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Anti-Social Determinism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Antony Flew
Antony Flew
Affiliation:
University of Reading
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Extract

The general moral decline widely perceived to be in process in both the UK and the USA is no doubt the effect of many causes. The present paper attends to only one, the de-moralization more or less unintentionally encouraged by the working of the machinery of the welfare state, and then further encouraged by a deliberate and systematic de-moralization of that machinery. It attempts to undermine a main assumption supporting that de-moralization, and thus contribute to the campaign for re-moralization waged in recent years by, among others, the Social Affairs Unit (SAU) in London and like-minded think-tanks in the USA.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 69 , Issue 267 , January 1994 , pp. 21 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1994

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References

1 See, for instance, D., Anderson and G., Dawson (eds.) Family Portraits (London: SAU, 1986);Google ScholarM., Novak (ed.) The New Consensus on Family and Welfare (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 1987);Google ScholarD., Anderson (ed.) Full Circle? Bringing up Children in the Post-Permissive Society (London: SAU, 1988),Google Scholar and D., Anderson (ed.) The Loss of Virtue: Moral Confusion and Social Disorder in Brain and America (London: SAU 1993).Google Scholar

2 Charles, MurrayLosing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984), p. 212.Google Scholar

3 Ibid., pp. 212–3; emphasis original.

4 Compare, for instance, ‘Thou Shalt Not Commit a Value Judgement’, Chapter 1 in N., Dennis and G., ErdosFamilies Without Fatherhood (London: IEA Health and Welfare Unit, 1992).Google Scholar

5 Excuses of this sort, which should in theory be available to all equally, are rarely if ever accepted for the behaviour of political opponents.

6 Growth and Inflation (London: Church Information Office, 1975), pp. 1–2. For more and more recent evidence of the decline in that church both of commitment to essentials of the traditional Christian faith and of emphasis upon individual responsibilities, compare The Loss of Virtue, pp. 211–17.Google Scholar

7 Skinner, B. F.Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York and London; Knopf and Cape, 1971 and 1972). For a critique of this work, see my A Rational Animal and Other Philosophical Essays on the Nature of Man (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), Chapter 6.Google Scholar

8 Skinner, 1971, p. 19.

9 Ibid., p. 25.

10 Wilson, J. Q., Thinking About Crime. (New York: Vintage, 1977), p. 58; emphasis original.Google Scholar

11 For more, and much more about this difference and about the peculiarities of the latter, see my Thinking About Social Thinking, (London: Harper-Collins Fontana, 1992).

12 Essays Moral, Political and Literary, edited by Miller, E. F. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1985), p. 198.Google Scholar

13 For a devastating critique of such explanations as applied to the UK, compare Christie Davies in The Loss of Virtue, pp. 3–13.Google Scholar

14 P.H., Nidditch(ed.) John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), II (xxi) 5, p. 236.Google Scholar

15 Ibid., 7, p. 237.

16 Ibid., 11, p.239. The Latin translates ‘St. Vitus' dance’.

17 For an application of these ideas to Hume's abortive search for an impression from which the idea of (physically) necessary connection might be derived, compare my ‘What Impressions of Necessity?’ in Hume Studies, XVIII 2, pp. 169–77.Google Scholar

18 For even ‘Not to choose is, in effect, to choose not to choose’. See Sartre, J.-P.Being and Nothingness, (London: Methuen, 1957), p. 481. Compare Locke, op. cit. 23, pp. 245–6.Google Scholar

19 See, for instance, his Runyon on Broadway, (London: Constable 1950).Google Scholar

20 For a consideration of the treatment of this matter in that tradition see, for instance, ‘The Terrors of Islam’ in Paul, Kurtz (ed.) Defending the Enlightenment (Buffalo, N.Y: Prometheus, 1994).Google Scholar

21 I (xxiii) 3.Google Scholar

22 Book III, Chapter 67.

23 Ibid. Chapters 88–9. Those who know of the Church of England only in its present (in more than one sense) secular decline will perhaps be surprised to learn that once upon a time its Commission on Doctrine unhesitatingly affirmed ‘that the whole course of events is under the control of God’, and appreciated that ‘logically this involves the affirmation that there is no event, and no aspect of any event, even those due to sin and so contrary to the Divine will, which falls outside the scope of his purposive activity’. See Doctrine in the Church of England (London: SPCK, 1922), p. 47.

24 Martin, LutherThe Bondage of the Will, in Rupp, E. G., Marlow, A. N., Waterson, P. S. and B., Drewery(eds. and translators) Luther and Erasmus: Freewill and Salvation (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1969), p. 139.Google Scholar

25 Summa Theologica, III Supp. xciv, 1–3. As used to be said in my day in the unhallowed other ranks of the Royal Air Force ‘F. you Jack, I'm fireproof’.

26 The Bondage of the Will, p. 138.Google Scholar

27 Ibid., p. 137.

28 Romans, IX, 18–24.Google Scholar