John Duns Scotus on the Role of the Moral Virtues

This dissertation examines the account of the role of moral virtue in human action put forward by John Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1308). Various issues related to Scotus’s account of moral virtue have received scholarly attention in recent years, notably the discussions in the late thirteenth century concerning the nature of human freedom and how it led to the view, adopted by Scotus, that moral virtues are habits (i.e. acquired dispositions) that pertain specifically to the faculty of free will, rather than to the human soul’s various powers of action, as some medieval philosophers maintained. The present work builds on such studies by examining how Scotus’s radical account of freedom drastically circumscribes the role that is possible for moral virtues. Scotus maintains that we are, as free rational beings, always able in principle to judge correctly what is the right action and to act freely according to that judgment; moreover, a free choice to follow right reason is sufficient for a human act to qualify as morally good, regardless of any habitual inclinations we might have or lack. Thus, while moral virtue inclines an agent to acts that would be morally good if accompanied by right reasoning, this inclination in itself has no moral character, nor does it cause the resulting act to be morally good. Scotus therefore denies that the moral virtues have an essential explanatory role in the account of how and why an action is morally good, and they do not play an essential role in his ethical theory.Ph.D