Ethical Studies

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CONTENTS.

Front matter

BY

F. H. BRADLEY

FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE, OXFORD

Preface

PREFACE.

THE object of this volume is not the construction of a system of Moral Philosophy. It is very far from attempting either an exhaustive or a systematic treatment of ethical questions. Nor is the Author so much as prepared to define the sphere of Moral Philosophy, to say what does fall within it and what does not.

The writer’s object in this work has been mainly critical. He sees that ethical theories rest in the end on preconceptions metaphysical and psychological. He believes that many of the fundamental ideas now current, especially in England, are confused or even false; and he has endeavoured, by the correction of some of these, at least to remove what seem obstacles to the apprehension of moral facts. These Essays are a critical discussion of some leading questions in Ethics, and are so far connected that, for the most part, they must be read in the order in which they stand.

The writer knows how much is demanded by his task. It demands an acquaintance with the facts of the world which he does not possess; and it demands that clearness of view on the main conceptions which govern our thoughts, which comes, if at all, to the finished student of metaphysic. The reader must not expect this either.

These Essays may be dogmatic and one-sided. They were produced and are published because the writer knows no English moral philosophy which does not, rightly or wrongly, seem to him to be at least as one-sided and even more dogmatic. Whatever they may be, if they bring any fresh element to the chaos of our philosophical literature they will be of use to the student.

But the ideas brought forward in these pages are not new. The source of every argument might in most cases have been given, and the reader referred to the works of one or two great men; and it is because the substance of the whole is not original that the writer has made scarcely any acknowledgments in detail. He has come forward not because what he has to say is new, but because our literature compels the belief that to the larger part of our philosophical public, and even of our philosophers, a great deal of it must be both novel and necessary.

This must be his excuse if the polemical part of his work (and too much is polemical) appears anywhere wanting in respect towards authors of repute and merit. But he thinks that he has nowhere overstepped the fair limits of controversy, a controversy into which he never would have ventured, were it not too much the fashion to take no account of views which are now more than half a century old, and the neglect of which he is convinced has done much to preclude the possibility of a solution.

Essay I.

ETHICAL STUDIES.

ESSAY I.

The Vulgar Notion of Responsibility in connection with the Theories of Free-Will and Necessity.

WHAT is not the scope of this essay? We must begin with that, for round the phrases which appear in our title there exist ‘perverse associations,’ which may lead our readers to expect, some this, and others that. And, because we think that some of these expectations will be disappointed, we will start with saying what it is that we do not propose to treat of.

The scope of this essay might have been the solution of one, or both, of two difficult problems. We might have asked what responsibility at bottom is; whether it implies necessity or freedom, and what these mean; and then we should have come to questions of abstract metaphysic. Or again, our task might have been the limitation of our accountability with reference to legal imputation, and here we should have had a juridical enquiry. But our object is not the solution of either one or the other of these questions.

What then is the end which we do set before us? It is a threefold undertaking: to ascertain first, if possible, what it is that, roughly and in general, the vulgar mean when they talk of being responsible; to ask, in the second place, whether either of the doctrines of Freedom and Necessity (as current among ourselves) agree with their notions; and, in case they do not agree, lastly to enquire in what points or respects they are incompatible with them.

And, at first sight, this undertaking may seem to the reader both easy and worthless; easy, because what every one thinks must be known by all men; and worthless, because the theories of philosophers do not stand and fall with the opinions of the people. To a more thoughtful consideration, however, it will appear to be neither.

It is not so easy to say what the people mean by their ordinary words, for this reason, that the question is not answered until it is asked; that asking is reflection, and that we reflect in general not to find the facts, but to prove our theories at the expense of them. The ready-made doctrines we bring to the work colour whatever we touch with them; and the apprehension of the vulgar mind, at first sight so easy, now seems, because we are not vulgar, to present a difficulty. And to know the signification of popular phrases is, in the second place, not worthless. Not all our philosophy professes its readiness to come into collision with ordinary morality. On the subject of responsibility this is certainly the case; the expounders of ‘Free-Will’ believe their teaching to be thoroughly at one with popular ideas, and even to be the sole expression and interpretation of them. So much does this weigh with many men, that their belief in vulgar moral accountability is the only obstacle to their full reception of Necessitarianism. And not to all of the disciples of Necessity has been given that strength of mind, which still survives in our Westminster Reviewers, and for which ‘responsibility or moral desert in the vulgar sense’ are terms which stand for ‘horrid figments of the imagination’ (West. Rev., Oct. 1873, p. 311). But, if to any philosophy what we call responsibility is not yet a figment, then it can not be without interest to know, on the one side, the conclusions of that philosophy; on the other side, the beliefs of the vulgar; and whether the two can be reconciled with one another. This is the limit of our present essay. Beyond us lie the fields of metaphysic, which the reader must remember we are, so far as possible, not to enter but merely to indicate.

So much by way of preface; what we have now to do is, first, to enter on a question of fact. What is the popular notion of responsibility? The popular notion is certainly to be found in the ordinary consciousness, in the mind of the plain or non-theoretical man, the man who lives without having or wishing for opinions of his own, as to what living is or ought to be. And, to find this plain man, where are we to go? For nowadays, when all have opinions, and too many also practice of their own; when every man knows better, and does worse, than his father before him; when to be enlightened is to be possessed by some wretched theory, which is our own just so far as it separates us from others; and to be cultivated is to be aware that doctrine means narrowness, that all truths are so true that any truth must be false; when ‘young pilgrims,’ at their outset, are ‘spoiled by the sophistry’ of shallow moralities, and the fruit of life rots as it ripens—amid all this ‘progress of the species’ the plain man is by no means so common as he once was, or at least is said to have been. And so, if we want a moral sense that has not yet been adulterated, we must not be afraid to leave enlightenment behind us. We must go to the vulgar for vulgar morality, and there what we lose in refinement we perhaps are likely to gain in integrity.

Betaking ourselves, therefore, to the uneducated man, let us find from him, if we can, what lies at the bottom of his notion of moral responsibility.

What in his mind is to be morally responsible? We see in it at once the idea of a man’s appearing to answer. He answers for what he has done, or (which we need not separately consider) has neglected and left undone. And the tribunal is a moral tribunal; it is the court of conscience, imagined as a judge, divine or human, external or internal. It is not necessarily implied that the man does answer for all or any of his acts; but it is implied that he might have to answer, that he is liable to be called upon—in one word (the meaning of which, we must remember, we perhaps do not know), it is right that he should be subject to the moral tribunal; or the moral tribunal has a right over him, to call him before it, with reference to all or any of his deeds.

He must answer, if called on, for all his deeds. There is no question of lying here; and, without lying, he can disown none of his acts—nothing which in his heart or his will has ever been suffered to come into being. They are all his, they are part of his substance; he can not put them on one side, and himself on the other, and say, ‘It is not mine; I never did it.’ What he ever at any time has done, that he is now; and, when his name is called, nothing, which has ever been his, can be absent from that which answers to the name. In this (real or supposed) juridical sphere the familiar saying of Agathon,

μόνου γὰρ αὐτοῦ καὶ θεὸς στερίσκεται, ἀγένητα ποιεῖν ἅσσ᾽ ἂν ᾖ πεπραγμένα.

is as inexorably true, as it is false when we pass into a higher region, where imputation of guilt is as meaningless, as even the Westminster Review would have it be.

And he must account for all. But to give an account to a tribunal means to have one’s reckoning settled. It implies that, when the tribunal has done with us, we do not remain, if we were so before, either debtors or creditors. We pay what we owe; or we have that paid to us which is our due, which is owed to us (what we deserve). Further, because the court is no civil court between man and man, that which is owed to us is what we pay (alas for the figments of the unenlightened mind). In short, there is but one way to settle accounts; and that way is punishment, which is due to us, and therefore is assigned to us.

Hence, when the late Mr. Mill said, ‘Responsibility means punishment,’ what he had in his mind was the vulgar notion, though he expressed it incorrectly, unless on the supposition that all must necessarily transgress. What is really true for the ordinary consciousness; what it clings to, and will not let go; what marks unmistakeably, by its absence, a ‘philosophical’ or a ‘debauched’ morality, is the necessary connection between responsibility and liability to punishment, between punishment and desert, or the finding of guiltiness before the law of the moral tribunal. For practical purposes we need make no distinction between responsibility, or accountability, and liability to punishment. Where you have the one, there (in the mind of the vulgar) you have the other; and where you have not the one, there you can not have the other. And, we may add, the theory which will explain the one, in its ordinary sense, will also explain the other; and the theory which fails in the one, fails also in the other; and the doctrine which conflicts with popular belief as to one, does so also with regard to the other.

So far we have seen that subjection to a moral tribunal lies at the bottom of our answering for our deeds. The vulgar understand that we answer; that we answer not for everything, but only for what is ours; or, in other words, for what can be imputed to us. If now we can say what is commonly presupposed by , we shall have accomplished the first part of our undertaking, by the discovery of what responsibility means for the people. And at this point again we must repeat our caution to the reader, not to expect from us either law or systematic metaphysics; and further to leave out of sight the slow historical evolution of the idea in question. We have one thing to do, and one only, at present—to find what lies in the mind of the ordinary man.

Now the first condition of the possibility of my guiltiness, or of my becoming a subject for moral imputation, is my self-sameness; I must be throughout one identical person. We do say, ‘He is not the same man that he was,’ but always in another sense, to signify that the character or disposition of the person is altered. We never mean by it, ‘He is not the same person,’ strictly; and, if that were our meaning, then we (the non-theoretical) should also believe, as a consequence, that the present person could not rightly be made to answer for what (not his self, but) another self had done. If, when we say, ‘I did it,’ the I is not to be the one I, distinct from all other I’s; or if the one I, now here, is not the same I with the I, whose act the deed was, then there can be no question whatever but that the ordinary notion of responsibility disappears.

In the first place, then, I must be the very same person to whom the deed belonged; and, in the second place, it must have belonged to me—it must have been mine. What then is it which makes a deed mine? The question has been often discussed, and it is not easy to answer it with scientific accuracy; but here we are concerned simply with the leading features of the ordinary notion. And the first of these is, that we must have an act, and not something which can not be called by that name. The deed must issue from my will; in Aristotle’s language, the must be in myself. Where I am forced, there I do nothing. I am not an agent at all, or in any way responsible. Where compulsion exists, there my will, and with it accountability, does not exist. So far the ordinary consciousness is clear, and on this point we must not press it further. To fix the limits of compulsion; to say where force ends, and where will begins; to find the conditions, under which we may say, ‘There was no possibility of volition, and there could have been none’ — is no easy matter, and fortunately one which does not concern us. [See more, Note A.]

Not only must the deed be an act, and come from the man without compulsion, but, in the second place, the doer must be supposed intelligent; he must know the particular circumstances of the case. (Τὸ ἑκόυσιον δόξειεν ἂν εἴναι οὗ ή ὰρχη ἐν αὐτῷ εἰδότι τὰ καθ' ἕκαστα ἐν οἶς ἡ πρᾶξις). If the man is ignorant, and if it was not his duty to know (for, supposing that to be his duty, the act, done in ignorance, is imputed to the will through the ignorance itself, which is criminally imputable), then the deed is not his act. A certain amount of intelligence, or ‘sense,’ is thus a condition of responsibility. No one who does not possess a certain minimum of general intelligence can be considered a responsible being; and under this head come imbecile persons, and, to a certain extent, young children. Further, the person whose intellect is eclipsed for a time—such eclipse being not attributable to himself—can not be made accountable for anything. He can say, and say truly, ‘I was not myself;’ for he means by his self an intelligent will.

Thirdly, responsibility implies a moral agent. No one is accountable, who is not capable of knowing (not, who does not know) the moral quality of his acts. Wherever we can not presume upon a capacity for apprehending (not, an actual apprehension of) moral distinctions, in such cases, for example, as those of young children and some madmen, there is, and there can be, no responsibility, because there exists no moral will. Incapacity, however, must not be imputable to act or wilful omission.

No more than the above is, I believe, contained in the popular creed. There are points which that creed has never encountered, and others again where historical developement has, to some extent, been the cause of divergences.

If we asked the plain man, What is an act? he could not possibly tell us what he meant by it. The problem, In what does an act consist? has never come home to his mind. To some extent we shall see the opinions of that mind, when we see (as we shall) what are not its opinions. For the present we may say, that what seems to lie at the bottom of its notion is this, that an act translates mere thoughts into corresponding external existence; that, by the mediation of the body, it carries what was only in the mind into the world outside the mind, in such a way that the changes thereby produced in the outer world are, on the other side, alterations in itself; and that in that quality they all form part of, and are all for ever preserved in, the self.

And there are points again, where ordinary morality shows divergences of opinion. In the absence of intelligence and moral capacity responsibility can not exist. A beast or an idiot is not accountable. But the vulgar could not tell us beforehand the amount of sense which is required, and, even in particular cases, would often be found to disagree amongst themselves. If we asked again about the relation of act to intent, we should find little more than confusion. What consequences are, and what are not, contained in the act itself? and how far are they contained? What, in such cases, is the degree of moral responsibility? Does a criminal state (e.g., drunkenness) make a man accountable for what he does in that state? and, if so, to what degree? How far, again, does a wrong act, done for an object innocent in itself, make the doer responsible for consequences issuing contrary to his intention? With regard to such points we should find a sterner and a softer view. One section would emphasize the act, and the other the (actual or possible) intention. The one sees crime committed, and is prone to neglect the mind of the doer; while the other is always ready to narrow the field of criminality, to see incapacity rather than guilt, and to make absence of crime in the intent carry its quality into the act.

To resume then; According to vulgar notions, a man must act himself, be now the same man who acted, have been himself at the time of the act, have had sense enough to know what he was doing, and to know good from bad. In addition, where ignorance is wrong, not to have known does not remove accountability, though the degree of it may be doubtful. And everything said of commission applies equally well to omission or negligence.

We have found roughly what the ordinary man means by responsibility; and this was the first task we undertook. We pass to the second, to see whether, and how far, the current theories of Freedom and Necessity (better, Indeterminism and Determinism) are consistent with his beliefs.

Let us first take the theory which goes by the name of the Freewill doctrine, and which exists apparently for the purpose of saving moral accountability. We have to ask, Is it compatible with the ordinary notions on the subject?

This doctrine, we are told, is the only one which asserts Freedom, and without liberty responsibility can not exist. And this sounds well: if we are not free to do as we will, then (on this point the plain man is clear) we can not be responsible. ‘We must have liberty to act according to our choice:’ is this the theory? ‘No, more than that; for that,’ we shall be told, ‘is not near enough. Not only must you be free to do what you will, but also you must have liberty to choose what you will to do. It must be your doing, that you will to do this thing, and not rather that thing; and, if it is not your doing, then you are not responsible.’

So far, I believe, most persons would agree that the doctrine has not gone beyond a fair interpretation of common consciousness. On the whole I think this is so, if we except perhaps a class of acts we have mentioned above, sudden so-called ‘instinctive’ actions. For if responsibility must imply choice, and if it can be maintained that no alternatives, in these cases, came before the mind at all, that all reflection, and therefore all choice, was absent—then, on that showing, we should not in these cases be accountable; and hence, as a consequence, the free-will doctrine would come into collision with the vulgar mind, which holds that a man can act freely without exercising choice.

Let us pass by this, however, as a point which we need not discuss, and, on the whole, we are still at one with ordinary notions. To proceed,—we are free to choose, but what does that mean? ‘It means,’ will be the answer, ‘that our choice is not necessitated by motives; that to will and to desire are different in kind; that there is a gap between them, and that no desire, or complication of desires, carries with it a forcing or compelling power over our volitions. My will is myself, and myself is superior to my desires, and exercises over them an independent faculty of choice, wherein lies freedom and with it responsibility.’ And all this again, in the main, does not appear contrary to ordinary beliefs, unless it implies that we are able to act altogether in the absence, and independent of, desire; and that seems certainly a curious idea, though we need not stop to consider it here.

But it is not right that we should learn the teaching of Freewill, as the opposite (real or supposed) of Necessitarianism, because as yet we do not know what the latter is. We must therefore ask, not what the Free-will theory is not, but what it is. What is then liberty of choice? ‘Self-determination. I determine myself to this or that course.’ Does that mean that I make myself do the act, or merely that my acts all issue from my will? ‘Making is not the word, and very much more is implied than the latter. You are the uncaused cause of your particular volitions.’ But does not what I am come from my disposition, my education, my habits? ‘In this case certainly not. The ego in volition is not a result, and is not an effect, but a cause simply; and of this fact we have a certain and intuitive knowledge.’ Or, if we express the answer in a different metaphysical language, it amounts to this: ‘The I is an universal, which has the power to abstract from all its particulars, and to suspend itself over them, before in choice it takes any one of them into itself, so as to realize that one, and itself thereby. This I, in the act of “I will,” is the self, as pure I, which is superior to all its contents, desires, &c., and descends into them only by its own libertas arbitrii.’

We have stated the doctrine in its clearest form, without troubling ourselves to keep too closely to our English expositors. That to a large extent it rightly expresses indubitable facts, the thoughtful reader will perceive. But we are not to ask, Is it true, and if so, how far true? but to find, if we can, how far it agrees with responsibility as commonly accepted. And so, reflecting on the theory, we see that, in the main, it is only the denial of the opposite theory. It is positive, so far as it asserts the self to be more than a collection of particulars, desires, &c., and to be necessarily concerned in the actions which are imputed to it. And so far the doctrine agrees well enough with common ideas. But the chief bearing of its conclusion is merely negative; and here, as we shall see, it comes into sharp collision with vulgar notions of responsibility.

In this bearing, Free-will means Non-determinism. The will is not determined to act by anything else; and, further, it is not determined to act by anything at all. Self-determination means that the self, the universal, may realize itself by and in this, that, and the other particular; but it also implies that there is no reason why it should identify itself with this one, rather than with that one; there is no rational connection between the two sides; there is nothing in the self which brings this, and not that, act out of it. Turn it as we will, the libertas arbitrii is no more at last than contingentia arbitrii. Freedom means chance; you are free, because there is no reason which will account for your particular acts, because no one in the world, not even yourself, can possibly say what you will, or will not, do next. You are ‘accountable,’ in short, because you are a wholly ‘unaccountable’ creature.

We can not escape this conclusion. If we always can do anything, or nothing, under any circumstances, or merely if, of given alternatives, we can always choose either, then it is always possible that any act should come from any man. If there is no real, no rational connection between the character and the actions (as the upholder of ‘Freedom’ does not deny there is between the actions and the character), then, use any phrases we please, what it comes to is this, that volitions are contingent. In short, the irrational connection, which the Free-will doctrine fled from in the shape of external necessity, it has succeeded only in reasserting in the shape of chance.

The theory was to save responsibility. It saves it thus. A man is responsible, because there was no reason why he should have done one thing, rather than another thing. And that man, and only that man, is responsible, concerning whom it is impossible for any one, even himself, to know what in the world he will be doing next; possible only to know what his actions are, when once they are done, and to know that they might have been the diametrical opposite. So far is such an account from saving responsibility (as we commonly understand it), that it annihilates the very conditions of it. It is the description of a person, who is not responsible, who (if he is anything) is idiotic.

The doctrine of Indeterminism asserts that the actions are in no case the result of a given character, in a given position. The self, or the will, of Indeterminism is not the man, not the character at all, but the mere characterless abstraction, which is ‘free,’ because it is indifferent. It has been well called ‘a will which wills nothing.’

But here we have not to investigate the doctrine, but to bring it into contact with ordinary life. Let us suppose a man of good character, innocent of theoretical reflections. Our apostle of Freedom would assure him of his responsibility, and our plain man would welcome and emphasize the statement. Our apostle would inform him, that the secret of man’s accountability was in his possession. He would be received with attention, though perhaps not belief. He might go on to say that a man was responsible, because he always had liberty of choice; and so far he might be followed. But, when he advanced, and began to explain that such freedom of choice must mean, that, before a man acted, it was never certain how he would act, then, I think, he might get for an answer, ‘that depends on what sort of man he is.’ Perhaps at this point he might appeal to his hearer’s consciousness, and put it to him, whether he was not aware that, on opportunities rising for the foulest crimes, he could not only do these acts if he would, but also that it was quite possible, in every case, that he should do them. Such a question, if asked, would be answered, I doubt not, by an indignant negative; and should a similar suggestion be made with respect to a friend or relation, the reply might not confine itself to words. What sayings in life are more common than, ‘You might have known me better. I never could have done such a thing.’ ‘It was impossible for me to act so, and you ought to have known that nothing could have made me’?

We have seen that responsibility (on the usual understanding of it) can only exist in a moral agent. And, if it be true of any man, that his actions are matters of chance, and his will in a state of equilibrium disturbed by contingency, then I think that the question, whether such a being is a moral agent, is a question answered, as soon as raised. And, if this is so, then, with the best of intentions, (such good intentions are the ruin of thinking) the saviours of accountability have failed to save it. They may have held their own against the enemy, and borne in triumph their ark from the contest. But what is brought out of the battle is a very different thing from that which went in, or, perhaps, which never was there at all.