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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
In an essay entitled “Freedom and Personality” (Philosophy, XIV, 55, July 1939) I have contended that “intelligence (or rationality) is a principle of indetermination within us.” As I find that my argument, though to myself it appears incontrovertible, has not produced conviction in some quarters where I had hoped it might be effective, I can only suppose that, presumably by my own fault, it was not stated as clearly as it should have been. This must be my excuse for returning to the subject; in doing so I shall try to be, to the best of my power, at once brief and lucid.
page 30 note 1 To put the argument into “syllogistic form” we may word it thus:
(a) Every event is a fully determinate function of antecedent events, and of antecedent events only.
(b) Every decision to act in one way rather than another is an event.
(c) Ergo, every decision to act in one way rather than in another is a fully determinate function of antecedent events and of antecedent events only.
The truth of the conclusion depends entirely on the truth of (a), and as far as I can see, no reason can be advanced for thinking (a) to be true except that it is per se notum, manifest from the nature of the case.
page 34 note 1 Any one who makes this retort is in exactly the position described by Kant when he speaks (Grundlegung, § II) of the possibility of doubting whether any single act of genuine moral worth has ever been actually performed by any man. But of course Kant's suggested doubt is meant to be “hyperbolical.” It is an exaggerated suspicion bred by painful experiences of the frequency of hypocrisy and self-deception. Kant no more meant that it is justified than Descartes that his experimental dubitatio de omnibus is justified. It is meant in both cases that the attempt to doubt everything reveals a certainty which is beyond doubt. The sceptic cannot doubt his own existence as a doubter; the cynic cannot doubt that disinterested obedience to the moral law is a duty.
page 37 note 1 I do not think that Kant's position is really affected by the difficulty (dwelt on, e.g., by Rashdall) of saying in what sense the act of the man who yields to “inclination” is free (as it must be in some sense if he is to be held morally answerable for it). We have only to bear in mind that freedom means freedom from restrictions of some kind, and that an act which is free in the sense that it is not hampered by restrictions of one kind may yet not be free in the sense of being unhampered by other restrictions. Any specifically human act, right or wrong, is free from the restriction which we commonly suppose to affect all the so-called “acts” of the “brute creation,” complete absorption in the “particular passion” of the moment. It is consciously forward-looking, and involves some contemplation of an alternative, and this is enough to make it responsible. But the act dictated by “inclination” against “practical reason” is not free from what Plato would call the domination of the “reasonable principle in the soul” by an έπτθνμία which does not originate with itself. The man whose act it is is not, in the ethical sense, dominus sui, κρεl;ττων αύτύ.