This chapter shows that early modern metaphysics was far more important for Pufendorf’s moral philosophy than has often been thought. In particular, it is essential to understanding Pufendorf’s theory of moral entities. This theory is often regarded as voluntarist and anti-metaphysical. Opposed to this, it has been argued, was a rationalist belief in objective and eternal moral values that was exemplified by philosophers like Leibniz. However, the main distinction for Pufendorf was not between voluntarism and rationalism, but between moral rules that were specific to a certain society because they were merely conventional, and others that were universal because they were natural, in the sense of being grounded in the physical characteristics of human nature as it had been created by God. The latter, according to Pufendorf, were necessarily true, though their necessity was hypothetical rather than absolute. Pufendorf’s intention was to turn moral philosophy into a science, which would supersede traditional Aristotelian-scholastic views that morality was concerned with the contingent circumstances of actions, and therefore incapable of ‘scientific’, that is syllogistic proof. Pufendorf’s theory of moral entities was central to this project of a moral science, which required him to provide a metaphysical foundation for these entities.

In providing a new foundation for natural law and thence political authority, Pufendorf engaged in a major and explicit reconstruction of the discipline. Scholastic natural law derived the law of nature from a prior nature held to contain norms for moral and civil conduct; for example, from a divine nature whose will imprinted the human will, or a rational nature that was supposed to guide the will, or from humanity’s supposedly sociable nature as the source of the key norm of sociality. Pufendorf’s radical intervention into this field lay in his declaration that since it had been “imposed” or instituted as a “moral entity” by God for unaccountable reasons, human nature was not itself normative, rationally or socially. Rather, as a set of given conducts and predispositions—seen most clearly humanity’s paradoxical need for co-operation in order to survive and its ineradicable proclivity to envy, malice and mutual predation—human nature supplied only the observable basis from which it was possible to deduce the natural law: that man should cultivate sociality as a disposition needed for security and social thriving. This formed the basis for political sovereignty as the unchallengeable deployment of civil power required to obtain social peace and security.