ended up in the grapefruit without anyone's intention. The chemical process causing death is separate from the intention that sets in motion that chemical process. Conversely, the intent to kill would not have 'caused' death without the lethal properties of the poison. Causation in Davidson's account is a legal as opposed to a scientific concept. In a trial for murder the prosecution would have to prove that (i) the poison placed in the grapefruit killed the deceased (excluding, for example, the possibility that the deceased suffered a heart attack before the poison took effect), (ii)the accused placed the poison in the grapefruit, and (iii) the accused placed the poison in the grapefruit with the intent to kill the deceased.39 Criminal law, beginning with the Romans, made the distinction between the first two and called it the *actus reus* while the third one was named *mens rea* in order to distinguish causation from agency.

Causation then is a matter of proving the operation of one or more mind independent properties, of experimentally provable evidence rather than of some sort of an epistemological theory. It is not the mental operation of the beholder, but the physical behaviour of the object(s) in question. It is the operation of natural kinds.

Placing ontology ahead of epistemology amounts to the insistence on the priority of the 'what' over the 'why' and the 'how'. The problem facing economics is that the facts with which it has to deal are unlike the facts of the natural sciences. They are incorporeal and unstable. Economics by-passed the admittedly very difficult question of the 'what' – the ontological question – in the hope and expectation that concentration on the why and the how – the epistemological, logical and linguistic issues – would render the 'what' question otiose. In doing so, it domesticated tools, that had been developed for the study of subjects where the subject matter of the inquiry was reasonably settled and the collection of facts could proceed. But in economics there are few if any facts to be faced directly, since the facts are not found, but made by the purposeful actions of individual and collective agents.40 Aristotle was right: it is the nature of the object that determines all else rather than our sensory perceptions or inferences determining its nature. "For Aristotle, the perceiver is the means for the fullest activation of the perceptible properties of objects in the world – which are activated as properties of objects rather than experiences of perceivers."41 Generalisations based on perception, logic or language will not supervene the radical ontological difference between objects and actions. A discipline such as economics, that is theory laden and given to creating its own reality is particularly vulnerable to the misapplication of "idealisation", "abstraction" and "isolation" of the object practiced in the natural sciences and, instead, it easily succumbs to the contrivance of the objects of its study at the expense of hard evidence, believing, as it does, that it is practicing science when mimicking idealisation,

39Hart, H.L. A. and A. M. Honoré (1959) *Causation in the Law,* Oxford at the Clarendon Press.

40The special problems of corporate action were explored in Róna, P. "Ethics, Economics and the Corporation" in Róna, P. and Zsolnai, L. (2017) *Economics as a Moral Science,* Springer.

41Marmodoro, A. (2014) *Aristotle on Perceiving Objects",* Oxford University Press, p.1.

abstraction and isolation. Mary Morgan,42 for example, does not even consider how these techniques of the natural sciences could apply to actions as opposed to objects, as indeed John Stuart Mill similarly assumed, that the actions of agents were objects of economics permitting the identification and elimination of 'disturbing causes'.

As the quote above from Leon Walras shows, economics, lacking empirically verifiable objects, contrives its own with the help of a variety of techniques.43 Its objects are not empirically verifiable things or events, but axioms, purportedly embodying some sort of a generalisation. As Keynes indicates in the quote above, its subject is "the models… relevant to the world" it creates. Models, not Aristotelian substances, relevant to, but not of the world. The immense complexity, the ceaseless change and turbulence, the fundamentally provisional and contingent nature of the material forces the economist to abstract, isolate or idealise not some fact or facts with a verifiably independent existence bearing verifiably independent properties and powers, but rather, to inductively contrive facts with the help of concepts of the economist's devising, such as supply and demand, equilibrium, GDP, etc. that outside the contrivance do not exist. These concepts, embedded in the relevant axiom, operate as surrogates for the objects of the natural sciences in the hope and expectation that they can be shown to manifest constant properties and powers. They are rather like Platonic Forms standing in the place of the Heraclitan flux.

SOCRATES: But if it is always passing away, can we correctly say of it first that it is *this*, and then that it is *such and such*?…

Then if it never stays the same, how can it *be* something?

……. Indeed, it isn't even reasonable to say that there is such a thing as knowledge, Cratylus, if all things are passing on and none remain. For if that thing itself, knowledge, did not pass on from being knowledge, then knowledge would always remain, and there would *be* such a thing as knowledge. On the other hand, if the very form of knowledge passed on from being knowledge, the instant it passed on into a different form than that of knowledge, there would be no knowledge…. But if there is always that which knows and that which is known, if there are such things as the beautiful, the good, and each one of the things that are, it doesn't appear to me that these things can be at all like the flowings or motions… (Emphasis in the original) Plato *Cratylus,* 439 d, e, 440a, b.

But the idea that we can reduce the Heraclitan flux to some cognate of the Platonic Form without fundamentally altering the properties and powers of the former is an intellectual sleight of hand made possible by the premature burial of ontology.44 Economics, from its very beginnings, has been and remains a search for divining the operations of the Invisible Hand. It has consistently believed in some sort of a hidden mechanism, directed by a sublime power concealed and compromised by 'disturbing causes'. While some of its practitioners, as, for example Ricardo, Marx and Mill believed in the discoverable hidden unity of economic life, over time economic concepts increasingly became idealised distillations, devised

42Cited below.

43Morgan, M. (2012) *The World in the Model,* Cambridge University Press.

44A "stinking corpse" according to Hilary Putnam. Putnam, H. (2004) *Ethics without Ontology,* Harvard University Press, p. 81.

not so much to unmask the empirically unknowable hidden nature of the Heraclitan flux, but rather, to contrive – under cover of the claim to scientific status buttressed by purported application of scientific techniques - a surrogate reality to which the flux should be adjusted by fiat, its movement guided with the help of appropriate institutions, laws and policies all in the name of a posited optimum. If the recommended or coerced human action in aid of achieving the posited optimum has secured an extraordinary level of material well-being for much if by no means all of humanity, as indeed it has - the result is not due to the discovery of natural causal properties, but to the guidance or coercion of human behaviour towards the posited end. Much like Socrates, not believing that the "flowings or motions" can be known, economic theory holds that the material of economics must "*be* something". But it isn't, it is what we contrive it to be.

If a detailed examination of the process with which economic theory displaces the ceaseless becoming of the Heraclitan flux of economic reality with its Platonic Forms is beyond the scope of this paper, it seems reasonable to conclude on the basis of the above, that the strategy of reification, the transformation of the flux into objects does not work. Just as stock and flow in accounting cannot be reconciled in the sense of deriving the one from the other, Flux and Form remain, despite Searle's efforts, incommensurable. The movement of the flux is the product of the agent's action. Transforming the flux into objects so that the agent's action can be disregarded - so that we have the Form without knowing what Flux brought it about - as the strategy for the discovery of causal dependencies is, therefore, a dead-end. There is no economics in nature and no nature in economics. It is all about conscious, purposeful human action.

#### **5.4 Rule-Based Roles**

Although John Stuart Mill committed economics to the tragicomedy of the utility maximising *homo oeconomicus* with his maxim that a greater gain is preferred over a lesser one, his more basic intuition to the effect that the purpose of economic action is to secure material goods seems reasonable even if Adam Smith's notion, that the basic human motivation is gaining the esteem of fellow humans appears more convincing. But securing material goods is no simple matter. Apart from the need to develop suitable technologies, know-how and skills, there is a need to avoid unbridled chaos in its pursuit. Economic behaviour must be regulated in order to keep social peace. This need results in the construction of *rule-based roles. Economic agency is conditioned upon compliance with these roles.*

Human action arises from the agent's dissatisfaction with some existing circumstance. The whole point of action is to change what exists or what is thought to exist to something more in line with the agent's hopes and expectations. But society does not give free reign to any and all dissatisfactions and therefore does not permit any and all action. All economic action requires social authorisation and the authorisation is granted through the often highly specific and elaborate content of these roles.

A 'seller' is a person with legal title to the goods he sells and is held responsible for the truthfulness of the explicit as well as the implicit or attributed representations made in connection with the sale. A 'buyer' is an agent with the capacity to satisfy the conditions of the seller. Employers and employees have specified roles and nonperformance of the role has serious consequences. In sharp contrast with the view of Rom Harré quoted and explored elsewhere in this volume45 to the effect that "institutions are not ontologically basic…(that) an institution is an appearance, an illusion…(that) there is and was no banking system", individual, group and institutional roles are formed and held together by powerful written and unwritten rules specifying authorised action and behaviour and sanctioning deviations from it. 'Causation' in agency is generated by the purposeful performance of a rule-based role. Economic roles have a clear purpose; intentionality is built into the role. The agent, by assuming the role, adopts the built-in intentionality. But there is a subtle cleavage between the actions of the self and the performance of a role by the self. Not being able to bring about economic action without adopting the role prescribed for the achievement of the desired end, she takes on the legislated intentionality of the role, but the gap between individual responsibility and responsibility for the performance of a role is evident. Accordingly, responsibility based on the operations of the conscience is replaced by the legally defined responsibility associated with the role. The most extreme form of this problem is the corporation and the question of corporate agency where the identity of the acting agent between the agents of the corporation and the corporation itself is disrupted by the corporate veil. Medieval Catholic theology was acutely aware of the problem,46 saw roles as *ficta*, 47 (best translated as 'made things', or contrivances) and the concern dominated English jurisprudence well into the eighteenth century. Chief Baron Manwood, for example, remarks in *Tipping and Pexhal's Cafe*48*:* "Corporations are invisible and immortal and have no Soul; None can create Souls but God; but the King can create Corporations, therefore they have no Souls".49 Souls have virtues and vices. Immortal objects have or lack usefulness. Mixing the two leads to the loss of the Soul.

The hallmark of modernity is the resolution of this tension between the soul as the source of conscience and moral autonomy and the rule-based role of the self in favour of the latter. With it the traditional notion of agent intentionality recedes, and

45See Archer, M. p.

46See for example Pope Innocent IV's decretal of 1246 in which he contemptuously dismisses the corporation as *persona ficta.*

47 'Persona ficta' is routinely translated in legal and other textbooks and monographs as 'finctitious person, but this translation is entirely mistaken.  The forect translation is based upon the root of 'cicta', namely 'fingere', and accordingly the term should be translated as 'made or contrived person'.

48 2 Bulstr. 233; also in*The Laws of Corporations: containing the Laws and Customs of All the corporations and Inferior Courts of Record in England* (1702) London.

49Rona, P. "Ethics, economics and the corporation" in Rona, P. and Zsolnai, L. (2017) *Economics as a Moral Science,* Springer.

agent action is constrained to the rule-based role. Intentionality is turning a choice from a legislated menu rather than being freely formulated by the self.

This trend is further exacerbated by the use of models, algorithms and artificial intelligence in economic decision making, production, logistics, marketing and distribution. In these cases, the agent executes the tasks or adopts the results specified by these means without the ability to deviate from them. The 'loan officer' of the typical bank of today operates a computerised program for the determination of the applicant's eligibility for a loan that does not permit the officer to proceed to the next question without an answer to the open one deemed satisfactory by the program. Whose intentionality is at play here? No one's. The program determines the specifications of the role of the eligible borrower, and the applicant either fulfils this role or fails to do so.

#### **5.5 Conclusion**

Causation in the sense in which the term has meaning in the natural sciences does not obtain in economics because economic phenomena do not have the sort of causal properties that obtain in natural objects; the subject matter of economics is not a natural kind. The study of dependent relations in economics, therefore, is entirely the study of agency, where any inductively obtained generalisation about a dependent relationship is a consequence not a of the properties of a natural kind, but of human action. This remains to be the case even if agency and the sort of intentionality traditionally associated with agency implying the autonomy of the agent is being replaced by the rule-based role, and the rule-based role is increasingly replaced by algorithms and artificial intelligence. Dependent relationships secured through algorithms depend neither on the properties of the objects involved nor the intentionality of the agent, but, rather, are *prescribed relationships* based on the rule posited in the algorithm. The algorithm is given the capacity and power to override both Causation and agency and brings about consequences that could not be obtained without it. This phenomenon requires analysis going beyond both causation and agency, and therefore beyond the scope of this paper.

The triumph and the tragedy of modern economics rests not in its failure to discover law-like regularities resembling those found in nature, but in its imposition on society of a surrogate reality, built with concepts borrowed from the determinist world of Newtonian physics. But the application of Newtonian causality to economic life is illegitimate. Instead of discovering something about an existing reality, economics generates its own - in Hobbes' phrase a 'made with words' reality - that conforms to its agenda. Economic optimality is just as much a subjective *telos,* the choice of which just as much the product of value judgment as any of the other value judgments economics purports to exile. Something is optimal in relation to something else the choice of which is not a matter of either science or logic. With its materialist determinism economics has compromised the moral autonomy of the

agent, expelled moral responsibility for the morally loaded choices it compels us to make, and transformed for the worse the physical world around us.

#### **References**

Anscombe, G.E.M. 1971. *Causality and Determination*. London: Cambridge University Press. Aristotle, *Physics,* Book II, Chapters iv and v.

Davidson, D. 1970. Mental Events. first given as a lecture at the university of Massachusetts, published in *Experience and Theory,* ed. L. Foster, and J.W. Swanson. The University of Massachusetts Press and Duckworth, reprinted in Davidson, D. (2013) *Essays on Actions and Events,* Oxford University Press; also reprinted in Sosa, E. and Tooley, M. (1993) *Causation,* Oxford University Press.

———. 1993. Causes and Conditions. *Journal of Philosophy* 64 (1967): 691–703.

Goodman, N. 1983. *Fact, Fiction and Forecast*. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Hart, H.L.A., and A.M. Honoré. 1959. *Causation and the Law*. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.

Morgan, M. 2012. *The World in the Model*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Putnam, H. 2004. *Ethics without Ontology*. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

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**Part II Praxis**

# **Chapter 6 Why Aquinas Would Agree That Human Economic Behaviour Is Largely Predictable**

#### **Richard Conrad and Peter Hunter**

**Abstract** Many people, from retailers and advertisers to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, work on the assumption that human economic behaviour is to a fair degree predictable, at least statistically. This paper asks how far the thirteenthcentury Thomas Aquinas would agree that human behaviour (including economic behaviour) is predictable, both the behaviour of individuals and the behaviour of groups, and on what grounds. In doing so it also asks how any elements of predictability would square with Aquinas' conviction that human beings enjoy *liberum arbitrium*, "free decision". In the context of the present volume, exploring Aquinas' position may promote a nuanced and multivalent approach to the question of what causes human behaviour, and liberate us from the fear that if human behaviour is *caused*, it cannot be *free*.

Aquinas was aware of the extreme complexity of the human psyche and of the organic interactions among its components. In particular, *liberum arbitrium* is achieved in interaction between intellect and will. The human will is *the rational appetite*, the ability to *be attracted by* the good perceived by reason. Any predictability of behaviour is therefore not a statistical result of intrinsic arbitrary randomness, as if acts of will were a kind of mental coin-flipping. Truly free behaviour is rationally explicable in terms of the goals it is right for human beings to pursue; *final causality* operates, in a way appropriate to responsible agents.

In an ideal world, not marred by sin, this would make human nature predictable to a *limited* degree. People would behave sensibly, as individuals and as communities, avoiding anything harmful. But people *naturally* differ in talents and temperament; geographical and historical circumstances vary; and human thinking is open-ended – within the time available, we can examine a situation from different points of view. In an unfallen world, people would happily adopt different social roles, and leaders' decisions about how to apply the Natural Law to particular

Blackfriars Hall, Oxford University, Oxford, UK

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circumstances would be sensible, but also "prudential" as not determined by a rigid reasoning process such as geometry uses. Within a context of good citizenship, people would make varying choices about practical matters, to the extent that an unfallen race would be more interesting and vital – because *more* human – than a fallen one.

Our world is not ideal. The basic dynamics of intellect, will and emotions remain good, but individual temperaments can include propensities to vice as well as to virtue. Intellect and will are in important ways blank slates at birth, and embedded in a biological and social context. In the long growth towards moral maturity people are vulnerable to corrupt customs which can obscure even obvious points of the Natural Law. Though God's grace is operative, not many people achieve the full moral freedom of an integrity in which emotions *enhance* a rational behaviour personally owned. When people do build up virtue, and thereby are partially liberated from the effects of the Fall, it becomes possible to predict in a general way that they will behave virtuously. But the open-endedness of thinking means that virtuous people will make varying choices about practical matters, *more* interesting and various than the dull and sadly predictable behaviour of people tied to various vices.

Since thorough-going vice is unnatural, most people tend towards a mediocre, partial moral consistency and *behave rationally enough*, obeying laws that carry sanctions, and listening to the more persuasive good advice; this will result in a certain predictability of behaviour on the part of the majority. They will also tend to follow bad laws and false persuasion without adequate reflection. Further, the failure to develop full rational control of their emotions (a control that must be "political" rather than "despotic") leaves people vulnerable to emotional drives: in the here-and-now they often perceive lesser, but easy and immediate, goods as preferable to greater goods that they *know* are better, but which are more demanding and distant. At the personal level, individual temperaments lead to a certain predictability of behaviour; at the social level, predictability may result from the proportion of temperaments that is statistically likely. Aquinas saw these temperaments as due to inheritance and astrological influences; we would replace astrological explanations by genetic ones and a better understanding of children's psychological development in its social context. For Aquinas, astrological influences remained potent throughout life, influencing the will *indirectly*, through the imagination and humours. We reject that form of predictability, but psychological experiments show that subconscious environmental factors, as well as fashion and peer-pressure, are potent. Aquinas also saw good and bad angels as influencing the human imagination and humours. Whether or not we agree with him on that, we recognise elements of unpredictability in social behaviour that are due to our vulnerability to unexpected mass movements, mass movements that we are inclined to label "demonic" – though there can also be *good* ("angelic") mass-movements.

In conclusion: Aquinas would agree that human behaviour is predictable in some degree, but his perceptive *pre-modern* understanding of human psychology invites us to reflect afresh on the nature of freedom and on the forms and causes of predictability.

#### **6.1 Introduction**

Many people, from retailers and advertisers to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, assume that human economic behaviour is to a fair degree predictable, at least statistically. They expect forms of persuasion, and fashion, to *cause* enough people to buy certain goods to make advertising, or stocking up on certain goods, profitable. They *predict* that increasing the tax on tobacco will *cause* a worthwhile proportion of smokers to quit the habit. This paper examines how far Thomas Aquinas would agree that the behaviour of individuals and of groups is predictable, and on account of what factors. In doing so it will touch on how elements of predictability would square with his conviction that human beings enjoy *liberum arbitrium*, "free decision".

Aquinas1 says little on economic behaviour as such,2 but is worth including in this volume because he worked before 1277. In that year certain "Aristotelian" propositions were condemned by Paris and Oxford Universities, an event David Luscombe describes as a "watershed".3 Aquinas and Bonaventure disagreed about the relative priority of intellect and will, but agreed that free decisions arise within the interaction of these components of human nature.4 Scotus, working after 1277, roots freedom in an *affectio iustitiae* distinct from our natural intellectual appetite for happiness.5 A broad-brush survey of Western thought might see this dissociation of freedom from our "natural dynamics", plus Ockham's "voluntarism", as profoundly affecting the way free will is perceived by many today. Arguably, Aquinas approach to issues of human agency is refreshingly pre-modern, and stimulates a nuanced, multivalent approach to the causes of human behaviour while allaying the fear that if our behaviour is *caused*, it cannot be *free*.

1References to Aquinas' *Summa Theologiae* are given in the format Part Question, Article. 1a = *Prima Pars*, 1a2ae = *Prima Secundae*, etc.

2He condemns usury in 2a2ae 78 (cf. *De Malo* 13, 4) but in 78, 2 ad 5 recognises the legitimacy of making a profit (or loss) on a joint project in which one invests.

3*Medieval Thought.* A History of Western Philosophy, II. Oxford: OUP, 1997. 114–121.

4Bonaventure, *Commentary on Book II of the Sentences*, Dist. XXV, Part I, Qq. 3 & 5.

5Thomas Williams, "How Scotus Separates Morality from Happiness." *American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly* 69 (1995) 425–445.

#### **6.2 Free Decision** *Within* **a Complex Psyche**

The essential background to our discussion is Aquinas' acute awareness of the extreme complexity of the human psyche. The salient points are summarised here.6

#### *6.2.1 Abilities of a Complex Form of Life*

Aquinas uses nouns like "intellect" and "will". These "powers of soul" should not be reified as if they were departments in an office-block, each with its own decisionmaking power. A soul (of a plant, animal, or human) is a "form of life" unifying and animating the organism. Its powers (Aristotle's "potentialities") are *abilities of the whole organism* that result from its form of life. All living things are able to take in nutrition, to grow and to reproduce. Animals can also perceive and respond in subtle ways; human beings can perceive and respond both in "animal" and in specifically human ways.

#### *6.2.2 Animal Abilities to Interpret and Respond*

Some abilities are "active". Digestion *works on* the food we ingest; our "agent intellect" *works on* the rich and complex material in the imagination. Some abilities are "passive" in the technical sense of "receptive". The power of hearing is the animal's ability to *be affected by* sound so as to hear things; the "emotions"7 are its abilities to *be attracted by* what it perceives as suitable, and *repelled by* what it perceives as noxious.

6Relevant texts include: 1a 77; 78; 79, 2–3; 80–86 (collected in R. Pasnau, *Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature: A Study of* Summa Theologiae Ia *75–89*. Cambridge: CUP, 2002); 1a2ae 8–10; 22–23; 25. Secondary literature includes:

Diana Fritz Cates, *Aquinas on the Emotions: A Religious-Ethical Inquiry*. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009. Powers of soul are summarised on pp. 267–8.

R. Pasnau and C. Shields. *The Philosophy of Aquinas*. Boulder: Westview Press, 2004. Chapter 7 (on sensory and intellectual powers).

Nicholas E. Lombardo, *The Logic of Desire: Aquinas on Emotion*. Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2010. Chapters 1–4.

Robert Miner, *Thomas Aquinas on the Passions: A Study of* Summa Theologiae 1a2ae *22–48*. Cambridge: CUP, 2009.

7*Passiones animae* are basic patterns of attraction and repulsion. To call them "passions of soul" might imply too much *passion* to suit them all. To call them "emotions" risks importing a modern psychological concept, but does hint at the complex social life of the higher animals, and so remind us of what we share with them.

Both kinds of ability have inbuilt dynamics, partly due to a shared nature, partly due to "individual nature" (e.g. the biochemistry of digestion is common to all humans, but some have more robust digestive systems than others).

Besides the five senses of touch, sight, etc., animals coordinate the sense-data received, and recall it *via* the "imagination". They also *make sense of* their world: by their "estimative sense" they perceive meanings like danger, and "affordances".8 Hence they react to stimuli both internal (e.g. hunger) and external.

We share many abilities with other animals; much *human* consciousness is "animal consciousness".

#### *6.2.3 Limited Conscious Control; Pre-conscious "Acts"*

Some abilities are not under conscious control. We can decide when and what to eat, but not what the body does with what we eat.

Much coordination and interpretation of sense-data goes on *pre-consciously*; we become aware of plates and food, not "raw" patches of colour.9 Reactions, too, are partly pre-conscious: when charged by a bull we *automatically* feel fear. Both Aquinas and we attribute such activities to the brain, plus other bodily structures – nerve impulses and hormones in our case, blood vessels and humours in Aquinas'.

#### *6.2.4 Rational Perception and Reaction*

Human beings have abilities other animals do not, namely *intellectus* and *voluntas*, "intellect" and "will".

The intellect is our ability to draw out and grasp *universal truths*, including those of applied sciences such as ethics-politics. We *abstract* universal concepts from particular instances located within space and time, and organise them into bodies of knowledge.

As *the rational appetite* the will is, in the technical sense, "passive" – the ability to *be attracted by* the good that reason perceives. It can "rise above" particular drives to "higher goods", even what Aquinas calls "universal good". I can resist hunger for the sake of political protest, or choose a painful medical procedure for the sake of future health.

8A term coined by J. J. Gibson. *The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception*. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1979. 127.

9So good are we at seeing *things*, it is hard to become a good visual artist or cartoonist and isolate the shapes and patches of colour we need to focus on when painting or drawing.

#### *6.2.5 Co-operation Between Intellect and Sensory Abilities, Between Will and Emotions*

Since "materiality" ties things down in space and time, Aquinas sees intellect and will as spiritual powers, not *in themselves* the functioning of bodily organs.10 This leads to a nuanced account of what external factors can influence them. However, our active *use* of concepts requires close cooperation between intellect, on the one hand, and the imagination and the estimative sense, on the other. We apply general knowledge to particular instances (e.g. a vet uses her knowledge of diseases in diagnosis). Even in *abstract* thought we make use of mental pictures, examples, implicit symbols, etc. Hence whatever affects brain functioning can affect our ability to think – sleep, drunkenness, brain injury, strong emotion… Both intellect and the senses are *transformed* by this close cooperation11: we are rational in an animal way, and animal in a rational way. Our imagination can "play" with memories; our estimative sense is transformed into the "cogitative sense".

Will and emotions also influence each other. We are voluntary in an animal way, and animal in a voluntary way. Emotional "drives" can make things attractive or repugnant to us – to us as *responsible* beings. Will and emotions cooperate: many physical movements are under voluntary control, but it is through the emotions that the will puts them into effect, while our emotions wait upon the will's command before initiating deliberate movement.12

#### *6.2.6 Co-operation Between Intellect and Will in Free Decision*

A key point is that *liberum arbitrium* – sometimes translated as "free will", better translated as "free choice" or "free decision" – *is achieved in two-way interaction between intellect and will*. The cooperation between thinking and wanting is so close that Aristotle spoke both of "desirous reasoning" (*orektikos nous*) and "reasoning desire" (*orexis dianoetikē*) 13; following *NE* 3.3 (1113a11) Aquinas considers "intellectual appetite"14 better than "appetitive intellect".15 Thinking and

10 1a, 75, 2; 1a2ae 9, 5.

11Candace Vogler, "The Intellectual Animal." A lecture delivered at Blackfriars, Oxford, on 2 March, 2017. Available https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IhNm1fa8GE. *New Blackfriars* (forthcoming).

12 1a 81, 3.

13*Nicomachean Ethics* (*NE*) 6.2 (1139b4).

14To call the will "*intellectual* appetite" does not mean it is always "highbrow". I have an intellectual appetite for dark chocolate, since I *know* I will enjoy it.

15 1a 83, 3–4.

wanting are so entangled that Mark Jordan speaks of "the untellable circlings of will and intellect".16

#### *6.2.7 Development of Habits and Virtues*

Many abilities are "open-ended" and can be "moulded" further by training and practice. We can "shape" our intellects with concepts of economics or engineering. We can be trained as children, or train ourselves later, to enjoy adult food.17 This channelling of an ability is a "habit", not in the sense of a nervous tic that takes us over, but rather like a learned skill we can deploy. A virtue, a good habit, is an enabling life-skill. A bad habit, a vice, means some aspect of our behaviour is habitually mis-directed.18

We can develop "intellectual virtues", "strengths of mind", that empower us to use our minds readily in theoretical and practical ways.19 These do not make us good people. We can also develop "moral virtues", "strengths of character", that bring our emotions and wills into harmony with right reason, so that "by second nature" we desire what is truly good, truly fulfilling, and live it out with readiness and a sense of fulfilment.20 Moral virtues are deployed by the intellectual virtue *prudentia* ("prudence" or, better, "good moral sense") and in turn support it, so that, unlike sciences and crafts, it is inseparable from *being* good.

#### *6.2.8 Limited Conscious Self-Awareness*

Consciousness is not a core concept for Aquinas: animals are conscious in various and shifting ways, and so are we. Being conscious of toothache makes it difficult to be conscious of other things.

In particular, we are not conscious of the whole "contents" of our intellects *or of our wills*. The human psyche is not geared to introspection. I am not consciously aware of concepts I have learned until some situation prompts me to call upon them. Nor am I fully aware of the priorities I hold, the "habits" that "structure" my will, until they result in *acts* of will.21 Both concepts and willed choices emerge from "the

16*Teaching Bodies: Moral Formation in the* Summa *of Thomas Aquinas*. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017. 102.

17This reminds us to hear "passive ability" in a nuanced way.

18Habits are treated in 1a2ae 49–54; virtue in 55–56.

19 1a2ae 57.

20 1a2ae 57–61. For Aristotle and Aquinas, reason takes charge of emotions in "political", not a "despotic" way (1a 81, 3 ad 2; 1a2ae 17, 7): emotions have dynamics we must work with sympathetically.

21 1a 87; 1a2ae 112, 5.

*habitual retention* of knowledge and love".22 We sometimes *discover* our wants; I may *surprise* myself by what I do – it may be different from what I supposed I wanted to do!23

#### *6.2.9 Influences Upon "Embedded" Free Decision*

It should now be obvious that internal and external factors affecting our bodies affect both our outward senses and our imaginations and emotions. Through them they can impinge on our intellects and wills, both because thinking draws on and cooperates with the senses, and because we can perceive our internal state (of hunger, health, emotion, etc.) to some extent. Our free decisions involve perceptions and motives at various levels of our psyche, many of which have been shaped by past behaviour and interactions.

The human will does not spring into being as part of a fully-formed, selfsufficient, adult psyche able to select its choices within a landscape it surveys. We come into being (a) needing to grow towards the use of reason, (b) "embedded" in a biological and psycho-social situation on which we are highly dependent – and to which we are vulnerable – and (c) with both intellect and will as "blank slates"24 even though they have intrinsic dynamics towards the true and the good. In our growth to maturity we remain highly dependent on human interaction; in developing virtue we must deal sympathetically and practically with the effects nature, nurture and earlier decisions have had on our emotions.

At no stage is the human will an "unmoved first mover", spontaneously and independently bringing an act of will into being.25 It is true that while Aquinas saw external factors as able to influence our senses and emotions, and to some extent our intellects, he held that *no external agent could directly influence the human will.* However, he insisted that whenever *any* human being's will acts, it is attracted into "act" by God as the Unmoved First Mover. For we are "embedded in God" who is in fact *within* the will, (a) as the Source of all being who holds the will and its "acts" in being, and (b) as the Infinite Good, the ultimate attractive Goal, who attracts our will into seeking good.26 Further, by Grace God can "enlarge our hearts" (Psalm 119:32) to embrace him as our *Friend* and to liberate us from false thinking

22 1a 93, 8.

23Nicely described by Gareth Moore, *The Body in Context: Sex and Catholicism*. London: Continuum, 2001. 16.

24 1a 84, 3.

25 1a2ae 9, 4.

26 1a2ae 9, 6. Bonaventure, too, denied that a *liberum arbitrium* "presides over" intellect and will, initiating their directions of thinking and loving. *Commentary on Book II of the Sentences*, D. XXV, Part I, Q. 2.

and willing. Grace is typically mediated through the Sacraments God gave to the Christian community.27

This outline of the contexts of our free decisions warns us not to expect a simple – let alone a reductionist – analysis of what might make for predictability in human behaviour.

#### **6.3 Explicable But Open-Ended Freedom**

To see the will as the ability to *be attracted by* the good perceived by reason is very different from a "voluntarism" which (to some extent caricatured) sees the will as a free-floating, pro-active, arbitrary deciding power surveying a landscape of options and saying, without motive or other such constraint, "I shall have X today." This would make an act of will the mental equivalent of flipping a coin. Pinckaers labels the resultant view of freedom "freedom of indifference": the will is faced with a range of options "on an even field".28 Arguably, it lies behind the presumption that increasing people's freedom is a matter of maximising their choices. Modern discussions of freedom, and Benjamin Libet's experiments,29 do often focus on such arbitrary choices. If individual choices were *purely* arbitrary, the resulting randomness might translate up into statistical predictability of behaviour. If, as Libet's experiments have suggested to some, choices are made prior to conscious awareness, they might become predictable once the biochemical or other factors that precipitate them are discovered.

However, investigations of arbitrary, random choices do not engage with Aquinas' account of *truly human, deliberate* choice, for he would label unthinking choices "acts of human beings"; by contrast, "*human* acts" engage us as rational, responsible, goal-seeking agents.30 They are free by what Pinckaers terms "freedom for excellence",31 that is, by "responsible ownership" of decisions. Motives and reasons do not *constrain* us, but *contribute to* freedom: if I can *explain* my behaviour, this means I have *owned* it by reflection on what is good for me, i.e. what on truly contributes to my well-being.

This view of freedom goes with a "metaphysics of morals" in which characters, decisions and actions are susceptible of more or less goodness; and insofar as they have more goodness, they have more being or reality, more integrity and truth.32 Hence freedom is susceptible of varying degrees. If our hierarchy of values corresponds to

27 1a2ae 62; 109–112; 3a 62.

28Servais Pinckaers, *The Sources of Christian Ethics*. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1995. Chapter 14.

29Helpfully described and critiqued at http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/libet\_ experiments.html

30 1a2ae 1, 1. As Mary Midgley remarked, "Randomness would not be freedom." *Wickedness: A Philosophical Essay*. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. 111.

31*The Sources of Christian Ethics*, Chapter 15.

32 1a2ae 18, 1; "deep down", truth and unity "coalesce" with goodness and being: 1a 5, 1; 11, 1; 16, 3.

the truth of things, and if we have the integrity to pursue wholeheartedly what is really good for us, we are the more free. Truly free behaviour is *more* rationally explicable than less free behaviour – explicable in terms of the goals it is happymaking for human beings to pursue.

The causality involved in truly human behaviour is **final causality**. It operates in a way appropriate to rational agents who act in the light of goals held with (ideally) increasing degrees of coherence.33

Insofar we behave in a human way, any predictability of our behaviour will not result from the statistics of random choices, or from *mere* biochemistry, but from the *rational explicability* of responsible choices. Given our psyche's "embedded complexity", one might hope to predict what an individual would choose in a given situation knowing her "personal chemistry", her acquired patterns of behaviour, and her account of her motives, her goals. However, besides our susceptibility to outside influences, there are (a) a "cascade effect" in "the untellable circlings of will and intellect" which seems to limit the predictability of particular choices, especially ones that do not engage any portentous moral judgment, and (b) elements of mystery in the human psyche:

33 1a 60, 2; 1a2ae 1, 1 & 6; 6, 1.

34 1a 82, 1; 1a2ae 10, 1.

35 1a 79 12; 82, 4 ad 3; 1a2ae 94, 2.

36 1a2ae 2 details these possibilities.

37 1a2ae 89, 6.

38Turning against God is rarely explicit; more often it is *implied* by some serious sin: 2a2ae 34, 2.

39 1a 82, 2; 1a2ae 8, 2–3; 14, 2.

40 1a2ae 10, 2.

a certain indeterminateness and spontaneity operates here – within the time available we are not determined to choose a particular means.41 We can fail to take something important into consideration, and *failure* can be *voluntary*. 42

• Having made a careful decision, we can still fail to carry it through owing to factors such as fear and laziness. That is, we can fail to follow our conscience. This failure, too, is *voluntary*. 43

An "economic" example illustrates how, in this "cascade", a means becomes an end for a subordinate decision, and how difficulties at lower levels can prompt rethinking at higher levels. If a concert is arranged in Manchester, it might be predicted that many people will attend, so that special train services are laid on. If my musical interests make attending the concert a "medium-sized" goal, I investigate means to that end (e.g. train travel) and, with those means acting as a subordinate end, I weigh up further means (buying a ticket on a chartered train, an advancepurchase ticket on a specified train, or an open return). Which I choose depends on how I perceive the alternatives (flexible timing *versus* a cheaper fare; a quiet journey *versus* the "buzz" of a chartered train). Maybe *no* means is open (there are no advance-purchase tickets; I can't afford a flexible ticket; I cannot cope with the crush on a chartered train), and I give up my "medium-sized" goal. A means might be open if I sacrifice a higher good: I could steal the money – then my *basic* goal comes into question, since theft is sinful, and (hopefully) I still give up the mediumsized goal. I may well not weigh up every option – but failing to consider a certain option *may* be a voluntary mistake (e.g. I don't notice a very cheap plane fare, either because I couldn't have realised a plane service had been established, or because I knew there might be one but didn't look into it). Further, while pursuing the mediumsized goal, I might culpably fail to think of every relevant thing, and so, culpably, fail to respect a greater goal (e.g. I promised to meet an important deadline, and going to Manchester makes me break my promise).

Clearly, such thinking does not have the compelling force of a geometrical proof. Even if my friends could have predicted I would try to attend the concert, and even if the train company correctly predicted the number travelling by train, my decision was not determined. In retrospect I will be able to explain my actions, but in doing so I may realise I made bad decisions, or failed to execute good ones as I should. Rationality is compatible with elements of spontaneity, mystery and openendedness; open-endedness is multiplied by the complexities both of the psyche, and of the situations among whose contingencies we negotiate practical decisions.

Many decisions in regard to the concert entailed no disobeying a serious moral law, hence one could not determine whether I would attend it simply on the basis of my goodness. Yet, Aquinas holds, no concrete human act is morally indifferent. Buying a first-class ticket might be no sin, but it would be "more perfect" to buy a cheaper ticket and give money to charity, and yet more perfect to miss the concert

41 1a2ae 13, 5–6; 14, 2, 3 & 6.

42 1a2ae 6, 3 & 8.

43 1a2ae 19, 5, cf. 6, 6–7.

and spend the time working in a hospice.44 A great deal must fall into place for human decisions to be made, and yet more if our characters and behaviour are to have perfect integrity and truth, and thus perfect goodness.

#### **6.4 In Humanity's Ideal State, Would Behaviour Be Predictable?**

On Aquinas' account of the Fall, the first human beings were endowed with gifts such as moral integrity; if they had not sinned, all human beings would have been born with those gifts.45 Children would still have grown towards the full use of reason, and acquired knowledge,46 but their wills would have been formed by Charity.47 Aquinas sometimes performs a "thought-experiment" about what an unfallen state would have been like to help distinguish what is natural to us both from what is the result of the Fall, and from what (being supernatural48) must *always* be God-given.49

Some of Aquinas' speculations have implications for the predictability of behaviour in an ideal state. People would naturally have behaved sensibly, as individuals and as communities, avoiding anything harmful and practising good citizenship.50 They would have engaged in practical reasoning because of the complexities of the world and of society. People would have been unequal: owing to shifting patterns of the stars, and variations in climate, some would have been stronger and wiser than others, though there would have been no birth *defects*. 51 By free choice, some would have advanced in knowledge and justice more than others.52 There would have been no slavery; people would have been governed for *their own* and for the *common* good, not *used*. 53 Within the context of good citizenship, people would have made varying choices about careers to pursue, where to live, whom to marry – "personal" but not irrational choices. It would have been possible to count on a balanced pattern of social roles. Lawgivers' decisions about how to apply the Natural Law to particular circumstances, and leaders' policies, would have been sensible yet also "prudential",

44No act actually performed is morally indifferent (1a2ae 18, 9), but Aquinas distinguishes precepts from counsels (1a2ae 108, 4): we are not obliged under pain of sin to follow counsels. 45 1a 95; 100, 1.

46 1a 101.

47Charity is a love for God that empowers a journey into him: 1a2ae 62.

48The "supernatural" is not the "spooky", but the divine. Forgiving enemies is more supernatural than levitating.

49Besides 1a 94–101, see 1a2ae 109, 1–5.

50Hinted at in 1a 97, 2 ad 4.

51 1a 96, 3.

52 *Ib*. This affirms the claim that, *without sin*, people can choose among more and less perfect options.

53 1a 96, 4.

not determined by rigid reasoning process such as geometry uses.54 Clearly, an ideal society would be anything but a uniform, regimented army. An unfallen race would be more interesting, vibrant and vital – because *more* human – than a fallen one. People would have been free for excellence.

The thought-experiment reassures us that variety55 and vibrancy are *natural*. A fallen world's warped perspective might suggest that vice is interesting and virtue boring, but the opposite is true; this meshes with Aristotle's conviction that while virtue is a *mean* between extremes, it is not mediocre,56 and with Aquinas' implication that friendship with God grows into an "exhilarating resonance".57 In the world as it is, people often are liberated from some effects of the Fall by God-given virtues and, I should argue, by the ways we help each other acquire virtues.58 While we can predict that virtuous people will behave well, good citizenship does not make them clones of each other. Human variety, the open-endedness of practical thinking, and the strange beauty of grace, mean that virtuous people's choices will often be more interesting and various than the dull and sadly predictable behaviour of people tied to various vices.

#### **6.5 Fallen, Vulnerable Humanity's Predictability**

For Aquinas, the Fall deprived us of *supernatural* gifts such as Charity; these are restored through Christ. Along with these gifts, others, that came to be called "preternatural", were also lost59; in God's providence, these are not restored in full in this life.60 They remedied the physical and psychological vulnerability that are *natural* to us as complex and interdependent, hence their loss has wounded us: our darkened intellect no longer has a firm grasp of the principles of moral reasoning, a grasp that actively pervades our practical decisions; our will is weakened, and our emotions often run ahead of reason, or impede it.61 There remain natural, and basically good, dynamics within our faculties62; Mary Midgley brought out – in a way similar to Aquinas – the dangers attendant on failing to integrate these with

54 1a2ae 96, 1 ad 3. Cf. the need for counsel, circumspection and caution: 1a2ae 14, 1; 2a2ae 49, 7–8.

55Naturally, in a fallen world there can also be immoral variations in preference.

56*Nicomachean Ethics* 2, 6 (1107a6–8).

57Andrew Pinsent, *The Second Person Perspective in Aquinas's Ethics: Virtues and Gifts.* London: Routledge, 2012. 96–98.

58To recognise how moral education, like medical techniques, can alleviate some effects of the Fall is not to deny our dependence on God for the restoration of Charity, and for total healing in the final resurrection.

59 1a2ae 82; 2a2ae 164. Moral/psychological integrity and immunity from sickness are "preternatural" since they could conceivably exist in people who loved God as Creator, but to whom he had not offered the *super*natural goal of sharing his bliss.

60 3a 69, 3.

61 1a2ae 17, 7; 24, 3 ad 1; 85, 3 & 5–6.

62 1a2ae 24, 2 & 4; 63, 1.

rational considerations.63 It is difficult to attend to all relevant aspects of a situation; and to carry through our decisions we must often overcome laziness, fear, or disordered desire.

Aquinas affirmed Aristotle's account of how the training of children, good laws, the advice of friends, and personal practice, promote "acquired" virtues that restore some degree of moral integrity.64 All this is liberating, not coercive. It involves practical ways of dealing with emotional difficulties; for example sadness may require companionship, sleep, bathing, legitimate pleasures, or cathartic weeping65 rather than "pulling yourself together" – we would add suitable drugs, when medically indicated, to the list.

Unless they are so strong as to dement us, emotions cannot override freedom, but they can affect it.66 It is difficult to achieve a moral integrity in which emotions *enhance* a rational behaviour personally "owned". Since vice, in which both reason and the affective powers cooperate in evil, is unnatural,67 thorough-going vice is relatively rare. Aquinas seems to share Aristotle's suspicion that many people are neither virtuous nor vicious, but "controlled" or "uncontrolled"68: if, for example, the presence of onlookers shames them, they do what is good "through gritted teeth"; sometimes they do evil, but "with a bad conscience". Many people follow their emotions, and do not make the effort to rise above them69; they often perceive lesser goods that are easy and immediate as preferable to greater goods that in principle they *know* are better, but which are more demanding and distant.70

We can expect most people to tend to a mediocre level of morality in which they *behave rationally enough*, at least when "controlled", and especially as regards the most basic principles of moral/practical reasoning that remain innate and potent.71 We can predict that most humans will make efforts to keep themselves alive, will beget children and care for them, will be social, and will worship God (or "gods").72 In a reasonably well-run society, we can count on most people obeying laws that carry sanctions and listening to persuasive advice; for example, if certain foodstuffs are lauded as healthy by respected authorities, people will buy them, unless they are so costly that doing so would deprive them of basic necessities. If certain substances are known to be dangerous, or are prohibitively expensive, or their use carries severe sanctions, few people will be so irrational as to purchase them.

At the same time, a failure to develop full rational control of their lives will leave many people vulnerable, not only to emotional drives, but also to bad laws and cor-

63*Wickedness*, Chapters 1, 2, 4 & 9.

64E.g. 1a2ae 63, 2; 92, 1.

65 1a2ae 38.

66 1a2ae 6, 6–7.

67 1a2ae 71, 2.

68*Nicomachean Ethics* 7, 1–3 (1145a15-1147b19).

69 1a 115, 4 ad 3; 1a2ae 9, 5 ad 3.

70 1a2ae 63, 1 ad 4; 75, 1–2; 2a2ae 20, 2.

71 1a2ae 100, 3.

72Cf. the natural inclinations in 1a2ae 94, 2.

rupt customs, to threats and peer-pressure. Human and God-given courage, and often the support of friends, empower some people to resist, but coercive rulers can often count on a large proportion of people yielding to even unpopular policies.

If many people do not rise above their emotions, personal temperaments (due to nature and nurture) will lead to some predictability in their behaviour once we know them and their backgrounds. We will examine below the factors Aquinas saw as influencing personal temperament. It seems he would not reject a statistical predictability resulting from the proportion of temperaments that is likely, or observable, owing to genetic, geographical and social factors.73

To those he graces, God imparts a panoply of virtues that gradually reintegrate our psyche, liberating us from Original and actual sin,74 though in most cases moral reintegration is partial this side of the grave. Aquinas does not predict that those whom God graces will regularly behave in ways that strike society as odd: Charity does not typically snatch people away from family commitments, but typically affirms, purifies, orders, divinises and widens natural affections.75 All the same, in a fallen world there is a war on against evil, so that Charity always leads to *some* dramatic gestures (e.g. fasting)76 and makes people wary of following the herd uncritically. In *some* cases it leads people to adopt odd forms of life, e.g. by making religious vows.77 In the Middle Ages this had an immense, and arguably beneficial, *economic* effect on society.78 It would be interesting to assess the current impact of ways in which devotion prompts people to stand out from the herd.

#### **6.6 Factors Causing Predictability, Especially of the Majority**

When reason is truly free, our decisions have a vitality that *sometimes* make us stand out from the herd, and we have the insight and integrity to assess laws, peerpressure and emotional urges rather than blindly follow them. But Aquinas held that many people do not take full rational control of their lives, with the result that factors operating at less personal levels to influence their emotions and perceptions will affect their behaviour unduly, and often in ways that make for some predictability.

73Aquinas saw *individual chance variations* as translating up into a *statistical pattern* in at least one area: it is by chance that a child is conceived male or female, but in this way "Nature" designedly produces the same number of males and females overall (1a 92, 1 ad 1).

74 1a2ae 62; 63, 3.

75 2a2ae 25, 6 & 8–9; 26, 6–12.

76 1a2ae 63, 4.

77 2a2ae 186.

78The growth of Cistercian life reclaimed land for farming; monasteries were empowering centres of local economy.

#### *6.6.1 Heavenly Bodies*

Following contemporary astronomy, Aquinas saw the heavenly bodies as having an *immense* influence on what happens here below: no reproduction was possible without an input of "energy" from the Sun. Their shifting patterns allowed the ongoing variety of earthly events, but – owing to the *chance* coincidence of causes, and the varying dispositions of matter – without imposing determinism on them.79 For human beings, (a) the pattern of the heavenly bodies at conception influenced someone's "personal chemistry",80 (b) the heavenly bodies had an on-going effect on our bodily organs, and through them on our imagination and emotions, and (c) thereby, indirectly, the heavenly bodies could influence our intellect and, to a lesser extent, attract our will. However, *they could not force the human will* so as to *cause* human acts, because the will does not necessarily follow the inclinations of the lower appetites.81 Nevertheless, since many people do not make the effort to rise above their emotions, particular patterns of the heavenly bodies could, *predictably*, provoke "mass movements" through their influence on people's imaginations and emotions. Hence astrologers could make correct predictions of events like wars.82

This view, though incorrect, did imply a recognition of (i) "personal chemistry", the propensities to virtue or vice in us at birth; (ii) our susceptibility to physical influences; and (iii) the possibility that mass movements might be explicable. Aquinas would not reject modern studies of our susceptibility to environmental, subconscious, pre-conscious and "psychological" influences.83

#### *6.6.2 Inheritance*

Aquinas accepted that human beings can inherit bodily defects, and characteristics like athletic ability or mental agility, but not personally acquired skills.84 Since he attributed *propensities* to particular virtues or vices to innate bodily dispositions, he presumably thought these were heritable, and would not be averse to studies of how character traits and behaviours that are not consciously chosen can be inherited. If patterns of behaviour do run in families, the relative proportions of patterns in a stable community might last for many generations. Modern science attributes to genetic factors a great influence over people's "character", in a sense replacing Aquinas' account of the heavenly bodies' real and natural causal power.

79 1a 115, 3 ad 2, & 6.

80For being born with certain propensities, see 1a2ae 50, 1; 63, 1; for the influence of the heavenly bodies, 1a 96, 3.

81 1a 115, 4.

82 *Ib*. ad 3.

83For some time, advertisers have used subliminal techniques; the influence of environmental factors, including scents, on people's behaviour in shops has been widely studied.

84 1a2ae 81, 1–2.

Aquinas' recognition of environmental and social factors, of personal choice, and of God's grace, reminds us not to rely *only* on genetics when investigating what contributes to people's characters.85

#### *6.6.3 Climate*

Aquinas recognised climatic factors86; he might well not be surprised by seasonal affective disorder, and might expect the climate of a region to have some predictable influence on patterns of behaviour there.

#### *6.6.4 Corrupt or Worthy Customs*

Current sociology would probably accord more influence than Aquinas did to cultural factors, to society's "mood" and presuppositions, and would analyse more deeply why many people follow these. But Aquinas did hold that, while in some sense the basic and obvious points of the Natural Law are built into everyone, we are still vulnerable to corrupt customs which can obscure even things that should be obvious.87 On the other hand, worthy customs can be a force for good behaviour and hence character-formation.

#### *6.6.5 Coercive Law*

In a fallen world, it is not easy to work out the fine details of the Natural Law; it requires a long-term effort on the part of the wise.88 Governments have the task of applying the Natural Law to local circumstances, of revising laws, and of granting dispensations justly.89 This requires a special kind of *prudentia*. 90 It can be assumed that most people will follow law, either because they are good, or because it carries sanctions.91 Given the power of corrupt customs, Aquinas might not be surprised to find that in certain countries and cultures honesty in filling in tax returns is easier to count on than in others. He would presumably agree that, out of fear, many people

85Good science is non-reductive in this regard; it also recognises "Lamarckian" as well as "Mendelian" inheritance, but judiciously: Edith Heard and Robert A. Martienssen, "Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: Myths and Mechanisms." *Cell* 157 (2014) 95–109.

86 1a 96, 3

87 1a2ae 94, 4 & 6.

88 1a2ae 100, 1.

89 1a2ae 91, 3; 95, 1–2; 97, 4.

90 2a2ae 47, 10–11; 50, 1.

91 1a2ae 92; 96, 5.

follow laws that should be disobeyed92; we might want to explore more deeply what instincts lead people to do what they are told even when it is questionable or unpopular.

If the proportion of people who will follow a particular kind of law can be estimated for a particular society, on the basis of observation, those who practise economics, as well as legislators and policy-makers, can rely on this estimate. It would be useful to study the power of law to influence not only behaviour, but also moral *perceptions*; this is probably greater than is often supposed.93

#### *6.6.6 Persuasion and Protreptic*

Perceptions and desires can be moulded by persuasion and protreptic on the part of preachers, teachers, experts and officials. Aquinas practised protreptic94; his work was embedded in a Scriptural and Liturgical system of moral formation in which Christ was the great moral Exemplar.95 While modern psychology has studied more deeply children's development in its social context, and phenomena such as peerpressure, Aquinas would expect educational systems to have a predictable effect on people's behaviour.

One thing he might have difficulty with is brainwashing, since the behaviour of a brain-washed person "comes from within" and so seems to count as voluntary96; yet it is imposed from without, against the person's deliberate choice.

#### **6.7 Angels, Demons and Grace: Causes of Unpredictability?**

Thus in the Mediaeval trio "the World, the Flesh and the Devil",97 the world (social influences) and the flesh (the emotions, and genetic and environmental factors that influence them) largely make for predictability. For Aquinas, angels and demons also had a strong influence.98 He saw them as affecting many physical occurrences

92He has a nuanced view about whether bad laws should be obeyed: 1a2ae 96, 4.

93E.g. to what extent did the Abortion Law make people see abortion as a morally legitimate option? One such study is Yuval Feldman and Oren Perez, "How Law Changes the Environmental Mind: An Experimental Study of the Effect of Legal Norms on Moral Perceptions and Civic Enforcement." *Journal of Law and Society* 36 (2009) 501–535.

94Adam Eitel, "The Protreptic of Summa Theologiae I-II, qq. 1–5." *The Thomist* 81 (2017) 183–212.

95Mark Jordan, *Teaching Bodies*. Chapters 1–4.

96 1a2ae 6, 4.

97 1a 114, 1 ad 3.

98 1a 111–114. Angels' existence seemed obvious, since the heavenly bodies kept revolving because angels pushed them: experience suggested that when you stop pushing, things grind to a halt. The fourteenth century saw develop the concept of a temporary impulse, later replaced by the concept of inertia: James A. Weisheipl, *Nature and Motion in the Middle Ages*. Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1985. 31–73.

on earth; they could move humours in the body and influence imaginations and emotions, and so could present us persuasively with ideas. Angels could not, directly, put abstract concepts into our intellects, but they could *strengthen* them.99 Our dependence on the imagination both for forming and for employing concepts meant our mental susceptibility to angelic influence was marked; however, as with the heavenly bodies, the human will was open to God alone – no angel could "get inside" it.100 Rebel angels – demons – could also influence us, towards evil, but only under God's providential permission.101 They could not influence the human will directly, any more than could the good angels or the heavenly bodies.

A healthy aspect of Aquinas' account of moral evil is his resistance to the idea that all sins are due to the devil; often enough they are due to "the world" or "the flesh", or simply to the mysterious lability of a created will.102 Many modern Christians accept the influence of angels and demons, but Aquinas remains a valuable conversation partner for people who do not: he was not reluctant to recognise many forms of vulnerability to non-voluntary, pre-conscious interior and exterior influences, and would not rule out in principle *psychological* accounts of mental and moral problems. If we do accept the existence of angels and demons, we should (with Aquinas) recognise that they can only work on and with the human psychological material accessible to their influence; we would expect them as a rule to do so in subtle ways.

The influence of angels and demons might result in *un*predictability: one could imagine that (under God's Providence!) demons might incite a people to evil in a way that could not have been foreseen – or (sent by God) good angels might excite a good social atmosphere. Recent centuries have seen more than their fair share of mass hysteria, genocidal hatred, revolutionary fervour that leads to a reign of terror, and similar events that might be labelled "demonic" even by people who do not believe in demons. We have also seen strikingly beneficent social movements; the fall of apartheid without a blood-bath springs to mind. If we believe in angels, we might surmise they have a role in such events, under divine providence, and without prejudice to the priority of God's grace which alone can be at work *within* the human will.103

Since angels and demons only work on and with the human psychological material accessible to their influence, their role might be, if not predictable, at least interpretable in retrospect. Certain studies have suggested that political history moves in stages which include times of marked vulnerability.104 If so, and someone like Hitler comes on the scene at such a time, disaster can happen "out of the blue";

99 1a 111, 1 & 3–4.

100 1a 111, 2.

101 1a 114, 1.

102 1a 63, 1; 114, 3. Moral evil, as intrinsically "messy", has neither a fully satisfying rational explanation, nor a unitary cause: 1a2ae 73, 1.

103 1a 105, 4; 1a2ae 9, 6.

104The studies were helpfully and critically reviewed by Frances Hagopian, "Political Development, Revisited." *Comparative Political Studies* 33 (2000) 880–911.

if someone with a charisma for good is providentially granted (e.g. Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela), un-hoped-for improvements take place. In such periods the influence of angels and demons might be especially marked as they work on and with natural liabilities, including our susceptibility to "public opinion" as enunciated (or manipulated) by the media, by demagogues – or by orators of truth and goodness.

Finally, we must recall that God's grace, "enlarging our hearts", is at work. Typically, it does not cut across the natural, but brings it to perfection in a way that promotes moral beauty.105 Hence it does not annul the natural elements of predictability and unpredictability we have examined. The striking things some of God's friends are inspired to do are not its most usual activities. Grace may be doing more than we realise – we dare not tame or corral it – to cause much more to go right in human behaviour than would go right if such a complex creature were left to its natural resources alone. On the other hand, it would not be true to Aquinas to deny the value of those resources which, being natural, we retain in a fallen world.

#### **6.8 Conclusion**

Aquinas' *pre-modern* view of the complexity of human psychology, of the decisionmaking process, and of the situations calling for decisions, has invited us to reflect on the nature of freedom and on the forms and causes of predictability. Freedom involves self-possession, not randomness of decisions, hence the statistics of randomness are not the correct way to approach human predictability. Final causality operates, in a distinctively human way, so that we can give a rational account of any free act of ours, even if in doing so we come to realise flaws in our thinking. At a first level of analysis, we might expect our inner dynamics towards truth and goodness to lead to predictability: people will tend to do the sensible thing. This *is* the case to some extent: most people make adequate provision for themselves and their families through work and household management; they generally follow law and custom. In an ideal world, they would do so through good citizenship; in a fallen world it is either through good citizenship or through fear of sanctions. People are also liable to be misled (in thinking and behaving) through corrupt laws and customs. However, *natural* human variety means that personal choices would make an unfallen society vibrant with variety; in a fallen world, grace leads God's close friends to buck the social trend in at least some ways.

Much of our psyche is *responsive* rather than pro-active; much of what goes on in it is pre-conscious. Free decisions involve interaction between thinking and wanting, and thinking is open-ended, hence individual decisions are not determined, *because* of being rational. A mysterious element of spontaneity is present regarding which components of a situation we attend to, or fail to consider, and how we perceive each one; this goes with our being embedded in a biological, social, historical

105 1a2ae 110, 2; 2a2ae 23, 2.

and geographical context, within which virtuous people take control of their wants and behaviour and, though good citizens, become in some ways *less* predictable than the majority. Most people settle for moral mediocrity, and fail fully to integrate their emotions, which leaves them susceptible to a wide range of interior and exterior influences, most of which make their behaviour predictable in a dull way (a) as *rational enough*, and (b) as influenced by factors not personally chosen, nor adequately recognised, evaluated or corrected for:

Individual variations in personal chemistry *may* translate up into statistical regularities.

However, our susceptibility to external influences leaves us vulnerable to factors that are to some extent unpredictable such as mass-movements, whether these are due to psycho-social patterns and forces, or to demons, or to the latter working with the former. Under God's providence, we can also be swayed by forces for the good, whether these are due to charismatic leaders, or to angels, or to the latter working with the former.

In short:

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# **Chapter 7 Agency, Time and Morality: An Argument from Social and Economic Anthropology**

#### **Paul Clough**

**Abstract** This paper reflects on the ways in which the concepts of agency, time, and morality can be linked together. It does so by considering how the kind of thinking which goes on in social anthropology and economic anthropology can contribute to our understanding of 'agency'. It then relates the discussion of agency to the concepts of time and morality. The mode of reasoning in social anthropology can be described as cyclical: social theory generates general questions that can be asked of a human society in particular times and places. Those questions stimulate empirical investigation, which results in a descriptive analysis of human social reality – known in social anthropology as ethnography. In turn, ethnography often challenges existing paradigms in social theory, because it throws up puzzles about human social interaction that can only be resolved by revising existing theory. Thus, there is a cycle in which theory stimulates ethnography, which throws up puzzles that can only be resolved by revising or changing theory. The same cycle can be discerned in economic anthropology, that sub-branch of social anthropology which understands 'economy' as a holistic social process interweaving production, exchange, and consumption (Narotzky 1997). The ethnography of micro-economic reality has provided rich evidence about human decision-making that can be used to address general theoretical questions. From its origin in studies of gift exchange (eg., Malinowski 1922) to contemporary studies of money and debt (eg., Graeber 2011), economic anthropology, like its parent discipline, has been preoccupied with theoretical questions like the tension between 'agency' and 'structure', 'individual' and 'society'.

P. Clough (deceased) University of Malta, Msida, Malta e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
#### **7.1 Agency in Social Anthropology**

In a lucid short essay on the history of agency in anthropological theory, Nigel Rapport shows how ideas of agency have emerged from debates over the connection between individuals and social structure. These debates explored the nature of individual consciousness and its freedom from external determination. He defines agency as the 'capability… to be the source and originator of acts' (Rapport and Overing 2007: 3). Discussions go back at least as far as the classic differences between Durkheim and Weber. Durkheim's account of human action focused on the norms whereby choices are guided, and those structures in which norms are formed. Leaving little or no room for self-creation, Durkheim's theory contrasted strongly with that of Weber, in which the distinctively human aspect of action consists of the various features of 'rationality' – consciousness, reflection, intention, purpose, meaning. The subsequent literature has tried to overcome the opposition between Durkheim and Weber, by exploring the limits on the individual's capacity to act independently of structural constraints. In Rapport's view, all attempts have ended up privileging either structure or agency (Rapport and Overing 2007: 4).

The most influential recent attempt in anthropology to resolve the opposition between structure and agency has been Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice (Bourdieu 1977, 1980). For Bourdieu, most consciousness is habitual. The body acts as a mnemonic device for communicating pre-existing collective codes of gender, normalcy, propriety, and domination. Thus, children encode the collective culture in their bodies through early training. Perhaps most strikingly, Bourdieu argues that competency in the different kinds of social interaction operates by individuals *not* thinking about how they act. Hence his key concept of habitus – 'the system of durable dispositions, predisposed to act as … principles [that] generate … practices and representations … *without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends'* (Bourdieu [1980] 1990: 53, emphasis added). In his various precise ethnographic analyses, the room for individual manoeuvre is strictly limited by prevailing dispositions and practices. Despite Bourdieu's continuous claims to have produced a unique synthesis from the analytical opposites of structure and agency, none is detectable (Clough 2016: 202–204).

There have been notable efforts in social anthropology to outline theories that do stress the importance of agency. For example, Gregory Bateson emphasized *individual creativity* in generating social change (Bateson 1973). Kenelm Burridge's outline of the process whereby idiosyncratic, 'heroic' individuals persuade others, or get copied by others, demonstrates how 'eccentrics' inaugurate patterns of action that eventually become the new norm (Burridge 1979). However, in this essay I will concentrate on the arguments of Terry Evens in his 2008 volume, *Anthropology as Ethics,* because he ranges so widely across philosophy and social theory. Evens links agency to intention and to moral responsibility. He stresses as well the need to allow room for the unprecedented, for the act of creative imagination (Evens 2008: 116). For Evens, a full description of the attributes of human agency entails the idea of 'self-conduction', which in turn implies the activity of genuine choice. Furthermore, reflection by the self on the self contains the awareness of a tension between the self and its surroundings, and equally, between self-interest and the demands of others. Awareness of this tension between the self and others includes belief in a personal responsibility to resolve that tension. Thus, the awareness of responsibility generates awareness of the reality of self-change (Evens 2008: 128– 130). I contrast Bourdieu's weak idea of agency as limited, structured change in a social system, with Evens' strong concept of agency as self-conduction in responsibility to others.

#### **7.2 The Argument**

Through my ethnography of one farmer-trader in West Africa, I will argue that this man's short-term economic decision-making and long-term planning implied the operation of a particular kind of agency. His decision-making involved imagination - the ability to visualize a future different from his present. The practical application of imagination entailed the qualities of intentionality and purpose, and the ability to plan for the imagined future. Furthermore, in the very framing of the goals used in his planning, he had to make choices in the ethical dilemma between expenditure on self and expenditure on family, kin, or clients. Thus, my argument favours 'strong' agency as self-conduction (Evens 2008) over 'weak' agency as the ability to slightly alter existing structures (Bourdieu 1977, 1990). Moreover, agency implicates time, because the very meaning of agency shifts as the analytical focus changes from the 'short-term' to the 'long-term'. If, in a 'short term', the question often asked with regard to agency is whether individuals can act differently than they do at particular points in time and space, the more appropriate question in a 'long term' is whether individuals can strive over time to act differently in the future than they do in the present – can install new goals, or even change some of their habits, over a period that is open to the future. Equally, reference to the long-term dimension of agency implicates morality. Here I draw on Levinas's philosophy of ethics as the inexhaustible or unending responsibility of the self to the other (in Levinas's language, the 'infinite' responsibility of Self to Other). Levinas exposes the tension between self-interest and other-regard. Awareness of tension between the demands of the self and the demands of the other includes belief in personal responsibility for the resolution of that tension. Thus, the awareness of responsibility – ethics – generates awareness of the reality of self-change *over a long term* (Evens 2008: 128– 130). In summary, *where* a person persists with a particular intention, *then* consistency of purpose can lead to self-change over the trajectory of a life.

#### **7.3 An Ethnography of Economic Action**

These various dimensions of agency can be seen in my ethnography of an individual farmer-trader among the Muslim Hausa of northern Nigeria, West Africa, to which I now turn. My research on this trader, whom I will call Abdulkadiri, was part of broader fieldwork on the relations of production and exchange in one village of Hausaland in northern Nigeria; and equally, on the trading networks for agricultural products that linked my village to other economic regions of Nigeria. Both the economic and cultural contexts of research are crucial, because they enable me to posit connections between the nature of agency and the real nature of global markets at the end of this essay. With regard to the economic context, the region where I did my research has long had a highly commercialized rural economy. By the time that I began fieldwork in Marmara village in 1976, the process of commodification had extended from products to land and finally to labour power. In Marmara, while half of all farmland had been inherited by the users, half had been acquired primarily by purchase or by borrowing the land in return for a money loan of its market value. Moreover, a half of farmland was farmed by household heads who combined family labour with hired labour. The top fifth of landowners combined farming with trading in various lines, using the profits from trade to invest in farmland and hired labour. Hence I use the term 'farmer-traders' for the social stratum of which Abdulkadiri formed a part. With regard to the cultural context, Hausa rural society was piously Muslim, and polygyny was the norm: the majority of family heads had from two to four wives. The marriage system accords wives an important degree of autonomy. Divorce is easy. Most men and women have been through several marriages.

In the complex ethnic composition of Hausa society, Abdulkadiri's ethnic background was actually Fulani, his original language – an ethnicity particular to pastoralists throughout West Africa - though he had migrated to the Hausa village of Marmara as a result of acute land scarcity in his home region. In his new home, he combined farming with trading in livestock, due to his close relationships with Fulani pastoral kinsmen who owned herds of cattle. This ethnography analyses 1 year of accumulation in Adulkadiri's life.

At the beginning of the year, in January 1978, he faced the need to make crucial decisions. He was the leader of a large family farming enterprise that included his two sons and two of his younger brothers. He combined trading in grains with trade in livestock. And he had 1600 Naira of personal savings - no mean sum in the currency of the time - which he looked upon as his working capital.  By the end of that year, in December 1978, Kadiri had invested all of his savings in farmland, which he had increased from 6 to over 20 acres. By combining his family work force with large amounts of hired labour, he used the additional farmland to more than quadruple his output of grains. He used part of his savings to contract successful marriages for his first son and for his unmarried brother. And he managed to marry first one, and after divorce, another woman who thus became his second wife. Over the year, Abulkadiri had successfully engaged in the accumulation of capital – investing profits from previous trade and production in the increased control of land and hired labour. But moreover, he had accomplished the prestigious cultural transition from a monogamous to a polygynous family head. It was – by any local measure - an astonishing transformation. How had he pulled it off?

In the course of my fieldwork, I very gradually learnt more about Abulkadiri from his occasional statements made in the midst of work. What follows is thus my analytical reconstruction based partly on his observed actions, and partly on his discourse. Years before, when he had first emigrated to Marmara, his intention had always been to eventually return to his home region to 'embrace' his parents. But they had died, leaving him without a compelling reason to return. Moreover, though his mother's family were well-connected to the hereditary rulers, his father had left very little farmland and few cattle. Thus, he weighed the absence of reasons to return against the opportunities in Marmara. By the beginning of 1978, he had come to the decision to remain in the economic region of southern Katsina, to abandon trading in livestock, and to focus his energies on agricultural production and trading. The timing was pushed because his eldest son and younger brother had reached maturity and needed to be married. In Hausa culture, the institution of family farming (called *gandu*) is based on a reciprocal exchange: sons and other working kinsmen receive from the household head the bridewealth needed for marriage, and food for themselves, their wives, and offspring, in return for their farm labour during the 'rainy' season and help with the household head's off-farm occupation during the 'dry' season. Hence, Kadiri's decision to abandon his residual traces of pastoral Fulani identity entailed large family responsibilities in his new focus, Hausa farming. I could see that this change in economic identity was accompanied by a certain change in his cultural identity. At the start of the year he could sometimes be seen in the customary Fulani dress, whereas by the year's end he was only wearing the Hausa robe and cap. This is not to deny that he retained close links with his Fulani kinsmen having herds of cattle. They kept for him his few remaining cattle, and being wealthy in terms of livestock, were a source of loans in emergencies (Clough 2014:274–326, 2016: 201–207).

Kadiri could not expand his landholding without finding the funds to hire the labour needed to farm it. In his trading he bought grains from local farmers for sale at a distant weekly marketplace where prices fluctuated at a much higher level than in Marmara. He continually emphasized to me that the weekly profits derived from the relatively large scale of his trading were necessary to pay for agricultural labour and other inputs. At the same time, since he had sunk his own savings into farmland and family marriages, he became increasingly dependent during the year on loans to finance his farming. Essentially, he was immersed in social relations of credit that were as important as the institution of family farming. These relations were of two kinds – patronage and trading friendship. His patron was a much wealthier trader in the same line, crop trading, who loaned him money for trade in return for Kadiri's long-term services in finding the patron new areas of supply, and selling his patron's traded grain in distant markets. His 'trading friends' (in Hausa, *abokanan ciniki*) were men in other lines of trade, with incomes much closer to that of Kadiri, whose marketing had different periodicities than Kadiri's crop trading. They were thus in a

position to loan him money at times when they had realized their own commercial proceeds.

All trading loans were without interest in rural Hausa society. This had less to do with the Islamic ban on usury than it had to do with the fact that all traders were involved in such tangled and variable claims for assistance from diverse kinsmen and friends, that they could not guarantee the regular money growth necessary for stable rates of interest to settle. Here, too, as in farming, economy depended on an ethic of reciprocity. As a trader sought to obtain loans, he found himself under pressure to give them. He knew, in borrowing, that part of the credit would be loaned out again. In the local circle of traders, potential borrowers were not only being assessed for their honesty, but equally, for their 'character' (in Hausa, *hali*). A person with 'character' had many men from whom he attracted credit. 'Character' in Hausa incorporates the ideas of redistribution and reciprocal justice. Since the success of most traders depended on the willingness of others to loan them commercial funds, reciprocal justice required that they lend to others still struggling to succeed.

Given the demands of kinsfolk and poorer traders on his funds, it may seem surprising that Abdulkadiri was able to achieve any capital accumulation at all. His singular feat was to borrow more from the circle of patrons and trading friends than he loaned out to others. Secondly, he was able during that year to convert many short-term loans into medium-term credit. He was even able to transform the medium-term loan from his patron into a long-term loan. In these ways he generated working capital for farming in the short term.

This summary gives a more seamless sense of the logic of the rural economy that is true of the human reality. Farmer-traders are managers of multi-purpose family enterprises. In consequence, the boundaries between domestic and productive expenditure are blurred. So I turn briefly to his discourse. Over the year, he was continually praising to me the beauty of women at the distant weekly marketplace where he sold his produce. It is from there that he found the two women whom he sought for marriage. In order to ensure that the second lady remained in his household, his mind fastened on a dramatic scheme – to completely rebuild his compound in order to better house, not only his two wives, but also those of his son and younger brother. The building took time, the result impressed the whole village. To finance the construction, he converted one of his largest trading loans into building money, and as far as I could tell, was only able to eventually repay that loan by tapping the funds of distant pastoral kinsmen. We have here a whole man, endowed with an aesthetic and with desires, who sought emotional security from the company of wives and friends. Reviewing the entire year, he actually spent more on household marriages and building than his considerable expenditure on farms and farming. It was larger, too, than his weekly investment in trading. He offered a revealing summary of his recent past: 'For four years, I have not postponed marriages in my house – for myself, for my son, and for my brother. *If not for this, I would have gone east* [ie., to Mecca, on the Muslim pilgrimage]!' Note that he did not say, 'I would have had more money to buy farms or hire labourers.' Expenditure on farmland and hired labour were embedded in the expansion of his household and the reciprocal obligations of patronage and trading friendship in a Muslim circle of traders.

#### **7.4 Theoretical Implications of Ethnography for a Theory of Agency**

Can we generalize from the specificity of micro-ethnography to philosophical or economic theory? Does a micro-study have implications for our understanding of agency? More particularly, how can meaning, purpose, intention, or self-reflection in the consciousness of the main character here - and, moreover, the changes in these - be seen to interconnect with the sequence of his actions over the period studied? I begin by asking whether a structural analysis of 'practices' in the manner of Pierre Bourdieu – 'skilled performances' based on indigenous practical knowledge in particular socio-economic niches – can explain Abdulkadiri's decision-making. It must be admitted that a structural analysis in the style of Bourdieu, based on the material necessity of certain actions in a particular economic niche, does indeed explain certain contours of his action over time. Having come from a pastoral family with limited livestock, Abdulkadiri almost inevitably gravitated from cattle herding to cattle trading. At the same time, he gradually realized that an expansion in his material income and social status required a certain oblique movement from being a trader focusing on cattle to being a trader focused on farming and agricultural trade. Analyzed thus, his change from a Fulani pastoral to a Hausa farming identity was certainly predictable.

Nevertheless, what a structural analysis cannot do is explain three elements of his consciousness. First, *the unpredictability of his search for beauty*. Being a man of middle age searching for women of similar age, material necessity cannot explain his search for a second wife. Moreover, a structural analysis does not construct a satisfying mental picture of his contrary urge to extravagance, as when he threw the loan of a major trading friend into house building rather than farming or trade. Secondly, *his capacity to dream of a future different from his past or present.* Put differently, while Bourdieu's structuralism can explain *how* a conscious being responds to the material pressures facing him, it cannot explain the existence of a dreaming, imaginative being *in the first place*. Thirdly*, his sense of a disjunction between dream and reality, between present planning and its future realization, between a relatively certain today and a merely possible tomorrow.* Thus, Abdulkadiri was aware of being caught between and among:

The claims from his wives, junior relatives and other close kin. The claims from the Muslim trading community to which he belonged. The pressures of personal desire in a polygynous context.

Such a being, being 'between', is somehow aware that he is distinct from the present spheres he seeks to manage, is disjunct from the future that he tries to turn into a reality. Human action is the putting into physical effect of wishes and dreams. Human action is a process of self-change that sometimes, as in this case, involves self-expansion.

In a sense, Kadiri was turning himself into a cause that initiates effects. Thus, he became by his actions a part of the 'structure' that constrains, or puts pressure on,

other people, and which they in turn take into account when they initiate actions. In other words, the structure is mobile. It is continuously changing because it is full of initiatory individual actions. In contrast to Bourdieu, who claimed to have transcended the analytical opposition between structure and agency, my reflections on this one farmer-trader suggest, not some synthesis, but rather a re-worded solution in favour of agency. This is not weak agency in Bourdieu's sense of 'social change', whereby in any society one action induces an array of consequent actions that can be specified predictively given adequate knowledge. Rather, it is strong agency, what Terry Evens calls 'self-conduction' (Evens 2008: 114). Self-conduction by numerous inter-actors generates a continuously changing structure - either slowly or rapidly. 'Structure' is the assemblage of interacting actions, where by 'action' is meant the human translation of dreams and wishes into a previously non-existent reality. Since structural fixity is a chimera, it makes no sense to analytically counterpose structure and agency in the first place. 'Structure' as the assemblage of interacting actions is shot through with agency and hence mobile.

Lastly, what is highlighted by the attention given to 'planning' in the actions of Abdulkadiri, is the analytical distinction between short-term and long-term in our understanding of agency. In the short-term, the *internal* compulsions to act in one way rather than another – prior convictions, fixed views, strong feelings, vivid memories – combine with the *external* constraints of political power and economic risk to limit the subject's possibility of choice. Therefore, if 'time' is glossed as a sequence of discrete 'points', then each point becomes a short-term in which internal compulsions and external constraints shape the consciousness and actions of the subject. Where, however, time is construed as a duration of indeterminate length, open to the future, then our perspective changes. We start to invoke different kinds of verb in our reflection – 'trying', 'attempting', 'striving', 'struggling', 'searching for' (in the manner of Gilbert Ryle experimenting with different verbs for 'thought' in his *Concept of Mind*). Perhaps, then, what the complex and variable language of 'choosing' or 'deciding' does, is to gloss an awareness of time *either* as a sequence of momentary points *or* as a temporal stretch of indefinite duration, open to the future. If, and when, a particular intention is persistent over time, then consistency of purpose leads to gradual self-change over a long period of time. The trajectory of a person's life cannot be described without reference to his or her intentions.

Although the temporal dimension of choice is specified in variable ways, the sense of self-conduction is ineluctable. Because I am aware of being a being suspended among present pressures and future possibilities, I am conscious that the self translates possible futures into an embodied present. Pervasive in this sense of selfsuspension is the tension between self-desire and other-regard (Evens 2008: 128, 296–297). In a sentence: it is through my sense of the difference between present and future, and through my consciousness of responsibility to the other, that I become aware of the meaning of agency.

#### **7.5 Implications for the Study of Global Markets**

These arguments for strong agency as a focus on individuals *striving over time* to change their condition or even their character, allow us to more clearly see the nature of market formation and change in different parts of the world. Markets are like any other 'structure' in my argument: they are assemblages and sub-assemblages of initiatory human interaction. As such, markets are shot through with agency, and hence mobile, constantly changing.

First, whereas a short-term perspective on markets assumes that most individuals are seeking to maximize current net satisfaction across the range of their prioritized desires, a long-term perspective opens up the possibility of a change in the very nature of their satisfactions and in individuals' hierarchies of desire. Such changes can alter the entire system of relative prices for different products and services. In the long-term, for example, changes in the consciousness of gender and of gender difference increasingly inflect consumer choice. New desires can lead to the emergence of new markets.

Secondly, focus on the intrinsically moral nature of agency enables us to shift attention from individual to collectively shared aspects of morality. I refer to the way in which social movements mobilize the collective force of their members to change public understandings of human obligation. Examples include the voluntary embargo on purchasing products from racist regimes, or the efforts by environmental movements to alter the consumer preferences of their members worldwide.

Thirdly, my Hausa micro-study points to a very particular structure in global markets – their cultural structure. The very different ways in which people in different parts of the world stratify their spending between social or public goods and individual private goods, demonstrate that markets are far more than the passive responses of anonymous, atomized individuals. Choices concerning what to produce or buy are made after public discussion and debate. In non-Western parts of the world, these choices are often made after community debates which can have recourse to religious beliefs, and – certainly in the case of Muslim societies - deliberation on the sacred texts of the religious group.

Fourthly, the cultural consequence over time of the intersection of different local and regional markets is *not* a universally shared concept of value. For example, despite a century of commercialization of the forces of production, all the evidence from my research area in West Africa reveals the continued priority given to household expansion through polygynous marriage, and to circles of trading friends through local systems of credit and debt, rather than to the capitalist accumulation of land and labour. As products and money circulate globally, their uses and meanings are altered in local contexts so that they express and sustain local systems of value (see also Parry and Bloch 1989).

Lastly, these diverse intersections between, on the one hand, local schemes of desire informed by political and religious movements, and, on the other, the global circulation of capital and search for profits, can only be given their full meaning if we see the entire assemblage of actions as shot through with agency in the strong sense. While, at any moment in time, individuals are constrained internally by fixed tastes, views and values and externally by pressures on their income, a long and open duration of time gives more scope for persistence of purpose to become a force that gradually works its way into individual decision-making.

#### **References**

Bateson, Gregory. 1973. *Steps to an Ecology of Mind*. London: Paladin.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. *Outline of a Theory of Practice*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1990 [1980]. *The Logic of Practice.* Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Burridge, Kenelm. 1979. *Someone, No One: An Essay on Individuality*. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Clough, Paul. 2014. *Morality and Economic Growth in Rural West Africa: Indigenous Accumulation in Hausaland*. New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books.

———. 2016. Tension, Reflection, and Agency in the Life of a Hausa Grain Trader. In *Reflecting on Reflexivity: The Human Condition as an Ontological Surprise*, ed. T. Evens, D. Handelman, and C. Roberts. New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Evens, T.M.S. 2008. *Anthropology as Ethics: Nondualism and the Conduct of Sacrifice.* New York/ Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Graeber, David. 2011. *Debt: The First 5,000 Years*. Booklyn/London: Melville House.

Malinowski, Bonislaw. 1922. *Argonauts of the Western Pacific*. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press.

Narotzky, Susana. 1997. *New Directions in Economic Anthropology*. London/Chicago: Pluto Press.

Parry, J., and M. Bloch. 1989. *Money and the Morality of Exchange*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rapport, Nigel, and Joanna Overing. 2007. *Social and Cultural Anthropology: The Key Concepts*. London/New York: Routledge.

Ryle, G. 1949. *The Concept of Mind*. London: Hutchinson.

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# **Chapter 8 The Switch from Agency to Causation in Marx**

**Scott Meikle**

**Abstract** This paper traces the shift from Marx's labour theory of value to his later forms of value theory and attributes the change to Marx's shift from agency to causation as the dominant dependent relationship in economic phenomena.

#### **8.1 First Edition Versus Second Edition**

From the time of Engels and Kautsky, everyone believed that Marx held only Ricardo's view that exchange value was labour time, known as the Labour Theory of Value (LTV). This began to change in 1972 when Pilling drew attention to the 'forms of value' in chapter one of Capital.1 Everyone had known about these, but nobody ever saw anything in them, and Ronald Meek summed things up in his book on the LTV: 'There is no need for us to follow Marx's rather complex analysis of the "elementary", "expanded" and "money" forms of value in any detail'.2 But Pilling had inspired others to look again at chapter one, and a non-Ricardian side to Marx's thought started to emerge. Since then there has been disagreement about what this is, but agreement that the second edition of Capital is where it must be found.

But the second edition cannot be trumps. Authors issue second editions for a reason, and if Marx issued his because he had a change of mind we need to know; second thoughts are not always best. Checking Marx's earlier work we find he developed his own theory of exchange value through the Contribution of 1859, the notes on Bailey, and the first edition of 1867. But he suppressed it and gave the job to Ricardo's theory instead, and the second edition was where he made the switch.

S. Meikle (\*)

1G. Pilling, 'The Law of Value in Ricardo and Marx', Economy and Society, 1972, vol. 1, no. 3, 281–307.

2Ronald L. Meek, Studies in the Labour Theory of Value, (London, 1973), 173.

Research Fellow, Glasgow University, Glasgow, UK e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Let us see what that original theory was, and let's call it the 'theory of commodities and money' or TCM for short.3

#### **8.2 The Theory of Commodities and Money (TCM)**

Marx asks two questions in the Contribution: what is the commodity, and what is money? He starts by noting that in the simple relationship of commodities, '20 yards linen = 1 coat', the coat represents the exchange value of the linen. That is Marx's first result: the relationship contains an act of representation. The coat is performing a social office, in representing the linen's exchange value, which is a social property with no natural presence in the world of things, until the coat provides it.

The linen has the same relation to other useful things too, so that:

20 yards linen = 1 coat, 1 quarter tea, 2 lbs. iron, 1 ell yarn, etc.

Putting these relationships in this horizontal series gives us a sense of the range of the linen's exchange value.

We also see that a thing becomes a commodity when it enters a network of exchangeability relationships with other things. That is Marx's second result: being a commodity is being in a set of social relationships. And his third result is that exchange value is a social property that a thing acquires when it enters such a set of social relationships, and loses when it leaves it.

In that horizontal series, each thing represents the exchange value of the first. But what if only one thing does the representing? Then we would have a vertical arrangement like this:

20 yards linen = 1 coat

= 1 quarter tea

= 2 lbs iron, etc

Here only one thing does the representing, and the others are excluded from that job. This is Marx's final result, because this is money.

Marx gives names to the social roles played in '20 yards linen = 1 coat'. The representing role the coat plays he calls 'the equivalent', and the role the linen plays he calls 'the relative'. The role money plays in doing all the representing he calls the 'universal equivalent'. The entire explanation is social: social relationships entered into; social roles performed; functions fulfilled. These things are established in our behaviour, and rest on agreements. Marx makes the point when he says, as he often does, that such and such a function is performed 'with social validity', like gold doing all the representing for instance.

When Marx first asked what money was, he recalled that 'Gladstone, speaking in a Parliamentary debate on Sir Robert Peel's Bank Act of 1844 and 1845, observed

3Book I Part 1 of Capital is entitled 'Commodities and Money' so the title 'TCM' fits.

that even love had not turned more men into fools than meditation upon the nature of money'.4 He adds that you can't get anywhere until you realize that 'the commodity is the origin of money'. And at the heart of the commodity lie those social agreements, and the main one is the coat's act of representation, the equivalent. Samuel Bailey made a lot of the commodity relationship, or 'exchange relation' as he called it, '20 yards linen = 1 coat', yet he never managed to say anything interesting about it because, says Marx, he never asked the crucial question: 'how is it possible to express the value in exchange of A in the value in use of B?'5

Formulating the theory obviously depends on the logic of predicates, particularly quality, quantity, and relation, and on the nature-convention distinction. Marx knew the Greeks; had studied Aristotle's Categories; and had a Rhineland education and cultural background. But this sort of thought was vexed in Britain, where logic and metaphysics had been purged as Papist in the seventeenth century, and decried by native philosophers from Hobbes to Hume as 'School Metaphysics'. This cultural loss handicapped British political economists trying to understand the meaning of '20 yards linen = 1 coat', depriving them of requisite tools.

Marx's kind of social thinking was very unusual for the mid nineteenth century. British intellectual fashion didn't turn towards social things in this way until Wittgenstein in the mid twentieth century, and before then even thought and language were thought of non-socially in individualistic Humean ways. This may be partly why the TCM was so little appreciated. Fashion then looked to the physical sciences. And that was partly why economists were impressed by Ricardo's theory identifying exchange value with a natural quantitative property, viz. time taken making things. It may also be partly why Marx lost confidence in the TCM, or in its favourable reception.

When the coat represents the linen's exchange value, Marx says it 'counts as' the linen's exchange value. But this is a different way of construing '20 yards linen = 1 coat' from Ricardo's way, which says it is an arithmetical equation equating two quantities. This requires finding a property that each side of the equation has. Bailey's objection to Ricardo's theory was precisely that it construes the relation as an equation, and then looks for a property for each side to have equal amounts of, and there isn't one, so they make one up, a hidden one called 'value', to fill the vacancy created by supposing the relation to be an equation in the first place.

Marx likens '20 yards linen = 1 coat' to an encounter, and he asks what the parties see in each other when they meet? He appeals to the image of kingship, so he obviously thinks some kind of social status lies behind it: 'This man here is only King, because other men behave towards him like subjects. They believe, however, that they are subjects because he is King' (Dragstedt, 24).6

4Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 29, 303.

5K. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, vol. 3, (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1971), 149.

6Page references to the first edition of Capital are to the translation (the first into English) by Albert Dragstedt, in Value: Studies by Marx, New Park, London 1976, hereafter referred to as 'Dragstedt'. Dragstedt translates the original version of chapter one, and the Appendix entitled 'The Form of Value', both of which Marx suppressed in the second edition.

But how does status come into it? Marx suggests that commodity status exists, as other statuses like kingship do, in virtue of agreements conferring what he calls 'social validity'. This applies across social reality as Searle has argued.7 Social statuses exist by people agreeing to 'count' something as being something else, and they are often conferred in special procedures, or ceremonies. A church gets the status of a cathedral only if a bishop is appointed to it under proper authority, and similarly for someone 'counting as' a barrister, or some land 'counting as' someone's private property. Searle's formula for it is that over a certain domain C, X things count as Y things, or 'X counts as Y in C'. For example, 'these bits of authorised paper count as legal tender in this country'. But commodity status is unusual, because things acquire it without any procedure. They simply slip into the network of exchangeability relations and acquire the property of exchange value and the capacity to play the roles of equivalent and relative.

Marx continued with this theory into the first edition. The planned chapter six extended the critique of economics by introducing the concept of valorisation to expose how economics builds market features into its supposedly universal account of production. But the chapter was withdrawn. It appears today as the essay 'Results of the Immediate Process of Production' where, in the last few pages, Marx introduces a set of ideas that go dramatically against all his previous work (Penguin, 1044ff).8 He moves away from the theory of the commodity, and towards a theory of capital. He drops 'exchange value' and adopts the term 'value'. The surplus, which had been called 'surplus labour', is now called 'surplus value'. He now speaks of labour 'creating value', breaching the distinction between the labour and valorisation processes. 'Valorisation' goes, and 'accumulation' and 'self expansion' arrive. The two 'aspects' of labour appear. Capital becomes an agency with a tendency to expand. The mover is capital, not people, whom capital now makes its instruments. The critique of economics seems to shift towards a radical version of economics.

#### **8.3 The Combined Theory: TCM & LTV**

Marx finds himself holding both the TCM and Ricardo's theory at the same time. This means that he has to hold both constructions of '20 yards linen = 1 coat': the construction that says it means that the coat 'counts as' the exchange value of the linen, and the construction that says it means that the coat and the linen contain the same quantity of labour time.

Chapter one in the first edition sets out the TCM. But in the second edition it becomes a complicated attempt to marry parts of the TCM with Ricardo's theory. This is the source of the Byzantine complexities of chapter one that have bothered

7 John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, Allen Lane, London, 1995.

8K. Marx, Capital vol. 1, trs. Ben Fowkes, (Penguin, London, 1976), henceforth 'Penguin'.

readers for generations, and of most of the notorious conceptual problems faced by interpreters.

In the process Marx introduces an ambiguous use of 'value' to mean the labour time embodied in a thing, and also to mean things in their social capacity as commodities, which are now referred to as 'values'.10 So the word 'value' now means

9Paul Sweezy builds his book on the notion of 'abstract labour time'. He writes 'abstract labour is susceptible to measurement in terms of time units', The Theory of Capitalist Development (Oxford University Press, 1942, [1946]), 33.

10As in Marx's phrase: 'the equal objectivity of the products of labour as values', Capital vol.1, (Penguin, 164).

both labour time embodied, and the social status of commodity-hood. This ambiguous usage eases Ricardo into the structure of the second edition, and affirms the combined theory. But it also merges a natural property (labour time) with a social status (commodity-hood), and this is commodity fetishism as Marx defines it. He does not want to advertise this, so in the discussion of fetishism in the second edition, he is forced to play down much of the TCM. The parts most affected are the four 'peculiarities of the equivalent form'.

#### **8.4 The 'Four Peculiarities'**

These are the analytical core of the TCM (Dragstedt, 55–60). The 'first peculiarity' is that it is the coat, the physical thing, and not its exchange value, that acts as representative of the linen's exchange value. But it does this '(note well) . . . only within the value relationship . . . since no commodity can relate itself to itself as equivalent and thus can also not make its own natural skin into the expression of its own value, therefore it must . . . make the natural skin of another commodity-body into its own value-form' (Dragstedt, 55, original italics). So the coat performs its social capacity in its natural capacity. It is already getting tricky to keep clearly in mind what is social and what is natural. Muddling them is the essence of the fetish of the commodity, and it is insinuating itself from the start.

The 'second peculiarity' is that 'concrete labour becomes the appearance-form of its opposite, abstractly human labour' (Dragstedt, 55). The different kinds of labour are passed around through the exchange of their products, and they all count as bits of one homogeneous uniform or 'abstract' labour, exchange value. But once the social fact of exchange value is established, the new fact comes to have overwhelming importance, and the activity that made the thing pales into insignificance in the face of the social property it counts as being. It is a case of 'X counts as Y in C', but one in which Y has become so dominant that X ceases to signify except insofar as it counts as a bit of Y.

Exchange value appears to exist as thing A, thing B, etc., and this has the effect of mystifying the useful thing, its social property, and the relation between them: 'If I say: Roman Law and German Law are both law, that is obvious. But if I say, on the other hand, the Law, (this abstract entity) realizes itself in Roman Law and German Law, (these concrete laws), then the connection becomes mystical' (Dragstedt, 57). It is all right to say 'this thing counts as a commodity in the market system' ('X counts as Y in C'), but it is a mystification to say 'this thing is a commodity', because it does not make clear that a social status is involved, and even obscures it. This means that economic thought contains a mystification in its conceptual foundation in the notion of the commodity. From his first brush with economic thought, in the Comments on James Mill in 1844, Marx thought it was a distorted and disturbed vision that saturated reality with commerce. In the first edition of Capital, in the 'four peculiarities', he finally showed the deep foundation of it.

The 'fourth peculiarity' is: 'the fetishism of the commodity form is more striking in the equivalent form than in the relative form of value' (Dragstedt, 59). The property of exchange value inheres in things 'only in our traffic with one another' and is 'not derived from nature' as the property of weight is, though it appears natural (loc. cit.). Physical analogies like sight involve causal relations between physical things, but commodity-hood is not a physical nature, and commodity relationships are not causal. Marx finds an analogy in the religious world, where things of our own devising give the appearance of being independent of us, and of having a life of their own in which they enter into relationships with us. 'That is the way it is in the commodity world . . . [and] this is what I call the fetishism which clings to labour-products as soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is thus inseparable from commodity-production' (Dragstedt, 60).

This particularly affects the equivalent. The exchange value of the 'relative' (the linen) becomes external to it, because the coat represents it. But with the 'equivalent' the natural thing and the social functionary are one and the same, or as Marx puts it, 'the corporeal- or natural-form of a commodity counts immediately as social form, as value-form for another commodity … it thus appears as a social natural property of a thing' (Dragstedt, 60).

#### **8.5 Fetishism**

The treatment of the equivalent in the first edition (Dragstedt, 53–60) is an imaginative logical and metaphysical analysis, and a step in explaining exchange value as a social property. It is set out under seven sub-headings. This care is necessary because the problem is delicate, and the prejudices and illusions surrounding the commodity are entrenched and persistent.

The second edition treatment (Penguin, 147–52) is incoherent, lacks detail, explanation, and organization. All the sub-headings have been removed. '20 yards of linen = 1 coat', is now called 'the value equation' (147), thus installing the first construction to the exclusion of the second, and Ricardo's LTV over the TCM. The social roles and functions played out in it are given no explanatory weight, and the reader gets no real understanding of the equivalent, or its place in the theory of the commodity. So the commodity and fetishism are not explained. Immediately after mentioning the 'value equation' Marx gets down to Ricardian quantitative considerations of 'the proportion in which the two are exchanged'.

The poor presentation in the second edition has left fetishism out of focus ever since. Even the writer who became the authority on fetishism, Lukács, could not focus it sharply enough to explore it properly. Other authors were even less sure of their footing. Sweezy relies heavily on quotations from Lukács, as if he lacked the confidence to deal with it himself, and even Lukács relies unusually heavily on quotations from Marx.11

Commodity fetishism appears, in the first edition, as the fourth of the 'four peculiarities', and is fully integrated into the TCM with the other parts: '20 yards linen = 1 coat'; the social roles things play in these relationships; the network of these relationships that forms the market; and the weird abstractions that this 'commodity world' throws up, such as abstract labour (compared by Marx to the 'abstract animal'). The theory is a coherent whole, which, once stated, illuminates all its parts.

11Sweezy, op. cit., 34–40.

This is especially true of fetishism, because the notion arises from this theoretical structure, and cannot be described without it, as can be seen in the second edition where Marx tries and fails. Even Lukács could not recover the idea with any precision from the second edition, and without the TCM the best reconstruction he manages is 'reification', which is a poor approximation telling us only that 'a relation between people takes on the character of a thing', with no account of the social role-playing to explain how this is possible and what it means.12

Imposing Ricardo's theory forced Marx to consider which bits of the TCM he can mention and which bits he must avoid. Construing '20 yards linen = 1 coat' as an equation means that the commensurability of coat and linen must be accounted for by a common property, and not by the relation of 'counting as' as in the TCM. But it also rules out any serious use of the social roles and functions, because that would imperil Ricardo's account of commodity-hood, which being naturalistic and weaker, is vulnerable in a comparison. However, he cannot explain fetishism without those social roles, so he has to present it as best he can. Hence the problems faced by Lukacs, Rubin, and Sweezy. The loss shows up in many ways. It is often said, for instance, that 'money is a social relation', which invites the economist's stock rejoinder that 'you can't buy anything with a social relation', and without the TCM there is no comeback.