F. H. Bradley

“ In saying thus much we feel ourselves safe; but we are far indeed from suggesting, that the belief of the philosopher is not every whit as superior in theory, as it doubtless, so far as we can conceive it realized, might in some respects prove convenient in practice.
But, be that as it may, the doctrine of Free-will does not square with popular views; and, bearing in mind that, of ‘two great philosophies,’ when one is taken, but one remains, it is natural to think that Necessity, as the opposite of Free-will, may succeed in doing what its rival has left undone. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Yes, in despite of sophistry, and in the face of sentimentalism, with well-nigh the whole body of our self-styled enlightenment against them, our people believe to this day that punishment is inflicted for the sake of punishment; though they know no more than our philosophers themselves do, that there stand on the side of the unthinking people the two best known names of modern philosophy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And, though I consider the phrase ‘result’ inaccurate and here misleading, I do not deny that the character of a man does follow, as a result, from his natural endowment together with his environment. If his self is the negation of all its particulars, that does not mean that it is not determined by them. But I do say that, given the knowledge of a man’s innate disposition, and given the knowledge of his outward world (in the fullest possible sense) , yet you can not, from these data, deduce his character. ”

“ Just as in reading Locke and so many of the friends of Locke, we have nothing before our understanding, until, as it were, we call up before our eyes solid things in space, denting, and punching, and printing another thing called a mind, and this other thing in like manner (how, heaven knows) making marks and prints on itself also—so, in reading our determinists, the one chance of their terms bringing anything at all before the intellect, is for us to keep in sight a thing called a will, pushed and pulled by things called motives ”

“ We saw that his notion of responsibility implied, together with rationality, a capacity for acting rationally; and further, that this means to act with some regularity, to act so that your actions can be counted on, and, if counted on, then with more or less certainty predicted.
Nothing is clearer than that the plain man does not consider himself any less responsible, because it can be foretold of him that, in a given position, he is sure to do this, and will certainly not do that; that he will not insult helplessness, but respect it; not rob his employer, but protect his interests ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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 ”

“ We may have regard for whatever considerations we please—our own convenience, the good of society, the benefit of the offender; we are fools, and worse, if we fail to do so. Having once the right to punish, we may modify the punishment according to the useful and the pleasant, but these are external to the matter; they can not give us a right to punish, and nothing can do that but criminal desert. This is not a subject to waste words over: if the fact of the vulgar view is not palpable to the reader, we have no hope, and no wish, to make it so. ”

“ If there is any opinion to which the man of uncultivated morals is attached, it is the belief in the necessary connection of punishment and guilt. Punishment is punishment, only where it is deserved. We pay the penalty, because we owe it, and for no other reason; and if punishment is inflicted for any other reason whatever, than because it is merited by wrong, it is a gross immorality, a crying injustice, an abominable crime, and not what it pretends to be. ”

“ 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 ”

“ I am far from denying that the I or the self is no more than ‘collective,’ than a collection of sensations, and ideas, and emotions, and volitions swept together with one another and after one another by ‘the laws of association’; though I confess that to a mind, which is but little ‘inductive,’ and which can not view the world wholly ὰ posteriori, these things are very difficult even to picture, and altogether impossible in any way to understand. We can bring before the mind certain atoms in space; we can call them feelings, or ideas, or what we will ”

“ 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. ”

“ If, on the one side, punishment is always an end in itself, whatever else it may be, and if, on the other, whatever else it is, it never can be an end in itself, we may take it for granted that between the two there is no agreement. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ So much being settled, we must ask, Is there no prediction then which he does find objectionable? I think there is. I believe that if, at forty, our supposed plain man could be shown the calculation, made by another before his birth, of every event in his life, rationally deduced from the elements of his being, from his original natural endowment, and the complication of circumstances which in any way bore on him,—if such a thing were possible in fact, as it is conceivable in certain systems, then, I will not go so far as to say that our man would begin to doubt his responsibility ”

“ Our self means thought, and the act is the outcome and issue of our self. Let us take an instance: A man of violent disposition, accustomed to handle weapons, is insulted at table by another man. A knife is in his hand, with which he at once stabs. Is he responsible? Yes; the deed came not merely from his disposition—a man is more than his disposition; it came from his character, the habits which his acts have formed. ”

“ 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’? ”

“ But when such a theory is brought into relation with the actions of ourselves, then, speaking not merely for ourselves alone, we can say little more than that we really can see no connection between the theory and the facts we know. The phrases of one sphere lose all their meaning when applied to the other sphere. That the self in desire should have gone beyond itself, and yet not be beside itself; that the many desires should all be the desires of the self; that the self should be divided against itself in desire; that the self should from all its desires distinguish itself ”

“ But when we ask him, what is to be understood by the term ‘desert,’ then we are answered at once, that its meaning is something quite other than the ‘horrid figment’ which we believe in; or, lost in phrases, we perceive thus much, that the world we are in is certainly not that of the vulgar mind.
We must be careful here not to suffer ourselves to be led astray. The empirical origin in history, or in the individual, of the notions of justice and desert is for us altogether beside the point. ”

“ 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.’ [4]
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. ”

“ When you speak to us plainly, you have to say that you really understand a man to be free, and free in no other sense than a falling stone, or than running water. In the one case there is as little necessity as in the other, and just as much freedom. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now each of these onions is not any other onion—it may be taken by itself, as a separate individual; and yet each of these onions is a state of the rope of onions. And further, this rope of onions is aware of itself—it talks about itself and generally comports itself as if it were inseparable, and, no doubt, it really is what it calls self-conscious. But here is the beginning of delusion; for, talking about ‘self,’ we (i.e. the onions) fall into the belief that there is something there under the onions and the rope, and on looking we see there is nothing of the kind. ”

“ If the man is made by what answers to your theoretical deduction, then you can deduce him in anticipation; but if he is not, then you can not. And so with society. If a stage in history is the result of what corresponds to your intellectual putting together of conclusions from premises, then you may calculate it; but if it is not, then you can not. If the individual self and society are ‘compositions’ of that order, that a knowledge of their elements gives you, apart from experience, a knowledge of the individuals, then you can ‘compound’ them, and construe them à priori ”

“ 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. ”

“ We have imaged to ourselves a collection of points in space, and that means we see the collection itself, as covering a given area, with other spaces and collections outside of it. Are we to say that the mind is in space? ”

“ 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 imputability, 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 ”