopathy.'21

The core of Leibniz's polemic against Pufendorf is to argue that for a volun­tarist �the laws of nature could have been anything at all, including evil, which is absurd'.22

In the same line of thinking, Pauline Westerman is by far the most virulent against Pufendorf's voluntarism in her study of the decline of scholastic natu­ral law: �Pufendorf denies that nature can be considered as the basis of natural law.

Eventually, instead of exalting the absurd consequences that voluntarism might lead to, Ian Hunter concentrates on the effects that Pufendorf appar­ently intended with his doctrine of the entia moralia. In Rival Enlightenments, Hunter sees Pufendorf perform �a remarkable anti-metaphysical tour de force’, a powerful attack on �the whole program of deriving moral duties from a moral nature embedded in the person and acceded to through reflection on divine or transcendent reasons'. The physical reality is the world of sub­stances, the moral world that of imposition. Against the rationalist thesis of the participation in God's reason, here is the belief that the knowledge of the moral laws stems from looking into the historical being of man.^{[884] [885] Hunter has deepened this interpretation in his recent article on Pufendorf's entia moralia doctrine: �[T]he definitive features of Pufendorf's natural law have remained opaque to those approaching it via theological and philosophical methods, that is, via the introspective retrieval of norms embedded in human nature; since access to the contents of Pufendorf's natural law is conditional on the displacement of these methods by those of an erudite empiricism'?5}

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