James Dundas, the First Lord Arniston, on the Idea of Moral Philosophy and the Concept of Will

This chapter focuses on the Scottish judge James Dundas, the first Lord Arniston, whose 313 page manuscript Idea philosophiae moralis (The idea of moral philosophy) has only recently come to light. Written in 1679, the year of Dundas’s death, the Latin manuscript, the only philosophical work he is known to have written, fits squarely within the category of Reformed orthodox scholasticism. Dundas begins in an Aristotelian spirit by expounding a concept of moral philosophy that rather closely resembles the concept that emerges from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, though Dundas believes Aristotle’s exposition to be the poorer for its not including a concept corresponding to that of the Fall. Dundas also discusses the concept of the will, with special reference to the question whether the will necessarily wills in accordance with the last judgment made in a deliberative process by practical reason, and he emerges from his discussion as a determinist who nevertheless believes that we have free will.