“Rational Man”
5Failure and Unhappiness:
Are They Our Own Responsibility?
1. Human failure, its nature and causes
IN EARLIER CHAPTERS there has been much talk of human folly. To the more cynical this might seem to be only laboring the obvious. But to the more philosophical, it raises some interesting questions. Is it true that anybody who isn’t happy is a fool? In many ways this could perhaps be said to epitomize Aristotelian moral theory. On such a view, moral principles and moral rules, if they are legitimate and defensible ones, are not just so many edicts imposed upon the individual from the outside, whether it be by parents or by society or by God Himself. Rather moral rules are more in the nature of counsels of perfection or instructions as to what one ought or ought not to do in order to attain happiness.
But if learning how to live be no more than what is in one’s own best interests, and if not learning be not so much “morally wrong,” in the currently popular sense of that term, as simply foolish, then how does it happen that so many of us fail to learn? For most of us do fail; we don’t lead examined lives; we don’t achieve our natural human perfection; we can’t honestly say that we are happy, at least not in any distinctively human way. What are the reasons and sources of such failure? Is it a failure that we could have prevented or that we might still do something about? Is it the sort of thing for which we may hold only ourselves responsible?
If we confine ourselves to generalities, it is not hard to classify the main causes of our failure to behave wisely, to make the most of ourselves, to attain true human happiness. In the light of what we have said thus far about man’s nature and the human situation, these causes fall readily under three main headings. A man’s failure to attain his end may be due either to ignorance (he doesn’t know what the true end or goal is of human existence, or else he doesn’t know how to attain it); or to bad choices (he knows what the end is and what it takes to achieve it, but he just doesn’t choose to do it); or to bad luck and the sheer force of circumstances (he knows what to do, and wants to do it, but he is prevented by purely external forces from carrying out his intention).
Accordingly, on the score of responsibility, the question becomes whether it is our own fault that we fail, when such failure is due either to not knowing what we ought to do, or to not choosing to do it, or to being prevented from doing it.
Suppose we consider first the sort of failure that is due to ignorance. Can we really be blamed if we make fools of ourselves and throw away our lives, simply because we don’t know any better? How many people really know, or have ever even stopped to think, what is really best for them? Ask the next person you meet on the street whether or not he is aware that only the examined life is worth living. He will think you are crazy. What do the claims of Socratic self-knowledge mean to him? He has never even heard of Socrates, much less taken his message to heart.
Nevertheless, the matter may not be quite so simple after all. In order to open up some of the complexities that are involved in failures arising from ignorance, suppose we consider how the issue tends to present itself in legal contexts, which are somewhat analogous to moral or ethical contexts. Thus in Western society the traditions of both civil law and common law have always tended to recognize the validity of the two maxims:
1. Ignorantia legis neminem excusat.
2. Ignorantia facti excusat.
Ignorance of the law does not excuse, but ignorance of fact does. What does this distinction mean, and why should only the latter be considered excusable and not the former?
The stock example of ignorance of fact is a man out hunting: he hears a movement in the thicket, he fires; but instead of shooting a deer, he shoots a fellow hunter. Is the first hunter to be held responsible for the injury inflicted on the second? The first man can say that he did not intend to injure anyone; he was only shooting at what he thought was a deer. Was it, then, just an accident, regrettable of course, but not anything for which anyone could be blamed or held accountable?
So far as the legal situation goes, the answer to such a question would doubtless turn on whether or not the man who had done the shooting had acted recklessly or carelessly. Had he, even though he knew the danger involved, fired just as soon as he saw the slightest movement in the bushes, without bothering to take precautions? Or had he, because of his excitement and eagerness, fired precipitately and without stopping to think whether there was any possible danger involved? On the former alternative, the man would be held to have acted recklessly, since he was aware of the risks he was taking in such hasty firing. On the latter alternative, he would be held to have been careless or negligent, since he did not stop to think either of risks or of precautions.
A third alternative is possible: that the hunter not only was aware of the dangers involved, but took the necessary precautions; that he did not fire until he actually saw the antlers of the deer; but at that very instant, quite by accident, the second hunter moved into his line of fire. Under such circumstances the first man would hardly be held accountable for the injury done to the second.
When the transition is made from a legal to an ethical context, our assessments would not be very different. Recklessness and carelessness could well be considered as moral weaknesses, or, more accurately, as evidences of either a lack of, or else of a failure to exercise, certain moral virtues.
It is also conceivable that even in a moral context there would be situations in which injury or harm might come to a man because he was exercising the moral virtues. Suppose a driver going north on the New Jersey Turnpike begins to run into patches of fog as he moves into the marshy flats on the approaches to New York City. Obedient to the specially posted traffic warnings, he reduces his speed, takes the requisite precautions, and alerts himself to possible dangers. Suddenly a heavy truck, coming up from behind and going at top speed, but quite invisible because of a sudden patch of dense fog, crashes into the rear of the car. One might say that had the driver of the car not been proceeding in a calm, cautious, intelligent manner, had he been either more reckless or more careless than he was, the truck would never have caught up with him, and the accident would never have occurred. The driver of the car would certainly not be held legally responsible for the accident; nor could he be held morally responsible for anything that by any stretch of the imagination could be considered foolish or improper behavior—but this would doubtless seem small consolation for having one’s car demolished and being obliged to spend several months in the hospital from serious injuries. The wages of sin may be death, but so may the wages of virtue.
Leaving it to the cynics to do what they will with such a hypothetical case, the fact remains that in morals and ethics, the principle that governs the assessment of responsibility for ignorance of fact is a very simple one. Clearly, we are responsible, we are to blame, if our ignorance is due to a lack of moral virtue—for example, when we don’t know the facts of the situation because we were too lazy to find out, or deliberately avoided finding out for fear the knowledge might be disagreeable, or were simply reckless or careless, or because we placed a wrong construction upon the facts, or because we were stampeded, so to speak, by our emotions: fear, anger, lust, jealousy, resentment, or what not. It is a truism that our judgment of things is often colored, or distorted, or blinded by how we feel, by our passions and appetites. Accordingly, when we fail to appreciate correctly, or maybe even to appreciate at all, the facts in a given situation, simply because we have not learned to moderate and redirect our feelings and desires so as to bring them under the control of intelligence and understanding, then surely we are responsible for such ignorance.
On the other hand, there is no getting around the fact that human life being what it is, there will be countless situations in our lives where, as we say, we would never have acted as we did, had we known what the facts were, and yet where at the same time we couldn’t possibly have been expected to know what the facts were, however constant and efficient we might have been in the exercise of moral virtue. Unforeseeable and, in a moral sense at least, unavoidable harms and injuries do befall us; nor in such cases are we properly to blame for the consequences of our ignorance.
But what now of ignorance of law? This is in many ways a more difficult principle to deal with, as is indicated by the fact that its explanation and justification are a source of no little embarrassment to the lawyers themselves. “Ignorance of the law,” they say, “is never an excuse.” But why? Unfortunately, legal scholars do not seem too ready to come forward with a justification of the maxim, unless it be in terms of social utility: society, it is argued, cannot be maintained unless there is some system of legal order; and a system of legal order cannot be maintained unless every individual citizen is held responsible for a knowledge of the law. But while this may be all very well from the standpoint of society, it seems rather harsh from the standpoint of justice to the individual. When we consider the volumes upon volumes of existing statutes, court decisions interpreting the statutes, and the equally voluminous works expounding the tradition of the common law, it would appear to be not merely a fiction but a downright injustice to presume that every man shall know the law. Moreover, what the law is in a given area is likely to be upset any day by a new court decision, and that decision in turn may be upset by an appeal to a still higher court, the parties to the litigation, notwithstanding, being presumed to have known all the while what the law was, even in advance of such judicial pronouncements and reversals—all this would appear to compound both the fiction and the injustice to the point of making them intolerable.
When we come to morals and ethics, there tends to arise a somewhat comparable embarrassment in connection with the ethical analogue of Ignorantia legis neminem excusat. For in the moral realm, there does seem to be operative a sort of natural law, in contrast to the more positive law that prevails in the legal order. Indeed, the very same principles of morals and ethics that we have thus far been concerned to defend could all be regarded as so many natural laws, or laws determined by man’s nature. For instance, we have argued that it pertains to the very nature of man that a full life for a human being must consist in living intelligently. Likewise, it is a law of man’s nature that he cannot lead an examined or intelligent life without first learning how to do so. And it is a further law of human nature that in order to be a good man, as distinct from merely being a good artisan, something more has to be acquired besides mere know-how, habits of choice or moral virtues being equally necessary.
To be sure, the language of “natural law” has gone out of fashion nowadays. Hence it may strike us as a bit awkward, not to say unnatural, to use a seemingly legal language in connection with the living of one’s life and with the demands and requirements of one’s human nature. But such a feeling of strangeness may be no more than a prejudice due to accidents of fashion. At any rate, for our present purposes it should prove illuminating to employ such legal-sounding language in connection with ethics. Thus we can say that the moral obligations and requirements of human life are determined by nothing less than the laws of man’s nature and of the order of nature generally.
Very well, then, what about a man’s responsibility for ignorance of such natural moral laws? Can it be maintained that every human being is presumed to know what such laws are and that ignorance of them is something for which there is no excuse?
At first glance it might seem that posing such questions would only serve to raise the ghost of relativism all over again. Given the bewildering variety of conditions, customs, mores, ideals, and circumstances of life that have characterized man in the course of his history, how can one possibly claim that only one way of life, the so-called intelligent or examined life, is natural to man? But a little closer examination will soon disclose that the question raised here is not one of relativism; it is this: Supposing that there is a natural law which determines what the right life for man is, how can all men be expected to know what it is? A primitive South Sea islander, a completely brainwashed North Korean Communist, an ignorant serf brought up in the confining conditions of a medieval manor, a young Puerto Rican immigrant living in grinding poverty in a Harlem slum, a slave laborer in ancient Egypt, a picked member of the Hitler Jugend, whose whole life has been one continuous process of being conditioned to a blind acceptance of the Nazi ideal—how could it possibly be maintained that human beings such as these, straitened and confined as they are, are in a position to know and appreciate the Socratic ideal of the examined life? Put this way, the thing certainly does seem preposterous. Nor is there any doubt that responsibility for ignorance on the part of those in less favorable circumstances of life is less than those in more favorable circumstances. It must doubtless be admitted that there are cases where the conditions of human life are such that anything like responsibility for ignorance of the so-called natural laws of human existence cannot fairly be attributed to the individuals in question.
At the same time, it is easy to exaggerate the prevalence of conditions of life so extreme as to remove altogether a man’s responsibility for knowing what the score is in human existence, or what are the natural obligations that are incumbent upon a human being for the perfection of his own nature. For take the case even of a slave, ignorant and uneducated and living in conditions of the utmost degradation. Would anyone make bold to say that such a man was totally incapable of recognizing instances of human vanity and folly, of cowardice and courage, of meanness and generosity?
It is true that as the conditions of life vary from age to age, from region to region, or from one culture to another, the criteria of bravery, say, or of honesty, or of stupidity, will vary considerably. But the distinction between bravery and cowardice, honesty and dishonesty, wisdom and folly, will nonetheless be recognized and maintained almost universally.
In fact, it stands to reason that when the standard of perfection in human life is simply to live wisely or intelligently, the intelligent course of action in one set of circumstances will be very different from what it is in another. The intelligent life for a Tibetan monk will take a somewhat different form from that appropriate to an American businessman. But even though our recognition of wisdom or folly in others may falter at times or even fail completely, particularly if the circumstances of their exhibition are radically different from those that we ourselves are accustomed to, still is it not possible for us usually to win through to at least some sort of appreciation of human excellence, or of human stupidity, no matter how superficially different our own standards may be?
Suppose we try an experiment in support of this contention. Suppose we consider the characters of certain historical figures, widely separated from one another in time, in geography, in culture and civilization, and in the specific circumstances of their lives. And as we consider such examples, suppose we keep putting to ourselves the question whether, just as we ourselves, despite our distance and difference from the men we are considering, are able to appreciate the excellence or the deficiency of their characters—whether these same men themselves, had they been able to know about one another, would not have likewise responded to one another’s excellences or deficiencies.
As our first example, let us again consider the character of Socrates, this time as he himself recounts it when speaking in his own defense at his trial:
Let me relate to you a passage of my own life which will prove to you that I should never have yielded to injustice from any fear of death, and that ‘as I should have refused to yield’ I must have died at once. I will tell you a tale of the courts, not very interesting perhaps, but nevertheless true. The only office of state which I ever held, O men of Athens, was that of senator: the tribe Antiochis, which is my tribe, had the presidency at the trial of the generals who had not taken up the bodies of the slain after the battle of Arginusae; and you proposed to try them in a body, contrary to law, as you all thought afterwards; but at the time I was the only one of the Prytanes who was opposed to the illegality, and I gave my vote against you; and when the orators threatened to impeach and arrest me, and you called and shouted, I made up my mind that I would run the risk, having law and justice with me, rather than take part in your injustice because I feared imprisonment and death. This happened in the days of the democracy. But when the oligarchy of the Thirty was in power, they sent for me and four others into the rotunda, and bade us bring Leon the Salaminian from Salamis, as they wanted to put him to death. This was a specimen of the sort of commands which they were always giving with the view of implicating as many as possible in their crimes; and then I showed, not in word only but in deed, that, if I may be allowed to use such an expression, I cared not a straw for death, and that my great and only care was lest I should do an unrighteous or unholy thing. For the strong arm of that oppressive power did not frighten me into doing wrong; and when we came out of the rotunda the other four went to Salamis and fetched Leon, but I went quietly home. For which I might have lost my life, had not the power of the Thirty shortly afterwards come to an end. And many will witness to my words.1
For our second example we shall shift the scene from Athens in 399 B.C. to the civil wars in Great Britain in the seventeenth century. The following is a brief account by a modern historian of the character of a certain James Butler, Earl of Ormonde, whom the King had placed in command of his forces in Ireland. Perhaps it should be noted in passing that at this time the fighting in Ireland had amounted to a veritable “fury of destruction and hatred,” Irish against English, Catholic against Protestant, and Parliament sympathizers against the forces of the King. This then is the sketch given of Ormonde:
The Earl of Ormonde, general of the forces of the Dublin Government, refused to lay waste Irish villages or kill civilians. The greater number of his Norman-Irish family were in sympathy with the rebels; his mother was a Roman Catholic, his brother was in arms with the insurgents. He had other anxieties, for the King had certainly communicated secrets to him that he would have been happier not to have known and he, if anyone, knew the extent of Charles’s inept tampering with the Irish. His competence and popularity with the Goverment forces made him indispensable, yet there were those on the Council who suspected him of complicity with the rebels. But Ormonde stood with great steadfastness, for law, order and loyalty to the Crown, and rebutted the whispered slanders: “I will go on constantly,” he wrote, “neither sparing the rebel because he is my kinsman, or was my friend, nor yet will I one jot the more sharpen my sword to satisfy anybody but myself in the faithful performance of my charge.”
His wife was cut off in Kilkenny Castle with her children and the hundreds of fugitives whom she had received and relieved there. The Irish leaders threatened to destroy them unless Ormonde abandoned his command of the Government forces. The English responded that if the Countess and her children came to harm, no Irish woman or child would be spared. But Ormonde, not slackening his preparations for the spring campaign, proclaimed a different answer. If his wife and children, he wrote, “shall receive injury by men, I shall never revenge it on women and children; which, as it would be base and un-Christian, would be extremely below the price I value my wife and children at.”2
Placing the characters of these two men, Socrates and the Earl of Ormonde, side by side, it goes almost without saying that there is a vast difference between fifth-century Athens after the death of Pericles and seventeenth-century Britain and Ireland under Charles I. Likewise it goes without saying that it would be hard to imagine men more different in many ways than Socrates and Ormonde—the one a pöbelhafter Mensch as Nietzsche called him, the son of a midwife, whose speech was ever that used “in the agora, at the tables of the money changers”;3 the other a refined and elegant Anglo-Irish aristocrat, nurtured in baroque surroundings and moving in a society where civility and good manners must have been absolutely de rigueur. Yet despite their differences—or perhaps one should say in their very differences—both men are at one in their determination to maintain their sanity and judgment in the face of pressures, passions, betrayals, and even the fear of death itself. It is just this sort of thing that the intelligent life and the virtuous life consist in.
Moreover, in the context of our present argument, what is significant is not merely the fact that both Socrates and Ormonde, each in their respective ways, might be said to have lived examined lives, but also that we today as we read the accounts of such lives are able to appreciate the excellence of their examples. For in the circumstances and conditions of our lives we are as different from both Socrates and Ormonde as they were from each other. Yet the requirements of human excellence are discernible in human life wherever it may be found, with the result that we all, with but few exceptions, have at least some inkling of the kinds of claims which our very human nature makes upon us,
Otherwise, how should we ever be able to read history and literature, not merely with aesthetic appreciation, but with an appreciation of their relevance to our own lives? The fact of our human response to examples of human achievement or human failure, of human wisdom or human folly, no matter how different these others may be from us in time or place or culture or circumstances of life—this fact is of no little import, when it comes to deciding whether there are more or less objective standards of human excellence and whether, as men, we are capable of recognizing such standards.
To be sure, many of us may have become so benumbed by the ordinary business and drudgery, to say nothing of the ordinary pleasures and distractions, of life that we have ceased to respond to, or perhaps even to be aware of, the claims that our own human nature makes upon us. Even so, most of us tend to be uncomfortably, even if dimly, conscious of how we could have fostered and cultivated such an awareness, instead of disregarding or even blinding ourselves to what, simply as human beings, we might have been, and should have been, and perhaps could still become, if we chose.
Lest it be thought that in our experiment we have limited ourselves to such characters as could evoke only our respect and approval, we might end with the following estimate which Dr. Johnson once gave of the character of Falstaff.
But Falstaff, unimitated, unimitable Falstaff, how shall I describe thee! thou compound of sense and vice; of sense which may be admired, but not esteemed; of vice which may be despised, but hardly detested. Falstaff is a character loaded with faults, and with those faults which naturally produce contempt. . . . Yet the man thus corrupt, thus despicable, makes himself necessary to the prince that despises him, by the most pleasing of all qualities, perpetual gaiety, by an unfailing power of exciting laughter, which is the more freely indulged, as his wit is not of the splendid or ambitious kind, but consists in easy scapes and sallies of levity, which make sport, but raise no envy. It must be observed, that he is stained with no enormous or sanguinary crimes, so that his licentiousness is not so offensive but that it may be borne for his mirth.
The moral to be drawn from this representation is, that no man is more dangerous than he that, with a will to corrupt, hath the power to please; and that neither wit nor honesty ought to think themselves safe with such a companion, when they see Henry seduced by Falstaff.4
May we not conclude that despite diversity of periods and cultures, despite the seeming heterogeneity of moral standards and standards of value, human beings do nevertheless seem capable—not infallibly, and certainly not unanimously, but still with impressive regularity—of appreciating and responding to instances of human worth and human weakness, of human perfection and human imperfection, wherever found? It is this universal, if intermittent, power of mutual appreciation among men which renders us capable of such pursuits as history and the humanities, and without which, though we might become scientists, we could never become humanists, or perhaps even human beings in the true sense.
Moreover—and with this we return to the central argument of the present section—if all men do have such a power of mutual appreciation, an ability to recognize and respond to both human folly and human excellence, then it would seem that what we have termed “ignorance of law,” in the sense of an ignorance of the laws and values of our own human nature, is an ignorance for which all of us are in a measure responsible, and for which we are to be held more or less accountable, however much that responsibility and accountability may vary in degree, depending on the particular circumstances of our various human conditions.
What has been established in the preceding section is that, given the normal human condition, nearly all of us probably do know, at least in principle, what is best for us. We are also capable of knowing, at least much of the time, what is the better course to follow even in a concrete particular case. Hence if many of us fail to become good men largely because of ignorance of what we ought to do, it must be that such ignorance, far from being an ultimate principle of explanation, is self-caused and self-imposed—i.e., an ignorance that we have brought upon ourselves and for which we ourselves are responsible. To put the same point a little differently, in the final analysis our human failures are ultimately due not to the fact that we don’t know what we ought to do, but rather to the fact that we don’t choose to act on our knowledge.
We are, then, brought face to face with that second cause of failure, mentioned earlier, which now bids fair to absorb, even to displace, ignorance as a cause of failure in anything like an ultimate sense. What we said earlier was that our bad choices, quite as much as our ignorance, might be the source of our failures. But it appears that even when ignorance is the cause of failure, it is usually an ignorance which is due to our bad choices. Accordingly, it begins to look as if right choice, much more than right knowledge, were the primary concern of ethics and morals.
4. Plato’s puzzler: virtue is nothing but knowledge, and
vice nothing but ignorance5
But no sooner do we make this suggestion than we are sure to find ourselves embarrassed by any such notion of human choice, for its understanding is fraught with any number of difficulties and complications. There seems to be no better way of broaching some of these complications than to consider briefly the famous thesis, defined in Plato’s dialogue of the Protagoras, that virtue is knowledge. The upshot of this Platonic thesis is that everything we have just been saying about choice, rather than ignorance, being the ultimate cause of failure is so much stuff and nonsense! Instead, Plato’s view in the Protagoras seems to be that failure can have no other cause than ignorance, and that the only reason anybody ever makes a bad choice is simply because he does not know any better.
More specifically, Plato takes his stand on the proposition that it is impossible for anyone ever knowingly to make a bad or wrong choice. For what is it to make such a choice, if not to choose that which turns out to be bad or injurious or harmful to the chooser? And who would ever deliberately choose that which he knew would be detrimental to himself? It is true that we often deliberately submit to that which we know will be hurtful and disagreeable. But is not this always with a view to what we think will in the long run be of greater benefit—as, for instance, when we undergo the suffering of a surgical operation, but only for the sake of regaining our health? Or if we don’t actually believe that the course of action we are choosing will in the long run be of greater benefit to us, we at least are convinced that in the short run it will have some advantage, and that in the long run it probably won’t hurt or make too much difference. Hence we say to ourselves, “Why not try to get such short-run enjoyment and benefit as we can? Surely, it will be worth it.” Such is the way we usually reason. Is it even conceivable that a man would ever choose that which he was quite certain would be more harmful to him than not, without any compensating factor to make the venture seem worth while after all?
Or look at it this way. What precisely does it mean for us to choose one thing or one course of action over another? Does it not mean that we prefer the one to the other? But to prefer one thing to another means that we take the one to be somehow better than the other. And when it is said that we “take” one thing to be better or preferable, this means that it seems better to us, we think it better. Indeed, is it any more than a tautology to say of human choice that it is always a choosing of that which seems or appears better to us? Of course, it may not really be better, but only seem so. And yet this but tends to confirm Plato’s thesis. For Plato is not for a minute contending that no one ever does in fact choose what is worse rather than what is better; his contention is only that no one ever does so knowingly. Consequently, for him, all of the bad choices which we human beings make—and goodness knows we make enough of them!—turn out to be but a function of our not knowing any better.
But doesn’t this conclusion run directly counter to what our experience repeatedly attests? Have we not all upon occasion said to ourselves: “I see what the better course is and I approve it, but I follow the worse” (“Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor”)?
Nor is it merely to common sense that this Platonic thesis does violence. In addition, it runs counter to Aristotle’s contention, which we explained and defended so painstakingly in the preceding chapter, that for the leading of a good or happy life, it will not suffice to have only intellectual virtue; one must have moral virtue as well. But now Plato comes along and says that whatever the better course of action may be, if a man knows what this is, he will necessarily follow it; on the other hand, if a man does something that is bad or foolish, this can only be because he didn’t realize what he was doing. What else, in fact, could be the sense of the celebrated Platonic maxim that virtue is simply a matter of knowledge and vice of ignorance? Similarly, on this Platonic view, the business of living well turns out to be a mere matter of skill or know-how, and of nothing else—just like the other arts.
5. Is there no getting around Plato’s argument?
How is one to meet this Platonic thesis? For however many grounds we may have for thinking it dubious, or even sophistic, it is extremely difficult to refute. Suppose we try to counter Plato’s thesis by appealing to the consideration that ignorance, so far from being the only reason for our bad choices, is itself not infrequently the result of our own choices. After all, human knowledge, and correspondingly human ignorance, do not arise in a complete vacuum. Much, if not most, of our knowledge results from our having deliberately chosen to inform ourselves and to find out about things. And as for ignorance, we have already remarked on how often it is that we don’t know about something, for the reason that we did not choose to take the trouble to learn, or perhaps because we deliberately chose not to learn. Indeed, the more one considers the matter, the more it seems that our ignorances and stupidities are perhaps mainly due to our own laziness, or maybe fear, or smugness, or carelessness. Hence why not turn the tables on Plato and say that it is not because of ignorance that our characters are weak and our choices bad, but rather because our characters are weak that we are so much of the time ignorant of what we should know and could know?
But Plato could have an easy answer for this one—although by now our interpretation of Plato has far outrun the actual Platonic texts. Plato need only point out that it merely shifts the issue of the decisive role of knowledge and ignorance in moral behavior to a further remove, but does not eliminate it. Granted that my lack of knowledge may be due to my not choosing to find out, or perhaps to my not choosing to consider what I very well know, still what about this prior matter of my not choosing to find out, or of my not choosing to exercise the knowledge I have? Why did I not choose to do so? Surely if I had realized (i.e., if I had known) how important it was to find out, or how much better it would have been for me to bring to bear the knowledge I already had, then most assuredly I would have chosen to do so. But I did not realize and didn’t know; hence I didn’t choose. Once again, the principle becomes both plain and inescapable: any choice necessarily presupposes some sort of judgment as to better and worse; and whether the judgment be a true or a false one is a matter of whether one knows or doesn’t know. In other words, virtue or right choice is simply a matter of knowing what the right thing to do is, just as not making the right choice is simply a matter of not knowing.
There doesn’t seem to be any way of penetrating Plato’s defenses. For no sooner does one adduce evidence to show that some such factor as bad choice enters into our human failures, quite as much as ignorance or lack of knowledge, than Plato can immediately make rejoinder that any choice we human beings make can only be a choice of what seems best to us at the moment. Hence if what seems best to us turns out to be not really best for us, then our choice will have been a bad one; but it will always ultimately be nothing but ignorance which is the cause of such bad choices, and so it can only be ignorance that is the ultimate cause of all of our failures.
Yet there is a weakness in this Platonic argument after all. For note that Plato’s defense is ever to appeal to the principle that a man’s choices can only be choices of what seems best to him at the moment. Nor can this principle be attacked, for it is not only true, but perhaps even a tautology since “to choose” simply means “to choose that which seems best.” Still, this principle alone does not suffice to make good Plato’s case. For not only must he show that our choices, when we make them, are determined by our opinions of what is best; he must also show that our opinions of what is best, when we have them, necessarily determine our choices. Nor do these two principles by any means come down to the same thing. For while it may be true that if and when I make a choice, I can only choose that which at the time seems best, it does not necessarily follow from this that if and when I have an opinion of what is best for me, I necessarily choose to act on this opinion.
However, it is precisely with reference to the latter situation that Aristotle’s insistence upon the need for moral virtue, as distinct from intellectual virtue, is of particular pertinence. For Aristotle was not questioning the fact that we always make our choices on the basis of some sort of immediate opinion or judgment as to what is best for us. Rather what worried him was that all too frequently our better judgment does not seem to determine our choice. On the contrary, when actually we get around to making a choice, we often choose that which in a calmer moment we readily recognize to have been exceedingly foolish and unwise. Hence the need for moral virtue, in addition to intellectual virtue—moral virtue, that is to say, which will serve to bring our actual choices and preferences into line with what our better judgment tells us is the better course for us to follow.
Viewed in this light, Plato’s principle begins to appear not so much true, as merely trivially true. For granted that at the moment of choosing I always do choose that which seems best to me just then, what does this prove? It certainly does not prove that I will necessarily go through with my choice. For it may well be that no sooner do I start to do so than I change my mind; some other course of action suggests itself to me as being far better; my earlier choice will then cease to be operative and will be replaced by a new and different choice in line with my new and different opinions. Even if one were to go along with Plato’s view to the point of conceding that my judgments as to what is better or worse do, either all of the time or most of the time, determine my choices, there is nothing in this situation to guarantee any constancy to such judgments. Hence to conclude from this that virtue is simply a matter of knowledge would seem to be either trivial and insignificant, or else downright misleading and even mistaken.
To take a familiar, if trite, example, suppose that I well know that my irritability and bad temper are serious weaknesses in my character, leading me repeatedly to do things that are foolish and regrettable. No doubt this knowledge of my own weakness gives rise on my part to repeated firm resolves to try to correct my bad habits. But if a telephone call interrupt me as I am taking a nap, if a driver on the highway suddenly puts on the brakes without signalling, if a secretary fails to get the letter typed which I had said had to go out in the afternoon mail—then what happens? I blow my top; I forget all about those earlier sensible considerations as to how stupid such displays of temper are and what a serious reflection they are upon my character and personality.
And what about Plato? In one sense, he is not exactly refuted, for even in my fit of temper I do choose to act in accordance with what my judgment at that moment tells me is all right and what I should do. But in another sense he is completely refuted. Virtue is not simply a matter of knowledge; it is far more a matter of abiding by one’s knowledge or remaining constant to it, instead of letting it be forever displaced by numberless counter-opinions and judgments that are determined by our passions and whims of the moment.
7. Implications with respect to human responsibility
After this rather long digression on Plato, we may be in a somewhat better position to understand the peculiar nature of human choice, and more specifically, just how and in what sense our bad choices are a cause of our human failures. There is also the question of our responsibility for such failures, once it be granted that these failures are due not so much to ignorance as to bad choices.
On this latter score it is interesting to note that if the “Platonic” theory (i.e., that interpretation and development of Plato’s ideas that we have been presenting) were correct and if ignorance were the sole reason for our failures, then there would be no way in which we could be justly held responsible for our own failures. Quite the contrary, since on the Platonic view every human being always does the best he knows how; hence a man’s not doing any better would be due simply to his not knowing any better. Nor could he be blamed for his ignorance, considering that, had he been able to find out what he needed to know, and had he realized how important it was to find out, he would certainly have done so. Accordingly, on any view which holds that virtue is but a matter of knowledge and vice one of ignorance, no man can very well be held personally responsible for being as he is.
On the other hand, once this Platonic theory is refuted and rejected, will it not be a different story as regards human responsibility? For now, although it must still be conceded that no man can choose any course of action other than that which seems best to him at the moment, still the mere fact that a certain course happens to seem best to him does not mean that he will necessarily choose it. On the contrary, it is always possible for him to change his opinion: he can think further about the matter and so come to realize that his original preference was unwise; or he can simply let himself be cajoled into the thinking otherwise under the influence of a change of feeling or mood. For that matter, even his original opinion of the situation might well have been a different one. After all, it is a simple fact borne in upon us repeatedly that even though at a given moment things do appear to us as they do, still they might not have seemed that way at all, had we but chosen to look farther, or had we taken pains to investigate more carefully; or contrariwise, had we not bestirred ourselves to see what we did see, or had we not taken the trouble to inform ourselves as we did.
8. Human responsibility as involving human freedom
Just what are we to understand by this expression “it is always possible” for us to change our opinions as to what is better or worse for us, or to have reached a different opinion in the first place? What is involved here is not merely a logical possibility, or even a mere physical possibility, in the sense that the various external causes and factors productive of my opinions might have been different or might still become different, thus causing my opinions either to have been or to be other than what they are. What is meant here is a possibility that is open to me in the sense of being within my own power and disposition. Thus when I say, “I should never have done that, if only I had stopped to think,” or “I knew what a foolish thing that was to do; why then did I let my temper get the better of me?”—in all such cases the implication is not merely that the results would have been different, had the circumstances been different, but also that it was somehow due to me that the circumstances were not different: I could have changed them, but I didn’t. Thus the responsibility for the final result rests with me.
You might reply, “It is true that we often speak this way about ourselves, as if it were within our power to have acted differently from the way we did. But is this any more than just a common way of speaking? What exactly does it mean? Does it not call up all the problems connected with free will, a notion which in the final analysis reduces to sheer unintelligibility?”
a. Value judgments as free judgments
Thus far we have avoided use of the term “free will,” because of the many difficulties connected with this expression. But perhaps we can avoid its use no longer. Or maybe for our purposes the Scholastic term, liberum arbitrium, “free choice” or perhaps even “free judgment,” would be better. In any case, despite the difficulties that arise in using such notions, we believe that they can be rendered meaningful and intelligible. In explaining them, we propose to follow, for the most part, an explanation that has become traditional in Western philosophy. It runs something like this.
There is a certain sense in which we human beings never seem satisfied with anything. Whatever it is that a man possesses, wealth or learning or fame or competence or even a beautiful woman, he can always think of something else that he still does not have and that he wants. The reason for this insatiability in the demands and desires of human nature is that man is a being who can form what we might call the notion of an absolute and infinite good. True, most of us in our daily lives don’t go around talking about the “infinite good.” Nor is it anything that we can actually point to, being a purely abstract notion, or perhaps better, a notion that forever transcends anything that we come upon in concrete experience. But however little we may talk about it, our conduct and behavior are not infrequently dominated by the notion of it—witness our restlessness, our striving, our boredom and dissatisfaction with what we have, our ever recurrent pursuit of the novel and the different. One could almost say that the very logic of our human situation makes this sort of tension and dissatisfaction almost inevitable. For whatever it is that I am, or whatever it is that I have, in the very nature of the case there is bound to be something else that I am not, or that I do not have. What’s more, as an intelligent being, I can scarcely avoid realizing that in being or having anything, there are countless other things that in the very nature of the case I must do without.
Little wonder, then, that such being our human condition, our choices will never be absolutely determined by any one opinion as to what is better or worse for ourselves. For no sooner will one course of action appear to be the best one open to us than the limitations of such a course will begin to impress themselves upon us: if we follow this particular course, we shall be unable to do certain other things that begin to appear attractive—we shall be deprived of this, barred from that, deflected from something else. Under a bombardment of such considerations, our original judgment as to what was best for us may change completely; something else may begin to appear more to our liking.
Moreover, the ironical thing is that this freedom of judgment, or freedom of will, operates even with respect to those things which really are best for us, and not only with respect to those which only seem to be so. For example, as regards the examined life itself, it makes no difference how clearly I may recognize its superior claims or how convinced I may be that it is the only life for me, still it is a way of life which is certainly limited when compared with the abstract standard of the infinite good. In consequence, my judgment that it is the best life for me, however true it may be, is still not a necessarily determined judgment. On the contrary. I can hardly fail to recognize that in order to be a Socrates, say, I shall have to give up a lot of things that may be very dear to me—comforts and luxuries, or place and position, or wealth, or even my career as scholar or general or diplomat or scientist; I might even have to drink the hemlock! When the realization of such sacrifices is borne in upon me, it would hardly surprise anyone if I were to begin to feel that the examined life really didn’t have so much to recommend it after all—despite the fact that in truth it might still be the best life for me and indeed for any man.
We are now in a position to discern the real meaning of these notions of free will and free judgments. Free judgment means no more than that in matters pertaining to what is of value for us and what it is best for us to do, our judgment is never necessarily determined to any one opinion alone. Even if our opinion happens to be a true opinion and we know it to be true, that opinion still does not necessarily determine our course of action. For compared with the abstract notion of an absolute or infinite good, any concrete notion of what is good for us here and now will inevitably appear restricted. Hence as we consider all that we shall not be getting, all that we shall be giving up and sacrificing, if we act upon our present judgment, it is not surprising that our judgment itself may change and that what had formerly seemed so attractive and worth while may now appear less so.
b. Free judgments and free choices
Nevertheless, this notion of “free judgment” cannot be properly understood save in close connection with the correlative notion of “free will” or “free choice.” To be sure, a judgment, even though it be a judgment of value, is nevertheless a proper judgment. That is to say, in any judgment of value, we do in a sense judge that something is the case, e.g., that a certain course of action is the best one to follow under the circumstances. And being a judgment, this will be either true or false. At the same time, this is the sort of judgment that can only be a contingent truth, not a necessary truth: it is something which, even though it be true, might conceivably have been otherwise. For example, suppose I make the statement: “At this hour, 10:30 P.M., on this day, March 24, 1962, I am sitting at my desk writing.” This statement is in fact true; and yet it is perfectly conceivable that it might not have been so: instead of being at my desk I might, alas, have been sound asleep in bed, or drinking a glass of beer with a friend, or reading a good book.
In this sense, then, an ordinary judgment of value is no more than a contingent truth: it could be true, but it need not be. Nevertheless, in holding these judgments of value to be free judgments more is meant than merely that they are contingent. For in addition to being contingent, such judgments of value are implied instructions or commands—commands to ourselves to choose to act in accordance with what we have judged to be the better course. Nevertheless, since as human beings we can scarcely avoid measuring our judgments of value against an ultimate and abstract standard of infinite good or absolute value, and since such a comparison always reveals the limited and restrictive character of the value that is being prescribed for us, it is inevitable that the implied directive or command that is involved in our judgment will not necessarily move us to act. On the contrary, we are always free to choose not to act. In other words, the “freedom” of such a judgment of value must be understood with reference to the freedom of choice which that judgment leaves, so to speak, undetermined and unnecessitated.
But further, the freedom that is involved in free will and free choice must also be understood with reference to a certain freedom that is involved in what we have called a free judgment in regard to values. As we have already seen in our discussion of Plato, a choice can only be of that which seems best to us at the moment. In this sense any human choice always presupposes a judgment of value as a sort of guide or directive. When we say that any of our finite human judgments of value always leaves us free to choose otherwise, this can only mean that other and alternative judgments of value must lie ready at hand, in accordance with which we may make a different choice. Not only that, but our very dissatisfaction, or at least our feeling that we are not entirely satisfied, with the limited and restricted values that are being recommended to us creates a demand for new and different directives, i.e., for other and alternative judgments of value. This is why, we would suggest, our very judgments themselves appear to be not so much determined by the facts, as elicited by our needs and wants. In this sense, they appear to be free and at our disposal. And so, we should be able to understand a little more clearly what is meant by human freedom. In contrast to all other instances of appetite, impulse, tendency, tropism, etc., such as occur throughout the rest of nature, the values that elicit our distinctively human choices and preferences are never uniquely determining. Instead, being subject to comparison with a standard of absolute value, such values always leave us free to choose something else; that is to say, we find ourselves, with respect to the objects of our wishes and desires, always caught up in an interplay of free judgment and free choice of the sort we have just been describing.
But, of course, where there is freedom, there is responsibility. Indeed, this is the sense of those locutions and turns of phrase which are the common coin of our daily lives and which no amount of philosophical sophistication can ever enable us to dispense with: “I chose to do this, but I didn’t have to, I could have chosen otherwise”; “I decided on this course of action because at the time it seemed best to me; but if only I had stopped to think, I should have realized how foolish the whole thing was”; etc.
More generally, however, where this matter of human responsibility is impressed upon us, and even sometimes over-whelms us, it is in connection with the good life as a whole. What human perfection consists in, what true human happiness involves, is in one sense determined by human nature itself; but it is not determined at all that we shall actually live this way. On the contrary, we ourselves must choose to do so. Moreover, we have to choose such a mode of life in the face of the fact that in comparison with an absolute good, it can appear distressingly limited and lacking in all sorts of things that we might wish for. But it is still the best life for us. We are all capable of recognizing this; indeed, we all, in a sense, do recognize it. And yet how few of us earnestly seek to attain it, to say nothing of actually succeeding. Here is where we do seem to be without excuse. It is not because of ignorance that we fail, ultimately, it is because we don’t choose when we could choose. In this sense, there is no one and no thing that we can ultimately hold responsible for such failure, save only ourselves.
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