Reconciling Moral Responsibility with Multiplicity in Conway’s Principles

ABSTRACT

Anne Conway’s commitment to the moral responsibility of creatures, or created beings, is seemingly in tension with her unique metaphysics. Conway is committed to individual moral responsibility. Conway insists that an innocent person ought not be punished for someone else’s sin. Interesting recent work highlights a unique aspect of Conway’s position that creatures are multiplicities: not only are creatures integrated into the larger whole of creation, but also their parts are mutually integrated into one another. The latter, which I will call ‘ontological overlap,’ renders the boundaries between creatures unclear. However, creatures must be distinct enough from each other to provide a proper subject for individual moral responsibility. This contribution suggests that Conway’s account of vital power can resolve an apparent tension between ontological overlap and individual moral responsibility and, more broadly, that Conway has a relational metaphysics of moral subjecthood.

KEYWORDS:

• Anne Conway
• moral responsiblity
• multiplicity
• metaphysics
• parthood
• powers

Acknowledgments

This paper greatly benefitted from the extensive feedback of two anonymous referees, Ruth Boeker, and Graham Clay. I had a helpful discussion of an earlier version of this paper at Carleton College and St. Olaf’s joint colloquium series. Finally, I would like to give a special thanks to Jason Decker, Dan Groll, Andrew Knoll, Anna Moltchanova, and Sue Sample for their feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. References to Conway’s Principles are to Conway (1996), The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, ed. and tr. Allison P. Coudert and Taylor Corse, hereafter cited in the text as ‘CC’, followed by page, chapter, and section number.

2. For further analysis of Conway on the multiplicity of creatures, see Jasper Reid (2020).

3. Conway imagines an interlocutor who objects that God is responsible for sin if ‘motion and being come from the same cause, God the creator, who nevertheless remains unmoved’ (CC 58; VIII.2). She replies that although the captain is not responsible for the existence of the wind, they are appropriately praised or blamed and punished according to how they use their power to direct the ship.

4. Hutton (2004) provides a thorough background on Conway’s religious, personal, and philosophical context.

5. See Hutton (1996) for an analysis of Conway’s account of universal salvation.

6. That in turn raises interesting issues concerning Conway’s modal commitments. For the purposes of this discussion, their success is at least inevitable in the sense that all creatures will succeed in the limit.

7. Thanks to Anna Moltchanova for discussion of this point.

8. See Jessica Gordon-Roth (2018) for an interpretation of Conway that has it that she vacillates between token existence monism and type monism for the created world. Emily Thomas (2020) argues that the passages that suggest vacillation can be explained away on the assumption Conway maintains priority monism, where the whole is prior to the parts. John Grey (2023) analyzes the issue of Conway’s monism with attention to considerations about moral responsibility..

9. One way to understand Conway’s remark that dust and sand are capable of love is that they are able to actualize that power when they transcend their current material form. To confirm that, consider that Conway attributes a creature’s ability to change species as that which enables ‘creatures to act and react upon each other in different ways’ (CC 32; VI.6). However, this is a complex issue that requires addressing her account of overall account of cognition.

10. Notably, vital motion is what follows from a creature’s ‘life and will’ (CC 69; IX.9).

11. Conway’s use of the term ‘instrument’ suggests that either God is the only cause, i.e., occasionalism, or all creaturely agency that generates motion is shared agency, a product of divine and creaturely coordination, i.e., concurrentism. An occasionalist interpretation of Conway’s account of causation could be developed that also preserves her commitment to creaturely moral responsibility, and I do not aim to rule out that interpretation in this discussion. Nevertheless, as a simplifying assumption, to avoid generating more puzzles about moral responsibility, I will assume that creatures make a partial causal contribution to their actions. See Alfred Freddoso (1991) for an account of occasionalism and concurrentism.

12. See Thomas (2017) for an account of Conway’s temporal holenmerism, a discussion that also provides a way to make sense of divine immanence alongside transcendence.

13. See Jacqueline Broad (2018) for insight into the temporal aspects of emanation causation, and see Christia Mercer (2012) for a contextualization of Conway’s account of causation within a history of early modern Platonism.