O, now for ever

Farewell the tranquil mind!

Farewell content!

Othello, Act, III, Scene 3

In his great tragedy, Othello, Shakespeare achieves a very penetrating phenomenological analysis of responsibility. When Othello utters the above words a turning point has been reached in the drama. Othello voluntarily and deliberately decides that he is going to entertain doubts about the fidelity of his beloved wife, Desdemona. He also realizes full well, and adverts to the fact, that in so doing he is bidding farewell to all of the happiness and glory he has known and deliberately decides to do it anyway, coûte que coûte. What is interesting about this in terms of the related problems of determinism, freedom and responsibility is the conscious and deliberate way in which he takes responsibility for his acts. He sees the consequences of what he is doing clearly, indeed he goes on in the long paragraph which follows to enumerate in detail all of the things that he is forfeiting in so doing, and he decides to do it anyway. In short, he assumes the full responsibility for his acts.

The reason why this is so interesting is because it contrasts so markedly with the pervasive moral attitude of our society in which the dominant tendency is a more or less total denial of responsibility for anything. That such a denial of responsibility should come about is not at all surprising since many philosophers, social scientists, and especially psychologists, regard man as a purely material being, and nothing else. If he is purely material, then he is as determined in his actions as the stone to fall or water to boil at 100⁰ C. And further, if he is totally determined because he is a purely material being, then he is not free and certainly not responsible for his actions. But how did we arrive at the moral and metaphysical vision of man which robs him of his spiritual dimension, of the nobility of moral responsibility, and reduces him to a purely material stimulus-response mechanism?

SCIENCE AND DETERMINISM

As early as the seventeenth century, Descartes in his Meditations was laying the groundwork for determinism. In Descartes' world all things, at least material things, were explainable in causal terms. The material universe was like a giant machine, and as such could be explained by mechanical laws. His world view of the material universe was thus both mechanistic and deterministic--although he did allow that there is, in the case of man at least, another realm, that of thought. Thus he maintained that there are two realms, the physical and the psychological, and that they are not only distinct but indeed opposed to one another. In his dualistic schema the laws which govern the material world are deterministic and mechanistic, although he still maintained freedom for the spiritual realm. In his view, only man among all the animals has a mental life. Other animals are mere mechanisms. With the advent of Darwin and Darwinism in the nineteenth century this view of the radical difference between man with a mental and spiritual life which differentiated him from the other animals suffered a severe setback. Man came to be seen as much more closely related to the other animals; eventually all essential differences would be obliterated, and he would be seen as a purely material being comme les autres.

Added to this in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was the monumental work of Sigmund Freud who developed a psychological theory according to which all mental occurrences, even those of seemingly the most trivial sort, are as strictly determined as are any physical phenomena.⁽²¹⁸⁾ Freud postulated unconscious mechanisms that give rise to dreams and neurotic symptoms, and he offered causal explanations of such trivia as slips of the tongue and pen. Nothing escaped a causal explanation. In this way he ushered in a new era in psychology in which psychological phenomena were explained by laws every bit as deterministic as Newtonian mechanics. So-called "free" choices could be explained on the basis of strictly deterministic and mechanistic law. Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth it seemed that the universe and all its elements, man and his psychic life included, could be explained on a strictly deterministic basis of mechanistic laws.

From this brief survey a causal chain appears operative from Descartes' dualistic metaphysics of man in the seventeenth century to the twentieth century determinism of Freud, for Freud offered not only explanations of psychological phenomena but an even more radical metaphysics of man than Descartes had attempted. In Freud's metaphysics of man, man is reduced to a purely material being; like other material beings he is explainable in terms of strictly deterministic causal laws. Following this view many philosophers argue that since man's so called "free will" and "free choices" can be explained on the basis of causal law then free will is a mere myth, and so also is moral responsibility.⁽²¹⁹⁾ Professors John Hospers and Paul Edwards argue, for example, that since actions proceed from character and since character is formed even before we have any choices about things, therefore, we are not free to do actions or not.⁽²²⁰⁾ They proceed from a character which is as fixed as poured concrete is to its mold, And hence we cannot be held responsible any more than a machine can be that stamps labels on cans. thus he writes in "Free Will end Psychoanalysis:

. . . everyone has been molded by influences which in large measure at least determine his present behavior; he is literally the product of these influences, stemming from periods prior to his "years of discretion," giving him a host of character traits that he cannot change. . . . What if even the degree of will power available to him in shaping his habits . . . is a factor over which he has no control? What are we to say of this kind of "freedom?" Is it not rather like the freedom of the machine to stamp labels on cans when it has been devised for just that purpose?⁽²²¹⁾

What effect will this deterministic vision of man have on responsibility? As Hospers sees it man is merely a "victim" who has no control over his actions. He is the helpless plaything of deeply buried, dark interior forces beyond his control. Again he writes in, "What Means This Freedom?"

The poor victim is not conscious of the inner forces that exact from him this ghastly toll; he battles, he schemes, he revels in pseudo-aggression, he is miserable, but he does not know what works within him to produce these catastrophic acts of crime. His aggressive actions are the wriggling of a worm on a fisherman's hook. And if this is so, it seems difficult to say any longer, "He is responsible."⁽²²²⁾

Thus all responsibility is removed from man for his actions. They are merely the products of deeply buried drives and desires which were formed before man had any control of them, and they now lie beyond his control. Rand Hospers notes that "we must admit that we are ultimately the kind of sons we are because of conditions occurring outside of us, over which we had no control."⁽²²³⁾ Hospers clearly wishes to connect this deterministic explanation of our behavior to an outright denial that there is any such thing as "right" and "wrong" in human behavior, and any such thing as "responsibility." Thus he concludes his article "What Means This Freedom?" by stating:

"Right" and "wrong" which apply only to actions, have no meaning here either. I suspect that the same is true of responsibility", for now that we have recalled often forgotten facts about our being the product of outside forces, we must ask in all seriousness what would be added by saying that we are not responsible for our own characters and temperaments. What would it mean even? . . . Instead of saying that it is false that we are responsible for our own characters, I should prefer to say that the utterance is meaningless.⁽²²⁴⁾

In the final analysis this type of deterministic vision of man must inevitably lead to a fatalism of a most pessimistic sort. Instead of our life being subject to our own freely determined direction and rational control, the course of our Life is whimsical, "the "luck of the draw," as gamblers would put it. This final point is accepted unblinkingly by Hospers.

. . . whether or not we have personality disturbances,

whether or not we have the ability to overcome deficiencies of early environment, is like the answer to the question whether or not we shall be struck down by a dread disease: "it's all a matter of luck."⁽²²⁵⁾

Could any view of life be more depressing than this kind of fatalistic pessimism?

But perhaps it might be thought what Hospers represents an idiosyncratic exception in contemporary thought. Such, unfortunately, is not at all the case. Thus among the "hard determinists" Paul Edwards,⁽²²⁶⁾ who shares Hosper's views, counts Jonathan Edwards, Anthony Collins, Holbach, Priestly, Robert Owen, Schopenhauer, Freud, and of course B.F. Skinner and the whole school of neo-behaviorists who take their lead from his inspiration.

Thus far we have seen that the tendency, starting in the seventeenth century with Descartes, followed closely by Newton, was to regard the material universe as a kind of giant machine, governed by, and explainable by, mechanistic laws. The universe was no cosmic lottery ruled by chance. Rather, thanks were seen as caused, and the causes determined the effects. Even Einstein in the twentieth century expresses this point of view in his famous remark "God does not play dice with the universe." Everything in the universe is explainable by causal laws.

This was part of the elan of seventeenth century rationalism which believed that everything in the universe could be explained by causal laws. As we have seen, Descartes had retained a spiritual realm of thought, the cogito, which was separate and diametrically opposed to matter, or res. But in this scheme of things man became a res cogitans, a thinking thing. It was a short step from this point for Darwin to reduce man simply to a purely material being, totally explainable in terms of causal laws which could adequately account for his origins in terms of an evolutionary process. In the end, this completely eroded man's unique distinction of thinking, res cogitans, which Descartes had retained, and simply reduced man to the res, now bereft of any uniquely distinguishing cogito.

Descartes had set the stage with rationalism's drive to explain everything, material at least, in terms of strictly mechanistic laws. True, he had attempted to vindicate the validity of a spiritual realm of thought, but his vindication left it on such a weak foundation that the nineteenth century onslaught of Darwinism quickly demolished it. Now everything in the universe could be explained on the basis of mechanistic causal laws, man included. It remained only for Freud to reduce even man's mental and psychological life to this same kind of mechanistic, deterministic explanation. Thus the grand design of seventeenth century rationalism was finally completed in the twentieth century.

Or so it seemed at least, until these seemingly unshakable Victorian certitudes began to crumble at the beginning of the twentieth century. The first cracks in the foundation began to appear in physics, and in particular in the area of microphysics where it began to become apparent that the inner workings of the atoms did not obey the old simplistic rules of Newtonian mechanics. By 1900 Max Planck's work in quantum theory presaged the collapse of the rigidly predictable mechanistic laws of classical Newtonian mechanics. This was followed by Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy which maintained that it is impossible to predict, even in principle, how electrons will behave, that is, to determine both their position and velocity.⁽²²⁷⁾ The arguments of the physicists about the truth or falsity of Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle need not detain us here since they are not within the scope of this paper. The only reason for mentioning them is to show that the old unshakable certainties of rationalism and the Victorian era, which also permeates much of Freud's thought, have in large measure collapsed. It seems that things are not as simple as naive Newtonian physics and Freudianism had supposed. It seems that everything in the universe cannot be so easily accounted for by simple mechanical, deterministic laws. There seems to be an elusive noumena which will not yield to such mechanistic explanations. As Shakespeare observed in Hamlet, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your Philosophy."

CAUSALITY AND DETERMINISM

But if it can be shown, as I hope to do, that the choice is not an either/or, that is, that we must choose either a universe in which all things, man included, are ruled by causes which totally determine, or a universe in which there is at least some areas of freedom but in which there cannot then be any causality. What I should like to suggest is that this is a false dilemma--either causality and determinism, or freedom but no causality.

In order to show that causality does not entail a totally deterministic world view, and that causality can be reconciled with freedom, the first thing that must be done is to distinguish the several senses that the term "determinism" can have. For Brand Blanshard determinism means "that all events are caused."⁽²²⁸⁾ But to say that all events are caused is not the same thing as saying that because all events are caused they are therefore determined. To say that all events are caused and that therefore determinism holds universally is to say more than we definitely know at any one time, since we could never, even in principle, know every cause that would be operative in producing an event. This does not mean that we must embrace an indeterminism which says that nothing is determined, for clearly some things are. What it means is that this understanding of determinism is not adequate.

To say that an event is not determined is not the same thing at all as saying that it is not caused. An event can be both caused and not determined. This means that a free act can be free and caused. In other words to claim that a free act cannot, eo ipso, be caused is to mistake absence of causation for mode of causation. What distinguishes free acts from unfree acts is not absence of causation, but rather mode of causation.⁽²²⁹⁾

A further confusion concerns proximate causation and remote causation. That there are remote causes of a human action does not preclude the possibility that this same action is free, even though there may be remote psychological causes.⁽²³⁰⁾ Suppose for example that I bring my car to a garage mechanic to have the transmission replaced. If he accepts the work he is responsible for performing it adequately. Obviously there are any number of causes that have brought the mechanic to this point in his life. He was born to a mother who was widowed when he was three, of Polish ethnic origin, who transmitted to him her depressive tendencies, and so on and on. If the mechanic accepts the job none of these remote causes that have been operative to bring him to this point in time in his life are relevant to his responsibility to do the work adequately.

If he accepts the job for a stipulated amount of money the fact that he is Polish, Catholic, with a tenth grade education and depressive tendencies are not at all irrelevant. He is responsible for doing the work properly, and if he does not, he will plead in vain that his Polish ethnicity, his incomplete education, and his depressive tendencies are the explanation of his careless work and that his background removes his responsibility. These remote causes in his life obviously just won't do. If there were a proximate cause, however, which prevented him from going the job, the case would be otherwise. Suppose, for example, that while he was bent over examining the engine burglars came up behind him, knocked him unconscious and took the transmission and his tools away.⁽²³¹⁾ This we would regard as excusing him from blame.

This example is interesting on two counts, the notion of proximate as opposed to remote causality, and also in regard to the relation of freedom and constraint. Concerning the first point, proximate causality, there is a tendency, especially in psychology since Freudian determinism, to mistakenly suppose that because something has a prior cause itself, that this somehow makes it less of a cause itself. Therefore in Freudian psychology it is frequently thought that, because there are all sorts of remote forces operative in my present life, this ipso facto means my present acts are not therefore free. The reasoning here seems to be that because a cause itself has a cause it is somehow therefore less of a cause itself. But the fallacious character of this line of reasoning is obvious. It is like saying that because I had a father who caused me that I am therefore somehow less of a cause of my children. But that is clearly silly. In terms of the problematic of responsibility this means that whatever moral responsibility I have for my decisions I have as their proximate cause and that responsibility is not diminished by showing that there have been remote causes operative in my life that have brought me to my present point.

We said above that our example of the mechanic was interesting for two reasons, the first involving the notion of proximate cause which we have now examined, and the second constraint, to which we will now turn our attention. What does it mean when I say that I have done something of my own free will? It means that I could have acted otherwise, and it is only when it is believed that I could have acted otherwise that I am held responsible. Now it seems that we have two common-sense beliefs which are at odds with each other. Common-sense tells us that we act freely and hence are morally responsible, and it also tells us that we are governed by causal laws.⁽²³²⁾ It is this seeming conflict which gives rise to the problem of freedom of the will. This problem of freedom of the will arises when it is assumed that freedom must be contrasted with causality, so that a man cannot be said to be acting freely if his action is causally determined. But this assumed opposition between freedom and causality is mistaken. It is not with causality that freedom should be contrasted, but rather with constraint.⁽²³³⁾ This means that to say that a free action is caused is not a contradiction in terms, for free should not be contrasted with caused, but rather with constrained. Thus in our example with the mechanic above we easily see that there are various causes operative in his life, his ethnicity, education, religion, etc., but these do not totally determine him to do what he does with the transmission, and therefore what he does is free and he is morally responsible for his acts. But it is perfectly clear that the loss of the transmission and his tools to the burglars was the result of constraint--he was knocked unconscious--and clearly he had no freedom, and thus no moral responsibility.

A further objection can be made against a deterministic explanation of all human conduct and one which leads to a denial of all moral responsibility, namely, that in the end it denigrates human dignity.⁽²³⁴⁾ In the example of Othello with which we started, one can see moral nobility and dignity, regardless of how obviously misguided his action. There is something that inspires our admiration for his character in taking total responsibility for his acts. There are no cowardly excuses, no whining self-pity, only the awe inspiring nobility of taking full responsibility as a moral agent.

The metaphysical vision of man that sees him only in one-dimensional terms as a purely material being can see man only as purely determined and governed by causal laws which impose the same kind of strict necessity on his behavior that rules in physical nature. Well meaning twentieth century social scientists, and especially psychologists, have done this to relieve him of the weight of responsibility for his acts, and thus it was hoped, to free him from Freudian guilt. But this attempt has been bought at a very dear price, specifically to deny him the dignity that can be his only as a free and responsible moral agent.

St. John's University

New York