The Search for the Self

Extract

There is a familiar determinist argument that runs: those of my actions that are most my own are those that express my character. But I did not make my character, it was made for me by heredity and circumstances. Those whose characters have been so made that they do good acts are lucky; those whose characters make them do bad acts are unlucky. Perhaps some people can change certain of their qualities, so that they act better after the change. But to have the desire and ability to make the change is simply something else about the way they are made -they are lucky. Actions that express one’s character may be chosen, but if one can do nothing about one’s character one surely cannot be blamed for it, or for what, given that one is like that, one will inevitably choose to do.

There is a curious defence of freewill which accepts nearly everything in this determinist argument. It concedes that character determines action and that character is made by other factors than one’s own choices. But it claims that in the exceptional situation where one’s moral duty requires an action that is incompatible with what one’s character would suggest one becomes aware that the self is more than one’s character, and the common or garden me that is my character can be over-ruled by the transcendent I which sees where duty lies.

This is an extreme example of a recurrent theme in philosophy—the identification of the self-observing self with the good rational self. In this version it is surely unacceptable because it implies that the capacity to see where duty lies and the strength of will that enables one to go through with it have nothing to do with the character that is formed by experience, the empirical character.