1. But how can we be blamed when it is not we who
make ourselves what we are?

BUT IS NOT ALL THIS TALK about how our bad choices or our not knowing any better may be causes of our failure and unhappiness—is not all this wide of the mark? To be sure, few of us perhaps are truly happy, and many of us do not make much of a “go” of our lives. But isn’t this because of the countless adverse circumstances that beset any human being throughout the course of his life—all of us some of the time and some of us all of the time? Such circumstances are not of our own choosing, certainly not of our own creation. We just find ourselves pursued and engulfed by them, and there is nothing we can do about it. A human being cannot live his life in a test-tube—and even if he could his condition would not be one of his own making, but one that was made for him. All of us, as soon as we begin to reflect and to examine our lives, find ourselves already plunged in medias res. Things, people, influences, circumstances, environment, conditions of life, heredity, and a thousand and one other factors have already made us what we are.

What is more, our earlier analogy between the life of man and the life of an acorn reinforces the point that our so-called success or failure in life is not, strictly speaking, our own doing, but rather something that is done for us, or better, to us. Nobody holds the acorn “responsible” for either succeeding or failing to grow into an oak. If the conditions are right, the acorn will develop and mature automatically; and if not, not. Likewise, one might argue, if there is such a thing as human nature, which predisposes every man to develop toward perfection, whether a given individual actually attains such perfection will depend not on him, but on circumstances. The attainment of such perfection may depend upon having the right knowledge and making the right choices, but given favorable circumstances of life, such knowledge and such choices will be forthcoming automatically; if circumstances are unfavorable, they will not. In the final analysis, human success or failure seems to be little more than a matter of good luck or bad luck, for which we ourselves cannot be held accountable.

2. The issue of scientific determinism—an ethical red herring?

In confirmation of the view that there is no such thing as personal moral responsibility for one’s actions, one has only to shift from a common-sense context to the perspective of contemporary science. Generally speaking, in modern psychology and sociology, to say nothing of physiology and biology, notions like “free will” and “personal responsibility” are not employed at all; they make no sense in the context of a scientific explanation. Nor is this surprising. For while the older schemes of a rigorous, mechanistic determinism may not be compatible with many of the recent developments in quantum physics, we are still not justified in reintroducing concepts like “freedom” and “moral responsibility” into the scientific domain.

On the contrary, the basic schema of explanation that continues to be almost the exclusive resource of all the different sciences in the contemporary world is a simple device of functional correlation. Events or phenomena of type A are correlated with certain other events of type B, so that the occurrence of an A is taken to be simply a function of B. For example, the stimulus-response scheme in modern psychology operates in this way: the response of the organism is treated as a mere function of the stimulus plus a certain initial state of the organism at the time of the stimulus. In the context of such an explanatory scheme there does not seem to be the slightest need for the more usual, common-sense, “anthropomorphic” type of explanation, according to which an animal or a human being sees or recognizes something as valuable and in consequence comes to want it and choose it.

With his usual clarity, Bertrand Russell explains how one can transplant or transpose oneself from one’s common-sense, everyday way of regarding things into the scientific perspective of modern psychology:

We all think that, by watching the behaviour of animals, we can discover more or less what they desire. If this is the case—and I fully agree that it is—desire must be capable of being exhibited in actions, for it is only the actions of animals that we can observe. They may have minds in which all sorts of things take place, but we can know nothing about their minds except by means of inferences from their actions; and the more such inferences are examined, the more dubious they appear. It would seem, therefore, that actions alone must be the test of the desires of animals. From this it is an easy step to the conclusion that an animal’s desire is nothing but a characteristic of a certain series of actions, namely, those which would be commonly regarded as inspired by the desire in question. And when it has been shown that this view affords a satisfactory account of animal desires, it is not difficult to see that the same explanation is applicable to the desires of human beings.

We judge easily from the behaviour of an animal of a familiar kind whether it is hungry or thirsty, or pleased or displeased, or inquisitive or terrified. The verification of our judgment, so far as verification is possible, must be derived from the immediately succeeding actions of the animal. Most people would say that they infer first something about the animal’s state of mind—whether it is hungry or thirsty and so on—and thence derive their expectations as to its subsequent conduct. But this detour through the animal’s supposed mind is wholly unnecessary. We can say simply: The animal’s behaviour during the last minute has had those characteristics which distinguish what is called “hunger,” and it is likely that its actions during the next minute will be similar in this respect, unless it finds food, or is interrupted by a stronger impulse, such as fear. An animal which is hungry is restless, it goes to the places where food is often to be found, it sniffs with its nose or peers with its eyes or otherwise increases the sensitiveness of its sense-organs; as soon as it is near enough to food for its sense-organs to be affected, it goes to it with all speed and proceeds to eat; after which, if the quantity of food has been sufficient, its whole demeanour changes: it may very likely lie down and go to sleep. These things and others like them are observable phenomena distinguishing a hungry animal from one which is not hungry. The characteristic mark by which we recognize a series of actions which display hunger is not the animal’s mental state, which we cannot observe, but something in its bodily behaviour; it is this observable trait in the bodily behaviour that I am proposing to call “hunger,” not some possibly mythical and certainly unknowable ingredient of the animal’s mind.¹

For our present purposes, we might note one sentence in particular in this quotation from Russell: “And when it has been shown that this view affords a satisfactory account of animal desires, it is not difficult to see that the same explanation is applicable to the desires of human beings.” Indeed, it is just this sort of explanation that modern psychologists do employ with reference to human behavior; and it is profitably employed, for on the basis of such a scheme, the behavior of human beings, both individually and in groups, can be predicted with remarkable success.

Such a mode of explanation and prediction enables the psychologist to dispense altogether with the entire paraphernalia that we have been using thus far in our discussion of human moral conduct, that is, the notions of human understanding and of human choice based on such understanding, in other words, of intellectual virtue and of moral virtue. The implications of such scientific behaviorism, or determinism, for questions of human responsibility are perfectly clear. On such a view, there is no such thing as human responsibility or accountability, for such ideas are unnecessary and irrelevant to the explanation of human behavior.

There is an interesting parallel here with Plato’s theory that virtue is merely a matter of knowledge, and vice of ignorance. In the Platonic view, if a man knows what is best for him he will automatically do what is best for him; if he doesn’t he won’t. He himself has no control over whether or not he possesses such knowledge. Similarly on the scientific, deterministic view of human nature, given a certain stimulus, it can be predicted that a given organism will respond in a certain way. The organism itself has no control over the way it responds to stimuli, or over what stimuli are presented to it. On neither view can an individual be held accountable for his own behavior, since in neither case can the individual exert any influence over his own actions or even over his own choices.

But if there is to be any such thing as ethics, there must be such a thing as personal responsibility. And if there is to be personal responsibility, then one must maintain the claims of something like free choice as a cause of human behavior, against the Platonist claim that knowledge is the exclusive determinant of such behavior, and against the determinists’ claim that external factors are the sole causes.

In undertaking a refutation of determinism, we might as well start by quoting Dr. Johnson: “Sir, all theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience for it.”² However irritated one may be by Johnson’s dogmatism, one must be impressed by his appeal to experience. For scientific determinism is, after all, only the product of a philosophic theory which is controverted at almost every step by our own unsophisticated, but inescapable, everyday human experience. We may even suggest that determinism is the sort of thing that is defensible only in theory but not in practice.

Nor is this contention based simply on the fact that in our everyday experience we do seem to be free, we do think and feel as if we had freedom of choice, no matter how convinced we may have become intellectually that our behavior is completely determined by forces outside our control. In addition, we would suggest that the determinist can scarcely avoid falling into a kind of practical inconsistency that is not unlike the inconsistency of which we found the relativist to be guilty. To see how this must be so, let us try to project ourselves imaginatively into the experience of a man who is a determinist by conviction.

Such a man must be convinced that men’s actions and behavior do not proceed from anything like knowledge and understanding or from choices based on such knowledge. But what of his own choices? As we have seen, any human choice necessarily implies some judgment of value, some judgment to the effect that one course of action is preferable to another. But if one is a determinist, what implications will his determinism have for his own judgments of value?

However the determinist may answer this question, he cannot avoid being inconsistent with his own principles. For whatever the implications of determinism may be with respect to our judgments of value, the very fact that determinism is acknowledged to have such implications at all is sufficient to refute that determinism. Have we not seen that it is a part of what one means by determinism to suppose that our conduct and behavior do not proceed from anything like knowledge or opinions about our human situation or from choices based on such opinions? And yet if our judgments of value are admitted to be somehow affected by our deterministic convictions, in the sense that the former tend to be either upset or confirmed or at least in some way influenced by the latter, then it would seem that we do make choices based on judgments of value which in turn are based on such knowledge and opinions as we happen to have regarding ourselves and the world round about us.

On the other hand, if the determinist, wishing to escape these consequences, turns to the other alternative of supposing that his deterministic theories and convictions have absolutely no effect on his judgments of value, then he must find himself in an even less defensible position. For how can a man be convinced of something without being critical of, perhaps even looking down his nose at, those who are not so convinced or who are of a contrary opinion? Indeed, the behavioristic psychologist—to select him by way of example—is not noted for lacking confidence that he is right. In fact, to be firmly convinced of anything is inevitably to adopt a mode of behavior that implies that one thinks one’s opponents are mistaken, if not foolish.

In other words, so far as one’s own self is concerned, and one’s own behavior, there is no way that any man—even a determinist—can totally isolate his personal choices and preferences from his convictions as to what is so. It is true that when a scientist, or a psychologist, or an old-fashioned determinist in philosophy, looks at his neighbor, or hs academc colleagues, or hs own wife and child, he could consistently treat them as if they were just so many puppets or automata whom he, the expert, can manipulate and condition much as one does monkeys, rats, and guinea pigs. But that he should bring himself under the same deterministic principles that he applies to other men—this, we would suggest, is simply impossible without falling into the most glaring practical inconsistency.

3. The force of circumstances: does it determine us or only
challenge us?

However easy it may be to expose the inconsistencies of various theories of determinism, we can scarcely blink the facts of life so completely as not to recognize that there are countless determining factors that operate to make us what we are, and to make us happy or miserable. Indeed, one might be tempted to revive once more the idea that we have already tried to lay to rest, the idea that morality, or living one’s life successfully and well, is nothing but a matter of art, of skill and cleverness, of mere intellectual virtue.

If we suppose that living well is only a matter of possessing certain favorable opportunities, plus the wit to exploit them, then the whole thing is pretty much a matter of luck. If I had died in infancy, one could scarcely say that I had had sufficient opportunity to attain my natural human perfection. Or if I survived, but with an I.Q. of a moron, I could hardly be expected to achieve much in the way of human perfection either. We cannot doubt that the circumstances of human life vary greatly, ranging from the most favorable to the most unfavorable. Not infrequently, they are such as to make perfection in anything like the sense in which we have defined it simply impossible; but for these circumstances we ourselves cannot be held responsible.

Nevertheless, for most of us, most of the time, our adversities and ill fortune are not such as to leave us completely without resource. Nor is such resource exclusively an intellectual affair. Quite the contrary. Suppose I find myself unjustly thrown into prison, or suppose I suddenly lose my financial independence and am reduced to the most severe penury and want. Under such circumstances some people, no doubt, might behave much more cleverly than I: they might figure out ways to escape from prison, or they might devise some ingenious means of recouping their financial losses. But this kind of intellectual ingenuity is not of primary moment in a moral context. From the moral standpoint the important thing is not whether I am shrewd enough to avoid certain misfortunes, or to extricate myself from them once they have befallen me, but whether I have sufficient character (moral virtue) to sustain them in such a way as a good man or a wise man would do. For imprisonment and financial ruin are misfortunes which may be borne either nobly or ignobly. Which way, then, shall I bear them?

More generally, is not much of the adversity which afflicts human beings of a sort to leave us with considerable choice as to how we shall respond and adjust to it—patiently or like spoiled children; like “good sports” or bad sports; bravely or ignominiously; maintaining our sense of justice and balance, or giving way to meanness and vindictiveness? And what holds in ill fortune is equally true as regards good fortune. Few of us are such thoroughgoing philosophers that we would not like to wake up some fine morning to find that we had fallen heir to a million dollars. But are we sure that we would not let such good fortune go to our heads? How do we know that, far from behaving wisely and intelligently, we might prove to be just as big a fool as the next man?

Of course, it is hardly likely that such somber philosophical reflections will dissuade many of us from dreaming now and then of what we might do “with a little bit, with a little bit, with a little bit of bloomin’ luck.” Nor is there any reason why they should; for what’s wrong with having a little bit of luck? Nothing at all. But the important thing is how we take our good fortune, or our ill fortune. That is what determines whether we are well off or not, not the good or ill fortune itself.

In other words, so long as the circumstances of our lives and the changes and chances of fortune leave us with at least some freedom of choice or of judgment as to how we shall act in the face of what has befallen us, then our fate as wise men or as fools will still be largely in our own hands. Our success or failure will not be due simply to the force of circumstances, but to our own character and our own exercise of moral virtue.

4. The moral problem transposed into a legal context by
way of illustration

Lest all this seem a bit implausible and far-fetched, let us once more shift the discussion to the context of criminal law. Just as earlier in regard to the question of our responsibility for ignorance, so now in regard to the question of the extent to which the mere force of circumstances determines our well-being, it may prove instructive to consider how the principles that are operative in the criminal law are analogous to, and hence illustrate, the principles that are relevant in the sphere of morals and ethics. In criminal law the question is usually a fairly straightforward one of a man’s responsibility for the infliction of certain legally defined harms; more specifically, in the present connection, it would be a question of a person’s responsibility for harms which he had inflicted when, in fact, he had been in some way coerced into doing what he did.

If in a given instance it could be shown that the accused had really been compelled to do something, in the sense that he quite literally had no choice at all but to do it, then clearly in the eyes of the law he would not be held responsible for his action. For instance, if despite my violent resistance a group of thugs should overpower me, force a gun into my hand, and then move my finger so as to pull the trigger and cause the gun to go off, I could scarcely be held responsible for any injuries that the shot might cause to someone else.

Nevertheless, most cases involving necessity or compulsion are not as clear-cut as this. If they were, they would probably never even have been prosecuted. The more usual situation is one in which the agent is subjected to pressures which are beyond his control, but in the face of which he is still left with certain alternatives as to how he shall react in the face of these circumstances. For instance, consider the following summary account of a variety of particular cases, quoted from a textbook by a distinguished contemporary authority on criminal law:

Thus, if a ship is cast by a storm upon a shore, the entry is not illegal; hence a passenger on the boat, deported from the country, is not guilty of illegal re-entry in such a case. So, also, as to failure to be present at a required time and place (e.g., a juror, witness, or soldier on leave) because of a flood or a broken bridge, or any other physical force that makes locomotion impossible. If a juror or witness has been imprisoned, the fact that a human agency created the barriers makes such cases no less instances of physical causation so far as the above persons are concerned, e.g., a cafe owner whose establishment remained open beyond the fixed closing time because he was tied hand and foot by his patrons. Thus, also, a married woman who was raped did not commit adultery, according to Ulpian. Where automobile lights are put out by an electric storm, this does not constitute a violation of the ordinance requiring them. But a beach-bather whose clothes were stolen can not plead physical necessity to a charge of nudeness since he had the alternative of remaining in the water until relieved.³

The solemnity with which these cases are reviewed may be amusing, but the principle that seems to govern in these weighty judicial decisions regarding nude beach-bathers, raped matrons, and resistant caféowners is not unlike the principle that would presumably govern in cases of comparable moral or ethical judgments.

The relevant question is always, first, whether the circumstances were such as to leave the agent any choice, and second, whether, granted that he did have a certain choice, he made the choice that a reasonable man, or a morally good man, might be expected to make in such circumstances.

To take another classical example from the law, what about jettisoning a ship’s cargo in order to save the lives of the passengers? Obviously, for a ship’s officer to jettison a cargo when there was no necessity for his doing so would be a criminal act. On the other hand, when in the case of a severe storm at sea it really did become necessary to jettison the cargo, just what does “necessary” mean here? Clearly, it is not an absolute necessity: the officer could always have chosen not to throw the cargo overboard; but had he so chosen he would have endangered the whole ship and the lives of the crew and the passengers. In other words, what is involved here is not the sort of necessity that excludes human choice altogether, but rather the sort of necessity that comes into play when we have to choose between the lesser of two evils.

As the older moralists would say, acts of the sort here under consideration are “mixed acts,” i.e., acts which we do choose to perform, but which we choose not because we prefer them in themselves, but because no better alternative seems open to us. Moreover, so long as any choice is open to us at all, then it would seem that whether in a moral or merely a legal context, our choice is one for which we may properly be held responsible.

5. Back from law to ethics again

Once more let us see how this principle works out in terms of a specific legal or moral situation. Quoting again from the same legal authority:

The leading decision in this country on the defence of necessity is U. S. v. Holmes. The case is especially significant because it is unexcelled in its suggestiveness of the quality of action taken in “states of necessity.”

In March of 1841 the American ship, William Brown, sailed from Liverpool, carrying a crew of seventeen, and sixty-five emigrants bound for the United States. On April 19th, after thirty-eight days at sea, it struck an iceberg late at night and began to fill rapidly. Thirty-two passengers, the first mate and eight seamen got into a “long-boat”; the captain, eight seamen and one passenger took to the smaller “jollyboat.” In little more than an hour the William Brown sank, carrying with her thirty-one passengers, the majority of them, children. “But not one of the officers or crew went down with the ship.” The two lifeboats parted the next morning, when it was apparent that the long-boat would be unmanageable, indeed, the first mate had already informed the captain that “it would be necessary to cast lots and throw some overboard.” “Let it be the last resort,” said the captain, ordering his crew to pull away. Almost immediately after being occupied, the long-boat had begun to take water through a plugged hole that became loosened. The boat was so crowded that the passengers were lying and sitting on one another; there was not sufficient room to bail out the water quickly. For twenty-four hours they carried on in the icy waters off the coast of Labrador. Then it began to rain and it rained all the next day, and by night the sea had become very rough and the wind stronger than ever. The men bailed frantically but the boat seemed doomed. A woman passenger, immersed in water almost to her knees, heard someone cry, “we are sinking,” and said, “we shall all be lost.” Another shouted: “The plug is out. The boat is sinking. God have mercy on our poor souls.” The mate gave the order to cast overboard all the male passengers except two whose wives were present. Unheeded, he repeated the order; then, fourteen men were thrown overboard, and two young women, sisters of one of them, either met a like fate or chose to join their brother. The next morning two other men who had hidden themselves were discovered, and the crew put both of them overboard. Almost immediately afterwards the longboat was sighted by the Crescent; all survivors were transferred to it, and later disembarked at Le Havre.⁴

In trying to assess either the moral or the legal responsibility of the first mate for the deaths of the men thrown overboard, the problem becomes one primarily of fixing the kind or degree of “necessity” under which the mate acted. The man could certainly say in his own defense, and others could say on his behalf, that he did “nothing but what inexorable necessity demanded,” that he did not want to cause the deaths of the men who were thrown overboard, but that he had to, circumstances having made it necessary.

One immediately recognizes that there was no absolute necessity involved here: it was only in consequence of the mate’s own decision that the men were sent to their deaths, and he could have chosen otherwise. It was thus one of those “mixed acts,” in which the action did proceed from the agent’s own choice, albeit a choice which did not commend itself to him in itself, but only as the lesser of two evils. Nevertheless, since the action was one which the agent did choose and decide upon himself, it was one for which he was himself responsible. Accordingly, putting aside the strictly legal question of guilt or innocence, and confining our attention to the moral question alone, what is to be said for the mate’s choice in such a case? Was it the right choice? Was it a choice that a good man or wise man would have made in similar circumstances?

To judge from the somewhat scant details which are given in the summary of the case, it would hardly seem that the first mate acted in a particularly heroic or even morally commendable fashion. There is even a suggestion that he shared with the captain the blame for themselves taking to the lifeboats and trying to save their own skins, even though many of the passengers were left aboard and went down with the ship. One would hardly say that the mate’s decisions and actions reflected any very remarkable display of moral virtue—of courage, of dignity, of sense of responsibility, of greatness of soul.

Nevertheless, for our present purposes, the more interesting question is not whether the mate proved under the circumstances to be a man of somewhat questionable moral stature. Rather I suggest that we pose the question a little differently: suppose we ask how a man of unquestioned moral stature would have acted under the same circumstances. What would he have done? Suppose Socrates himself were in the shoes of the first mate, and suppose that he had made his choice, exercising the relevant intellectual and moral virtues, what would his decision have been? Strangely enough, his decision might very well have been the same as the first mate’s.

It is quite conceivable that a man in complete possession of himself, sensing fully his responsibilities in the situation, not for a moment thinking simply of saving himself, but being quite ready to sacrifice his own life first if need be, might nevertheless decide that in these particular circumstances the proper course was for him to sacrifice the lives of some of the passengers first. He might realize that only a very skillful seaman could keep the longboat afloat at all; that only an officer with sufficient authority could keep the distraught passengers, to say nothing of the cowardly and irresponsible members of the crew, in line. Hence it is readily imaginable that reluctantly, and doubtless even with many misgivings, our Socrates, turned ship’s officer, might have made the same choice as the rather shabby-seeming first mate: the one, quite as much as the other, might have given the order to have some of the passengers thrown overboard in order to save the lives of the others.

a. Do we find ourselves committed to a mere ethics
of good intentions after all?

But does this not point up a curious paradox, perhaps even a glaring weakness, in the whole ethical theory we have thus far been expounding? If our hypothetical Socrates in the role of first mate did what he did, exercising the moral virtues, then by our account his conduct would be morally commendable and right. On the other hand, the actual first mate doing the same thing, not from moral virtue, but irresponsibly and primarily in order to save his own skin—in his case the very same conduct would have to be adjudged reprehensible and bad. Would it not seem, then, that on our view of ethics, it makes not the slightest difference what a man does; it is only how he does it that counts—i.e., in what spirit he does it, and whether he does it with good will or not? In short, the ethics of the examined life, of the intelligent life, turns out to be no more than an ethics of good intentions. Or does it?

Before answering this question, let us consider still another implication of the way in which we have been suggesting that one assess the moral worth of actions performed under so-called necessity. To recur once more to the sinking of the William Brown, it is conceivable that not every good man, finding himself in the shoes of the first mate, would have decided to do what the first mate did. Socrates might have decided to throw some of the passengers overboard, but it is also conceivable that he might have come to a very different decision. He might have reasoned in some such way as this: “It’s true that my skill and my authority are probably necessary to keep the longboat afloat; hence if I sacrificed myself, the rest are much more likely to perish. On the other hand, as a ship’s officer, it is my responsibility to subordinate my own welfare to that of the passengers and the ship as a whole; not only that, but as a human being I realize that it is hardly the part of a brave man, to say nothing of a man with a sense of his own dignity and responsibility, to try to work things around in such a way that it is his own life that is saved, while others are sacrificed. What’s more, even though it might well seem in this particular case as if duty prescribed the same course of action as that dictated by self-interest, still such a seeming coincidence of duty and self-interest is always to be regarded with suspicion: it is only too likely that in such circumstances one’s supposedly reasoned judgment of what one’s duty is will in fact be merely a cowardly rationalization. Consequently, all things considered, it would seem to be the better part for me to throw myself overboard first. In this way I can make sure that I keep my own slate clean; and in addition, it might possibly serve as an example to others, encouraging and even inspiring them to take themselves in hand, and overcome their panic, and act somewhat more like sane and sensible human beings.”

Accepting such a line of reasoning as sound and defensible, the conclusion from our example seems clear: two morally good men, when confronted with the same circumstances, might well decide that the situation called for radically different types of conduct, and both decisions would be entirely warranted and morally commendable. Moreover, this conclusion tends to reinforce and confirm the earlier hypothesis which we considered above, viz., that in response to a given situation the same course of action would have to be adjudged morally right and commendable when performed by a good man, and not so when performed by a man who was not good. In both instances, it would seem that it is not the act itself that counts, but only the intentions of the actor or agent. In other words, what we have here does seems to be an ethics of good intentions.

b. But the good life must be an intelligent life,
not just a well-meaning life

Not entirely so, however. It is true that if the goal of our ethical endeavors is nothing less than the achievement of an examined life, then we are concerned to judge not the isolated act, or even the effects of such an act upon others and upon society; rather it is the human being himself that we are trying to judge.

“Oh,” you will say, “this is only to push the issue one step further back. For what is it that makes a man a good man, on the theory here expounded, if it be not simply his being well-meaning or well-intentioned? It’s not what he does that counts so much as the quality of his choices. It’s not even what the man knows that seems to count. For ultimately the quality of his choices is determined not so much by the shrewdness that he displays in making them as by the moral virtue that he exercises. Does this give the lie to the whole idea of the good life being the intelligent life? Intelligence seems to be largely irrelevant: you might be a perfect ass, but so long as you meant well, you would at least be entitled to the distinction of being good, for whatever that might be worth!”

This criticism misses the mark, though, in its equation of moral virtue with mere good intentions. For as we have already seen, moral virtue is not something that functions independently of knowledge and intelligence; on the contrary, the moral virtues are nothing but habits or dispositions to choose in accordance with our intelligence and our better judgment. Yet the kind of judgment that is relevant here is not judgment about how best to win wars, avoid depressions, or retire early and live longer. It is the kind of intelligent judgment that is concerned simply with oneself and with what it takes to be a truly human being. Without this knowledge, not all the good intentions in the world will serve to make one’s actions the actions of a good man. And with such understanding, one still needs the so-called moral virtues in order that he will actually want and come to choose those actions which are requisite in an intelligent, examined life.

Coming back to the main theme of the present section, it should now be clear that it is not the force of circumstances or the chances of fortune that ultimately make us well off or badly off. So long as the events which befall us leave us with any choice at all as to how we shall react to our fate, we then have the opportunity of reacting either in the way that a good man or a wise man would react, or otherwise. Thus our well-being still seems to remain pretty much in our own hands and to be our own responsibility.

6. A final doubt as to our freedom and responsibility
in the face of adverse circumstances

All the same, we must not let ourselves be carried away by our own eloquence on the subject of man’s freedom in the face of compelling circumstances and his responsibility for his own decisions and choices. Indeed, there is something disingenuous, not to say pharisaic, about our whole discussion of the tragedy of the William Brown. It is easy enough to sit comfortably in one’s study and write pompously and judiciously about how the first mate failed to display the requisite moral virtue in the situation in which he found himself. But suppose we ourselves had been out in the longboat in the icy waters of the Atlantic, realizing that the boat was shipping water faster than it could be bailed out, listening to the screams and shrieks of the desperate passengers, knowing that the prospects of rescue were so slight as to be almost non-existent, just how would we have conducted ourselves? Is it not likely that we should have been, if anything, even less brave and less heroic than the first mate? How then can we be so glib in our condemnation of him? And just how meaningful is it to say that the mate, strictly speaking, was not forced to act as he did, that he could have behaved otherwise?

In like manner, one could say that the American soldiers who were captured in Korea, and who were subjected to weeks and weeks of constant pressure and torture and brain-washing—one could say, of course, that these men did not have to give in, that they could have resisted the pressures exerted upon them, and that they were therefore responsible for any moral weaknesses that any of them may have shown in the course of their ordeal. Or, to change the example, is there any sense in saying that a person brought up in a totalitarian regime, and conditioned from infancy to believe all the outpourings of party propaganda and to manifest all the hatred and fanaticism that such propaganda is meant to evoke—is there any sense in saying that such a person nevertheless remains free not to be taken in by such lies and that he is therefore responsible for not having tried to practice a more examined life?

Certainly, warnings against self-righteousness and a holier-than-thou attitude are entirely justified. Moreover, there is always a point where external pressures become so compelling that their victim is left with no freedom of choice at all. Our example of this was the man who was completely overpowered and literally forced to pull the trigger of a gun. One could also cite examples of where this point was reached, when the pressures exerted were not merely crude physical pressures but psychological ones.

It may be difficult, if not impossible, in practice to determine exactly when this point is reached in the case of a given individual. Hence one can never be sure just when a man’s freedom of choice, and hence his responsibility for his actions, disappear entirely. Nevertheless, even long before any such end point is reached, it is obvious that the external forces exerted upon an individual may become so great that even though in the literal sense he may be said still to have some freedom of choice, for all practical purposes we recognize that the pressures on him were so great that we could not blame the man for acting as he did under the circumstances.

But even though charity and understanding are always in order in our assessment of the shortcomings of others, at the same time it is important that we ourselves not lose sight of the fact that, until that end point of what might be called absolute compulsion is reached, any human being, ourselves included, still has some slight freedom of choice left and thus remains fundamentally a responsible human being. This simple fact may be a source of no little uneasiness to us; it may even be a source of what the existentialists are wont to call dread or anxiety. For such a responsibility is very hard to live up to. Yet at the same time it is the ultimate source of our dignity as human beings, and hence of any hope that we may cherish for ourselves and our future.

7. Still one more doubt, this time concerning happiness:
is the good life necessarily the happy life?

And now for one last point that may have seemed particularly implausible and unrealistic in the foregoing account of man’s comparative independence of the changes and chances of fortune. We have argued that no matter what happens to a man, so long as he has any freedom of choice left at all, he will continue to have the option of reacting to his fate in the way in which a wise and intelligent man would do, not with whining and complaining, not with grovelling and cowardice, not with self-pity and resentment, not with bluster and braggadocio, but with fortitude, patience, and dignity.

Admitting all this, what does it have to do with happiness? For remember, our entire justification of the good life or the examined life consisted in the fact that this, for a human being, is the happy life. Yet considering the incredibly varied and frightful and unforeseeable misfortunes that can befall a man in the course of his life, is it not being fatuous to say that no matter what may happen to him, all he needs to do in order to be happy is simply to exercise the moral virtues?

It is one thing to recommend the so-called good life on the ground that it is our duty, or what God demands of us, or something of the sort; but it is another thing to recommend it on the ground that only the good life is the happy life. For there is no getting around the fact that human life is fraught with so many perils that even the moral virtue of a Socrates could not guarantee anything that by any stretch of the imagination could be called genuine happiness.

This problem plagued Aristotle himself in the very first book of the Ethics:

Happiness, as we said, requires both complete goodness and a complete lifetime. For many reverses and vicissitudes of all sorts occur in the course of life, and it is possible that the most prosperous man may encounter great disasters in his declining years, as the story is told of Priam in the epics; but no one calls a man happy who meets with misfortunes like Priam’s, and comes to a miserable end.⁵

Aristotle’s resolution of the problem seems at first reading to be somewhat evasive and disappointing:

But the accidents of fortune are many and vary in degree of magnitude; and although small pieces of good luck, as also of misfortune, clearly do not change the whole course of life, yet great and repeated successes will render life more blissful, since both of their own nature they help to embellish it, and also they can be nobly and virtuously utilized; while great and frequent reverses can crush and mar our bliss both by the pain they cause and by the hindrance they offer to many activities. Yet nevertheless even in adversity nobility shines through, when a man endures repeated and severe misfortune with patience, not owing to insensibility but from generosity and greatness of soul. And if, as we said, a man’s life is determined by his activities, no supremely happy man can ever become miserable. For he will never do hateful or base actions, since we hold that the truly good and wise man will bear all kinds of fortune in a seemly way, and will always act in the noblest manner that the circumstances allow; even as a good general makes the most effective use of the forces at his disposal, and a good shoemaker makes the finest shoe possible out of the leather supplied him, and so on with all the other crafts and professions. And this being so, the happy man can never become miserable; though it is true he will not be supremely blessed if he encounters the misfortunes of a Priam.⁶

How satisfactory is this as an answer to the challenge that the good life—the life of intellectual and moral virtue—is no guarantee of happiness? Aristotle’s concession is a major one: he admits that, in cases of extreme adversity, the good man cannot be said to enjoy full happiness; in fact, he cannot count on much more than the none-too-consoling certainty that he will at least “never become miserable.” This, you might say, is a pretty slim recommendation for a life of virtue!

It is well to keep in mind what Aristotle is trying to prove. He is not concerned to demonstrate that virtue is a sure guarantee of happiness. He is only trying to show that a life of virtue, while not an absolute guarantee of happiness, is the best guarantee there is, and that the good man, while he may not be completely happy under circumstances of adversity, is at least happier under such circumstances than the non-virtuous man would be. In other words, the Aristotelian contention is that only by living in a truly human way—i.e., by exercising the intellectual and moral virtues—can a human being assure himself of leading as happy and as full a life as circumstances will permit.

In the light of such considerations it is the part of wisdom to acknowledge that there is another dimension to ethics, over and above the dimension of the purely human and the properly philosophical. In such a dimension one can only have faith that “the Lord is my stony rock, and my defense; my Savior, my God, and my might, in whom I will trust, my buckler, the horn also of my salvation, and my refuge.”⁷ This, however, is to pass beyond philosophy and enter into the precincts of religion; but to go beyond philosophy is to go beyond the province of this book.