in effect, we will maintain the dogma of human indeterminism, even though reason is forced to admit the cogency of the argument against it, because we need that dogma as a bulwark against indifference and fatalism,—this defense is itself morally indefensible. To dread the legitimate outcome of our own thinking, is to be guilty of treason to that authority on which moral judgments, like all others, depend. An absolute confidence in the rightful supremacy of truth not only is the scientific temper, it is the only justifiable attitude of mind for the practical moralist.
Let us see what will be the result of accepting the conclusions of the determinist, or necessitarian, view of human conduct—as regards the ethical notions, first, of freedom, and secondly, of merit and demerit.
1. Freedom.It is a false antithesis which opposes liberty and determinism, as though a free action must be identical with an uncaused event. It is irrational to speak of any occurrence as though it sprang into existence of itself, unrelated to, and in independence of, all other physical and psychical phenomena. But if to deny that an action has a cause is absurd, it does not follow that reason forbids us to recognize certain classes of action as free. What we want, is a clear understanding of the meaning of the concept freedom, what acts are free, and what it is that differentiates such acts from all others. And no change in the denotation of the word is needed. The acts which the libertarian calls free, the determinist calls free too,—those, namely, to which the agent is not directly constrained by any force external to himself, and which are consciously performed with the idea of attaining an end which is more or less clearly present to the agent's mind. On the negative side, then, my freedom implies that the act, for instance, a movement of my hand, is not the work of some person or thing outside of me, as it would be if the hand were forcibly moved without regard to my wishes, but that it is exclusively my act. On the positive side, it implies some degree of consciousness of the act, and of the consequences that are to follow from it. In a word, all truly voluntary acts are free.
