Duns Scotus on the metaphysics of virtue and conformity to right reason

Abstract

For Duns Scotus, facts about moral psychology are ultimately reducible to facts about ontology. The created agent has a soul which includes as formal “parts” the intellect and will; the intellect and will, of course, are the seat of qualities (e.g. thoughts and volitions, respectively) and habits (e.g. virtues) that are related to one another in various ways. One of these ways is the conformity relation. From a metaphysical base of categorical being – whether Substance, Quality/Habit, or Relation – Scotus constructs an ethical theory which complements, though in some interesting ways departs from, the Aristotelian tradition of which he is a part. In this essay, our aim is twofold: first, to reconstruct the ontological status of virtue within Scotus's overall metaphysical framework. Second, we attend to the ways in which this metaphysic of virtue places constraints on how one is to understand the conformity relation that, according to Scotus, must exist between an agent's will and right reason whenever a morally good action results.