Can this be done? Can philosophy restore the faith in human freedom, when science seems so entirely to dispense with it? I believe that the answer is yes. But there is no greater proof of human freedom, than the vested interest in denying it; and philosophy, which persuades only by speaking softly, is unlikely to win by a show of hands.
We make choices, and carry them out; we praise and blame one another for our acts and omissions; we deliberate about the future and make up our minds. Like the animals, we have desires; but, unlike the animals, we also make choices - we can choose to do what we do not want to do, and want to do what we do not choose. All these facts seem to imply that we are free to do more than one thing, and that what we actually do is our choice, and our responsibility.
The belief in freedom seems at first sight to conflict with scientific determinism, which is the view that every event has a cause, and that every event is also determined by its cause. A determines B if B has to happen, given A. The usual argument given for determinism is that the relation between cause and effect is law-like': one event causes another only if there is a law connecting them. And laws have no exceptions. In which case, given the sum of true scientific laws, and a complete description of the universe at any one time, a complete description of the universe at any other time may be deduced. Hence the way the world is at any [98] future time is fully determined by the way the world is now. This goes for my actions too. What I shall do at any future moment is therefore inexorable, given present (and past) conditions. So how can I be free?
A very old-fashioned view of science is supposed in that account. Scientific laws do have exceptions. They tell us, as a rule, what is probable, given certain conditions. Quantum mechanics holds that even the ultimate laws of the universe must be phrased in terms of probabilities. It is therefore never true that the effect must follow, given the cause; only, at best, that it is very likely to follow.
This does not remove the problem, however. For even if the law connecting cause and effect is expressed in terms of probability, it is still the case that the effect was produced by the cause, which was produced by its cause, and so on ad infinitum. Hence an action is the result of causes which stretch back in time, to some point before the agent's own existence. His wielding the dagger was caused by movements in the muscles which were caused by impulses in the nerves which were ... Eventually we emerge from the series of causes at the other side of the human person, in a place where he is not. So what part did he play in the action, given that the conditions were in place before his birth which were to lead to it? And in what sense was he free to do otherwise?
The problem with such an argument is that it is essentially rhetorical: it is an attempt to shift the burden of proof onto those who believe in freedom. Instead of proving that we are not free, it asks us to prove that we are. But why should we do that, when it is obvious that we are free, and when we have yet to be given an argument for thinking otherwise? Hume argued that the idea of freedom arises when we attribute the consequences of an action to the agent, by way of praise and blame. There is nothing in this idea that either affirms or denies determinism, and its grounds are unaffected by the advance of science. Our problem [99] arises because we neglect to ask what we are doing, in describing an action as free. Only if we know what we are doing, will we really understand the concept: and the belief that an action, to be free, must be free from the chain of causes, results either from intellectual indolence, or from a misguided will to believe.
But what exactly are we doing, in describing an action as free? The problem of free-will is easily run together with another - the problem of the subject, and its relation to the world of objects. In a magnificent work of synthesis, Kant argued that only a 'transcendental subject' could be free, that such a subject is essentially outside nature, and that its freedom is also a form of obedience - obedience not to causal laws, but to the necessary and eternal laws of reason. He then had the task of showing how this transcendental subject could act in the realm of nature, and manifest its freedom here and now. In other words, he stumbled across another 'point of intersection of the timeless with time'. In the end, he was inclined to say, we know that we are free, since freedom is the pre-condition of all decision-making, including the decision to worry about freedom; at the same time we cannot understand this thing that we know, since the understanding stops at the threshold of the transcendental. Whatever lies beyond the threshold cannot be brought under concepts, and therefore cannot be thought. To which there is an obvious response: have you not brought it under concepts, in explaining the problem? If not, perhaps you should heed the last proposition of Wittgenstein's Tractates - That whereof we cannot speak, we must consign to silence'.
Like all attempts to say what cannot be said, Kant's takes up many pages. Its point is revealed, not in the unsayable conclusions, but in the intelligible approach to them. The first step in that approach is to put aside the word 'freedom', and look instead at the practice in which it occurs: the [100] practice of holding people to account for what they do. Imagine walking down a street, minding your own business, when suddenly confronted by a mugger. Without regard for your desires or feelings in the matter, he strikes you to the ground, removes your wallet, and walks calmly away as you nurse your wounds. If there is such a thing as a free action, then this was it. Not only do you condemn the mugger; you and others will seek to punish him, and feel anger and resentment so long as he goes free. He is responsible for your loss, for your wounds, and for your damaged peace of mind: he acted deliberately in causing your suffering, and cared for nothing but his own advantage.
Imagine a slightly different case. You have entrusted your child to your friend for the day, being called away on urgent business, and the child being too young to look after itself. Your friend, intending no harm, but drinking more than he should, leaves the child to its own devices, with the result that it strays into the road and is injured by a passing car. Nobody in this situation acted deliberately so as to cause the child's injury. But your friend was nevertheless responsible. His negligence was the key factor in the catastrophe, since by neglecting his duty, he made the accident more likely. To say that he neglected his duty is to say that there are things which he ought to have done which he left undone. You are angry and resentful; you reproach him; and lay the blame for the accident at his door.
Imagine yet another case. You have asked someone to look after your child, and he does so scrupulously, until suddenly called away by a cry of distress from the house next door. While he is absent, helping his neighbour, who would have died without his assistance, your child wanders into the roadway and is injured. You hold your friend responsible at first, are angry and reproachful; but on learning all the facts, you acknowledge that he acted rightly, in the circumstances, and is therefore not to blame.
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The three cases illustrate the idea, fundamental to all human relations, of responsibility. They show that a person can be held to account, not only for what he does deliberately, but also for the consequences of what he does not do. And they show that responsibility is mitigated by excuses, and enhanced by negligence or self-centred disregard. If you study the law of negligence, or the legal concept of 'diminished responsibility', you will see that the absolute distinction that we may be tempted to draw, between free and unfree actions, is no more than a philosophical gloss on a distinction which is not absolute at all, but a distinction of degree. Persons are the subject of a constant moral accounting, and our attitudes towards them are shaped by this. This is the heart of the social practice which gives the concept of freedom its sense.
Let us look first at ordinary personal relations: relations of familiarity, friendship and co-operation, on which our daily lives depend. If someone deliberately injures another, or negligently causes injury, the victim will feel resentment, and perhaps a desire for retribution or revenge. The first step in normal relations, however, is to reproach the person who has wronged you. He may then recognize his fault, and ask to be forgiven. Perhaps he shows a willingness to atone for it, through deliberately depriving himself for your benefit. And perhaps, at the end of this process, you are prepared to forgive him and, having done so, discover that your original feelings towards him are restored. This process is familiar to us in many guises: wrongdoing, reproach, confession, atonement and forgiveness form the stages away from and back to equilibrium in relations of friendship, co-operation and love. The Christian religion recognizes these stages as fundamental, too, in our relation to God. Only if the wrongdoer refuses to recognize his fault, do the original feelings of resentment and desire for revenge continue. For [102] now the wrongdoer is setting aside the norms of peaceful conduct, and throwing down a challenge.
To take up this challenge is to act in the name not of friendship, but of justice. Where friendship desires reconciliation, and therefore atonement, justice demands retribution, and therefore punishment: one and the same process may be viewed as either - but what makes it atonement or punishment is the intention with which it is inflicted or assumed.
Both these processes show a search for equilibrium. And both are possible only between persons, whose actions are shaped and opposed through reasoned dialogue. It is always true that I could relate to other persons as I do to objects, studying the laws of motion that govern them, and adjusting their behaviour through the application of medical and biological science. But this would be to step outside the moral dialogue, to treat the other as a mere object, and to circumvent the normal paths to equilibrium. When human beings treat others in this way, it strikes us as sinister, uncanny, even devilish. On the other hand, with certain people, moral dialogue is useless: it makes no difference to them that they inspire resentment, anger or outrage. However we treat them, they will never mend their ways - either because they do not understand the need for this, or because they are driven by impulses which they cannot control. In such cases we begin to renounce the moral dialogue; we feel entitled to treat the other as an object; entitled to apply to him our store of scientific knowledge; entitled to bypass his consent, when seeking a remedy for his bad behaviour.
The point has been made in other terms by the Oxford philosopher, Sir Peter Strawson, who argues that reactions like resentment and anger are reasonable in part because they are effective. In normal cases, we have a far more effective way of influencing people's behaviour, by responding to them in this way, than is made available by any [103] 'objective' science. Strawson suggests that the conflict between freedom and causality is not a conflict in rem, but a conflict between two kinds of attitude: the interpersonal and the scientific. Interpersonal emotion gives us a far more effective handle on the world than we could ever obtain through a science of human behaviour. But there comes a point where the interpersonal approach ceases to bring rewards. It is then that we begin to look for causes; it is then that we demote the other from person to thing - or, to revert to the Kantian language, from subject to object.
Now let us return to the idea of freedom. You can see at once that we don't actually need this word. We can say what we want to say in terms of the more flexible notions of responsibility, accountability, and excuses. These are the ideas that we employ, in order to describe people as partners in the moral dialogue. They take their sense from the practices of giving and taking reasons for action, of ascribing rights and obligations, of assessing people in the constant and ongoing dialogue which is the norm of human society.
We can now move a little further down the path towards the unsayable thing that Kant sought to say. When we 'hold someone responsible' for a state of affairs, we do not necessarily imply that his actions caused it. Nor do we hold someone responsible for everything that he deliberately does. (Excuses may erase responsibility.) The judgement of responsibility attaches an event, not to the actions of a person, but to the person himself. We are, so to speak, summoning him to judgement. And if we use the word 'cause' in such a case, it is usually in a special way - to say, not that your actions were the cause, but that you were the cause. In other words, the term 'cause' no longer links two events, but links an event to a person, so as to charge him with it.
But how is this link established? Causation seems to be neither necessary, nor sufficient. Nor does the link exist only [104] between a person and the present or past. You can take responsibility for the future, and this 'assumption' of responsibility entitles others to praise or blame you in the light of what transpires. Relations of responsibility, unlike causal relations, are also negotiable. We may, as a result of reasoned dialogue, reduce or increase your 'accountability' for an accident. The relation of the person to the event is not established at the time of the event, nor at any time in particular, but only when the case is 'brought to judgement'. Judgements of responsibility are just that - judgements, making appeal to the impartial court of reason, in which we are equal suitors for our rights. Already we may be tempted to say that the judgement of responsibility does not link objects to objects, but objects to subjects, who stand judged by their fellow subjects in another sphere.
I remarked on the fact that our attitudes to people may shift from the interpersonal to the scientific, when the first prove unrewarding. The same shift may occur in our attitude to ourselves. Consider the following dialogue:
A: What are you going to do, now that your wife has left?B has expressed a decision, and found reasons to justify it. His sincerity is proved hereafter by what he does. If he makes no effort to take up this dangerous occupation, then doubt is cast on whether he meant what he said.
B: I shall take up mountaineering.
A: Why?
B: Because it is good, when life has lost its zest, to put yourself in danger.
Suppose, however, that the dialogue proceeds as follows:
A: What are you going to do, now that your wife has left? [105]Here B has expressed no decision, but only a prediction. And he supports his prediction not with a justifying reason, but with evidence - i.e., with a reason for believing, rather than a reason for doing, something. Clearly B's attitude towards his future, in this second example, is very different from the attitude expressed in the first. He is now looking on it from outside, as though it were the future of someone else, and as though he had no part in it. In making a decision I project myself into the future, make myself accountable for it, and look on it as part of myself. Furthermore, if you ask how B knows that he will take up mountaineering, when he has decided to do so, there is no answer other than 'he has decided to do so'. His knowledge is based on nothing, since it is an immediate expression of his conscious self. If you ask, in the second case, how he knows that he will take to drink, then the answer is to be found in the evidence he uses. In the case of a prediction, he can make a mistake. In the case of a decision there is no room for mistakes, and non-performance must be explained in another way - either as insincerity, or a change of mind.
B: I expect I shall take to drink.
A: Why?
B: I seem to be made that way.
This distinction touches on the very essence of rational agency. The person who only predicts the future, but never decides, has fallen out of dialogue with others. He is drifting in the world like an object, and sees himself in just that way. Only the person who decides can take a part in moral dialogue, and only he can relate to others as persons do - not drifting beside them, but engaging with them in his feelings, as one self-conscious being engages with another. And surely, there is nothing forced in the suggestion that the person who only predicts his behaviour sees himself as an object, whereas he who decides is seeing himself as a subject. [106] We are closer still to the unsayable thing that Kant wanted to say: to the idea that I am both an object in nature, and a subject outside it, and that freedom is lost when the subject surrenders to the object.
And perhaps we can stop here, without stepping over the threshold. Perhaps it is enough to say that we can see ourselves and others in two different ways: as parts of nature, obedient to the laws of causality, or as self-conscious agents, who take responsibility for the world in which they act. But these two 'aspects' are so very different, that there will always be a problem as to how they are related, and the problem will not be less intractable than that of the relation between the timeless and time. Moreover, we can now see just what is at stake in the confrontation between science and philosophy, and how there is indeed a 'consolation of philosophy', even in the disenchanted world we live in. By philosophizing we have lifted human action out of the web of causal reasoning in which it is ensnared by science. We have discovered concepts which are indispensable to our lives as rational beings, yet which have no place at all in the scientific view of the world: concepts like person, responsibility, freedom and the subject, which shape the world in readiness for action, and which describe the way in which we appear to one another, regardless of what, from the point of view of science, we are.
It is with such concepts that the human world is formed. Our attitudes depend upon the way in which we conceptualize each other. You can feel resentment towards another only if you see him as responsible for what he does, and this means applying to him the concepts that I have been discussing in this chapter. Interpersonal attitudes like love, liking, admiration, disapproval and contempt, all depend upon this system of concepts, and to the extent that those attitudes are indispensable to us, and the foundation of happiness in this or any world, then these concepts cannot [107] be replaced. Of course, I can adopt the scientific approach to human beings as to anything else: and, as I argued in the first chapter, it is in the nature of science to sweep away appearances in favour of the underlying reality which explains them. The explanation of the facts on which our interpersonal attitudes are based would describe a world very different from the world of appearances, and one that could no longer be conceptualized in the way that we require. If the fundamental facts about John are, for me, his biological constitution, his scientific essence, his neurological organization, then I shall find it difficult to respond to him with affection, anger, love, contempt or grief. So described, he becomes mysterious to me, since those classifications do not capture the 'intentional object' of my interpersonal attitudes: the person as he is conceived.
In the last chapter I described the concept of the sacred, and the feelings which depend on it. The sense of the sacred, I suggested, derives from the fact that the meaning which we find in the human person can be found also in objects -in places, times and artefacts, in a shrine, a gathering, a place of pilgrimage or prayer. This 'encounter with the subject' in a world of objects is our 'homecoming'; it is the overcoming of the metaphysical isolation which is the lot of rational beings everywhere. Nothing in the scientific view of things forbids the experience of the sacred: science tells us only that this experience, like every other, has a natural and not a supernatural cause. Those who seek for meanings may be indifferent to causes, and those who communicate with God through prayer should be no more cut off from him by the knowledge that the world of objects does not contain him, than they are cut off from those they love by the knowledge that words, smiles and gestures are nothing but movements of the flesh. But the scientific worldview contains a fatal temptation: it invites us to regard the subject as a myth, and to see the world under one aspect alone, as a [108] world of objects. And this disenchanted world is also a world of alienation.
We should not forget that the attempt to re-create the human world through science has already been made. Marx's theory of history, and the Nazi science of race are very bad examples of science. But they licensed forms of government in which the scientific view of our condition was for the first time in power. People were seen as objects, obedient to natural laws; and their happiness was to be secured by experts, acting as the theory prescribed. The theory informed the believer that God is dead, and that with him has been extinguished the divine spark in man. Human freedom is nothing but an appearance on the face of nature; beneath it rides the same implacable causality, the same sovereign indifference, which prepares death equally and unconcernedly for all of us, and which tells us that beyond death there is nothing. The sense of the sacred warns us that there are things which cannot be touched, since to meddle with them is to open a door in the world of objects, so as to stand in the I of God. The desacralized view of the world annihilates that sense, and therefore removes the most important of our prohibitions. In describing the Nazi death-camps Hannah Arendt wrote (Eichmann in Jerusalem) of a 'banalization' of evil. It would be better to speak of a 'de-personalization', a severance of evil from the network of personal responsibility. The totalitarian system, and the extermination camp which is its most sublime expression, embody the conviction that nothing is sacred. In such a system, human life is driven underground, and the ideas of freedom and responsibility - ideas without which our picture of man as a moral subject disintegrates entirely - have no public recognition, and no place in the administrative process. If it is so easy to destroy people in such a system, it is because human life enters the public world already [109] destroyed, appearing only as an object among others, to be dealt with by experts versed in the science of man.
Even if we did not have before us the reality of the Nazi and Communist experiments, we have those works of fiction by Orwell, Huxley and Koestler, which warn us what the world must inevitably become, when humanity is surrendered to science. To see human beings as objects is not to see them as they are, but to change what they are, by erasing the appearance through which they relate to one another as persons. It is to create a new kind of creature, a depersonalized human being, in which subject and object drift apart, the first into a world of helpless dreams, the second to destruction. In a very real sense, therefore, there cannot be a science of man: there cannot be a science which explores what we are for one another, when we respond to each other as persons. In what follows we will see in more detail why that is so.
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