About In Dreams Begin Responsibilities Yes, many people think that determinism—the view that the history of the universe is fixed, the view that everything that happens is strictly necessitated by what has already gone before, in such a way that nothing can ever happen otherwise than it does—is the real threat to free will, to ultimate moral responsibility. But the basic argument against ultimate moral responsibility works whether determinism is true or false. It’s a completely a priori argument, as philosophers like to say. That means that you can see that it is true just lying on your couch. You don’t have to get up off your couch and go outside and examine the way things are in the physical world. You don’t have to do any science. And actually, current science isn’t going to help. Ultimate moral responsibility is also ruled out by the theory of relativity. Einstein himself, in a piece written as a homage to the Indian mystical poet Rabindranath Tagore, said that “a Being endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, would smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.” Yes, but I just want to stress the word “ultimate” before “moral responsibility.” Because there’s a clear, weaker, everyday sense of “morally responsible” in which you and I and millions of other people are thoroughly morally responsible people. Well, “truly” is a flexible word—again I think “ultimately” is better—but yes: No one can be ultimately deserving of praise or blame for anything. It’s not possible. This is very very hard to swallow, but that’s how it is. Ultimately, it all comes down to luck: luck—good or bad—in being born the way we are, luck—good or bad—in what then happens to shape us. We can’t be ultimately responsible for how we are in such a way as to have absolute, buck-stopping responsibility for what we do. At the same time, it seems we can’t help believing that we do have absolute buck-stopping responsibility. In the end, and in a sense: yes. Obviously it’s wildly hard to accept. For some people I think it’s impossible to accept, given their temperament (they might not be able to make sense of their lives anymore). As I said, I can’t really accept it myself—I can’t live it all the time. If someone harmed or tortured or killed one of my children I’d feel everything almost anyone else would feel. I’d probably have intense feelings of revenge. But these feelings would fade. In the end they’re small and self-concerned. Only the grief would last. Maybe one way to put it is this: People in themselves aren’t evil, there’s no such thing as moral evil in that sense, but evil exists, great evil, and people can be carriers of great evil. You might reply, Look, if they’re carriers of evil they just are evil, face the facts. But I would have to say that your response is in the end superficial. After all, we don’t call natural disasters evil. There’s another thing to say about the Hitler case. Our sense that he must be held to be utterly responsible for what he did is both cognitive and emotional, and it usually seems to us that these two factors can’t possibly come apart. The cognitive part, the sense that it is just an absolute objective fact that he is wholly responsible in the strongest possible way, seems inseparable from the non-cognitive part, the moral nausea, the disgust, the anger, I don’t know what to call it. They seem inseparable in the way that blood is inseparable from a living body (that was Shylock’s problem). And since the non-cognitive emotional part is plainly a completely appropriate reaction it can seem that the cognitive part must be, too. Nevertheless, I think they can come apart. Many of our emotional responses can stay in place when we confront the fact that there is no ultimate moral responsibility. We don’t stop retching involuntarily when we realize that there is nothing objectively disgusting about a smell of decay. No doubt some of our emotional responses are essentially connected to belief in ultimate moral responsibility. But I think even the most emotionally intense desires for revenge and retribution, say, can be felt in a way that does not presuppose ultimate moral responsibility.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 07:34:00 +0000