No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Moore in Ethics (1912), ch. vii, writes – if I understand him right – that our basic experience of free-will resides in our certain feeling, in regard to our past actions, that we could have acted differently if we had so chosen; more exactly, that we should have acted differently if we had so chosen, which precisely means that we could have acted differently. He adds the qualifying adverb ‘sometimes’; I think we may well say always, keeping in mind, of course, (i) that we are only concerned here with ‘actions’ proper, as contrasted with involuntary movements, twitchings, starts, fits, etc., and also with wholly habitual, routine-like movements or manipulations performed without any attention and without the slightest deliberation, and (ii) that only such actions are meant here as are within our range of physical or psycho-physical power, which is anyhow implicit in the concept of choice: there is no sense in my saying that I might here and now ‘choose’ to carry this building on my back to Paris, to dismiss the present Government or to continue writing in impeccable Japanese. However, Moore is aware of the clearly meaningful objection that ‘acting as we choose’ (within those obvious limits) would not establish the fact of free-will unless it were also the case that our choice itself is (often) free, in other words that we not only choose to act so instead of acting differently but also choose to choose so instead of choosing differently. He argues that this too is indeed (often) the case, emphasising in this context our experience of the unpredictability, even by ourselves, of our future choices (or of many or most of them). He concludes, though, on a note of doubt which shows that he is not quite sure in his own mind to have definitively disposed of the objection.
page 21 note 1 That freedom, ‘an intrinsic characteristic of the agent’, should not be based on ‘unpredictability’ (which is ‘extrinsic to the agent’) is forcefully argued by Lacey, A. R., ‘Free Will and Responsibility’, Proceedings ofthe Aristotelian Society (October 1957), p. 32Google Scholar.
page 22 note 1 See the discussion about whether actions must be preceded by decisions (acts of will) between Pears, D. F., Thomson, J. F. and Warnock, M. in Freedom and the Will, ed. by Pears, (London, 1963), esp. pp. 19–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Professor Ryle's ‘infinite regress’ argument against the necessity of decision – acts of will being themselves actions, every act of will would have to be preceded by another act of will, this again by another, and so on – is countered by M.W. with the suggestion that not every act may have to be thus preceded and that acts of will may constitute a particular class exempt from this necessity; J.F.T. rejects this distinction as subversive of the model of ‘action based on decision’ as a whole; D.P. seems to argue (more in keeping with M.W.) that between initial thinking and planning on the one hand and overt action on the other an express act of decision and ‘effort of the will’ may or may not intervene. Cf. Ewing, A. C., ‘May Can-Statements be Analysed Deterministically?’, P.A.S. (1964), p. 172Google Scholar: Some voluntary acts are preceded by specific acts of volition. My own contention is that decisions (‘acts of will’) are not in themselves actions at all (as are ‘overt’ or physical but also purely internal actions such as deliberately fixing one's attention to some object or contemplating the virtues of a person one dislikes) and are not of course preceded by ‘decisions’ to make this decision, though they invariably have their intellectual and emotive-volitive prehistory including all sorts of decisions (our choices being partly determined by previous events: Ewing, op. cit., p. 170); with Pears's account I would agree so far that acts of choice or decision can indeed be casual, unemphatic and toned-down to the point of being difficult to locate and all but imperceptible, but I would make the reservation that his vague concept of ‘(practical) thinking and planning’ obviously already includes preliminary choices and identifiable decision-like acts.
page 23 note 1 The expressive term fiat, in this context, originates to my knowledge from William James.
page 24 note 1 The scholastic concept of actus imperatvs a voluntate is endorsed as ‘the right metaphor’ by Kenny, A., Action, Emotion and Will (London, 1963), p. 238Google Scholar.
page 24 note 2 Lacey, op. cit., p. 27, justly writes: ‘I am surely as free in non-moral situations as in moral ones’ and ‘…it would be odd if conscientious action were alone in being unaffected by the agent's background’.
page 25 note 1 Skinner, R. C., ‘Freedom of Choice’, Mind (October 1963), p. 476Google Scholar. There are, I think, few attempts to defend the libertarian doctrine as admirable as Skinner's.
page 26 note 1 Cf. my paper ‘Deliberation is of Ends’ in P.A.S. (March 1962), esp. p. 272Google Scholar.
page 27 note 1 The case against decisional or volitive causality in action ha s probably been argued most subtly and insistently by Melden, A. I. in his book Free Action (London, 1961 and 1964), esp. ch. v (‘By Willing, One Does …’), pp. 43–55Google Scholar. The gist of his argument appears to be that volition cannot be the cause of action since it cannot be neatly separated from the action it is supposed to cause, i.e. individuated as an event distinct and independent of the event constituted by the action to which it necessarily refers. My objection to this, as set out in my text, is that decision, though not logically independent of the action decided upon, is de facto sufficiently distinct from t i to form another event preceding it and – in what manner is indeed an obscure question – bringing it about. I suggest that if Melden's argument were sound, the odd implication would hold that whereas a stroke of lightning setting a house on fire could be called the cause of the house's being on fire, an incendiary's act of arson could not be so called, for ‘setting fire to a house’ and ‘that house being on fire’ are somehow contained in each other or fused together. Cf. Ewing, op. cit., p. 171: ‘I cannot see any good reason for saying that choice as part of a mental state may not be a cause of a physical action’. I do not, however, deny the tendency of volition ot ‘fuse into’ action, significantly revealed by the English idiom ‘I will …’ which Fowler describes as the ‘first-person coloured future’. This meaning of ‘I will …’ (I intend or am resolved to …, an d shall do it) is also, less often, similarly expressed in German (Ich will …, and particularly Wir wollen …, in the sense of ‘It is fit, or best, for us to …, and so that is what we are going to do forthwith’).
page 29 note 1 Julia Ward Howe, Battle-Hymn of the Republic.
page 31 note 1 Professor Williams, B. A. O. in his Postscript to Freedom and the Will, ed. by Pears, (quoted above), p. 124Google Scholar emphasises the degrees and limitations of freedom of choice, particularly as dependent on the agent's true and false beliefs concerning the courses of action open to him. Light is thrown thereby on the relations, not to say transitions, between the concept of freewill as a status or constitutive attribute of man and that of ‘inner freedom’ as a distinctive quality or ‘virtue’ which quite plainly admits of an infinitude of degrees. Nevertheless, the distinction is conspicuous and ineliminable. In ordinary life, we simply assume freedom of the will, with responsibility as its corollary, in everybody not in a condition of insanity, intoxication and the like, though we may also recognise its being perhaps abnormally circumscribed by an amount of ignorance ‘extraordinary in the circumstances’. We do not praise (or in any way single out) a man for his ‘unusually free will’ or ‘highly developed freedom of choice’. Whereas, this is precisely what we do in reference to ‘inner freedom’. When we say that a man is ‘responsible for what he does’ and when we call a person ‘highly responsible’ we mean two completely different things: in the first case, that his doings are imputable to him; in the second, that he is laudably mindful of his responsibilities. ‘Responsible’ in the first sense is opposed to ‘non-responsible’; in the second sense, to ‘irresponsible’.
page 33 note 1 That is why Intention, which on the one hand tends to outrun actual performance (since this may partly or wholly fail, or even prove to be altogether impracticable), on the other hand never embraces the whole content of Action and sometimes strikingly falls short of it; and this fact also lends colour to the appearance that actions sometimes ‘grow’ out of antecedent desires and speculations without the intervention of true decision or willing (see p. 22, note) in a sort of haphazard rambling or vegetable continuity.
page 34 note 1 See Kenny, op cit., p. 88, note 1. Anscombe misleadingly writes (Intention, p. 22) that Plato's example of a master refraining from beating a slave who has deserved punishment lest he should do so from anger shows that we can choose our motives. Kenny points out that we can indeed choose our actions and so far can choose between doing something from a certain motive or not doing it (‘actualise’ a motive or not, I would say with Sir David Ross) but, having once decided to do something (from whatever motive), we cannot then on top of it choose the motive from which to do it. I submit that if Plato's model shows anything at all it is precisely this inability of ours to choose our motives as such. The master felt that he ought to exercise an act of ‘retributive justice’ but, being in a dudgeon, also felt that he could not help doing it with anger and therefore could not be sure that he would not do it from anger as well (which he considered an improper motive). None the less, Anscombe has a point in so far that through deciding our conduct we can indirectly curb or, as Joffre did in the reported case, strengthen the operation of our motives.
page 35 note 1 Cf. p. 24 n. 1.
page 36 note 1 See Melden, op. cit., ch. iv: ‘How does one raise one's arm?’
page 37 note 1 Skinner's (op. cit., p. 468) common sense is quick to notice what unsound enthusiasts and misinterpreters of freedom, such as most Existentialists, are apt to forget: ‘that we seldom concern ourselves just with making a choice, but almost always with making the best choice, whether it is best from the point of view of our own comfort or pleasure, or from the moral point of view, or from the aesthetic point of view, or from the purely practical point of view of choosing a means to achieve some particular end.’ For the view that ‘counter-suggestion’ (i.e. my doing deliberately the opposite of what I know somebody has predicted that I am going to do) fails to prove free-will, see Pears, op. cit., p. 97.
page 39 note 1 Professor Aranguren, J. L. L., Ética (Madrid, 1958), pp. 62–6 and 72Google Scholar. He borrows this basic distinction from X. Zubiri, whose disciple he professes to be. Morality as structure is inherent in man's character as an agent, morality as content represents the moral standard and man's possible conformance to it. The distinction is obviously akin to, but not identical with, that between formal and material ethics and that between ‘metaethics’ and the descriptive analysis of moral consciousness or pheno-menology of moral experience.
page 40 note 1 The concept of ‘unpredictability’ – a distinctively English idiom only translatable into other languages by some equivalent of ‘inconstancy’ or ‘capriciousness’ – bears an adverse moral sign which, however, is barely more than marginal. It plainly means something far different from ‘non-predictability’ which, taken descriptively, simply refers to free-will, and, taken evaluatively, would point to a rich and complex nature amply endowed with ‘inner freedom’. But neither is ‘unpredictability’ a synonym of ‘unreliability’. It is the attribute, not of a person whose promises cannot be trusted, but of a person whose presumable commitments, practical ‘maxims’ and policies cannot be safely built upon or expected to operate.
page 42 note 1 The expression is Professor G. P. Henderson's (see his lecture, pp. 1–19 above), meaning, unless I have misunderstood him, the presence of free-will which can always be felt in agency and made conspicuous in salient cases but which is inextricably embedded in the network of psychological determinations.
page 43 note 1 Kenny's (op. cit., p. 214), proposal to use the technical term ‘Volition’ as a portmanteau word for all emotive strivings and tendings that may issue i n ‘willing’ proper, and especially his bold attempt to make up for the absence in English of an ordinary, idiomatic form of ‘to will’ as it exists in most languages ἐΘἑλειν velle, vouloir, wollen, etc.) by introducing the ill-sounding technical term ‘to volit’, is open to manifold criticisms but reveals a deep-seated need in man to ‘integrate’ his being in certain ‘wholehearted dedications’ comprising his free-will and his psychological infrastructures alike. Paradoxes like the Christian quasi-commandments ‘Thou shalt love (God, thine enemies, etc.)’, or the feeling of ‘guilt’ for things one is not actually responsible for, or the ancient experience of ‘sin’ that ‘happens to’ the person and yet is somehow ‘sin’ and ‘soils’ him, are of course closely relevant here. So much is certain that, while – as we have seen – freedom of choice is not as such a moral category at all, moral evaluation on the other hand, as distinct from deontic moral demands, applies to many features of character and behaviour outside the range of free choice, and moral achievement clearly depends on such factors also: e.g. to a large extent, ‘fortitude’ and some other classic ‘virtues’.
page 45 note 1 In the discussion following the reading of this paper at the Royal Institute of Philosophy, a speaker (unknown to me) made the most interesting remark that in ordinary language an ‘agent’ meant somebody acting on behalf of another or of others and that something of this aspect also survived in the philosophic concept of agency. I entirely agree with that suggestion. My volitive and responsible, choosing and ‘decreeing’ or ‘policy-making’ ego is representative of the world of concerns, interests, wants, etc., compacted in my person as a whole; and in some sense also representative, in relation with these, of the macrocosmic world of facts, forces, standards, persons and institutions that surrounds me. I believe that the institutional presuppositions of ‘agency’ and ‘will’ have in fact been discovered or vaguely surmised by a number of sociologically interested authors. Cf. Mr B. Mayo's analysis of agentship in terms of ‘playing a part’, pp. 47–63 below.
page 45 note 2 Farrer, A., The Freedom of the Will (London, 1958), p. 106Google Scholar. With several other trains of thought of this pithy but somewhat diffuse book I feel to be in substantial agreement.