Tom Pink has been teaching moral and political philosophy for more than thirty years at King’s College London, and has done research on decision theory, moral psychology, and history of moral philosophy. He is known for books on free will and the theory of action, and for papers on ethics, political and legal theory and on the history of these subjects, especially from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. He is currently editing The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance (2026) for the Clarendon edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes.

In this interview, Tom Pink highlights the importance of scholastic metaphysics of free action as the indispensable background for understanding the turning point in modern moral and political philosophy. To understand the meaning of the critique of free will in Hobbes’ philosophy, it is thus necessary to take a long detour through what Francisco Suárez, a Spanish Jesuit, means by freedom, and to understand in particular how the latter inscribes freedom in the will understood as oriented by a specifically normative power of reason. Unlike the moderns, Hobbes and Hume in particular, who reduce the practical dimension of reason following the former or reject it following the latter, the second scholasticism provides itself with the theoretical tools to think about orienting action according to values. In the political field, this late scholasticism sees the State as having a public reason that is very different from that put forward by liberal theorists following John Rawls: distinct from the reason of individuals, this reason aims to orient public action towards common goods. Forgotten, often misunderstood and caricatured, this moral and political thinking is, according to Tom Pink, a resource for contemporary thinking about action and politics.

This interview was conducted by Luc Foisneau, in Paris, in the audiovisual centre of EHESS, 96 boulevard Raspail, on 15^th May 2018; it has been revised and completed by Tom Pink on the 4^th December 2024.

Luc Foisneau – You have been teaching moral and political philosophy at King’s College London during many years? How did you first decide to specialize in moral philosophy? Were there any particular reasons behind this choice?

Tom Pink – I was originally intended for an academic career as an historian, studying history as an undergraduate at Peterhouse, a Cambridge college that then had a considerable reputation and tradition in the subject. Students were put to work on the history of political thought, though without receiving any training in philosophy or being much encouraged to read more widely in metaphysics and ethics – a lack that has had an unfortunate effect on the so-called Cambridge school in the history of political thought. I mean you get historians of this school writing about a thinker such as Suarez without much apparent awareness of the metaphysics on which his political theory was based. They seem not to have reflected much about his Metaphysical Disputations for example – and this damages understanding of his political theory.

But I had already become interested in philosophy. A friend Adrian Cussins and I had begun discussing problems in philosophy of mind and exchanging work while still at school. While I was at Cambridge he was studying philosophy at Oxford. He was eventually to begin an academic career there working on connexionism and the philosophy of artificial intelligence. We remained in touch while university students and after the sudden death of my father in my first year at university I went through a delayed adolescent revolt – and informed the historians at Peterhouse that I was going to change subjects to study philosophy.

The area of philosophy I turned to was not moral philosophy at all, but something as far removed from history as possible – the philosophy of probability and related areas of metaphysics, especially to do with causation. These were taught at Cambridge by Hugh Mellor (1938-2020), who became my doctoral supervisor. Though later on I began to do much more historically oriented work in philosophy, and to work on moral and political philosophy, I have never lost my interest in probability and causation. Essential to understanding the moral and political theory of the scholastic tradition, on which I now write a great deal, is its basis in very distinctive and rather complex forms of causal theory, such as Suarez put forward in his Metaphysical Disputations. Equally, it is very important that Hobbes’s opposition to these theories of causation was central to the development of his rival political and ethical theory that culminated in Leviathan.

Indeed much of my present interest in moral and political theory developed out of my initial interest in causation and probability and their importance to the metaphysics and ethics of human action.

Luc Foisneau – You’ve been working quite extensively on the problem of free will. Could you just tell us a bit more on how you became interested in free will?

Tom Pink – Well, when I started in philosophy, I wasn’t interested in free will at all. I was working on rational choice theory – on decision and game theory. At that date, around 1980, many philosophers were interested in decision theory as a way of using probabilities and utilities to provide a descriptive theory of how the mind works. But it became clear to me that it was very hard to use decision theory to make sense of the way we ordinarily think about decisions. We think of a decision, not as a kind of passion or something that just happens to us, but as something we do, a kind of motivating attitude that we form actively, and that we can form actively long before we perform the action decided upon. So a decision is a very distinctive kind of action, an inner or mental higher-order action, an action we perform now to get us to perform another action later. And it’s very hard to make that conception of a decision as a genuine kind of action work in standard decision theory. Decision theory understands rational action as utility-maximising. But you cannot apply that utility-maximising model to actions of decision, because the rationality of a decision is tied not to how far it, the decision itself, maximises utility or produces goodness, but instead to justifications for the decision’s object, the action decided upon. In fact the rationality of a decision looks a bit like that of something passive, like a desire, which is also made rational by the object of the desire, what is desired, and the justifications for that object. And so decision theory tends to be forced either to treat decisions as Hobbes clearly treated them, as a kind of passion or desire that precedes and motivates action without being a genuine action itself. Or decision theory does class a decision as an action, but as utility-maximizing itself, rather as David Gauthier1 and David Lewis2 do. But then you get really absurd views of decision rationality. It becomes rational to take decisions to perform actions that are very bad and entirely lacking in justification, just to get utility from the decision itself.

So it became clear to me that this was rather strange, and very different from the medieval scholastic tradition which understands decisions as actions but also as made rational not by their own utility but by justification for their objects, the actions decided upon. For the scholastic tradition, in fact, the primary locus of action is to be found in the will, in our capacity to take decisions. Actions of the will, decisions to do things, the very actions that cannot plausibly be seen as utility-maximising, these for the medieval scholastics were the primary form of action. This scholastic account of action as located in the will was, of course, Hobbes’s target. Hobbes was completely opposed to it. And Hobbes was in a sense an ancestor of modern rational choice theory. And so I came into the problem of free will through an interest in the psychology of the will. The question was this: can action, what we do freely, occur in the will itself, as an action of decision, or does it only occur, as Hobbes supposed, as an effect of the will, in actions willed.

Luc Foisneau – This brings us to my second point, which is the connection between philosophy and its history. So could you tell us a bit more about the way you conceive of using or going back to conceptions in classical or scholastic philosophy. I’m thinking in particular of your interest in Suarez and how his philosophy could clarify our understanding of action.

Tom Pink – Suarez is called a late scholastic for a very good reason. He inherits a very lengthy tradition, which he himself recognizes as a tradition, and which he argumentatively inhabits and explores. As a modern philosopher you too can explore this tradition just as a tradition, and lot of historians of medieval and early modern philosophy have done just that. So you relate someone like Suarez to earlier traditions of commentary on Lombard’s sentences and to the newer tradition of commentary on Aquinas and so forth. You explore the tradition from the inside. And obviously I think it’s necessary and vastly interesting (and complex) to do that. But I think it’s also important to look at what I call the conceptual deep structure of the sorts of theories within the tradition that people are putting forward. So, for example, where action and the will are concerned Suarez inhabits much debated territory within the scholastic tradition between Thomism and Scotism. How far does this debate between Thomists and Scotists involve more fundamental shared assumptions, assumptions that someone like Hobbes will later challenge and abandon? What is the significance of the diversity within scholasticism and how much uniformity is there?

To answer that sort of question, you have to attend to questions of deep structure. You have, for example, to examine what fundamentally a theory of action is supposed to do. You have to examine why you get certain conceptual or theoretical assumptions about action being made in the scholastic tradition that aren’t made outside it. So I think that it’s immensely interesting to look at the scholastic tradition both as a complex and changing tradition but also as a locus of very specific assumptions that are generally shared within it, but which aren’t always identified in general terms.

Luc Foisneau – Since Hobbes is very important to your own approach to questions concerning free will, what happened to him? How does he break with the scholastic tradition? And why did this break happen when it did?

Tom Pink – The breach involved not only action and the will, but general ethical notions, ideas of law and obligation, reason and the like. Fundamental to Hobbes is a certain view of the human-animal distinction. For Hobbes that distinction does not come to very much. Humans are much more like animals metaphysically than the scholastics ever admitted. Some people say, and there’s some truth in it, that Hobbes takes elements of the scholastic tradition on the nature of animals and applies these to humans as well. By contrast, the scholastic tradition builds the morality of the self on the idea that humans are metaphysically very distinctive. By contrast to the animals, humans bear the image of God. And this involves a radical difference in kind from the animals not only in our psychological capacities and states, but also in the way that we relate to power. By power I mean a capacity to produce or prevent outcomes. Ordinary causation, the power of a brick to break a window, is one case of power, exercised by the brick when it is thrown and to which the window is subject when it breaks. Here we have one part of material nature impacting on another and producing an outcome through ordinary causal force. For the scholastics ordinary causation is not the only form of power. As humans we both exercise and are subject to special forms of power that involve our capacity for reason, that non-rational animals cannot directly exercise themselves or be directly subject to. These forms of power are importantly different from ordinary causation. They involve different power-bearers or at least different modes of exercising power. One kind of power is a power we exercise ourselves, the power of freedom. This is often understood within the scholastic tradition, by Suarez included, as a kind of efficient causation, but not the efficient causation involved in a brick breaking a window.

With a brick, the nature of the brick’s power dictates what is going to happen - how when the brick hits the window that power is going to operate. It is certainly not left up to the brick how it exercises its power, whether it breaks the window or not. Freedom is very different. The cause, the bearer of the power, which is the free agent, controls how the power is exercised, so that the operation of the power is not dictated simply by the nature of the power itself but left to its bearer. I have in freedom a power to raise my hand or lower it; and it is up to me how I exercise that power. So in freedom you’ve got a very distinctive form of efficient causation, which Suarez calls contingent causation – the power is contingent precisely because it is up to the power-bearer how it is exercised – and which he contrasts with the necessary causation exercised by bricks where the nature of the power necessitates how it is exercised. But then, beyond that, you've got what I call normative power, which is power involved in the exercise of our capacity for reason, something we possess but animals don’t. This is power to which we are subject, a force of reason that moves us to form mental states and to perform actions that are justified, that reason supports.

These normative powers involve justifications or bases of value, like truth, or goodness, veritas or bonitas, operating on us through objects of thought that they are attached to. A claim, an object of thought and a potential object of our belief, is likely true, and its likely truth exercises a power over us, to move us to believe the claim. Or we entertain in thought a potential goal of action, a potential object of decision. And this potential goal is very good, and its goodness moves us to decide on it as our goal. These normative properties, truth and goodness, move us through the objects that they are attached to – objects of thought that we consider when we deliberate about what to believe or what to decide. And they move us to form beliefs and take decisions that are justified – that are supported by reason. These normative powers of truth and goodness bypass the animals completely, or pretty much completely. There is some debate about how completely this was in the case of the animals, but let us simplify and ignore that debate. Normative power is central to how we function as capable of reason and central also to how we attain happiness, since our proper exercise of reason, our response to truth and goodness, is fundamental to our well-being.

Luc Foisneau – But these ideas of power are precisely what Hobbes criticizes in his debate with Bramhall, which, by the way, you’re editing for the Clarendon edition of the works of Thomas Hobbes. Those ideas are found in Suarez, and are still in Bishop Bramhall’s theology and in his views of liberty and necessity. Could you be a bit more specific about the way Hobbes proceeds?

Tom Pink – There are two lines of attack. One is the attack on freedom as a power. And the other is the attack on reason as involving normative power. And I think Hobbes’s approach is interestingly different in each case.

With freedom, he is extremely aggressive. He is quite clear, quite open that freedom simply doesn’t exist as a form of power, that it could never do so. Freedom is not a power that we ourselves exercise to determine for ourselves what we do. There is simply no such power. Our actions are determined and necessitated by our desires, and not freely determined by us. For Hobbes the only power in nature is ordinary causation, attaching to things like bricks to break windows, or to passions in our own head to push us into action. Here the operation of the cause is always necessitated by the nature of its power. So once I’ve got a strong enough desire to do something, that is bound to push me into doing it. Hobbes is not a modern English language compatibilist. For modern compatibilists freedom remains a form of power, but one to be understood in compatibilist terms, such as a power attaching to our desires to cause us to act as desired. Hobbes is more radical. Freedom is no longer any kind of power at all, but is instead an absence of obstacles to power. And it needn’t be peculiar to human beings, because rivers, for example, where there is causal force, the force of their current, can be free if they are not dammed up so that the force of their current can proceed unobstructed to the sea. Hobbes is extremely aggressive about this, and I think there’s more than one thing going on.

At one level there is in Hobbes a theological program, which I think is sincere and is very, very much to the forefront of the debate with Bramhall, in which Hobbes presents himself as a Protestant hero. So, Hobbes makes out, anyone who thinks that there is a power of freedom must be some sort of crypto-Catholic. And of course Bramhall is an Arminian who clearly has some respect for Suarez, something that Hobbes brings acidly to our attention. Hobbes says, “for whosoever chanceth to read Suarez his Opuscula where he writeth of Free-will, and of the concourse of God with Mans Will; shall find the greatest part, if not all that the Bishop hath urged in this Question”. This is obviously aimed to embarrass Bramhall, linking him, a Protestant Anglican, to a Spanish Jesuit. At the same time, there is, I think, a much more fundamental intellectual programme in Hobbes, aiming to change the way that law is understood.

Law involves obligation – law subjects us to obligations and duties. The late scholastic theory of law and obligation is entirely built both on the idea of freedom as a power by which we determine for ourselves what we do and on the idea of reason as subjecting us to power in normative form. Law is reason as a power to move and direct the exercise by us of our power of freedom. Indeed the function of directing a power of freedom is essential to what turns reason into genuine law. Thanks to directing freedom reason turns from being advice, that something would be a good idea, which might move you to form beliefs that aren’t within your control, into something not merely advisory but demanding, obligatory as law. Reason can become demanding only when you are free to disobey it. Only when free can you be morally responsible for following the rational directive. Only then can the directive bind you with the force of demand or obligation. Hobbes flatly denies that this is the right way to understand law and obligation. Law should just be understood as reason, of a kind, backed up by commands, as theorems of reason that you are commanded by a superior to follow. I say that Hobbes understands law in terms of reason ‘of a kind’ because though he does reject the idea of a power of reason to move us, this rejection is muffled. It is not as forthright and explicit as his rejection of a power of freedom.

When looking at reason, Hobbes abandons the scholastic theory of powers specific to rational nature. Reason no longer involves a power distinct from ordinary causation to which only rational humans can respond. Reason turns into no more than a set of theorems about how to survive, and those theorems engage a built-in desire to survive that almost all of us possess. Indeed we share this desire to survive with the non-rational animals. It is this desire and its ordinary causal force that then moves us to follow reason. Hobbes does not want entirely to abandon the idea of a directive reason, even if it no longer takes the form of a power of goodness to move us. That’s because Hobbes has very little left of a theory of normativity unless he preserves something of that idea of directive reason.

Normativity has two aspects, in my view. There is what I call the normativity of appraisal – a standard by which people are graded as better or worse. Reason obviously involves this sort of appraisal. We do grade people as reasonable or unreasonable. But we think there’s another part of normativity, which is what I call directive. This involves some capacity to direct us in a way to which we can respond; some power to move us to comply. Reason involves this too. Justifications direct us to think or want or act as justified, and our rationality involves our being apt to respond to and be moved by these justifications.

It’s very clear in the debate with Bramhall that for Hobbes the directive comes first – we have no understanding of appraisal independent of it. Specifically, Hobbes claims that we have no idea of moral goodness – of meeting a standard of moral appraisal – beyond obedience to a law of reason, that is following rational direction. So Hobbes must continue to talk of reason as directive, because that is fundamental to his normative theory, but while also avoiding the idea of a power of goodness to move us to decide on what is good. Hence the motive force now comes via ordinary causation from our desire to survive, a desire that no power of goodness ever moves us to hold but which we hold in any case.

With freedom, he’s very explicit, as I’ve said. Freedom as a power does not exist. But with reason Hobbes is slightly more nuanced. The power of reason to move the will as a form of law was explained by late scholasticism as a form of final causation. But Hobbes does not similarly say outright that final causation does not exist. Instead he ‘explains’ final causation, that is explains it away, as no more than ordinary causation involving desires internal to us, such as a desire to survive. The final cause is no longer a goal attracting us through its goodness, but involves simply ideas of external objects that engage the ordinary causal force of our desires to seek means to satisfying those desires.

Luc Foisneau – Can I just interrupt you on that because, I mean, this is a very important point. What is the relation between Hobbes’s opposition to late scholastic theories of normative power and modern theories of reason and justification like Rawls and Scanlon? Are modern philosophers who appeal in moral theory to reason and justification taking us back to late scholasticism?

Tom Pink – No I don’t think they are doing that at all. Indeed the views of modern philosophers who appeal to reason in moral theory are really those of Hobbes and Hobbes’s successor Hume, but in a way that is somewhat muffled, so that they seem to take reason more seriously than they really do. Modern moral philosophers no more believe in a power of reason to move us than did Hobbes or Hume, or at any rate, even if they describe us as responding to justifications or write of justifications as moving us, they give no account whatsoever of what kind of power is involved. They are not providing any metaphysics of normative power. If any power moves us to act it seems, for them, to be only ordinary causation, that is, a power attaching not to goodness operating on us through mental objects, but to our own psychological states. Late scholastic theories of the power of reason to move the will are just too metaphysically problematic. How can you have goodness as a form of power attaching to things that seem not really to exist, that are objects of mere thought? This is a kind of power that’s very distant from ordinary causation. The cause, the power-bearer, is a merely intentional object. And the power operates only through these objects and solely on the mind. That conception of power is simply not available in contemporary philosophy of mind. The problem of the mental in contemporary philosophy of mind is about the nature of mental states, but as ordinary causes relating in some way to physical states also as ordinary causes. Contemporary philosophers do not suppose for one moment that the intentional objects of mental states are causes too, exercising a kind of power of their own to produce those mental states. But of course, that’s precisely what’s envisaged in scholastic psychological theory.

Luc Foisneau – So late scholastic theories of reason and the good are very different. Could you relate them to the question of the common good in politics? Did scholasticism understand the common good and political normativity in equally different terms?

Tom Pink – There is a very distinctive way of thinking about the state within the scholastic tradition which you won’t find in modern political philosophy, though the scholastic way of thinking about political authority is very natural. Indeed, I think it must be the right way to think about political authority.

Scholasticism views political authority as completely discontinuous from any authority or right belonging to private individuals or private groups of individuals. Within the scholastic tradition, as in the Roman law tradition as well, states have forms of right or authority that no individual could ever possess. A clear case is the right to punish. The state has a right to punish people; but no private individual could ever have a right to punish anyone because private individuals entirely lack the authority required. Thinkers such as Suarez and Molina explicitly anticipate but equally explicitly reject Locke’s conception of a pre-political state of nature populated by individuals already in possession of a right to punish those who violate the law of nature. And this rejection of Locke’s right of private individuals to punish does not look silly at all. I mean, a lot of people would say, of course a private person has no right to punish others. Individuals just don’t possess that authority over other individuals. This denial of a private right to punish others means that the authority of the state cannot be explained as Hobbes and Locke explain it – as authority or right originally belonging to individuals but somehow transferred to or surrendered to the state. But how then are we to explain an authority to punish that is peculiar to the state, that can only arise politically?

Scholastic political theory has an answer which connects to their conception of reason as involving normative power. And the story is this. Human beings already have, just as private individuals, a natural capacity to respond to reason, that is, to a normative power of truth in relation to belief and of goodness in relation to practice and the will. But they can only really do this in relation to truth and goodness at the level of the private. Just as an individual, I have some understanding of my own interests and the interests of others privately connected with me. I can understand a good as of benefit to you or to me. But I do not have a natural understanding of the interests of a ‘complete community’ – an entire community of people with whom I have no private connexion at all – or of property as a public institution serving the interests of that complete community and its members. That understanding of a genuinely public good, the common good of a complete community, requires political institutions and is communicated through political institutions, that is through the state. Public reason involves the power of reason to move us to understand and pursue the good of a complete human community, and this power of a genuinely public reason needs to be mediated by political institutions.

We can see why for the scholastic tradition the state has certain forms of authority that individuals cannot possess. It is because only the state enables us to understand and respond to the good of a complete human community. This is the understanding required for decisions to punish people, and on which argument about why those decisions are reasonable depends, and it is just not available to pre-political humanity. Public reason for Suarez is something that moves us but which we are not very receptive to just as private individuals. This is why the Suarezian state is, as I describe it, a coercive teacher. The parts of the state that are involved in positive legal direction and punishment are all about ensuring that we are properly receptive to something of which we will not have much of understanding without the state, which is reason as it involves the good of the community. Fundamental is a story about the metaphysics of normative power and how we are receptive to normative power. This is radically different from the way public reason is understood in modern liberal political theory. Here the idea of a public reason involves no serious metaphysics of reason at all.

In modern liberal political theory, public reason is entirely available to private individuals. The notion of publicity serves instead to restrict the content of public reason to conceptions which all ‘reasonable’ individuals can be expected to share. Public reason is supposedly common property to all individuals whom we appraise as ‘reasonable’. In effect the notion of publicity is used to restrict the content of acceptable political discussion. So public reason may be held to exclude religion or a metaphysics of the good because, supposedly, those are not common property to all reasonable discussants. Reasonable people could reject these religious or metaphysical theories or disagree about them. So in liberal political theory we’re not talking about public reason as involving any responsiveness to a directive normative power at all. We are instead defining what counts as acceptable discourse in the political sphere. Indeed, the scholastic theory of public reason would likely be excluded from modern liberal public reason as so much problematic and debatable metaphysics.

Luc Foisneau – A last question: how are you going to develop those ideas? Have you got specific projects to do with understanding the state as a coercive teacher? This idea seems contrary to many forms of liberalism in political theory…

Tom Pink – I think that one very interesting figure in all this is David Hume, somebody rather misunderstood by modern political theory, especially the Rawlsian or post-Rawlsian form of that theory I think of as ‘Harvard rationalism’. ‘Harvard rationalism’ is political theory built on much verbal appeal to reason, though entirely lacking in any metaphysics of reason as a power to move us. David Hume openly says what Hobbes put in more muffled form – that there is no such thing as being moved by reason. Reason never moves us. Only psychological states that are bearers of ordinary causal power ever move us.

Many now read Hume’s scepticism about practical reason as denying that beliefs or cognitive states ever move us into action. But I don’t think Hume really rules out belief moving us into act. Desires for Hume include expectations of pain or pleasure, in this sense forms of belief. So Hume allows that beliefs do move us. What Hume is ruling out is a power of practical reason itself to move us, what the late scholastics clearly did believe in, a form of normative power, a power of goodness that can move the will and attract us into deciding to pursue goals that are good. The Humean project is to provide a theory of the normative that is entirely to do with appraisal, and that excludes a theory of normative direction. Moral standards are not standards of reason at all but are standards purely of what Hume calls merit. They are simply standards of personal admirability. And this Humean project involves political theory - a political theory that is fascinating just because, unlike much modern political theory, it is very overtly pursued without appeals to practical reason. Notions like liberty involve for Hume entirely non-rational sentiments, not values that can be rationally unpacked in any way. That’s why a lot of my work will look at the project of understanding normativity as Hume did, that is, entirely without a theory of reason, even the rather superficial theory of reason to be found in modern liberal political theory.

There is a range of positions to be explored. There is Hume’s complete reason scepticism. Then there are rationalisms. These are theories that prioritise the right over the good, that seek to understand reason without appeal to standards of moral appraisal, but also without (nowadays) a serious metaphysics of direction. And then, somewhat in the middle, there is late scholastic political and ethical theory, which does take the metaphysics of direction very seriously, but then proceeds further in some ways that are quite like Hume, putting much emphasis on the theory of normative appraisal to explain and flesh out the theory of normative direction. Suarez doesn’t think you can understand rational direction entirely prior to and independently of a theory of normative appraisal. He thinks the theory of rational direction needs to be informed by a theory of appraisal.

Modern virtue theory often thinks that obligation is one thing while virtue, moral goodness, is quite another. But late scholasticism says that the way we understand obligation as a distinctively demanding form of rational direction is precisely through its link to appraisive standards of moral good and bad.

My parents introduced me to the nature of moral obligation by telling me that ‘it would be very bad of me to hit my little sister’. They were telling me that hitting my sister was wrong, a breach of obligation – something I was demandingly directed not to do – by introducing the directive as one that it would be bad to breach, so coming also as a standard of appraisal.

So we’ve got out and out reason-sceptics (like Hume) on the one side, out and out rationalists (like Kantians) on the other, and I think scholasticism very interestingly in the middle, but with a deeply distinctive metaphysics of power or force.