Aquinas’s Sheep: A Note on Anscombe on Freedom

At the beginning of his paper “Anscombe on Freedom, Animals, and the Ability to Do Otherwise,” Denis F. Sullivan differentiates Elizabeth Anscombe’s position on freedom from that of both Aquinas and the Cartesian tradition. For both Aquinas and the Cartesian tradition, Sullivan says, freedom understood as the ability to do otherwise is possible only for creatures who have minds: more precisely, for Aquinas, for creatures who act from judgment informed not merely by instinct, but by reason (ST I, q. 83, a. 1); for the Cartesian tradition, for creatures who, by virtue of being immaterial minds, somehow escape the determinism that rules matter. For these thinkers, since among creatures only human beings have minds, it follows that human beings are the only creatures who enjoy freedom. Sullivan claims that Anscombe’s position is different as she holds “that not only human beings, but also at least some thoughtless brutes are free in the sense that they have the ability to do otherwise” (Sullivan 2007, 231). According to him, her reasoning is that “freedom in the sense of having the ability to do otherwise is a necessary condition for intentional action. But animals, other than human beings, also perform intentional actions. So these animals are also free.” There are a number of interesting things to discuss here. First, I propose that we consider the meaning of freedom. In her paper “Causality and Determination,” Anscombe asserts, against the thesis that freedom and determinism are compatible, that