Robert BERNASCONI

Luis de Molina’s Moralizing in the Face of an Increasingly Autonomous Colonial System

It is tempting to suppose that the Portuguese and Spanish sleepwalked into their slave-based Empire by degrees, but at various moments its basis was rigorously examined, especially from within the Salamanca School. Domingo de Soto questioned the validity of the arguments used to legitimate the Spanish Empire even before Vitoria wrote De Indiis. However, subsequent generations of the Salamanca School were left with the task of reconciling the consciences of both the colonizers and the beneficiaries of the slave trade with a system that was widely recognized as corrupt, in many of its operations unjustifiable, but by that time so well established that it seemed impossible to dismantle. Francisco Suarez, the last major philosophical representative of the Salamanca School, could criticize some of the practices of the colonizers but the “justifications” for what de Soto had been unable to justify were now so well established that they survived until the late eighteenth century largely unchallenged both by Catholics within the Iberian Peninsula and by Protestants in Northern Europe where they had been embraced, albeit from within a different philosophical framework.
    The discourse in which the Salamanca School accomplished their work was an eclectic mixture of philosophy, moral theology, and legal and economic theory, but, equally importantly, it also relied on attempts to investigate the facts. Luis de Molina, who wrote more extensively on slavery than any other member of the School did so on the basis of interviews with numerous participants involved in the trade and indeed a study of global slavery. Whereas Vitoria largely dismissed the need to investigate whether persons have been legitimately enslaved prior to purchasing them, Molina argued that buyers needed to be more scrupulous. Nevertheless, in his work condemnations of the system were combined with advice to confessors tasked to ease the wrestling consciences of individuals who had succumbed to the temptations the system offered. His ability to do so revealed the paradoxes of the institutional basis from which he wrote. He represented a religious order and an educational institution that was at one and the same time committed to another world and yet an interested beneficiary of the commercial activities that were under investigation.

Robert BERNASCONI is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies at Penn State. A collection of his essays that highlights his work on the history of the concept of race was recently published under the title Critical Philosophy of Race. Essays (Oxford University Press, 2023). He has published two books on Heidegger and one on Sartre. In addition to being the editor or co-editor of a number of collections in critical philosophy of race including Race, Miscegenation, and Hybridity (Thoemmes, 2005), Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy (Indiana, 2003), Race (Blackwell, 2001), and The Idea of Race (Hackett, 2000), he is the editor of three journals: Critical Philosophy of Race, Levinas Studies, and Eco-Ethica.