  In moral psychology, Buridan appears to effect a compromise between two rival views on the relation between the will and the intellect: the intellectualist or naturalist tradition associated with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, according to which the will is always subordinate to the intellect, and the voluntarist tradition of Augustine and Franciscan thinkers such as Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, which held that the will is sometimes capable of acting autonomously. Buridan's apparent compromise is to argue (with the intellectualists) that human happiness ultimately consists in an intellectual act, “the perfect apprehension of God”, rather than in a volitional act such as perfectly willing or perfectly loving God (QNE X.5: 213rb), although he emphasizes (with the voluntarists) the role of the will as a self-determining power in achieving that end. The compromise turns on Buridan's innovative conception of free choice, which develops Albert the Great's notion that certainty admits of  degrees (see Saarinen 1993, 161–93).  The idea is that even if the will lacks the power to choose evil as such, it is still able to defer its choice and do nothing if the goodness of one of the alternatives presented to it is unclear or uncertain. Of course, given our poor epistemic position in this life, it almost always has this power because it is almost always possible to doubt the goodness of a proposed course of action. The compromise is only apparent, however, because it turns out that the will's act of deferment is possible only if “the intellect would judge it to be good to consider the matter further” (QNE III.5:  44va).[55]  This claim, together with his assumptions that the will can only choose non-optimally through ignorance or impediment (QNE III.3–5; 9), places deferment squarely within the jurisdiction of the intellect, which must weigh the relative goodness of different possible courses of action, including deferment. It is not the case that the will can choose to defer regardless of what the intellect decides, or that the will can choose to defer even if the intellect has judged deferment to be less good than some other course of action. Accordingly, if this is a compromise between the intellectualists and the voluntarists, it is a disingenuous one. It is more likely that Buridan simply appropriated voluntarist terminology to express what is otherwise a straightforwardly intellectualist account of the will, perhaps to dispel the cloud of heterodoxy which had surrounded intellectualist moral psychology since the Condemnation of  1277.[56]