You know how large a part questions of
ACCOUNTABILITY have played in ethical controversy. To hear some
persons, one would suppose that all that ethics aims at is a code of
merits and demerits. Thus does the old legal and theological leaven,
the interest in crime and sin and punishment abide with us. 'Who's
to blame? whom can we punish? whom will God punish?'--these
preoccupations hang like a bad dream over man's religious history.
So both free-will and determinism have been inveighed against and
called absurd, because each, in the eyes of its enemies, has seemed
to prevent the 'imputability' of good or bad deeds to their authors.
Queer antinomy this! Free-will means novelty, the grafting on to the
past of something not involved therein. If our acts were
predetermined, if we merely transmitted the push of the whole past,
the free-willists say, how could we be praised or blamed for
anything? We should be 'agents' only, not 'principals,' and where
then would be our precious imputability and responsibility?
But where would it be if we HAD free-will? rejoin the determinists.
If a 'free' act be a sheer novelty, that comes not FROM me, the
previous me, but ex nihilo, and simply tacks itself on to me, how
can _I_, the previous I, be responsible? How can I have any
permanent CHARACTER that will stand still long enough for praise or
blame to be awarded? The chaplet of my days tumbles into a cast of
disconnected beads as soon as the thread of inner necessity is drawn
out by the preposterous indeterminist doctrine.
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