Franciscan Studies

The more I love someone, the more firmly or steadily I love her – the more ready I am to act for her good; accordingly, the more I love someone the more prepared I am to suffer evil for her sake.¹ My desire for her good makes me want to act for her good. I appeal to this love when deciding what I should do; and in acting I try to make the world around me conform to what I desire for her. But one might argue that I could be virtuous and order every good that I seek ultimately to my own good.

This essay examines John Duns Scotus's efforts in Ordinatio 3.27, where he treats the natural and infused virtues of charity, to escape such an inference, an inference that he associates, I argue, with Aristotle.² For Scotus we never [End Page 97] act morally when the end that structures what we do and think is ultimately our own good. Against Aristotle, Scotus believes that the distinctive motive of virtuous agency is not the kalon (τὸ καλόν) of the virtuous act – its moral beauty – as aimed at the actualization of the agent's good. Rather, the distinctive motive of virtuous agency is the kalon of the virtuous act as aimed at the actualization or preservation of another's good. The virtuous agent does not seek the good of others instrumentally. His principal motives are not ulterior motives. The virtuous father, for example, seeks his child's good principally and his own good secondarily. For Scotus the moral act is an essentially ordered act in which the agent's self-interest is subordinated to the good of the other.

I will argue that if careful attention is paid to Scotus's treatments of friendship and heroic self-sacrifice in Ordinatio 3.27, as well as the medieval debates in which they find a place, then the text warrants just this reading of Scotus's moral psychology. I will contrast Scotus's treatments of friendship and heroic self-sacrifice principally with Aristotle's, but also with those of Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and Godfrey of Fontaines. In Ordinatio 3.27 Scotus shifts the virtuous agent's center of gravity from the self to the concrete individuals existing outside of him. This shift rests on a precisely defined theory of desirability that is enshrined [End Page 98] in the distinction that Scotus draws between two grades of lovability (amabilitas) of an object – a distinction that has received little scholarly attention. For Scotus the principal basis of friendship is not found, as Aristotle would have it, in a metaphysics of identity and resemblance. Rather human experience teaches us both that the most basic ratio of friendship is the ratio of lovability, a friend's amabilitas, and that the ratio of lovability is the moral beauty or uprightness of a friend, his honestas.

A close reading of heroic self-sacrifice in Ordinatio 3.27 will bring further clarity to Scotus's moral psychology. Scotus's treatments of both friendship and heroic self-sacrifice are driven by the principle that God has made the human will so that it is free to tend toward every object in the manner dictated by reason.³ From this principle it follows that apart from grace we must be able to love more than the self whatever is better than the self, which effectively means that we must have a natural capacity to love God and the common good over the self.⁴ It also follows that if the distinctive motive of virtuous agency does not vary, as Scotus believes, then moral motives must properly be other-regarding motives. In Ordinatio 3.27 Scotus considers the example of the soldier who does not believe that the soul is immortal and who yet risks death for the common good because he loves it more than he loves himself. Thomas Osborne has recently argued [End Page 99] that this soldier's choice and act exemplifies our ability to act freely on selfless motives against what we believe is most in the interest of our...