Aristotle vs the New Natural Law

Traditional Thomists (like Steve Jensen) and “new natural law” theorists (like Chris Tollefsen) differ radically on the nature of intentional action. For new natural lawyers, I intend to do something only if the thing in question is entailed by some description of my action that figures as such in my practical reasoning. For Aristotelian Thomists, my intention includes all the essential or per se consequences of the basic action I choose to perform. For example, if one uses lethal force to stop an aggressor, new natural lawyers will deny that one intends to kill. One merely intends to “disable” the aggressor, since if, by some miracle, the aggressor were to survive but become unable to complete the aggression, one’s ultimate aim would not be frustrated. In contrast, Aristotelian Thomists argue that one cannot distance oneself from the natural consequences of a lethal action applied to a fellow human being.

I approach these questions as a metaphysician and philosopher of nature, working within a broadly Aristotelian framework. The conflict between new natural lawyers like Tollefsen and what Tollefsen calls “neo-Thomists” like Jensen comes down to the very different conceptions of the relationship between the mind and the world found in the Aristotelian and the “modern” or Cartesian traditions. New Natural Lawyers rely on a dualistic or even angelistic theory of the operation of the human will, a theory that alienates the human being both from the body and from one’s social situation.

The word ‘intention’ has its roots in scholastic Latin, where it means simply a “stretching toward” something. As used by Thomas Aquinas, intention extends far beyond the scope of human life. Non-rational creatures, even plants and inorganic, are correctly described as intending certain results (S. Th. I-II, Q12, a1; De Principii Naturae, ch. 3). Intention is a consequence of teleology, and every being characterized by active and passive causal powers acts “for an end” (teleologically). Rational agents are capable of knowing the ends for which they act, while non-rational agents are either entirely ignorant of those ends or act without an awareness of how and why their ends are good. In every case, the intention of a particular act corresponds to the naturally predictable consequences of exercising the relevant causal power. Intention in rational agents is just a special case of this widespread phenomenon.

Not surprisingly, Anscombe fully accepts this Aristotelian account. Anscombe’s “making a little speech” argument in Intention is aimed at exactly the sort of modern, atelic account assumed by the New Natural Law. According to Chris Tollefsen, an intention is a propositional content, a “proposal,” that is adopted by the human will. Whenever I act intentionally, I adopt a proposal of the form: Let it be the case that p, where ‘p’ represents some quasi-linguistic, conceptualized proposition. Just as God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light (in Genesis 1), so Tollefsen supposes that our adopting such proposals somehow results (under normal circumstances) in the truth of the propositional content of the proposal. This is certainly how God operates, and it may well be the way that angels exert their will, but it is highly improbable that human beings operate in such a way. Instead, we human beings act by actualizing certain embodied capacities or powers.

It is actually Tollefsen, not the Aristotelians, who take intention to be an “interior movement” (as Anscombe puts it), a purely mental act with something like the form: what I mean to be doing is X. For Aristotelians (including Thomas) choice always involves an immediate object, which typically lies outside the mind. The object is some embodied causal power. When Steve Jensen states that the agent “intends to engage his power to bring about death,” he is not attempting to define intention, nor is he proposing some internal movement prior to the engagement of the power. Rather, he is saying (as Anscombe would put it) that the agent’s engagement of his power is characterized by a certain intentionalness.

Each act of choice terminates in the actualization or manifestation of some such causal power. The immediate actualization of the power is the object of the choice. Objects of choice must be distinguished from ends (or “proposals”, to use Tollefsen’s terminology). Choices may have more than one end. Every choice has a corresponding object as its proximate end, but many choices also have remote ends.

According to Thomas Aquinas, the goodness of a human action depends on four factors: its intrinsic goodness as a human action, its object, its circumstances, and its “ends” (S. Th. I-II, Q18, a4). The species of an action or choice is determined by its object, and not by its circumstances or remote ends (S. Th. I-II, Q18, a2). For an action to be morally permissible, both its species and its remote ends (if any) must be permissible. The new natural law completely collapses this distinction between object and end.

Human action is possible only because we have certain basic or fundamental causal powers. A basic causal power is a power possessed by a substance in such a way that its possession of that power is not grounded in its possession of other, more basic powers. We can narrow the focus of causal powers in this context to agential abilities and skills.

The object of a choice is defined by the basic causal power whose actualization or manifestation it is. Causal powers manifest themselves in events (changes) or processes (unfolding successions of changes). So, objects are events or processes. These objects are hylomorphic compounds. They are neither merely physical nor merely psychological but are irreducibly psychophysical (see Charles 2021). These objects have both psychological and physical aspects. They are essentially agential in nature: performed by an agent for some reason. And they are also essentially physical in nature: realized in a succession of changes in the matter of the human body and its physical environment.

We can use the word ‘consequence’ to embrace both effects (“separate existences”) and facts that are constitutive of the event or process that is the object. Some consequences are essential to the object (and hence to the choice or action) and others are only accidental. (Thomas uses the phrases ‘per se’ and ‘per accidens’ here.) All the per se consequences of the object of choice are included in the agent’s intention, whether nor not the corresponding content played any role at all in the agent’s deliberation. In fact, per se consequences are within the agent’s “intention” (in the broad sense) even when the agent is ignorant of them.(Of course, acting in innocent ignorance of what one is doing can constitute a valid excuse.)