ABSTRACT
It has long been observed by scholars that free will on Aquinas’s account is incompatible with natural necessitation (or causal determinism), since he holds that nothing outside the agent’s will itself can be an efficient cause of his volitions.1 If any bodily or mental movement is efficiently caused by forces external to the will, then that movement is not a “volition” at all. Aquinas defends Augustine’s doctrine that the will’s internal act (deciding or voluntarily withholding from decision) cannot be necessitated or compelled, even by God (ST I-II q. 6, a. 4). Aquinas does, however, allow final causes to act as sufficient conditions for volitions: he holds that the human will has a built-in and inalienable intrinsic desire for perfect beatitude (even without understanding it), which orients it towards goodness in general and which serves as its final cause. Thus unlike Duns Scotus who held that our will could choose to act for the sake of a final end that is independent of perfect happiness or eudaimonia, Aquinas was traditionally understood as denying the strict “libertarian” thesis that moral responsibility for any volition always entails being able to avoid that volition.2 Eleonore Stump contrasts Aquinas’s view with that of “Franciscans” who “suppose that free will had to be independent of the intellect as well as of external causal influence.”3 Moreover Aquinas’s Dominican followers famously clashed with certain Jesuits over his conception of providence, including his thesis that God co-causes all actions that are (in contemporary lingo) also agent-caused by the human will, or by any similar secondary (created) causal power.4
