We blame the hurricane when it uproots the ancient oak, kick the bicycle for its flat tyre and shout at the Siamese cat as it chases the pigeons, yet there is no serious conjecture that the hurricane, bicycle or feline is morally blameworthy. We know them as causally responsible, partly so, for the tragedies that unfold – they help bring them about – yet they engaged no reflection, weighed no factors; they moved without reason. How different it is, we assume, with human beings.
Human beings are usually held morally responsible for what they do; hence, they are usually – and ought to be – treated differently from other worldly items, animate or inanimate. We may open the door to welcome a guest, but not, unless metaphorically or humorously, a gust of wind. We praise the skills of the tightrope walker; we neither admire nor condemn the tightrope. Tightropes – hurricanes, bicycles and cats – are not recipients of moral evaluations. They know no shame; they know no absence of shame. There are grey areas, most obviously manifest in children.
We are entering the territory of reason and freedom of action. Moral demands apply only to those who can deliberate, choose and realize responsibility for resultant actions – to moral agents, to those who can act freely. For existentialists, freedom is central. More accurately, central is their emphasis on the responsibility that we humans must accept in our doings and valuations. Existentialists do not confine their philosophizing to classrooms, tutorials or ivory towers. They live their philosophy.
Later in this chapter we confront the metaphysical question of whether we are ever free and hence ever merit moral praise or blame. First, though, we view prominent landmarks in the existentialists’ territory, better to grasp existentialism’s approach to morality.
Existentialism is a broad church: some existentialists are religious believers; many are not. Notable existentialists – more accurately, existentialism’s forerunners – are Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, both of the nineteenth century. The existentialist label was first used by the twentieth-century Gabriel Marcel, and embraced famously by Jean-Paul Sartre and his long-standing companion Simone de Beauvoir, both influential intellectuals and political activists of mid-twentieth-century France.
Existentialists highlight individual responsibility. Humans are estranged from the world, either expressly or with the estrangement submerged. The estrangement arises through the incongruity between us as embodied biology and as conscious reflective beings, aware of our embodiment, needing to interpret the world and choose how to live. There exists a tension between seeing ourselves as part of the natural whole, the order of physical causes and effects, and as separate from that whole, transcending it, making free choices. That is, humans possess, in Sartre’s terms, both facticity and transcendence. The two are intimate: we understand the factual world through our human purposes, practices and choices, features that appear to transcend the factual world of physics. Another tension arises between the individual and the community: we can rebel against the community herd of which we are part.
Existentialists are not intrinsically irrationalists. They reason about the matters above, set on understanding reality as it appears phenomenologically – as experienced in consciousness. They conclude that there is no reason for the universe; there is no reason, independent of our choices, which grounds our valuations. Camus – existentialist without label – points to how we long for reason behind the world, but the world is inscrutable, impenetrable and mysterious; there is no remedy. We are alienated not just from the physical causal world, but also from others and indeed from ourselves, from our physicality, emotions and experiences. Indeed, the poet Rilke wrote, ‘We are not very much at home in this world that we have expounded.’ Decades earlier, Novalis, an eighteenth-century German Romantic, spoke of philosophers seeking a homecoming, trying to feel at home in the world, in harmony and not alienated.
Consciousness reveals our freedom and our inescapable responsibility for handling the estrangement. Our choices and actions manifest our valuations, our valuations, our responsibility. Morality is not, however, determined by our feelings – a contrast with the next chapter’s emotivists – for we are free to interpret our feelings, to respond to things differently. We may see our lover’s behaviour, engrossed in conversation with another man, as disloyal; we experience jealousy. We may, though, see that same behaviour as compassionate; we experience admiration.
Understanding our place, or rather lack of place, in nature, existentialists encounter an ineluctable absurdity and feeling of abandonment; our responsibility cannot be shifted to others, however hard we try. Anxiety, angst, is the result – a dizziness of freedom. Nothing prevents us from jumping off a cliff. We could leap. Nothing prevents us from abandoning our family. We could walk out. Of course, we can seek to blind ourselves to the angst – to such possibilities – and we usually do.
To live authentically, eyes open, not in self-deception, we must recognize explicitly our freedom and responsibility. That realization can even be a joyful liberation. In the words of Kierkegaard, we individuals are ‘constantly in the process of becoming’, becoming aware of the existence of new possibilities for how we can be. As de Beauvoir portrays it, we are narratives on the world: we seek to construct a unity to our lives out of fragmentary episodes.
With that brief background, let us focus on Sartre’s position: there is no God; there are no moral rules that bind us; there is no human nature that determines us. To think otherwise is a self-deception. As Sartre writes:
…we have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse. We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into the world he is responsible for everything that he does.
For a human being, there is a future to be fashioned, ‘a virgin future that awaits him’. No authority can be responsible for that future other than our own authority.
The existentialist emphasis on responsibility does not, in fact, require commitment to God’s non-existence or, indeed, the non-existence of a realm of values. The emphasis on choice is as much present whether God exists, whether a realm of values exists. Suppose there is a God, suppose there is that realm: we still must choose whether to follow God’s word, whether to commit to the values. We can be defiant. We can rebel. Abraham could have dismissed God’s angel and the demand to sacrifice his son Isaac. Of course, there is a difference between saying that there are no values save those we create through our choices and saying that there are values, yet we choose whether to accept or dismiss them. In both cases, we remain responsible for our choices and actions.
Man has no function, no essential nature or purpose. To highlight this, Sartre distinguishes between being-in-itself (l’être-en-soi), where a function is determined, and being-for-itself (l’être-pour-soi), where there is consciousness, with nothing determined. An inkwell is known through what it is for: to hold ink. Its essence, its function to hold ink, precedes its existence. For man, things are reversed: existence precedes essence. I have no function or fixed nature; I am no thing. Although embodied, I am conscious, aware of my freedom – my freedom to value some things, disvalue others. To indicate that values are absent from the world, Sartre terms them ‘ideal’.
Sartre seems to view choosing as grounded in an empty will, a will, as Iris Murdoch proposes, that is footloose, isolated from belief, reason and feeling – an empty, giddy will, totally unhinged from everything. Sartre writes:
… my freedom is the unique foundation of values and nothing, absolutely nothing, justifies me in adopting this or that value, this or that scale of values. As the being by whom values exist, I am unjustifiable.
Caveats and explanations are needed to prevent this from being utterly mysterious; yet caveats and explanations detract from the alluring obscurity of Sartre’s literary expression, for example, his ‘nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being, like a worm’.
With detraction to the fore, we note the obvious truth that human beings have biological parts that operate in unchosen ways. No human being can live the way of a fish – or soar unaided to the Moon – yet, of course, a person lacks the fixity of an inkwell. We can sense, at least on the surface, how a person is free, within limits, to choose how to live. Sartre’s freedom is not meant to be arbitrary, capricious or random. Existentialist choices are not really derived ex nihilo, from nothing. We are orientated within a situation, yet our attitudes are not thereby determined.
In summary: biology constrains choices; biology does not make choices. As Sartre later puts it, ‘You can always make something out of what you’ve been made into.’ He says, for example, ‘I cannot be crippled without choosing myself as crippled.’ I choose the way in which I treat my disability – whether humiliating, something to flaunt or something to use. We can orientate.
Obscurity remains. Whether existentialist or not – how are our orientations, choices, interpretations grounded, yet also made freely? If grounded in nothing, they would appear to be random; if grounded in something outside, we should not have determined them ourselves. We are entering the free will puzzle; but before that explicit engagement, let us grasp more of Sartre’s morality.
How man lives shows what it is that he values. How man lives is his responsibility. To believe otherwise is to enter a self-deception, mauvais fois, bad faith. Here is the much-discussed waiter tale, a tale Sartre probably wrote while in Les Deux Magots in Saint-Germain, Paris:
His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the customers with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the client. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tightrope-walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the arm and hand.
The man is trying to secure himself as a being-in-itself, as a café-waiter-object, determined by its function. It is as if there is no free choice involved in his rising at dawn, no free choice in his conferring value on the rights and duties of a waiter. In Sartre’s paradoxical terminology, he is not a waiter in the mode of a being-in-itself, but is a waiter in the mode of what he is not. ‘We are what we are not and are not what we are.’
The example reminds us that our choices are indeed determined in part by our biology. If no other work is available, yes, the man has a choice, between working as a waiter or starving – that is, between living or not living at all. That choice differs somewhat from the choice between committing to a political party or gardening or philosophizing.
As observers of the waiter, we, the public, may see his behaviour as a game, yet we may connive. In bad faith, we reify ourselves as customers and him as waiter. We have expectations regarding such social roles:
there is the dance of the grocer, of the tailor, of the auctioneer, by which they endeavour to persuade their clientele that they are nothing but a grocer, an auctioneer, a tailor. A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a grocer.
The man – as waiter, grocer or tailor – may indeed be playing the part of a mechanism, really denying his freedom; he is hence in bad faith. We may similarly be in bad faith; we fix ourselves as diners.
Rather than being in bad faith, the man, the so-called waiter, could, though, be consciously seeing his actions as a game, as play, as could we when playing at being customers. Whether the example is one of bad faith therefore depends on what the waiter is up to. In fact, play for Sartre is contrasted with seriousness: man is serious when he takes himself for an object, hiding his freedom. If I insist seriously that I am not a coward, I may be implying that I am something else, something fixed – more bad faith.
Here is a question. What is so bad about bad faith, in individuals deceiving themselves, closing eyes to their human freedom, be it through identifying with a role, succumbing to how others perceive them or excusing their actions as caused by external events? Surprisingly, Sartre condemns such deception; yet on his approach, valuing good faith should have no greater objectivity than valuing bad faith – for we are free to choose our values.
Sartre’s defence is, he says, ‘grounded in logic’. The player in bad faith is hiding from reality; he acts in error. Strict consistency demands that we recognize our freedom; and with such recognition we act in good faith. We could respond that Sartre should see nothing objectively wrong in embracing error and inconsistency. Why not self-deceive, if it makes life easier? Errors of self-deception may be preferable to any veridical angsts of freedom.
THE FOLLY OF RELATIVISM
Existentialists reap accusations that they treat values as resting on choice or taste. If you feel subjectively that something is right, then it is right. That is a limiting case of moral relativism: morality is relative to the subject. Relativism is often cultural. Slavery was right for ancient Athens, it is said, but is not for us today in the West.
‘It’s all relative, isn’t it?’ No. Some argue that all truths are relative – true for him or for his culture, but not thereby true for us. That is nonsense. This book will not turn into an elephant – that is an objective truth. If an express train runs you over, you will be injured – no relative matter at all.
Relativism is often restricted to morality: if someone tortures you for fun, that is only relatively wrong; such torture could be right for that culture. Nothing more can be said by us against it. Yet if the students’ mathematics answers are wrong, is it just a relative matter that I ought to give lower grades than otherwise? Is it just a relative matter that it is wrong to torment the sick?
Stoning for adultery: In certain Islamic states, women guilty of adultery are sentenced to death by stoning. Cultural relativists may argue that such treatment is wrong in the West, but right for Islamic states. Hence, we have no right to intervene or protest. That conclusion fails to follow. If moral matters are just relative, then perhaps, relative to our society, we ought to intervene.
Toleration or respect? Moral relativists may be intending to defend toleration, but that we should be tolerant is a moral claim, not itself relative. Valuing liberty, we may insist that, morally, people ought to be allowed to live as they want so long as not harming others. Of course, there are questions: does denigrating people pass muster as harm?
We ought not to tolerate genocide, but should we tolerate those who merely declare in speech their support for it? Perhaps we should tolerate intolerable views being expressed – holocaust denial, for example – but that does not mean we should respect those views or even have much respect for the purveyors thereof. Not all views deserve respect.
Clearly then, Sartre’s existentialism is not intended as a simple nihilism of ‘anything goes’. Sartre values authenticity. At one stage, he steps even further into recognizable moral terrain, with a Kantian universalizing spin:
Once a man has seen that values depend upon himself, in that state of forsakenness he can will only one thing, and that is freedom as the foundation of all values.
In choosing, I create what I value; I therefore value for all of mankind, at least in as far as choosing shows that I value freedom. Sartre’s universalizing, as he later saw, sits uneasily with the rest of his existentialism. Recognizing my freedom means I recognize the freedom of others; but why should I value reciprocal freedom, honouring that freedom of others?
An approach by de Beauvoir casts some light. A person’s existence is degraded into an in-itself – a mere object – when bad faith succeeds. In bad faith, I let my freedom lapse into facticity; my transcendence of the physical world collapses into immanence, into the physical world. I deceive myself by objectifying myself, an object with a fixed nature – a waiter, an automaton. That is a moral fault when we consent to it in ourselves. Therefore it is a moral fault when we inflict it on others; it amounts to oppression.
We could resist that conclusion, even while accepting that bad faith degrades ourselves. We could be authentic in our commitment to oppressing others, turning them into objects. That may yet commit a deeper metaphysical error. For me to have a sense of my self, I need the presence of others. Sartre describes this vividly via ‘the Look’: I become aware of myself through the gaze of others. That is vague, but gestures at the following.
What dignity do I achieve, what status do I possess, if the sole ‘admiration’ I receive is from slaves whom I oppress, whom I treat as mere objects? I cannot be valued by a tractor, admired by a pebble or feel shame before a tree; and I cannot be respected by others, if I order them to respect me and, from fear, they move as if respectful. A human being, a being-for-itself, could not exist completely divorced from free agents or, at least, their possibility. At best, though, that shows only my need to acknowledge and respect the existence of some other free agents; it does not show why I ought not to oppress anyone at all.
Freedom is the essence of consciousness; anguish is the consciousness of freedom. Hence, we exist in anguish. We often mask that anguish, as seen, through self-deception, hiding responsibility for our choices.
In 1940s Paris, under German occupation, a student sought Sartre’s advice. The student’s lonely mother was ailing; she lived only for him. Her elder son, his brother, had been killed by the occupying force. The student felt the full weight of needing to stay with his mother. He was, though, torn. He wanted to avenge his brother’s death. At a public level, he wanted to combat the occupation. He should flee to England, join the Free French Forces and then return to fight. Yes, helping his mother would have the immediacy of making her life better. Yes, the project of fighting might end in failure, ‘vanishing like water into sand’, yet he felt the demand to avenge. The student had to choose.
The student had to choose between two courses. He sought advice; yet, on existentialist reasoning, how would any advice help? First, to which advisers should he listen? Secondly, advisers may give conflicting advice – and how do they reach their advice? Thirdly, whatever advice is given, assuming consistent, he has still to decide whether to follow it. He may decide to do his duty; but what determines his duty? He may decide to follow his gut feelings, but how does he weigh feelings?
Sartre responded, arguably unhelpfully. He offered no views on the particular considerations; any views, he seemed to think, could have no bearing on the student’s decision. He apparently simply said:
You are free, therefore choose – that is to say, invent.
Given that response, the tale is usually taken to present the world as valueless until we choose. Yet does it show that? Value judgements exist in the dilemma from the beginning. The student recognizes the evils of the occupation, the significance of his mother’s need and his perceived duty regarding his brother’s death. His dilemma arises because those recognized values compete; they are all values of significance to him. The dilemma is not as if a trivial choice between wearing a red dress and a blue. It is not to be settled by spins of a coin. He wants to make the right choice.
That there is a choice is right, but that it is a choice to be made without scope for reasoning, advice, talking through, is wrong. Discussion could have helped the student see his motives and values more clearly. That would not have made the choice for him, but he might have found himself more in tune with one way of looking, with putting his personal duty above duties of the political – or vice versa.
‘You’d face a coward in the mirror each day you stayed at home,’ he may have thought, then adding, ‘Yes, but that could be the courageous path.’ If he remained with his mother, maybe he would be judged too scared to fight; so, he needed courage to handle public humiliation. Or perhaps he needed to stand up to his mother’s tears, as he said goodbye, convinced that he must avenge his brother’s death.
In making his choice he is, in a sense, making himself. (The idea is explored in Chapter Ten.) When he sought to do what is right, he sought to do what is right for him. That does not imply that any choice made would be right so long as he felt it right. To have skulked around, helping neither his mother nor the Resistance – but to have played cards night after night – would not have been right. For him, though, it may have been right to stay with his mother; for someone else, to join the Resistance. Contrary to Sartre’s earlier injunction, to choose for him is not thereby to choose for all. It is, though, to choose without excuse. It is, as Sartre said, to create – to invent – himself.
The existence of free choice has been assumed. Moral praise and blame surely are deserved only if we possess the freedom to choose to attempt the action or not. We need therefore to take seriously the argument that all actions are causally determined by past events grounded in our nature and nurture over which we lacked ultimate control; hence no choice is free choice, no action free action. Given the circumstances, we could not have chosen otherwise than we did, so we ought not to be held morally responsible; we merit neither moral praise nor blame.
We accept people as responsible for their actions when they are the originating cause of what they do. We excuse people, when they are compelled to act by external factors: by gunmen, hypnotists or drugs. Some internal factors also excuse people: they may have a compulsive neurosis, so are blameless. In listing excusing factors, we are casually assuming that there exists a ‘true’ chooser, a true actor morally responsible when excusing factors are absent. The question becomes: should the fact (if it is one) that our actions are causally determined, being events in causal chains that stretch back before our existence, be added to the excusing list?
Our development is determined by our genetic make-up (we certainly did not choose that) and by our environment, culture, education and training; we did not initially control those. ‘But some children choose to work hard; others do not.’ Hard-working inclinations, though, are also presumably caused by genetic make-up, upbringing and environmental impingings. Just as we may be at the mercy of the gunman, the hypnosis or drugs, are we not, even more so, at the mercy of the causally deterministic world?
There seems no escape from concluding that moral praise and blame is unjustified; there is, though, one attempted escape: indeterminism. Perhaps the world is not completely deterministic. That ‘solution’ to the free will problem – that, at the micro level of quantum mechanics, indeterminism, randomness reigns – is no solution at all. Free choices are not meant to be random events that happen to us. Further, it is no help thinking of actions being partly determined, for what of the undetermined part? That part, being undetermined, leaves us adrift in random seas.
Consider a thermostat. It lacks free will. Even if we add a voice box, even if the programme contains random elements, we should not hold the thermostat responsible for what it does. The arising moral muddles are illustrated by the loutish teenagers caught by Officer Krupke; they are facing the judge. Seeking to evade responsibility for their misdeeds, the teenagers insist:
It’s our upbringing that gets us out of hand;
we can’t help it, you need to understand.
They could have added that their genes, brain structures and culture also contributed to their bad behaviour, all factors beyond their control; so, they could not possibly be morally responsible or held accountable. The judge could respond that he is terribly sorry, but given his judgemental upbringing and neurology, he cannot help but sentence them to ten years imprisonment – and hard labour.
The institution of desert, of what is deserved, of praise and blame, of our judicial systems – if requiring free will as so far understood – rests on a mistake. Our moral censures may be as inappropriate as medieval animal trials, where pigs, wolves and rats would be found guilty of misdeeds and sentenced accordingly. Praise and blame, on this view, amount at best to manipulative inputs to secure certain consequences. We select punishments, moral exhortations, prizes, if likely to generate desirable future behaviour. Hospitals and straitjackets come into play when moral evaluations and pressures are ineffective. Of course, if determinism does hold, then our desires regarding future behaviour are outside our control – as are our arguments about determinism. How logical reasoning, good reasoning, relates to neurological causes and effects in which it is grounded remains a deep metaphysical puzzle.
Let us reflect. Must we live with the sceptical conclusion that no one truly merits moral assessment? Here are two thoughts for moving forward. The first concerns lack of sense; the second proposes a different approach.
Free will, understood as ‘could have done otherwise in exactly the same circumstances’, or as requiring agents to be in ultimate control, is surely incoherent, senseless. We should no more fret about its lack of sense than fret about the lack of round squares or how to ‘blibble-blobble’ – that expression being senseless. Free will, as understood so far, can exist neither in deterministic nor indeterministic worlds. Even its logical possibility has been excluded.
If I, to act freely, must be understood as not characterized by any features ultimately derived from outside my control, then I am featureless, an existentialist nothing. The self, the ‘I’, vanishes. If I am more than nothing – with dispositions of kindness, irritability or preferences for red wine – then the sceptical challenge arises: the ‘more’ was brought about by factors outside my control. Ultimately I cannot be author of my existence; hence, I cannot be held morally responsible for anything.
For a different approach, let us turn to the everyday, where we do treat people as acting freely; that is, when they act as they want, from their convictions, for good reasons and so forth. If that is our starting point, we have the makings of a ‘compatibilist’ position – compatibilist because doing what we want, having reasons, is compatible with causal determinism. You fall into her arms because you want to – as opposed to because you tripped over the cat. In the first case, you acted freely; in the second, not. If you open the safe because you are after the cash, you act freely; if because a loaded gun is pressed against your head, you act under compulsion. In the latter case, your action is mixed: reason tells you what to do to survive, but you have no desire to aid the gunman.
The above line is far too coarse as it stands. People want to smoke; in smoking they do what they want, but they may deeply prefer to be non-smokers – so they are not really smoking freely. Their first-order desire to smoke is fulfilled, but their second-order desire, to be non-smokers, is thwarted. Free action may now be grasped as acting in accordance with second-order, or deeper-order, desires, desires that involve rationality and reflection about how we want our lives to go. We act freely when we identify what we do as in accord with how we want to make ourselves. Inevitably, there are grey areas, as we are about to see.
We know that we ought not to drink and drive, but such a duty, such rationality, is swamped by immediate desires; we succumb to more drinks. That is akrasia, weakness of will. Perhaps we should be blamed for such weakness – we could surely have resisted the swamping – yet akrasia can also be viewed as the very manifestation of lack of free will. Akrasia – often translated from the classics, unhappily so, as ‘incontinence’ – is described by Ovid thus:
Some strange power draws me on against my will. Desire persuades me one way, reason another. I see the better course and approve it; I follow the worse.
How can that weakness arise? Socrates understood it as a failure to see matters clearly. Our eyesight for distant disasters – road accidents, throat cancer – is defective. Akrasia therefore should not be viewed as voluntary; we are acting in ignorance of the horrendous possibilities of our actions. If that is taken seriously, we reach an asymmetry, one already encountered in Kant’s thinking: we act freely when doing what is right, but are always acting unfreely when doing what is wrong. In Aristotle’s terms, akrasia is a failure in the practical wisdom necessary for being virtuous. Should we be held accountable for such failure, given that we are, so to speak, sleepwalking, unable to see clearly?
That we are aware of conflicts between our desires, that we can judge between them, sometimes resisting the easy route – that we have reasons for our choices – are marks of free action, marks distinctive of most human beings, of persons. Non-human animals lack such reflective decisions. They move according to their dominant desires. Some humans, ‘wantons’ – maybe all of us, on occasion – are just driven by the net outcome of conflicting desires, as flotsam moves according to the strongest currents. Often, though, we stand fast against the currents, being true to our deepest bedrock desires and values.
Morality: without luck?
Moral luck is contradictory; surely we cannot be rightly blamed or praised for events outside our control – or can we?
What you bring about: Janet and John drive with the same degree of casual attentiveness. A child runs in front of John’s car and is killed. Luckily, no child runs in front of Janet. What resulted from John’s driving – a child killed – was outside John’s control, yet people heap blame on John: he should have been more careful. Janet receives no blame. Is that differential treatment morally justified?
Decisions – and circumstances: Janet and John possess the same character traits. They both succumb to authority, wanting an easy life. Janet lives in a peaceful country, no horrendous demands on her. John lives in a dictatorial state; he must obey orders. We blame John for taking part in, say, genocide, or helping in the gas chambers – yet Janet would have done the same. If John merits blame, then surely so does Janet. Circumstances were outside John’s control. Had he not been in Syria or Rwanda or Nazi Germany, he would have reaped no blame.
Nature and nurture: We push on further. The sort of individual you are – whether you are timid or strong, authoritarian or liberal – are surely matters of genetic or educational luck. How can it be right to blame, say, Ms Ruthless, unluckily possessed of a ruthless nasty character? She did not choose her nature and nurture. Mr Peaceful inherited a kindly character; but does he merit praise for that good fortune?
Puzzles: John regrets being a driver who killed – ‘agent regret’ – even though not his fault. His tragedy is that he killed. It was his bad luck, yet he accepts moral responsibility; after all, he killed a child.
Turning to bad luck as excusing our character, a response is: identity precedes luck and unluck. Before questions of luck arise, we must exist with a certain nature, making us who we are. We do not merit praise or blame for coming into existence. Mind you, that we exist is surely astonishing luck, be it for good or ill.
The compatibilist approach to free will has obvious problems. The truly wicked cannot help being the sort of people they are, with their deepest desires being for wickedness. We cannot help which desires we happen to have. Moral accolades received rest upon a range of bad to good fortunes – on moral luck (please see ‘Morality: without luck?’). The basic puzzle reappears: our moral judgements of people seem bereft of good grounds.
David Hume asked whether it was possible to live the life of the sceptic, of one who doubted everything. He thought not. If truly sceptical, you would have no reason to eat or drink – why think they are sensible activities? You would have no need to avoid cliff tops: who can tell whether falling will again be dangerous? The true sceptics would have short lives, unless with non-sceptical friends who tend them, steering them away from cliff tops.
Here we ask: is it possible to live a life, treating all actions as causally determined, with no one held morally responsible? Think of everyday human attitudes. We readily recognize distinctions between living creatures and objects – and between human beings and other creatures. The proposal is that we cannot live a human life without treating each other as persons, typically morally responsible. Further, we do not usually treat others as doubtfully known points of consciousness hidden behind biological masks, the human form. As Wittgenstein expresses that point:
My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.
We can see that someone is in pain or is deliberately standing in our way – that there is a person present, no mere object. In the words of Simone Weil:
If we step aside for a passer-by on the road, it is not the same thing as stepping aside to avoid a billboard; alone in our rooms, we get up, walk about, sit down again quite differently from the way we do when we have a visitor.
We respect other human beings in moving aside; they possess powers to refuse what we demand, not as a key that refuses to turn in a lock. We often need consent from others; we seek no consent from locks. That need registers awareness of others as deserving respect and fair treatment. Indeed, my treating others as slaves, as puppets, as mere physical impediments, may, as seen earlier, undermine respect for myself.
We may humiliate a person, but not a boulder or tree. We blush with embarrassment, admire someone’s skill; no cat blushes or admires. We love and forgive, feel indignant or angry, show gratitude or admiration. Those relationships matter. Do others have good will towards us – or are they malevolent? The attitudes are ‘reactive attitudes’. We could not live a human life without such reactive attitudes, without treating people as moral agents.
Reactive attitudes can be suspended. People sometimes act so bizarrely, dangerously even, that they are incapable of normal personal relationships; we may then adopt objective attitudes, neither praising nor blaming, but seeking medical treatment for those people. That is the radical case of moral suspension. Minor cases occur: their behaviour was not the result of bad will, but accidental; they escape blame. When we adopt objective attitudes to people, we still do not view them as nothing but physical objects. We still care about them and for them; we attempt to re-engage them in reactive relationships.
The proposal that we cannot conduct lives while believing in determinism and its incompatibility with moral relationships, may yet be challenged. If we were, one day, to discover physical determinants of all human behaviour, we should surely lose sight of free will and moral responsibility. Yet would – or could – our behaviour change in any significant way?
Even if I know my actions are causally determined, I still have to choose what to do next and how to react to others. Possibly, I could become so psychologically detached that I treat other people as nothing but causal sources, hindering me or providing me with pleasures – no different from the wind blowing me off course or the sun allowing me to bask – but I should still have to treat myself as a choice-making agent. Perhaps that is why we see an asymmetry between the past – totally fixed – and the future, open to deliberation; inevitably I have to make choices about the future. Further – and doubting Sartre’s ‘nothingness’ – to make sense of my actions, plans and projects, I must treat myself as something enduring, with a past, with a future, not as a nothing – otherwise I should have no reason for doing anything about myself at all.
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Whatever reality exists behind our concepts of a persisting self, of choice and free action, the demands of morality may yet be illusory. It may simply be prudent sometimes to acquiesce in so-called morality, other times to rebuff. No values exist with a justified hold over us. Or is that so?
We need to give the moral sceptics a run for their money. This takes us into considerations of meta-ethics, of what is meant by our moral terms, of how moral properties do (or do not) exist. Meta-ethics and moral scepticism can entwine, as Schopenhauer observed:
The theoretical examination of the foundation of morals is open to the quite peculiar disadvantage that it is easily regarded as an undermining thereof, which might entail the collapse of the structure itself.