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[Expo. 3.2 (2009) 223–228] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368  
doi:10.1558/expo.v3i2.223 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

Notes, INsIghts aNd Flashes

Aquinas’s Sheep: A Note on Anscombe on Freedom

BERNARD G. PRUSAK

Center for Liberal Education, Villanova University

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 pos-
sible 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 deter-
minism 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 nec-
essary 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 pro-
pose 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

[t]he truth of physical indeterminism is…indispensable if we are to 
make anything of the claim to freedom. But certainly it [that is, the 
truth of physical indeterminism] is insufficient. The physically undeter-
mined is not thereby “free.” For freedom at least involves the power of 
acting according to an idea…. (Anscombe 1981, 146)



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(By the way, elsewhere she writes that “where [a] thing wanted is not 
even supposed to exist, as when it is a future state of affairs, we have 
to speak of an idea…” [Anscombe 1963, 70].) Sullivan claims that we 
have “good grounds…for believing that non-human animals can be 
free” (Sullivan 2007, 239), and that the reason that philosophers have 
failed to recognize these grounds is that they have confounded freedom 
with moral responsibility. According to Sullivan, non-human animals 
are not morally responsible since they lack reason; but “freedom is not 
a consequence of the use of reason but is a condition for its use,” and 
so the fact that non-human animals do not enjoy ethical freedom is no 
reason to deny that they enjoy with us “a broader and more basic form 
of freedom” (Sullivan 2007, 239). I am not so sure, however, and I am 
also not sure that Anscombe would agree with this interpretation of 
her work. To put my question in brief, what is this “broader and more 
basic form of freedom”? We might also wonder whether it would be 
more accurate to say that freedom is neither a consequence nor a con-
dition of the use of reason, but rather is realized in the use of reason.

If I understand correctly, Sullivan holds that a “thoughtless brute” 
like a sheep, Aquinas’s example, may rightly be called free even if we 
agree with Aquinas that, “seeing the wolf, [the sheep] judges it a thing 
to be shunned, from a natural and not a free judgment,” where free 
means informed by reason, which Aquinas says “may follow opposite 
courses” (Aquinas 1922, 148 [ST I, q. 83, a. 1]). In other words, on 
my understanding, Sullivan agrees with Aquinas that the sheep does 
not act from free judgment informed by reason, but claims neverthe-
less that the sheep acts freely. My problem is that I do not see what the 
sheep’s freedom could be here for Sullivan, other than freedom from 
the causal chains that deterministic physics envisions as binding all 
movements. This “freedom from,” however, “certainly…is insufficient,” 
to use Anscombe’s words, to ground the claim that the sheep itself enjoys 
freedom or is free in any meaningful sense, narrow or broad. In other 
words, that an animal’s actions are free from physical determination 
does not warrant the claim that the animal itself is free or acts freely. 
Other things too, like bombs connected to Geiger counters placed 
near radioactive material (Anscombe’s example taken from Richard 
Feynman), are free from the causal chains envisioned by determin-



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istic physics (Anscombe 1981, 144-145); but we are not tempted to  
attribute freedom to such things as a power that they themselves enjoy. 
More is needed to warrant attributing freedom to something than free-
dom from physical determination. The upshot is that it strikes me that  
Anscombe’s position on freedom is in fact difficult to differentiate 
from Aquinas’s; and I doubt whether Sullivan’s distinction between 
“the form of freedom that involves the notion of moral responsibility” 
and “a broader and more basic form of freedom” can be sustained, at 
least in the way that he draws it (Sullivan 2007, 239).

The core claim of Sullivan’s paper is that “freedom in the sense of hav-
ing the ability to do otherwise is a necessary condition for intentional 
action” (Sullivan 2007, 231). Putting this claim in different words, 
he also says that, “if determinism turns out to be true, then all our 
talk about human actions and human agents…would be ‘just a highly 
convenient, nay indispensable, façon de parler’” (Sullivan 2007, 236, 
quoting Anscombe 2005, 103); and “if one were to hold that a given 
movement were necessitated by prior perceptions, beliefs, desires, and 
intentions, then…there would be nothing for the intention embodied 
in that action to explain” and it would make no sense to count that 
movement as an intentional action (Sullivan 2007, 237). The conclu-
sion that he draws from this last statement is that “if an action is inten-
tional…, it is necessary that what happened in the action could have 
been otherwise,” which is to say it must be the case that the agent is 
free. To recall the overarching argument of his paper, the next premise 
is that there are non-human animals that act intentionally (which I do 
not dispute); and the final conclusion is that these animals are free.

There are two questions to consider here, though they are difficult to 
answer apart from one another: first, whether Sullivan has Anscombe’s 
position right on the relevance of intentional action to freedom; and 
second, whether he has Anscombe right or not, whether we ought to 
agree with him that intention is in fact relevant to the question of free 
will (Anscombe reports that Wittgenstein, for what it’s worth, appeared 
to think it isn’t [Anscombe 1963, 7]). Again to reiterate, Sullivan claims 
that, “if one were to hold that a given movement were necessitated by 
prior perceptions, beliefs, desires, and intentions, then…there would 
be nothing for the intention embodied in that action to explain” and 



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it would make no sense to count that movement as an intentional  
action (Sullivan 2007, 237). This is an interesting claim, but I do not 
find warrant for it in Anscombe’s writings, and it is not obvious to me 
that it is true. Freedom and determinism may not be compatible; but 
are ascriptions of intention, say to Aquinas’s poor sheep fleeing a wolf 
so as to live another day, incompatible with our saying that the sheep 
could not do otherwise? Anscombe writes in Intention that “the term 
‘intentional’ has reference to a form of description of events” and that 
“[w]hat is essential to this form” is displayed by the application that 
we give to the question “Why?” (Anscombe 1963, 84). If we answer 
“in order to” or “because” in a sense that, in her words, “go[es] beyond 
physics,” then typically we are dealing with this form of description 
(Anscombe 1963, 85–86). The question to ask is whether using this 
“form of description” in a way that is more than just a façon de parler 
commits us to denying that the events could be explained, at least in 
principle, precisely in the terms of physics, which is to say in the terms 
of some reductive form of explanation that makes no room for free-
dom. This strikes me as a worthwhile question for further considera-
tion. To make an initial contribution, Anscombe’s remark that it is a 
“mistake to think that the relation of being done in execution of a certain 
intention, or being done intentionally, is a causal relation” suggests that 
describing an action as intentional does not rule out giving a causal 
explanation of it in different terms (Anscombe 2005, 95).1

To close, I want to consider briefly Anscombe’s oft-cited remark 
that 

there is nothing unacceptable about the idea that [the] “physical hap-
hazard” should be the only physical correlate of human freedom of 
action; and perhaps also of the voluntariness and intentionalness in 
the conduct of other animals which we do not call “free.” 

(Anscombe 1981, 146)
This remark strikes me as opaque, and at the very least in need of elabo-
ration. If I understand correctly, Sullivan takes her point to be that free 
actions may be understood as the effects of so-called non-necessitating 
causes: namely, the kind of cause, in Anscombe’s words, “that can fail 
of its effect without the intervention of anything to frustrate it” (Ans-
combe 1981, 144). Sullivan also claims that, 



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if one accepts the notion of non-necessitating causes, and [if ] one rec-
ognizes the immensely complicated nature of the processes that go on 
in the brain, [then] it is reasonable to assume that in anything like the 
causal processes leading from the light striking the eye to the contrac-
tion of muscles in pushing [a] button [in an experiment], there are 
non-necessitating causes. (Sullivan 2007, 235)

The upshot is that an action such as pushing a button upon seeing a 
particular color may be free for the reason that it didn’t need to hap-
pen, though it was not causeless: after all, some agent did it (compare 
Sullivan 2007, 233–234). My final question is whether this way of try-
ing to make sense of freedom does not extend the Cartesian tradition 
of conceiving of human beings as, in John Dupré’s words, “putative 
exceptions to an otherwise seamless web of causal connection” (Dupré 
2001, 157). Perhaps what we need to do instead, and here I follow 
Dupré, who himself draws from Anscombe, is to think out the con-
sequences of the fact that “indeterminism anywhere, by virtue of the 
variety of causal chains that might be initiated by an indeterministic 
event, is liable to infect putatively deterministic phenomena anywhere” 
(Dupré 2001, 168–169).2 One consequence is that “[c]ausal regular-
ity is a much rarer feature of the world than is generally supposed.” 
Another might be that the “solution to the problem of freedom of the 
will” lies not in finding ways that human beings escape the so-called 
“web of causal connection,” but in realizing that human beings, and 
other animals as well, “are in fact dense concentrations of causal power 
in a world where this is in short supply” (Dupré 2001, 157).

Notes

1. Anscombe explains: “[A]n intention does not have to be a distinct psychological 
state which exists either prior to or even contemporaneously with the intentional 
action whose intention it is.” In a given action, it may be the case that “there 
was…no prior formation of intention, nor is the intention a mental state that  
accompanies the action…. The teleology of conscious action is not to be ex-
plained as efficient causality by a condition, or state, or desire. Remembering that 
that was ‘what I did … for,’ does not have to involve remembering such a state” 
(Anscombe 2005, 95–96).

2. See also Dupré’s earlier and more technical account in The Disorder of Things: 
Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science (Dupré 1993, 187–193). 



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Compare Anscombe in “Causality and Determination”: “it has often been sup-
posed that [indeterministic physics] makes little difference to the assumption of mac-
roscopic determinism: as if underdeterminedness were always encapsulated in systems 
whose internal workings could be described only by statistical laws, but where the total 
upshot, and in particular the outward effect, was as near as makes no difference always 
the same…. Feynman’s example of the bomb and Geiger counter smashes this concep-
tion…” (Anscombe 1981, 146–147).

References

Anscombe, Elizabeth

1963 Intention. 2nd edn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
1981 Causality and Determination. In Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind, 

133–147. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
2005 The Causation of Action. In Human Life, Action and Ethics, ed. Mary 

Geach and Luke Gormally, 89–108. Exeter: Imprint Academic.

Aquinas, Saint Thomas

1922 Summa Theologica. Tr. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. 2nd 
edn., vol. 4. London: Burns Oates and Washbourne.

Dupré, John

1993 The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science. 
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

2001 Human Nature and the Limits of Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sullivan, Dennis

2007 Anscombe on Freedom, Animals, and the Ability to Do Otherwise. 
Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 81 (2007): 
231–240.


