freedom and responsibility essay

The Interplay of Freedom and Responsibility in Ethical Theory

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Have you ever pondered the intricate dance between our freedom to choose and the moral weight of our actions? This delicate balance of human freedom and moral responsibility is a cornerstone in the grand edifice of ethical theory . It’s where the philosophical rubber meets the road of real-life decisions and dilemmas. Let’s embark on a thought-provoking journey to unravel how the concept of freedom is not just a philosophical luxury but a fundamental component of understanding moral obligation and ethical conduct.

The essence of moral accountability

At the heart of ethical discussions lies a simple yet profound question: Are we truly free in making our choices, or are the threads of our decisions woven by the loom of pre-existing causes? The notion of moral responsibility hinges on the belief that individuals are free agents capable of making autonomous choices. Without this freedom, the very fabric of moral accountability unravels. After all, can we hold someone morally responsible for an action if they had no real choice in the matter?

Free will versus determinism

To fully grasp the relationship between freedom and responsibility, we must first navigate the waters of philosophical debate surrounding free will and determinism. Determinism posits that every event, including human cognition and behavior, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. If determinism holds true, the implication for moral responsibility is seismic—our choices are but echoes of predetermined events, rendering the concept of moral culpability moot.

Indeterminism and moral agency

Contrasting determinism is indeterminism , the theory that not all events are causally determined and that human beings can exercise genuine choice. This viewpoint casts us as authors of our fate, capable of initiating new causal chains not predetermined by past events. Here, the stage is set for moral responsibility, as our actions are products of our volition.

Implications for ethical conduct

The debate between determinism and indeterminism is not just an intellectual pastime; it has profound implications for ethical conduct. If we accept that we possess free will, then we must also shoulder the moral responsibility for our actions. This belief is the linchpin of legal systems and societal norms—where actions have consequences, and individuals are accountable for their choices.

The interplay of freedom and obligation

Moral obligation: The idea of moral obligation is predicated on the notion of freedom. We often speak of “ought to do” in ethical discussions, but this presupposes that we have the freedom to choose otherwise. It’s this capacity for choice that underpins our moral duties and obligations.

Autonomy and ethics: Autonomy, or self-governance, is another pillar of ethical theory intimately linked to freedom. It is the principle that we have the authority to make decisions governing our own lives, and with this authority comes the responsibility to make ethically sound choices.

Challenges to the notion of free will

While the idea of free will is appealing, it faces challenges from various quarters. Advances in neuroscience , for example, have led some to question whether our decisions are truly free or merely the result of complex neural processes. Additionally, social determinants such as upbringing, culture, and environmental factors can seem to constrain our freedom, influencing our choices in ways that challenge the concept of autonomous decision-making.

Responsibility in a determined world

Even if we were to lean towards a deterministic view of the world, this doesn’t necessarily extinguish the flame of moral responsibility. Some philosophers argue that responsibility could still apply in a determined world if individuals can reflect on their desires and motives and respond to reasons. This compatibilist perspective reconciles determinism with the moral intuitions that undergird our justice systems and social practices.

In the grand tapestry of ethics, the interplay between human freedom and moral responsibility is a thread that runs deep and strong. As we’ve seen, the concept of freedom is central to understanding moral obligation and ethical conduct. Whether we embrace free will or grapple with determinism, the quest to understand our moral landscape remains a pivotal and enduring human endeavor.

What do you think? Is free will an essential ingredient for moral responsibility, or can we find a way to hold individuals accountable even in a deterministic framework? How do your personal experiences shape your view on the matter?

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1 Nature and Scope of Ethics

• Moral Intuitionism
• Human Person in Search of Himself/Herself
• Love and the Moral Precepts
• The Dynamics of Morality
• The Constant and the Variable in Morality

2 Importance and Challenges of Ethics

• The Challenge of Situation Ethics
• Cultural and Ethical Subjectivism
• Morris Ginsberg’s “On the Diversity of Morals”

3 Ethics in History of Indian Philosophy

• Sources of Moral Ideals in India
• Ethics: Its Meaning in Indian Tradition
• Ethics in Vedic Period
• Ethics in Buddhism
• Jaina Ethics

4 Ethics in the History of Western Philosophy

• Thomas Aquinas
• William of Ockham
• Thomas Hobbes
• Jeremy Bentham
• Immanuel Kant
• John Stuart Mill
• Emile Durkheim

5 Human Values

• Subjectivism
• Subjectivism of Mackie
• Cultural Relativism
• Rational Constructivism
• Emotivism of Ayer
• Intuitionism

6 Human Virtues

• Aristotle and His Concept of Eudaimonia
• Virtues and Actions
• Evaluating Virtue Ethics
• Ethics of Care
• MacIntyre: Relativity of Virtues
• Virtues in Asian Religions

7 Human Rights

• Development of Human Rights
• A Critical Look at Some Specific “Human Rights”
• The Right to Life

8 Human Duties

• Different Types of Norms
• Distinction between Values and Norms
• Ross and Prima Facie Duties
• John Rawl’s Theory of Justice

9 International Ethics

• Realism and International Ethics
• Idealism and International Ethics
• Constructivism and International Ethics
• Cosmopolitanism and International Ethics

10 Bioethics

• Moral Pluralism
• Social Dimensions
• Core and Other Ethical Considerations Respect for Persons
• Minimizing Harms While Maximizing Benefits

11 Environmental Ethics

• Environmental Ethics: Meaning
• The Modern Construction of Environmental Ethics
• Environmental Ethics and Sustainable Development
• Environmentalism and Pacifism
• Ecosystems: The Land Ethic

12 Media Ethics

• Code of Ethics for Media
• Being Ethical in Print Media
• Ethical Norms for Audio-Visual Media
• Freedom of Press and Right of Privacy
• Remedial Measures for Maladies in Mass Media
• Social Responsibility and the Media
• Ethics in Producing and Screening of Movies
• Media Ethics: Practical Applications and Solutions

13 Natural Moral Law

• The Data of Moral Consciousness
• The Foundation of the Moral Order
• Existentialist Humanism
• The Human Order and the Moral Order

14 Deontology and Moral Responsibility

• Categorical Imperative
• Freedom as One of the Three Postulates
• Human Freedom and Moral Responsibility
• Determinism versus Indeterminism
• Existential Situation and Human Freedom
• Levinas’ Ethics of Responsibility for the Other

15 Discourse Ethics

• The General Features of Habermas’ Discourse Ethics
• The Rules of Argumentation
• Moral Consciousness and Discourse Ethics
• Karl-Otto Apel’s Discourse Ethics
• Apel’s Critique of Previous Moral Theories

16 Social Institutions

• Accounts of Social Institutions
• General Properties of Social Institutions
• The Main Theoretical Accounts of Social Institutions
• A Teleological Account of Institutions
• Normative Character of Social Institutions
• Social Institutions and Distributive Justice

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Moral Responsibility

Making judgments about whether a person is morally responsible for her behavior, and holding others and ourselves responsible for actions and the consequences of actions, is a fundamental and familiar part of our moral practices and our interpersonal relationships.

The judgment that a person is morally responsible for her behavior involves—at least to a first approximation—attributing certain powers and capacities to that person, and viewing her behavior as arising (in the right way) from the fact that the person has, and has exercised, these powers and capacities. Whatever the correct account of the powers and capacities at issue (and canvassing different accounts is the task of this entry), their possession qualifies an agent as morally responsible in a general sense: that is, as one who may be morally responsible for particular exercises of agency. Normal adult human beings may possess the powers and capacities in question, and non-human animals, very young children, and those suffering from severe developmental disabilities or dementia (to give a few examples) are generally taken to lack them.

To hold someone responsible involves—again, to a first approximation—responding to that person in ways that are made appropriate by the judgment that she is morally responsible. These responses often constitute instances of moral praise or moral blame (though there may be reason to allow for morally responsible behavior that is neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy: see McKenna 2012: 16–17 and M. Zimmerman 1988: 61–62). Blame is a response that may follow on the judgment that a person is morally responsible for behavior that is wrong or bad, and praise is a response that may follow on the judgment that a person is morally responsible for behavior that is right or good.

It should be noted at the outset that the above schema, while useful, may be misleading in certain respects. For one thing, it suggests a correspondence and symmetry between praise and blame that may not exist. The two are certainly asymmetrical insofar as the attention given to blame far exceeds that given to praise. One reason for this is that blameworthiness, unlike praiseworthiness, is often taken to involve liability to a sanction. Thus, articulating the conditions of blameworthiness may seem to theorists the more pressing matter. Perhaps for related reasons, there is a richer language for expressing blame than praise (Watson 1996 [2004: 283]), and “blame” finds its way into idioms for which there is no ready parallel employing “praise”: compare “ S is to blame for x ” and “ S is to praise for x ”. Note, as well, that “holding responsible” is itself not a neutral expression: it typically arises in blaming contexts (Watson 1996 [2004: 284]). Additionally, there may be asymmetries in the contexts in which praise and blame are appropriate: private blame is a more familiar phenomenon than private praise (Coates & Tognazzini 2013a), and while minor wrongs may reasonably earn blame, minimally decent behavior often seems insufficient for praise (see Eshleman 2014 for this and other differences between praise and blame). Finally, the widespread assumption that praiseworthiness and blameworthiness are at least symmetrical in terms of the capacities they require has also been questioned (Nelkin 2008, 2011; Wolf 1980, 1990). Like most work on moral responsibility, this entry will tend to focus on the negative side of the phenomenon; for more, see the entry on blame .

A few other general observations about the concept of moral responsibility are in order before introducing particular conceptions of it. In everyday speech, one often hears references to people’s “moral responsibility” where the point is to indicate that a person has some duty or obligation—some responsibility —to which that person is required, by some standard, to attend. In this sense, we say, for example, that a lawyer has a responsibility (to behave in certain ways, according to certain standards) to his client. This entry, however, is concerned not with accounts that specify people’s responsibilities in the sense of duties and obligations, but rather with accounts of whether a person bears the right relation to her own actions, and their consequences, so as to be properly held accountable for them. (Unfortunately, this entry does not include discussion of some important topics related to moral responsibility, such as responsibility for omissions (see Clarke 2014, Fischer & Ravizza 1998, and Nelkin & Rickless 2017a) or collective responsibility (see the entry on collective responsibility and Volumes 30 and 38 of Midwest Studies in Philosophy ).

Moral responsibility should also be distinguished from causal responsibility. Causation is a complicated topic, but it is often fairly clear that a person is causally responsible for—that is, she is the (or a) salient cause of—some occurrence or outcome. However, the powers and capacities that are required for moral responsibility are not identical with an agent’s causal powers, so we cannot infer moral responsibility from an assignment of causal responsibility. Young children, for example, can cause outcomes while failing to fulfill the requirements for general moral responsibility, in which case it will not be appropriate to judge them morally responsible for, or to hold them morally responsible for, the outcomes for which they may be causally responsible. And even generally morally responsible agents may explain or defend their behavior in ways that call into question their moral responsibility for outcomes for which they are causally responsible. Suppose that S causes an explosion by flipping a switch: the fact that S had no reason to expect such a consequence from flipping the switch might call into question his moral responsibility (or at least his blameworthiness) for the explosion without altering his causal contribution to it. Having distinguished different senses of responsibility, unless otherwise indicated, “responsibility” will refer to “moral responsibility” (in the sense defined here) throughout the rest of this entry.

Until fairly recently, the bulk of philosophical work on moral responsibility was conducted in the context of debates about free will, which largely concerned the various ways that (various sorts of) determinism might threaten free will and moral responsibility. A largely unquestioned assumption was that free will is required for moral responsibility, and the central questions had to do with the ingredients of free will and with whether their possession was compatible with determinism. Recently, however, the literature on moral responsibility has addressed issues that are of interest independently of worries about determinism. Much of this entry will deal with these latter aspects of the moral responsibility debate. However, it will be useful to begin with issues at the intersection of concerns about free will and moral responsibility.

1. Freedom, Responsibility, and Determinism

2.1 forward-looking accounts, 2.2.1 “freedom and resentment”, 2.2.2 criticisms of strawson’s approach, 2.3 reasons-responsiveness views, 3.1.1 attributability versus accountability, 3.1.2 attributionism, 3.1.3 answerability, 3.2.1 the moral competence condition on responsibility, 3.2.2 conversational approaches to responsibility, 3.2.3 psychopathy, 3.3.1 moral luck, 3.3.2 ultimate responsibility, 3.3.3 personal history and manipulation, 3.3.4 the epistemic condition on responsibility, other internet resources, related entries.

How is the responsible agent related to her actions; what power does she exercise over them? One (partial) answer is that the relevant power is a form of control, and, in particular, a form of control such that the agent could have done otherwise than to perform the action in question. This captures one commonsense notion of free will, and one of the central issues in debates about free will has been about whether possession of it (free will, in the ability-to-do-otherwise sense) is compatible with causal determinism (or with, for example, divine foreknowledge—see the entry on foreknowledge and free will ).

If causal determinism is true, then the occurrence of any event (including events involving human deliberation, choice, and action) that does in fact occur was made inevitable by—because it was causally necessitated by—the facts about the past (and the laws of nature) prior to the occurrence of the event. Under these conditions, the facts about the present, and about the future, are uniquely fixed by the facts about the past (and about the laws of nature): given these earlier facts, the present and the future can unfold in only one way. For more, see the entry on causal determinism .

If possession of free will requires an ability to act otherwise than one in fact does, then it is fairly easy to see why free will has often been regarded as incompatible with causal determinism. One way of getting at this incompatibilist worry is to focus on the way in which performance of a given action should be up to an agent if he has the sort of free will required for moral responsibility. As the influential Consequence Argument has it (Ginet 1966; van Inwagen 1983: 55–105; Wiggins 1973), the truth of determinism seems to entail that an agent’s actions are not up to him since they are the unavoidable consequences of things over which the agent lacks control. Here is an informal summary of this argument from Peter van Inwagen’s important book, An Essay on Free Will (1983):

If determinism is true, then our acts are the consequences of the laws of nature and events in the remote past. But it is not up to us what went on before we were born, and neither is it up to us what the laws of nature are. Therefore, the consequences of these things (including our present acts) are not up to us. (1983: 16)

For an important argument that suggests that the Consequence Argument conflates different senses in which the laws of nature are not up to us, see David Lewis (1981). For more on incompatibilism and incompatibilist arguments, see the entries on free will , arguments for incompatibilism , and incompatibilist (nondeterministic) theories of free will , as well as Randolph Clarke (2003).

Compatibilists maintain that free will (and/or moral responsibility) is possible even in a deterministic universe. Versions of compatibilism have been defended since ancient times. For example, the Stoics—Chryssipus, in particular—argued that the truth of determinism does not entail that human actions are entirely explained by factors external to agents; thus, human actions are not necessarily explained in a way that is incompatible with praise and blame (see Bobzien 1998 and Salles 2005 for Stoic views on freedom and determinism). Similarly, philosophers in the Modern period (such as Hobbes and Hume) distinguished the general way in which our actions are necessitated if determinism is true from the specific instances of necessity sometimes imposed on us by everyday constraints on our behavior (e.g., physical impediments that make it impossible to act as we choose). The difference is that the necessity involved in determinism is compatible with agents acting as they choose to act: even if S ’s behavior is causally determined, it may be behavior that she chooses to perform. And perhaps the ability that matters for free will (and responsibility) is just the ability to act as one chooses, which seems to require only the absence of external constraints (and not the absence of determinism).

This compatibilist tradition was carried into the twentieth century by logical positivists such A. J. Ayer (1954) and Moritz Schlick (1930 [1966]). Here is how Schlick expressed the central compatibilist insight in 1930 (drawing, in particular, on Hume):

Freedom means the opposite of compulsion; a man is free if he does not act under compulsion , and he is compelled or unfree when he is hindered from without…when he is locked up, or chained, or when someone forces him at the point of a gun to do what otherwise he would not do. (1930 [1966: 59])

Since deterministic causal pressures do not always force one to “do what otherwise he would not do”, freedom—at least of the sort specified by Schlick—is compatible with determinism.

A closely related compatibilist strategy, influential in the early and mid-twentieth century, was to offer a conditional analysis of the ability to do otherwise (Ayer 1954, Hobart 1934, Moore 1912; for earlier expressions, see Hobbes 1654 and Hume 1748). As just noted, even if determinism is true, agents may often act as they choose, and it is equally compatible with determinism that an agent who performed act A (on the basis of his choice to do so) might have performed a different action on the condition that (contrary to what actually happened) she had chosen to perform the other action. Even if a person’s actual behavior is causally determined by the actual past, it may be that if the past had been suitably different (e.g., if the person’s desires, intentions, choices, etc. had been different), then she would have acted differently. And perhaps this is all that the ability to do otherwise comes to: one can do otherwise if it is true that if one had chosen to do otherwise, then one would have done otherwise.

However, this compatibilist picture is open to serious objections. First, it might be granted that an ability to act as one sees fit is valuable, and perhaps related to the type of freedom at issue in the free will debate, but it does not follow that this is all that possession of free will comes to. A person who has certain desires as a result of indoctrination, brainwashing, or psychopathology may act as he chooses, but his free will and moral responsibility may still be called into question. (For more on the relevance of such factors, see §3.2 and §3.3.3 .) More specifically, the conditional analysis is open to the following sort of counterexample. It might be true that an agent who performs act A would have omitted A if she had so chosen, but it might also be true that the agent in question suffers from an overwhelming compulsion to perform act A . The conditional analysis suggests that the agent in question retains the ability to do otherwise than A , but, given her compulsion, it seems clear that she lacks this ability (Broad 1934, Chisholm 1964, Lehrer 1968, van Inwagen 1983). More generally, incompatibilists are likely to be dissatisfied with the conditional analysis since it fails to give an account of an ability that agents can have, right here and right now, to either perform or omit an action while holding everything about the here and now, and about the past, fixed.

Despite the above objections, the compatibilist project described so far has had significant lasting influence. As will be seen below, the fact that determined agents can act as they see fit is still an important inspiration for compatibilists, as is the fact that determined agents may have acted differently in counterfactual circumstances. For more, see the entry on compatibilism . For recent accounts related to (and improving upon) early compatibilist approaches, see Michael Fara (2008), Michael Smith (2003), and Kadri Vihvelin (2004), and for criticism of these accounts, see Randolph Clarke (2009).

Another influential trend in compatibilism has been to argue that moral responsibility does not require an ability to do otherwise. If this is right, then determinism would not threaten responsibility by ruling out access to behavioral alternatives (though determinism might threaten responsibility in other ways: see van Inwagen 1983: 182–88 and Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 151–168). In a very influential 1969 paper, Harry Frankfurt offers examples meant to show that an agent can be morally responsible for an action even if he could not have done otherwise. Versions of these examples are often called Frankfurt cases or Frankfurt examples . In the basic form of the example, an agent, Jones, considers a certain action. Another agent, Black, would like to see Jones perform this action and, if necessary, Black can make Jones perform it through some type of intervention in Jones’s deliberative process. However, as things transpire, Black does not intervene in Jones’s decision making since he can see that Jones will perform the action on his own and for his own reasons. Black does not intervene to ensure Jones’s action, but he could have, and he would have, had Jones showed some sign that he would not perform the action on his own. Therefore, Jones could not have done otherwise , yet he seems responsible for his behavior. After all, given Black’s non-intervention, Jones’s action is a perfectly ordinary bit of voluntary behavior.

There are questions about whether Frankfurt’s example really shows that Jones is morally responsible even though he couldn’t have done otherwise. For one thing, it may not be clear that Jones really couldn’t have done otherwise: while he performed the action on his own, there was the alternative that he perform the action due to some intervention on Black’s part, and not on his own. Furthermore, though he did not do so, Jones might have given Black some indication that he would not perform the action in question. Alternatively, an objection might be framed by asking how Black could be certain that Jones would or would not perform the action on his own. There seems to be a dilemma here. Perhaps determinism obtains in the universe of the example, and Black sees some sign that indicates the presence of factors that causally ensure that Jones will behave in a particular way. But in this case, incompatibilists are unlikely to grant that Jones is morally responsible if they think that moral responsibility is incompatible with determinism. On the other hand, perhaps determinism is not true in the universe of the example, but then it is not clear that the example excludes alternatives for Jones: if Jones’s behavior isn’t causally determined, then perhaps he can do otherwise. For objections to Frankfurt’s original example along these lines, see Carl Ginet (1996) and David Widerker (1995); for defenses of Frankfurt, see John M. Fischer (1994: 131–159; 2002; 2010); and for refined versions of Frankfurt’s example, meant to clearly deny Jones access to alternatives, see Alfred Mele and David Robb (1998), David Hunt (2000), and Derk Pereboom (2000; 2001: 18–28).

In response to criticisms such as the above, Frankfurt has said that his example was intended mainly to draw attention to the fact “that making an action unavoidable is not the same thing as bringing it about that the action is performed” (2006: 340; emphasis in original). In particular, while determinism may make an agent’s action unavoidable, it does not follow that the agent acts as he does only because determinism is true: it may also be true that he acts as he does because he wants to and because he sees reasons in favor of so acting. The point of his original example, Frankfurt suggests, was to draw attention to the significance that the actual causes of an agent’s behavior (such as her reasons and desires) can have independently of whether the agent might have done something else. Frankfurt concludes that “[w]hen a person acts for reasons of his own…the question of whether he could have done something else instead is quite irrelevant” for the purposes of assessing responsibility (2006: 340). A focus on the actual causes that lead to behavior, as well as investigation into when an agent can be said to act on her own reasons, has characterized a great deal of work on responsibility since Frankfurt’s essay (see §2.3 and §3.3.3 ).

2. Some Approaches to Moral Responsibility

This section discusses three important approaches to responsibility. Additional perspectives (attributionism, conversational theories, mesh or structural accounts, skeptical accounts, etc.) are introduced in more or less detail in the discussions of contemporary debates below.

Forward-looking approaches to moral responsibility justify responsibility practices by focusing on the beneficial consequences that can be obtained by engaging in these practices. This approach was influential in the earlier parts of the twentieth century (as well as before), had fallen out of favor by the closing decades of that century, and has recently been the subject of renewed interest.

Forward-looking perspectives tend to emphasize one of the central points discussed in the previous section: an agent’s being subject to determinism does not entail that he is subject to constraints that force him to act independently of his choices. If this is true, then, regardless of the truth of determinism, it may be useful to offer certain incentives to agents—to praise and blame them and generally to treat them as responsible—in order to encourage them to make certain choices and thus to secure positive behavioral outcomes.

According to some articulations of the forward-looking approach, to be a responsible agent is simply to be an agent whose motives, choices, and behavior can be shaped in this way. Thus, Moritz Schlick argued that

The question of who is responsible is the question concerning the correct point of application of the motive …. in this its meaning is completely exhausted; behind it lurks no mysterious connection between transgression and requital…. It is a matter only of knowing who is to be punished or rewarded, in order that punishment and reward function as such—be able to achieve their goal. (1930 [1966: 61]; emphasis in original)

And, according to Schlick, the goals of punishment and reward have nothing to do with the past: the idea that punishment “is a natural retaliation for past wrong, ought no longer to be defended in cultivated society” (1930 [1966: 60]; emphasis in original). Instead, punishment ought to be

concerned only with the institution of causes, of motives of conduct…. Analogously, in the case of reward we are concerned with an incentive. (1930 [1966: 60]; emphasis in original)

J. J. C. Smart (1961) also defended a well-known, forward-looking approach to moral responsibility in the mid-twentieth century. Smart claimed that to blame someone for a piece of behavior is simply to assess the behavior negatively (to “dispraise” it, in Smart’s terminology) while simultaneously ascribing responsibility for the behavior to the agent. And, for Smart, an ascription of responsibility merely involves taking an agent to be such that he would have omitted the behavior if he had been provided with a motive to do so. Whatever sanctions may follow on an ascription of responsibility are administered with eye to giving an agent motives to refrain from such behavior in the future.

Smart’s general approach has its contemporary defenders (Arneson 2003), but many have found it lacking in important ways. For one thing, as R. Jay Wallace notes, an approach like Smart’s “leaves out the underlying attitudinal aspect of moral blame” (Wallace 1996: 56, emphasis in original; see the next subsection for more on blaming attitudes). According to Wallace, the attitudes involved in blame are “backward-looking and focused on the individual agent who has done something morally wrong” (Wallace 1996: 56). But a forward-looking approach, with its focus on bringing about desirable outcomes

is not directed exclusively toward the individual agent who has done something morally wrong, but takes account of anyone else who is susceptible to being influenced by our responses. (Wallace 1996: 56; emphasis added)

In exceptional cases, a focus on beneficial outcomes may provide grounds for treating as blameworthy those who are known to be innocent (Smart 1973). This last feature of (some) forward-looking approaches has led to particularly strong criticism.

Recent efforts have been made to develop partially forward-looking accounts of responsibility that evade some of the criticisms mentioned above. These (somewhat revisionary) accounts justify our responsibility practices by appeal to their suitability for fostering moral agency and the acquisition of capacities required for such agency. Most notable in this regard is Manuel Vargas’s “agency cultivation model” of responsibility (2013; also see Jefferson 2019 and McGeer 2015). Recent conversational accounts of responsibility ( §3.2.2 ) also have an important forward-looking component insofar as they regard those with whom one might have fruitful moral interactions as candidates for responsibility. Some responsibility skeptics have also emphasized the forward-looking benefits of certain responsibility practices. For example, Derk Pereboom—who rejects desert-based blame—has argued that some conventional blaming practices can be maintained (even after ordinary notions of blameworthiness have been left behind) insofar as these practices are grounded in “non-desert invoking moral desiderata” such as “protection of potential victims, reconciliation to relationships both personal and with the moral community more generally, and moral formation” (2014: 134; also see Caruso 2016, Levy 2012, and Milam 2016). In contrast to some of the forward-looking approaches described above, Pereboom (2017) proposes that only those agents who have in fact acted immorally should be open to forward-aiming blaming practices. (For more on skepticism about responsibility, see §3.3 and the entry on skepticism about moral responsibility .)

2.2 The Reactive Attitudes Approach

P. F. Strawson’s 1962 paper, “Freedom and Resentment”, is a touchstone for much of the work on moral responsibility that followed it, especially the work of compatibilists. Strawson’s aim was to chart a course between incompatibilist accounts committed to a free will requirement on responsibility, and forward-looking compatibilist accounts that did not, in Strawson’s view, appropriately acknowledge and account for the interpersonal significance of the affective component of our responsibility practices. In contrast with forward-looking accounts such as J. J. C. Smart’s and Moritz Schlick’s ( §2.1 ), Strawson focuses directly on the emotions—the reactive attitudes—that play a fundamental role in our practices of holding one another responsible. Strawson’s suggestion is that attending to the logic of these emotional responses yields an account of what it is to be open to praise and blame that need not invoke the incompatibilist’s conception of free will. Indeed, Strawson’s view has been interpreted as suggesting that no metaphysical facts beyond our praising and blaming practices are needed to ground these practices.

Part of the novelty of Strawson’s approach is its emphasis on the “importance that we attach to the attitudes and intentions towards us of other human beings” (1962 [1993: 48]) and on

how much it matters to us, whether the actions of other people…reflect attitudes towards us of goodwill, affection, or esteem on the one hand or contempt, indifference, or malevolence on the other. (1962 [1993: 49])

For Strawson, our practices of holding others responsible are largely responses to these things: that is, “to the quality of others’ wills towards us” (1962 [1993: 56]).

To get a sense of the importance of quality of will for our interpersonal relations, note the difference in your response to one who injures you accidentally as compared to how you respond to one who does you the same injury out of “contemptuous disregard” or “a malevolent wish to injure [you]” (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 49]). The second case is likely to arouse a type and intensity of resentment that would not be (appropriately) felt in the first case. Corresponding points may be made about positive responses such as gratitude: you would likely not have the same feelings of gratitude toward a person who benefits you accidentally as you would toward one who does so out of concern for your welfare. The focus here is on personal reactive attitudes directed toward another on one’s own behalf, but Strawson also discusses “sympathetic or vicarious” attitudes felt on behalf of others, and “self-reactive attitudes” that an agent may direct toward herself (1962 [1993: 56–7]).

On Strawson’s view, the tendency to respond with relevant reactive attitudes to displays of good or ill will implicates a demand for moral respect and due regard. Indeed, for Strawson, “[t]he making of the demand is the proneness to such attitudes”, and the attitudes themselves are the “correlates of the moral demand in the case where the demand is felt to be disregarded” (1962 [1993: 63]; emphasis in original). Thus, among the circumstances that mollify a person’s (negative) reactive attitudes, are those which show that—despite initial appearances—the demand for due regard has not been ignored or flouted. When someone explains that the injury she caused you was entirely unforeseen and accidental, she indicates that her regard for your welfare was not insufficient and that she is therefore not an appropriate target for the negative attitudes involved in moral blame.

Note that the agent who excuses herself from blame in the above way is not calling into question her status as a generally responsible agent: she is still open to the demand for due regard and liable, in principle, to reactive responses. Other agents, however, may be inapt targets for blame and the reactive emotions precisely because they are not legitimate targets of a demand for regard. In these cases, an agent is not excused from blame, he is exempted from it: it is not that his behavior is discovered to have been non-malicious, but rather that he is seen to be one of whom better behavior cannot reasonably be demanded. (The widely-used terminology in which the above contrast is drawn—“excuses” versus “exemptions”—is due to Watson 1987 [2004]).

For Strawson, the most important group of exempt agents includes those who are, at least for a time, significantly impaired for normal interpersonal relationships. These agents may be children, or psychologically impaired like the “schizophrenic”; they may exhibit “purely compulsive behaviour”, or their minds may have “been systematically perverted” (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 51]). Alternatively, exempt agents may simply be “wholly lacking…in moral sense” (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 58]), perhaps because they suffered from “peculiarly unfortunate…formative circumstances” (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 52]). These agents are not candidates for the range of emotional responses involved in our personal relationships because they do not participate in these relationships in the right way for such responses to be sensibly applied to them. Rather than taking up interpersonally-engaged attitudes (that presuppose a demand for respect) toward exempt agents, we instead take an objective attitude toward them. The exempt agent is not regarded “as a morally responsible agent…as a member of the moral community” (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 59]); though he may be regarded as “an object of social policy” and as something “to be managed or handled or cured or trained” (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 52]).

Strawson’s perspective has an important compatibilist upshot. We may be able, in limited circumstances, to take up a detached, objective perspective on the behavior of normal (that is, non-exempt) agents. But Strawson argues that we cannot take up with this perspective permanently, and certainly not on the basis of discovering that determinism is true:

The human commitment to participation in ordinary interpersonal relationships is, I think, too thoroughgoing and deeply rooted for us to take seriously the thought that a general theoretical conviction [e.g., about the truth of determinism] might so change our world that, in it, there were no longer any such things as interpersonal relationships as we normally understand them; and being involved in inter-personal relationships…precisely is being exposed to the range of reactive attitudes and feelings that is in question. (1962 [1993: 54])

More specifically, the truth of determinism would not show that human beings generally occupy excusing or exempting conditions that would make the attitudes involved in holding one another responsible inappropriate. It would not follow from the truth of determinism, for example, “that anyone who caused an injury either was quite simply ignorant of causing it or had acceptably overriding reasons for” doing so (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 53]; emphasis in original); nor would it follow (from the truth of determinism)

that nobody knows what he’s doing or that everybody’s behaviour is unintelligible in terms of conscious purposes or that everybody lives in a world of delusion or that nobody has a moral sense. (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 59])

Various objections have been raised regarding P. F. Strawson’s general theoretical approach to moral responsibility, his assumptions about human psychology and sociality, and his arguments for the compatibility of determinism and responsibility.

As noted in the previous subsection, Strawson argues that learning that determinism is true would not raise general concerns about our responsibility practices. This is because the truth of determinism would not show that human beings are generally abnormal in a way that would call into question their openness to the reactive attitudes: “it cannot be a consequence of any thesis which is not itself self-contradictory that abnormality is the universal condition” (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 54]). In reply, it has been noted that while the truth of determinism might not suggest universal abnormality, it might well show that normal human beings are morally incapacitated in a way that is relevant to our responsibility practices (Russell 1992: 298–301). Strawson’s assumptions that we are too deeply and naturally committed to our reactive-attitude-involving practices to give them up, and that doing so would irreparably distort our moral lives, have also been criticized (Nelkin 2011: 42–45; G. Strawson 1986: 84–120; Watson 1987 [2004: 255–258]).

A different sort of objection emphasizes the response-dependence of Strawson’s account: that is, the way it explains an agent’s responsibility in terms of the moral responses that characterize a given community’s responsibility practices, rather than in terms of independent facts about whether the agent is responsible. This feature of Strawson’s approach invites a reading that may seem paradoxical:

In Strawson’s view, there is no such independent notion of responsibility that explains the propriety of the reactive attitudes. The explanatory priority is the other way around: It is not that we hold people responsible because they are responsible; rather, the idea ( our idea) that we are responsible is to be understood by the practice, which itself is not a matter of holding some propositions to be true, but of expressing our concerns and demands about our treatment of one another. (Watson 1987 [2004: 222]; emphasis in original; see Bennett 1980 for a related, non-cognitivist interpretation of Strawson’s approach)

Strawson’s approach would be particularly problematic if, as the above reading might suggest, it entails that a group’s responsibility practices are—as they stand and however they stand—beyond criticism simply because they are that group’s practices (Fischer & Ravizza 1993a: 18).

But there is something to be said from the other side of the debate. It may seem obvious that people are appropriately held responsible only if there are independent facts about their responsibility. But on reflection—and following R. Jay Wallace’s (1996) influential Strawsonian approach—it may be difficult “to make sense of the idea of a prior and thoroughly independent realm of moral responsibility facts” that is separate from our practices and yet to which our practices must answer (1996: 88). For Wallace, giving up on practice-independent responsibility facts doesn’t mean giving up on facts about responsibility; rather, “we must interpret the relevant facts [about responsibility] as somehow dependent on our practices of holding people responsible” (1996: 89). Such an interpretation requires an investigation into our practices, and what emerges most conspicuously, for Wallace, from this investigation is the degree to which our responsibility practices are organized around a fundamental commitment to fairness (1996: 101). Wallace develops this commitment to fairness, and to norms of fairness, into an account of the conditions under which people are appropriately held morally responsible for their behavior (1996: 103–109). (For a more recent defense of the response-dependent approach to responsibility, see Shoemaker 2017b; for criticism of such approaches, see Todd 2016.)

As noted in §1 , one of the lasting influences of Harry Frankfurt’s defense of compatibilism was to draw attention to the actual causes of agents’ behavior, and particularly to whether an agent—even a causally determined agent—acted for her own reasons. Reasons-responsiveness approaches to responsibility have been particularly attentive to these issues. These approaches ground responsibility by reference to agents’ capacities for being appropriately sensitive to the rational considerations that bear on their actions. Interpreted broadly, reasons-responsiveness approaches include a diverse collection of views, such as David Brink and Dana Nelkin (2013), John M. Fischer and Mark Ravizza (1998), Ishtiyaque Haji (1998), Michael McKenna (2013), Dana Nelkin (2011), Carolina Sartorio (2016), R. Jay Wallace (1996), and Susan Wolf (1990). Fischer and Ravizza’s Responsibility and Control (1998), which builds on Fischer (1994), offers the most influential articulation of the reasons-responsiveness approach.

Fischer and Ravizza begin with a distinction between regulative control and guidance control. Regulative control involves the possession of a dual power: “the power freely to do some act A , and the power freely to do something else instead” (1998: 31). Guidance control, on the other hand, does not require access to alternatives: it is manifested when an agent guides her behavior in a particular direction (and regardless of whether it was open to her to guide her behavior in a different direction). Since Fischer and Ravizza take Frankfurt cases ( §1 ) to show that access to behavioral alternatives is not necessary for moral responsibility, they conclude that “the sort of control necessarily associated with moral responsibility for action is guidance control ” and not regulative control (1998: 33; emphasis in original).

A number of factors can undermine guidance control. If a person’s behavior is brought about by hypnosis, brainwashing, or genuinely irresistible urges, then that person may not be morally responsible for her behavior since she does not reflectively guide it in the way required for responsibility (Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 35). More specifically, an agent in the above circumstances is not likely to be responsible because he “is not responsive to reasons—his behavior would be the same, no matter what reasons there were” (1998: 37). Thus, Fischer and Ravizza characterize possession of guidance control as (partially) dependent on responsiveness to reasons. In particular, guidance control depends on whether the psychological mechanism that issues in an agent’s behavior is responsive to reasons. (Guidance control also requires that an agent owns the mechanism on which she acts. According to Fischer and Ravizza, this requires placing historical conditions on responsibility; see §3.3.3 .)

Fischer and Ravizza’s focus on mechanisms is motivated by the following reasoning. In a Frankfurt case, an agent is responsible for an action even though his so acting is ensured by external factors. But the presence of these external factors means that the agent in a Frankfurt case would have acted the same no matter what reasons he was confronted with, which suggests that the responsible agent in a Frankfurt scenario is not responsive to reasons. This is a problem for Fischer and Ravizza’s claim that guidance control, and thus reasons-responsiveness, is necessary for responsibility. Fischer and Ravizza’s solution is to argue that while the agent in a Frankfurt case may not be responsive to reasons, the agent’s mechanism—“the process that leads to the relevant upshot [i.e., the agent’s action]”—may well be responsive to reasons (1998: 38). In other words, the agent’s generally-specified psychological mechanism might have responded (under counterfactual conditions) to considerations in favor of omitting the action that the agent actually performed (and that he was guaranteed to perform, regardless of reasons, since he was in a Frankfurt-type scenario).

Fischer and Ravizza thus arrive at the following provisional conclusion: “relatively clear cases of moral responsibility”—that is, those in which an agent is not hypnotized, etc.—are distinguished by the fact that “an agent exhibits guidance control of an action insofar as the mechanism that actually issues in the action is his own, reasons-responsive mechanism” (1998: 39). But how responsive to reasons does an agent’s mechanism need to be for that agent to have the type of control over his behavior associated with moral responsibility? A strongly reasons-responsive mechanism would both recognize and respond to any sufficient reason to act otherwise (1998: 41). (In Fischer and Ravizza’s terminology, such a mechanism is strongly “receptive” and “reactive” to reasons). But strong reasons-responsiveness cannot be required for guidance control since many intuitively responsible agents—i.e., many garden variety wrongdoers—fail to attend to sufficient reasons to do otherwise. On the other hand, weak reasons-responsiveness is not enough for guidance control. An agent with a weakly reasons-responsive mechanism will respond appropriately to some sufficient reason to do otherwise, but the pattern of responsiveness revealed in the agent’s behavior might be too arbitrary for the agent to be credited with the kind of control required for responsibility. A person’s pattern of responsiveness to reasons would likely seem erratic in the relevant way if, for example, she would forego purchasing a ticket to a basketball game if it cost one thousand dollars, but not if it cost two thousand dollars (Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 66).

Fischer and Ravizza settle on moderate reasons responsiveness as the sort that is most germane to guidance control (1998: 69–85). A psychological mechanism that is moderately responsive to reasons exhibits regularity with respect to its receptivity to reasons: that is, it exhibits “an understandable pattern of (actual and hypothetical) reasons-receptivity” (Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 71; emphasis in original). Such a pattern will indicate that an agent understands “how reasons fit together” and that, for example, “acceptance of one reason as sufficient implies that a stronger reason must also be sufficient” (Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 71). (In addition, a pattern of regular receptivity to reasons will include receptivity to a range of moral considerations (Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 77). This will rule out attributing moral responsibility to non-moral agents; see Todd and Tognazzini 2008 for criticism of Fischer and Ravizza’s articulation of this condition.) However, a moderately responsive mechanism may be only weakly reactive to reasons since, as Fischer and Ravizza put it (somewhat mysteriously), “reactivity is all of piece” such

that if an agent’s mechanism reacts to some incentive to…[do otherwise], this shows that the mechanism can react to any incentive to do otherwise. (1998: 73; emphasis in original)

Fischer and Ravizza’s account has generated a great deal of attention and criticism. Some critics focus on the contrast (just noted) between the conditions they impose on receptivity to reasons and those they impose on reactivity to reasons (McKenna 2005, Mele 2006a, Watson 2001). Additionally, many are dissatisfied with Fischer and Ravizza’s presentation of their account in terms of the powers of mechanisms as opposed to agents. This has led some authors to develop agent-based reasons-responsiveness accounts that address the concerns that led Fischer and Ravizza to their mechanism-based approach (Brink & Nelkin 2013, McKenna 2013, Sartorio 2016).

3. Contemporary Debates

3.1 the “faces” of responsibility.

Do our responsibility practices accommodate distinct forms of moral responsibility? Are there different senses in which people may be morally responsible for their behavior? Contemporary interest in these possibilities has its roots in a debate between Susan Wolf and Gary Watson. Among other things, Wolf’s important 1990 book, Freedom Within Reason , offers a critical discussion of “Real Self” theories of responsibility. According to these views, a person is responsible for behavior that is attributable to her real self, and

an agent’s behavior is attributable to the agent’s real self…if she is at liberty (or able) both to govern her behavior on the basis of her will and to govern her will on the basis of her valuational system. (Wolf 1990: 33)

The basic idea is that a responsible agent is not simply moved by her strongest desires, but also, in some way, approves of, or stands behind, the desires that move her because they are governed by her values or because they are endorsed by higher-order desires. Wolf’s central example of a Real Self view is Watson’s (1975). In an important and closely related earlier paper, Wolf (1987) characterizes Watson (1975), Harry Frankfurt (1971), and Charles Taylor (1976) as offering “deep self views”. For more on real-self/deep-self views, see §3.3.3 ; for a recent presentation of a real-self view, see Chandra Sripada (2016).

According to Wolf, one point in favor of Real Self views is that they explain why people acting under the influence of hypnosis or compulsive desires are often not responsible (1990: 33). Since these agents are typically unable, under these conditions, to govern their behavior on the basis of their valuational systems, they are alienated from their actions in a way that undermines responsibility. But, for Wolf, it is a mark against Real Self views that they tend to be silent on the topic of how agents come to have the selves that they do. An agent’s real self might, for example, be the product of a traumatic upbringing, and Wolf argues that this would give us reason to question the “agent’s responsibility for her real self” and thus her responsibility for the present behavior that issues from that self (1990: 37; emphasis in original). For an important account of an agent with such an upbringing, see Wolf’s (1987) fictional example of JoJo (and see Watson 1987 [2004] for a related discussion of the convicted murderer Robert Alton Harris). For discussion of JoJo in this entry, see §3.2.1 , and for general discussion of the relevance of personal history for present responsibility see §3.3.3 .

Wolf suggests that when a person’s real self is the product of serious childhood trauma (or related factors), then that person is potentially responsible for her behavior only in a superficial sense that merely attributes bad actions to the agent’s real self (1990: 37–40). However, Wolf argues that ascriptions of moral responsibility go deeper than such attributions can reach:

When…we consider an individual worthy of blame or of praise, we are not merely judging the moral quality of the event with which the individual is so intimately associated; we are judging the moral quality of the individual herself in some more focused, noninstrumental, and seemingly more serious way. (1990: 41)

This deeper form of assessment—assessment in terms of “deep responsibility” (Wolf 1990: 41)—requires more than that an agent is “able to form her actions on the basis of her values”, it also requires that “she is able to form her values on the basis of what is True and Good” (Wolf 1990: 75). This latter ability will be impaired or absent in an agent whose real self is the product of pressures (such as a traumatic childhood) that have distorted her moral vision. (For the relevance of moral vision, or “moral competence”, for responsibility, see §3.2 .)

In “Two Faces of Responsibility” (1996 [2004]), Gary Watson responds to Wolf. Watson agrees with Wolf that some approaches to responsibility—i.e., self-disclosure views (a phrase Watson borrows from Benson 1987)—focus narrowly on whether behavior is attributable to an agent. But Watson denies that these attributions constitute a merely superficial form of responsibility assessment. After all, behavior that is attributable to an agent—in the sense, for example, of issuing from her valuational system—often discloses something interpersonally and morally significant about the agent’s “fundamental evaluative orientation” (Watson 1996 [2004: 271]). Thus, ascriptions of responsibility in this responsibility-as-attributability sense are “central to ethical life and ethical appraisal” (Watson 1996 [2004: 263]).

However, Watson agrees with Wolf that the above story of responsibility is incomplete: there is more to responsibility than attributing actions to agents. In addition, we hold agents responsible for their behavior, which “is not just a matter of the relation of an individual to her behavior” (Watson 1996 [2004: 262]). When we hold responsible, we also “demand (require) certain conduct from one another and respond adversely to one another’s failures to comply with these demands” (Watson 1996 [2004: 262]). The moral demands, and potential for adverse treatment, associated with holding others responsible are part of our accountability (as opposed to attributability) practices, and these features of accountability raise issues of fairness that do not arise in the context of determining whether behavior is attributable to an agent (Watson 1996 [2004: 273]). Therefore, conditions may apply to accountability that do not apply to attributability: for example, perhaps “accountability blame” should be—as Wolf suggested—moderated in the case of an agent whose “squalid circumstances made it overwhelmingly difficult to develop a respect for the standards to which we would hold him accountable” (Watson 1996 [2004: 281]).

There are, then, two forms, or “faces”, of responsibility on Watson’s account. There is responsibility-as-attributability, and when an agent satisfies the conditions on this form of responsibility, behavior is properly attributed to her as reflecting morally important features of her self—her virtues and vices, for example. But there is also responsibility-as-accountability, and when an agent satisfies the conditions on this form of responsibility, which requires more than the correct attribution of behavior, she is open to being held accountable for that behavior in the ways that predominantly characterize moral blame.

It has become common for the views of several authors to be described (with varying degrees of accuracy) as instances of “attributionism”; see Neil Levy (2005) for the first use of this term. These authors include Robert Adams (1985), Nomy Arpaly (2003), Pamela Hieronymi (2004), T. M. Scanlon (1998, 2008), George Sher (2006a, 2006b, 2009), Angela Smith (2005, 2008), and Matthew Talbert (2012, 2013). Attributionists take moral responsibility assessments to be mainly concerned with whether an action (or omission, character trait, or belief) is attributable to an agent for the purposes of moral assessment, where this usually means that the action (or omission, etc.) reflects the agent’s “judgment sensitive attitudes” (Scanlon 1998), “evaluative judgments” (A. Smith 2005), or, more generally, her “moral personality” (Hieronymi 2008).

Attributionism resembles the self-disclosure views mentioned by Watson (see the previous subsection) insofar as both focus on the way that a responsible agent’s behavior discloses interpersonally and morally significant features of the agent’s self. However, it would be a mistake to conclude that contemporary attributionist views are interested only in specifying the conditions for what Watson calls responsibility-as-attributability. In fact, attributionists typically take themselves to be giving conditions for holding agents responsible in Watson’s accountability sense. (See the previous subsection for the distinction between accountability and attributability.)

According to attributionism, fulfillment of attributability conditions is sufficient for holding agents accountable for their behavior. This means that attributionism rejects conditions on moral responsibility that would excuse agents if their characters were shaped under adverse conditions (Scanlon 1998: 278–85), or if the thing for which the agent is blamed was not under her control (Sher 2006b and 2009, A. Smith 2005), or if the agent can’t be expected to recognize the moral status of her behavior (Scanlon 1998: 287–290; Talbert 2012). Attributionists reject these conditions on responsibility because morally and interpersonally significant behavior is attributable to agents that do not fulfill them, and such attributions are taken to be sufficient for an agent to be open to the responses involved in holding agents accountable for their behavior. Attributionists have also argued that blame may profitably be understood as a form of moral protest (Hieronymi 2001, A. Smith 2013, Talbert 2012); part of the appeal of this move is that moral protests may be legitimate in cases in which the above conditions are not met.

Several objections have been posed to attributionism. Some argue that attributionists are wrong to reject the conditions on responsibility mentioned in the last paragraph (Levy 2005, 2011; Shoemaker 2011, 2015a; Watson 2011). It has also been argued that the attributionist account of blame is too close to mere negative appraisal (Levy 2005; Wallace 1996: 80–1; Watson 2002). In addition, Scanlon (2008) has been criticized for failing to take negative emotions such as resentment to be central to the phenomenon of blame (Wallace 2011, Wolf 2011; a similar criticism would apply to Sher 2006a).

Building on the distinction between attributability and accountability ( §3.1.1 ), David Shoemaker (2011 and 2015a) has introduced a third form of responsibility: answerability. On Shoemaker’s view, attributability-responsibility assessments respond to facts about an agent’s character, accountability-responsibility responds to an agent’s degree of regard for others, and answerability-responsibility responds to an agent’s evaluative judgments. However, A. Smith (2015) and Hieronymi (2008 and 2014) use “answerability” to refer to a view more like the attributionist perspective described in the previous subsection, and Pereboom (2014) has used the term to indicate a form of responsibility more congenial to responsibility skeptics.

3.2 Moral Competence

The possibility that moral competence—the ability to recognize and respond to moral considerations—is a condition on moral responsibility has been suggested at several points above ( §2.2.1 , §2.2.2 , §2.3 , §3.1.1 , §3.1.2 ). Susan Wolf’s (1987) fictional story of “JoJo” is one of the best-known illustrations of this proposal. JoJo was raised by an evil dictator, and as a result he became the same sort of sadistic tyrant that his father was. As an adult, JoJo is happy to be the sort of person that he is, and he is moved by precisely the desires (e.g., to imprison, torture, and execute his subjects) that he wants to be moved by. Thus, JoJo fulfills important conditions on responsibility ( §3.1.1 , §3.3.3 ), however, Wolf argues that it may be unfair to hold him responsible for his bad behavior.

JoJo’s upbringing plays an important role in Wolf’s argument, but only because it left JoJo unable to fully appreciate the wrongfulness of his behavior. Thus, it is JoJo’s impaired moral competence that does the real excusing work, and similar conclusions of non-responsibility should be drawn about all those whom we think “could not help but be mistaken about their [bad] values”, if possession of these values impairs their ability to tell right from wrong (Wolf 1987: 57).

Many others join Wolf in arguing that impaired moral competence (perhaps on account of one’s upbringing or other environmental factors) undermines one’s moral responsibility (Benson 2001, Doris & Murphy 2007, Fischer & Ravizza 1998, Fricker 2010, Levy 2003, Russell 1995 and 2004, Wallace 1996, Watson 1987 [2004]). Part of what motivates this conclusion is the thought that it can be unreasonable to expect morally-impaired agents to avoid wrongful behavior, and that it is therefore unfair to expose these agents to the harm of moral blame on account of their wrongdoing. For detailed development of the moral competence requirement on responsibility in terms of considerations of fairness, see R. Jay Wallace (1996); also see Erin Kelly (2013), Neil Levy (2009), and Gary Watson (1987 [2004]). For rejection of the claim that blame is unfair in the case of the morally-impaired agent, see several of the defenders of attributionism mentioned in §3.1.2 (particularly Hieronymi 2004, Scanlon 1998, and Talbert 2012)

The moral competence condition on responsibility can also be motivated by the suggestion that impaired agents are not able to commit wrongs that have the sort of moral significance to which blame would be an appropriate response. The basic idea here is that, while morally-impaired agents can fail to show appropriate respect for others, these failures do not necessarily constitute the kind of flouting of moral norms that grounds blame (Watson 1987 [2004: 234]). In other words, a failure to respect others, is not always an instance of blame-grounding disrespect for others, since the latter (but not the former) requires the ability to comprehend the norms that one violates (Levy 2007, Shoemaker 2011).

Considerations about moral competence play an important role in the recent trend of conversational theories of responsibility, which construe elements of our responsibility practices as morally-expressive moves in an ongoing moral conversation. The thought here is that to fruitfully (and fully) participate in such a conversation, one must have some degree of competence in the (moral) language of that conversation.

Several prominent versions of the conversational approach develop P. F. Strawson’s suggestion ( §2.2.1 ) that the negative reactive attitudes involved in blame are expressions of a demand for moral regard from other agents. Gary Watson argues that a demand “presumes”, as a condition on the intelligibility of expressing it, “understanding on the part of the object of the demand” (1987 [2004: 230]). Therefore, since, “[t]he reactive attitudes are incipiently forms of communication”, they are intelligibly expressed “only on the assumption that the other can comprehend the message”, and since the message is a moral one, “blaming and praising those with diminished moral understanding loses its ‘point,’” at least in a certain sense (Watson 1987 [2004: 230]; see Watson 2011 for a modification of this proposal). R. Jay Wallace argues, similarly, that since responsibility practices are internal to moral relationships that are

defined by the successful exchange of moral criticism and justification…. it will be reasonable to hold accountable only someone who is at least a candidate for this kind of exchange of criticism and justification. (1996: 164)

Michael McKenna’s Conversation and Responsibility (2012) offers the most developed conversational analysis of responsibility. For McKenna, the “moral responsibility exchange” occurs in stages: an initial “moral contribution” of morally salient behavior; the “moral address” of, e.g., blame that responds to the moral contribution; the “moral account” in which the first contributor responds to moral address with, e.g., apology; and so on (2012: 89). Like Wallace and Watson, McKenna notes the way in which a morally impaired agent will find it difficult “to appreciate the challenges put to her by those who hold [her] morally responsible”, but he also argues that a suitably impaired agent cannot even make the first move in a moral conversation (2012: 78). Thus, the morally impaired agent’s responsibility is called into question not only because she is unable to respond appropriately to moral demands, but also because “she is incapable of acting from a will with a moral quality that could be a candidate for assessment from the standpoint of holding responsible” (McKenna 2012: 78). This point is related to Neil Levy’s and David Shoemaker’s contention, noted in the previous subsection, that impairments of moral competence can leave an agent unable to harbor and express the type of ill will or lack of regard to which blame responds. By contrast, Watson (2011), seems to allow that significant moral impairment is compatible with the ability to perform blame-relevant wrongdoing, even if such impairment undermines the wrongdoer’s moral accountability for her actions.

For another important account of responsibility in broadly conversational terms, see Shoemaker’s discussion of the sort of moral anger involved in holding others accountable for their behavior (2015a: 87–117). For additional defenses and articulations of the conversational approach to responsibility, see Stephen Darwall (2006), Miranda Fricker (2016), and Colleen Macnamara (2015).

Impairments of moral competence come in degrees. Susan Wolf’s JoJo ( §3.2.1 ) has localized impairments of the capacity to recognize and respond to moral considerations, but it is not clear that he is entirely immune to moral considerations. However, at the far end of the spectrum, we encounter more globally and thoroughly impaired figures such as the psychopath. In philosophical treatments, the psychopath is typically presented as an agent who, while retaining other psychological capacities, is entirely—or as nearly so as possible—incapable of responding appropriately to moral considerations. (This is something of a philosophical construct since real-life psychopathy admits of varying degrees of impairment, corresponding to higher or lower scores on diagnostic measures.)

One interesting question is whether the psychopath’s inability—or at least consistent failure—to respond appropriately to moral incentives is primarily the result of a motivational rather than cognitive failure: does the psychopath in some way know what morality requires and simply not care? If a positive answer is given to this last question (Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 76–81; Nichols 2002), then it seems likely that the psychopath could be responsible for at least some of his bad behavior. And some have argued that even if psychopathy is primarily a cognitive impairment, it may still be the case that psychopaths possess a sufficient capacity for distinguishing right and wrong—or that they possess sufficient related capacities—to be held responsible, at least to some extent and in certain ways (Glannon 1997, Greenspan 2003, Maibom 2008, Shoemaker 2014, Vargas & Nichols 2007). On the other hand, many believe that the psychopath’s capacity for grasping moral considerations is too superficial to sustain responsibility (Kennett 2019; Levy 2007; Nelkin 2015; Wallace 1996: 177–78; Watson 2011; see Mason 2017 for the claim that the relevant deficiency is one of moral knowledge rather than moral capacity). And still others have argued that even those who are fully impaired for moral understanding are open to blame as long as they possess broader rational competencies (Scanlon 1998: 287–290; Talbert 2014). However, the psychopath’s possession of these broader competencies has been called into question (Fine & Kennett 2004, Greenspan 2003, Litton 2010).

3.3 Skepticism and Related Topics

This section introduces contemporary skepticism about moral responsibility by way of discussions of several topics that have broad relevance for thinking about responsibility.

If moral responsibility requires free will, and free will involves access to alternatives in a way that is not compatible with determinism, then it would follow from the truth of determinism that no one is ever morally responsible. The above reasoning, and the skeptical conclusion it reaches, is endorsed by the hard determinist perspective on free will and responsibility, which was defended historically by Spinoza and d’Holbach (among others) and, more recently, by Ted Honderich (2002). But given that determinism may well be false, contemporary skeptics about moral responsibility more often pursue a hard incompatibilist line of argument according to which the kind of free will required for desert-based (as opposed to forward-looking, see §2.1 ) moral responsibility is incompatible with the truth or falsity of determinism (Pereboom 2001, 2014). The skeptical positions discussed below are generally of this sort: the skeptical conclusions they advocate do not depend on the truth of determinism.

According to Thomas Nagel, a person is subject to moral luck if factors that are not under that person’s control affect the moral assessments to which he is open (Nagel 1976 [1979]; also see Williams 1976 [1981] and the entry on moral luck .)

Is there such a thing as moral luck? More specifically, can luck affect a person’s moral responsibility? Consider a would-be assassin who shoots at her target, aiming to kill, but fails to do so only because her bullet is deflected by a passing bird. It seems that such a would-be assassin has good moral outcome luck (that is, good moral luck in the outcome of her behavior). Because of factors beyond her control, the would-be assassin’s moral record is better than it would have been: in particular, she is not a killer and is not morally responsible for causing anyone’s death. One might think, in addition, that the would-be assassin is less blameworthy than a successful assassin with whom she is otherwise identical, and that the reason for this is just that the successful assassin intentionally killed someone while the unsuccessful assassin (as a result of good moral luck) did not. (For important recent defenses of moral luck, see Hanna 2014 and Hartman 2017.)

On the other hand, one might think that if the two assassins just mentioned are identical in terms of their values, goals, intentions, and motivations, then the addition of a bit of luck to the unsuccessful assassin’s story cannot ground a deep contrast between these two agents in terms of their moral responsibility. One way to sustain this position is to argue that moral responsibility is a function solely of internal features of agents, such as their motives and intentions (Khoury 2018; also see Enoch & Marmor 2007 for some of the main arguments against moral luck). Of course, the successful assassin is responsible for something (killing a person) for which the unsuccessful assassin is not, but it might be possible to argue that both are morally responsible—and presumably blameworthy— to the same degree insofar as it was true of both of them that they aimed to kill, and that they did so for the same reasons and with the same degree of commitment toward bringing about that outcome (see M. Zimmerman 2002 and 2015 for this influential perspective).

But now consider a different would-be assassin who does not even try to kill anyone, but only because his circumstances did not favor this option. This would-be assassin is willing to kill under favorable circumstances (and so he may seem to have had good circumstantial moral luck since he was not in those circumstances). Perhaps the degree of responsibility attributed to the successful and unsuccessful assassins described above depends not so much on the fact that they both tried to kill as on the fact that they were both willing to kill; in this case, the would-be assassin just introduced may share their degree of responsibility since he shares their willingness to kill. But an account that focuses on how agents would be willing to act under counterfactual circumstances is likely to generate unintuitive conclusions about responsibility since many agents who are typically judged blameless might willingly perform terrible actions under the right circumstances. (M. Zimmerman 2002 and 2015 does not shy away from this consequence, but criticisms of his efforts to reject moral luck—Hanna 2014, Hartman 2017—have made much of it; see Peels 2015 for a position that is related to Zimmerman’s but that may avoid the unintuitive consequence just mentioned.)

Another approach to luck holds that it is inimical to moral responsibility in a way that generally undermines responsibility ascriptions. To see the motivation for this skeptical position, consider constitutive moral luck: that is, luck in how one is constituted in terms of the “inclinations, capacities, and temperament” one finds within oneself (Nagel 1976 [1979: 28]). Facts about a person’s inclinations, capacities, and temperament explain much—if not all—of that person’s behavior, and if the facts that explain why a person acts as she does are a result of good or bad luck, then perhaps it is unfair to hold her responsible for that behavior. As Nagel notes, once the full sweep of the various kinds of luck comes into view, “[t]he area of genuine agency” may seem to shrink to nothing since our actions and their consequences “result from the combined influence of factors, antecedent and posterior to action, that are not within the agent’s control” (1976 [1979: 35]). If this is right, then perhaps,

nothing remains which can be ascribed to the responsible self, and we are left with nothing but a…sequence of events, which can be deplored or celebrated, but not blamed or praised. (Nagel 1976 [1979: 37])

The above quotations notwithstanding, Nagel himself doesn’t fully embrace a skeptical conclusion about responsibility on grounds of moral luck, but others have done so, most notably, Neil Levy (2011). According to Levy’s “hard luck view”, the encompassing nature of moral luck means “that there are no desert-entailing differences between moral agents” (2011: 10). Of course, there are differences between agents in terms of their characters and the good or bad actions and outcomes that they produce, but Levy’s point is that, given the influence of luck in generating these differences, they don’t provide a sound basis for differential treatment of people in terms of moral praise and blame. (See Russell 2017 for a compatibilist account that is led to a variety of pessimism, though not skepticism, on the basis of the concerns about moral luck just described.)

Another important skeptical argument—related to the observations about constitutive moral luck in the previous subsection—is Galen Strawson’s Basic Argument, which concludes that “we cannot be truly or ultimately morally responsible for our actions” (1994: 5). (Since the argument targets “ultimate” moral responsibility, it does not necessarily exclude other forms, such as forward-looking responsibility ( §2.1 ) and, on some understandings, responsibility-as-attributability ( §3.1.1 ).) The argument begins by noting that an agent makes the choices she does because of certain facts about the way she is: for example, the facts about what seems choiceworthy to her. But if this is true, then, in order to be responsible for her subsequent choices, perhaps an agent also needs to be responsible for the facts about what seems choiceworthy to her. But how can one be responsible for these prior facts about herself? Wouldn’t this require a prior choice on the part of the agent, one that resulted in her present dispositions to see certain ends and means as choiceworthy? But this prior choice would itself be something for which the agent is responsible only if the agent is also responsible for the fact that that prior choice seemed choiceworthy to her. And now we must explain how the agent can be responsible for this additional prior fact about herself, which will require positing another choice by the agent, and the responsibility for that choice will also have to be secured, which will require explaining why it seemed choiceworthy to her, and so on. A regress looms here, and Strawson claims that it cannot be stopped except by positing an initial act of self-creation on the responsible agent’s part (1994: 5, 15). Only self-creating agents could be fully responsible for their own tendencies to exercise their powers of choice as they do, but self-creation is impossible, so no one is every truly or ultimately morally responsible for their behavior.

A number of replies to this argument (and the argument from constitutive moral luck) are possible. One might simply deny that how a person came to be the way she is matters for present responsibility: perhaps all we need to know in order to judge a person’s present responsibility are facts about her present constitution and about how that constitution is related to the person’s present behavior. (For views like this, see the discussion of attributionism ( §3.1.2 ) and the discussion of non-historical accounts of responsibility in the next subsection). Alternatively, one might think that while personal history matters for moral responsibility, Strawson’s argument sets the bar too high, requiring too much historical control over one’s constitution (see Fischer 2006; for a reply, see Levy 2011: 5). Perhaps what is needed is not literal self-creation, but simply an ability to enact changes in oneself so as to acquire responsibility for the self that results from these changes (Clarke 2005). A picture along these lines can be found in Aristotle’s suggestion that one can be responsible for being a careless person if one’s present state of carelessness is the result of earlier choices that one made (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics ; see also Michele Moody-Adams 1990).

Roughly in this Aristotelian vein, Robert Kane offers a detailed incompatibilist account of how we can secure ultimate responsibility for our actions (1996 and 2007). On Kane’s view, for an agent

to be ultimately responsible for [a] choice, the agent must be at least in part responsible by virtue of choices or actions voluntarily performed in the past for having the character and motives he or she now has. (2007: 14; emphasis in original)

This position may appear to be open to the regress concerns presented in Galen Strawson’s argument above. But Kane thinks a regress is avoided in cases in which a person’s character-forming choices are undetermined. Since these undetermined choices will have no sufficient causes, there is no relevant prior cause for which the agent must be responsible, so there is no regress problem (Kane 2007: 15–16; see Pereboom 2001: 47–50 for criticism of Kane on this point.)

Of particular interest to Kane are potential character-forming choices that occur “when we are torn between competing visions of what we should do or become” (2007: 26). In such cases, if a person sees reasons in favor of either choice that he might make, and the choice that he makes is undetermined, then whichever choice he makes will have been chosen for his own reasons. According to Kane, when an agent makes this kind of choice, he shapes his character, and since his choice is not determined by prior causal factors, he is responsible for it and for the character it shapes and for the character-determined choices that he makes in the future.

Kane’s approach is an important instance of those incompatibilist theories that attempt to explain how free will, while requiring indeterminism, could clearly be at home in the natural world as we know it (also see Balaguer 2010, Ekstrom 2000, and Franklin 2018). (This is as opposed to agent-causal accounts of free will—Chisholm 1964, O’Connor 2000—that invoke a type of causal power that is less easily naturalized). However, many have argued that any account like Kane’s, which inserts an indeterministic link in the causal chain leading to action, actually reduces an agent’s control over an action or at least leaves it unclear why such an insertion would increase agential control over actions as compared to a deterministic story of action (Hobart 1934; Levy 2011: 41–83; Pereboom 2014: 31–49; van Inwagen 1983: 126–52; Watson 1999).

Accounts such as Neil Levy’s (2011) and Galen Strawson’s (1994), described in the two preceding subsections, assume that the facts about the way a person came to be the way she is are relevant for determining her present responsibility. But non-historical views, such as attributionism ( §3.1.2 ) and the views that Susan Wolf calls “Real Self” theories ( §3.1.1 ), reject this contention. Real Self accounts are sometimes referred to as “structural” or “hierarchical” theories, and John M. Fischer and Mark Ravizza (1998: 184–187) have called them “mesh” theories. By whatever name, the basic idea is that an agent is morally responsible insofar as her will has the right sort of structure: in particular, there needs to be a mesh or fit between the desires that actually move the agent and her values, or between the desires that move her and her higher-order desires, the latter of which are the agent’s reflective preferences about which desires should move her. (For approaches along these lines, see Dworkin 1970; Frankfurt 1971, 1987; Neely 1974; and Watson 1975.)

Harry Frankfurt’s comparison between a willing drug addict and an unwilling addict illustrates important features of his version of the structural approach to responsibility. Both of Frankfurt’s addicts have desires to take the drug to which they are addicted, and the nature of their addictions is such that both addicts will ultimately act to fulfill their first-order addictive desire. But suppose that both addicts are capable of taking higher-order perspectives on their first-order desires, and suppose that they take different higher-order perspectives. The willing addict endorses and identifies with his addictive desire. The unwilling addict, on the other hand, repudiates his addictive desire to such an extent that, when it ends up being effective, Frankfurt says that this addict is “helplessly violated by his own desires” (1971: 12). The willing addict has a kind of freedom that the unwilling addict lacks: they may both be bound to take the drug to which they are addicted, but insofar as the willing addict is moved by a desire that he endorses, he acts freely in a way that the unwilling addict does not (Frankfurt 1971: 19). A related conclusion about responsibility may be drawn: perhaps the unwilling addict’s desire is alien to him in such a way that his responsibility for acting on it is called into question (for a recent defense of this conclusion, see Sripada 2017).

One objection to Frankfurt’s view goes like this. His account seems to assume that the addicts’ higher-order desires have the authority to speak for them—they reveal (or constitute) the agent’s “real self”, to use Wolf’s language (1990). But if higher-order desires are invoked out of a concern that an agent’s first-order desires may not stem from his real self, why won’t the same worry recur with respect to higher-order desires as well? In other words, when ascending through the orders of desires, why stop at any particular point, why not think that appeal to a still higher order is always necessary to reveal where an agent stands? (See Watson (1975) for an objection along these lines, which partly motivates Watson—in his articulation of a structural approach—to focus on whether an agent’s desires conform with her values , rather than with her higher-order desires).

And even if one agrees with Frankfurt (or Watson) about the structural elements required for responsibility, one might wonder how an agent’s will came to have its particular structure. Thus, an important type of objection to Frankfurt’s view notes that the relevant structure might have been put in place by factors that intuitively undermine responsibility, in which case the presence of the relevant structure is not itself sufficient for responsibility (Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 196–201; Locke 1975; Slote 1980). Fischer and Ravizza argue that

[i]f the mesh [between higher- and lower-order desires] were produced by…brainwashing or subliminal advertising…we would not hold the agent morally responsible for his behavior

because the psychological mechanism that produced the behavior would not be, “in an important intuitive sense, the agent’s own ” (1998: 197; emphasis in original). In response to this type of worry, Fischer and Ravizza argue that responsibility has an important historical component, which they attempt to capture with their account of how agents can “take responsibility” for the psychological mechanisms that produces their behavior (1998: 207–239). (For criticism of Fischer and Ravizza’s account of taking responsibility, see Levy 2011: 103–106 and Pereboom 2001: 120–22; for quite different accounts of taking responsibility, see Enoch 2012; Mason 2019: 179–207; and Wolf 2001. For work on the general significance of personal histories for responsibility, see Christman 1991, Vargas 2006, and D. Zimmerman 2003.)

Part of Fischer and Ravizza’s motivation for developing their account of “taking responsibility” was to ensure that agents who have been manipulated in certain ways do not turn out to be responsible on their view. Several examples and arguments featuring the sort of manipulation that worried Fischer and Ravizza have played important roles in the recent literature on responsibility. One of these is Alfred Mele’s Beth/Ann example (1995, 2006b), which emphasizes the difficulties faced by accounts of responsibility that eschew historical conditions. In the example, Ann has acquired her preferences and values in the normal way, but Beth is manipulated by a team of neuroscientists so that she now has preferences and values that are identical to Ann’s. After the manipulation, Beth is capable of reflecting on her new values, and when she does so, she endorses them enthusiastically. But whereas we might normally take such an endorsement to be a sign of the sort of self-governance associated with responsibility, Mele suggests that Beth, unlike Ann, exhibits merely “ersatz self-government” since Beth’s new values where imposed on her (1995: 155). And if certain kinds of personal histories similarly undermine an agent’s ability to genuinely or authentically govern her behavior, then agents with these histories will not be morally responsible. (For replies to Mele and general insights into manipulation cases, see Arpaly 2003, King 2013, McKenna 2004, and Todd 2011; for discussion of issues about personal identity that arise in manipulation cases, see Khoury 2013, Matheson 2014, Shoemaker 2012)

Now one can take a hard line in Beth’s case (McKenna 2004). Such a stance might involve noting that while Beth acquired her new values in a strange way (and in a way that involved moral wrongs done to her), everyone acquires their values in ways that are not fully under their control. Indeed, following Galen Strawson’s line of argument (1994), described in §3.3.2 , it might be noted that no one has ultimate control over their values, and even if normal agents have some capacity to address and alter their values, the dispositional factors that govern how this capacity is used are ultimately the result of factors beyond agents’ control. So perhaps it is not as clear as it might first appear that Beth is distinguished from normal agents in terms of her powers of self-governance and her moral responsibility for her behavior. But this reasoning can cut both ways: instead of showing that Beth is assimilated into the class of normal, responsible agents, it might show that normal agents are assimilated into the class of non-responsible agents like Beth. Derk Pereboom’s four-case argument employs a maneuver along these lines (1995, 2001, 2007, 2014).

Pereboom’s argument presents Professor Plum in four different scenarios. In each scenario, Plum kills Ms. White while satisfying the conditions on desert-involving moral responsibility most often proposed by compatibilists (and described in earlier sections of this entry): Plum kills White because he wants to, and while this desire is in keeping with Plum’s character, it is not irresistible; Plum also endorses his desire to kill White from a higher-order volitional perspective; finally, Plum is generally morally competent, and the process of deliberation that leads to his decision to kill White is appropriately responsive to reasons.

In Case 1, Plum is “created by neuroscientists, who…manipulate him directly through the use of radio-like technology” (Pereboom 2001: 112). These scientists cause Plum’s reasoning to take a certain (reasons-responsive) path that culminates in Plum concluding that the self-serving reasons in favor of killing White outweigh the reasons in favor of not doing so. Pereboom believes that in such a case Plum is clearly not responsible for killing White since his behavior was determined by the actions of the neuroscientists. In Cases 2 and 3, Plum is causally determined to undertake the same reasoning process as in Case 1, but in Case 2 Plum is merely programmed to do so by neuroscientists (rather than having been created by them), and in Case 3 Plum’s reasoning is the result of socio-cultural influences that determine his character. In Case 4, Plum is just a normal human being in a causally deterministic universe, and he decides to kill White in the same way as in the previous cases.

Pereboom claims that there is no relevant difference between Cases 1, 2, and 3 such that our judgments about Plum’s responsibility should be different in these three cases. Furthermore, the reason that Plum is not responsible in these cases seems to be that, in each case, his behavior is causally determined by forces beyond his control (Pereboom 2001: 116). But then we should conclude that Plum is not responsible in Case 4 (since causal determinism is the defining feature of that case). And since, in Case 4, Plum is just a normal human being in a causally deterministic universe, the conclusion we draw about him should extend to all other normal persons in causally deterministic universes. (For an important, related manipulation argument, see Mele’s “zygote argument” in Mele 1995, 2006b, and 2008.)

Pereboom’s argument has inspired a number of objections. For example, it could be argued that in Case 1, the manipulation to which Plum is subject undermines his responsibility for some reason besides the fact that the manipulation causally determines his behavior, which would stop the generalization from Case 1 to the subsequent cases (Fischer 2004, Mele 2005, Demetriou 2010; for a response to this line of argument, see Matheson 2016; Pereboom addresses this concern in his 2014 presentation of the argument; also see Shabo 2010). Alternatively, it might be argued, on compatibilist grounds, that Plum is responsible in Case 4, and this conclusion might be extended to the earlier cases since Plum fulfills the same compatibilist-friendly conditions on responsibility in those cases (McKenna 2008).

The four-case argument attempts to show that if determinism is true, then we cannot be the sources of our actions in the way required for moral responsibility. It is, therefore, an argument for incompatibilism rather than for skepticism about moral responsibility. But, in combination with Pereboom’s argument that we lack the sort of free will required for responsibility even if determinism is false (2001: 38–88; 2014: 30–70), the four-case argument has emerged as an important part of a detailed and influential skeptical perspective. For other skeptical accounts, see Caruso (2016), Smilansky (2000), Waller (2011); also see the entry on skepticism about moral responsibility .

There has been a recent surge in interest in the epistemic, or knowledge, condition on responsibility (as opposed to the freedom or control condition that is at the center of the free will debate). In this context, the following epistemic argument for skepticism about responsibility has been developed. (In certain structural respects, the argument resembles Galen Strawson’s skeptical argument discussed in §3.3.2 .)

Sometimes agents act in ignorance of the likely bad consequences of their actions, and sometimes their ignorance excuses them from blame for so acting. But in other cases, an agent’s ignorance might not excuse him. How can we distinguish the cases where ignorance excuses from those in which it does not? One proposal is that ignorance fails to excuse when the ignorance is itself something for which an agent might be blamed. And one proposal for when ignorance is blameworthy is that it issues from a blameworthy benighting act in which an agent culpably impairs, or fails to improve, his own epistemic position (H. Smith 1983). In such a case, the agent’s ignorance seems to be his own fault, so it cannot be appealed to in order to excuse the agent.

But when is a benighting act blameworthy? Several philosophers have suggested that we are culpable for benighting acts only when we engage in them knowing that we are doing so and knowing that we should not do so (Levy 2011, Rosen 2004, M. Zimmerman 1997). Ultimately, the suggestion is that ignorance for which one is blameworthy, and that leads to blameworthy unwitting wrongdoing, has its source in knowing wrongful behavior. Thus, if someone unwittingly does something wrong, then that person will be blameworthy only if we can explain his lack of knowledge (his “unwittingness”) by reference to something else that he knowingly did wrong.

Consider an example from Gideon Rosen (2004) in which a surgeon orders her patient to be transfused with the wrong type of blood, and suppose that the surgeon was unaware that she was making this mistake. According to Rosen, the surgeon will be blameworthy for harming her patient only if she is blameworthy for being ignorant about the patient’s blood type when she requests the transfusion, and she will be blameworthy for this only if her ignorance stems from some instance in which the surgeon knowingly failed to do something that she ought to have done to avoid her later ignorance. It won’t, for example, be enough that the surgeon’s ignorance is explained by her failure to doublecheck the patient’s medical records. In order to ground blame, this omission on the surgeon’s part must itself have been culpable, which requires that the surgeon knew that this omission was wrong. And if the surgeon wasn’t aware that she was committing a wrongful omission (when she failed to doublecheck her patient’s medical records), then this failure of knowledge on the surgeon’s part must be explained by some prior culpable—that is, knowing—act or omission. In the end, for Rosen,

the only possible locus of original responsibility [for a later unwitting act] is an akratic act …. a knowing sin. (2004: 307; emphasis in original)

Similarly, Michael Zimmerman argues that

all culpability can be traced to culpability that involves lack of ignorance, that is, that involves a belief on the agent’s part that he or she is doing something morally wrong. (1997: 418)

The above reasoning may apply not just to cases in which a person is unaware of the consequences of her action, but also to cases in which a person is unaware of the moral status of her behavior. A slaveowner, for example, might think that slaveholding is permissible, and so, on the account considered here, he will be blameworthy only if he is culpable for his ignorance about the moral status of slavery, which will require, for example, that he ignored evidence about its moral status while knowing that this is something he should not do (Rosen 2003 and 2004).

These reflections can give rise to a couple forms of skepticism about moral responsibility (and particularly about blameworthiness). First, we might come to endorse a form of epistemic skepticism on the grounds that we rarely have insight into whether a wrongdoer was akratic—that is, was a knowing wrongdoer—at some suitable point in the etiology of a given action (Rosen 2004). Alternatively, or in addition, one might endorse a more substantive form of skepticism on the grounds that a great many normal wrongdoers don’t exhibit the sort of knowing wrongdoing supposedly required for responsibility. In other words, perhaps very many wrongdoers don’t know that they are wrongdoers and their ignorance on this score is not their fault since it doesn’t arise from an appropriate earlier instance of knowing wrongdoing. In this case, very many ordinary wrongdoers may fail to be morally responsible for their behavior. (For skeptical suggestions along these lines, see M. Zimmerman 1997 and Levy 2011.)

There is more to the epistemic dimension of responsibility than what is contained in the above skeptical argument, but the argument does bring out a lot of what is of interest in this domain. For one thing, it prominently relies on a tracing strategy. This strategy is used, for example, in accounts that feature a person who does not, at the time of action, fulfill control or knowledge conditions on responsibility, but who nonetheless seems morally responsible for her behavior. In such a case, the agent’s responsibility may be grounded in the fact that her failure to fulfill certain conditions on responsibility is traceable to earlier actions undertaken by the agent when she did fulfill these conditions. For example, a person may be so intoxicated that she lacks control over, or awareness of, her behavior, and yet it may still be appropriate to hold her responsible for her intoxicated behavior insofar as she freely took steps to intoxicate herself. The tracing strategy plays an important role in many accounts of responsibility (see, e.g., Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 49–51), but it has also been subjected to important criticisms (see Vargas 2005; for a reply see Fischer and Tognazzini 2009; for more on tracing, see Khoury 2012, King 2014, Shabo 2015, and Timpe 2011).

Various strategies for rejecting the above skeptical argument also illustrate stances one can take on the relevance of knowledge for responsibility. These strategies typically involve rejecting the claim that knowing wrongdoing is fundamental to blameworthiness. For example, it might be argued that it is often morally reckless to perform actions when one is merely uncertain whether they are wrong, and that this recklessness is sufficient for blameworthiness (see Guerrero 2007; also see Nelkin & Rickless 2017b and Robichaud 2014). Another strategy would be to argue that blameworthiness can be grounded in cases of morally ignorant wrongdoing if it is reasonable to expect the wrongdoer to have avoided her moral ignorance, and particularly if her ignorance is itself caused by the agent’s own epistemic and moral vices (FitzPatrick 2008 and 2017). Relatedly, it might be argued that one who is unaware that he does wrong is blameworthy if he possessed relevant capacities for avoiding his failure of awareness; this approach may be particularly promising in cases in which an agent’s lack of moral awareness stems from a failure to remember her moral duties (Clarke 2014, 2017 and Sher 2006b, 2009; also see Rudy-Hiller 2017). Finally, it might simply be claimed that morally ignorant wrongdoers can harbor, and express through their behavior, objectionable attitudes or qualities of will that suffice for blameworthiness (Arpaly 2003, Björnsson 2017, Harman 2011, Mason 2015, Talbert 2013). This approach may be most promising in cases in which a wrongdoer is aware of the material outcomes of her conduct but unaware of the fact that she does wrong in bringing about those outcomes.

For more, see the entry on the epistemic condition for moral responsibility .

The special issues of Midwest Studies in Philosophy cited in the Introduction are Volume 30 (2006) and Volume 38 (2014), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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• –––, 1987, “Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility”, in Schoeman 1987: 46–62. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511625411.003
• –––, 1990, Freedom Within Reason , New York: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2001, “The Moral of Moral Luck”, Philosophic Exchange , 31: 4–19. [ Wolf 2001 available online ]
• –––, 2011, “Blame, Italian Style”, in Wallace, Kumar, and Freeman 2011: 332–347.
• Zimmerman, David, 2003, “That Was Then, This Is Now: Personal History vs. Psychological Structure in Compatibilist Theories of Autonomous Agency”, Noûs , 37(4): 638–671. doi:10.1046/j.1468-0068.2003.00454.x
• Zimmerman, Michael J., 1988, An Essay on Moral Responsibility , Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield.
• –––, 1997, “Moral Responsibility and Ignorance”, Ethics , 107(3): 410–426. doi:10.1086/233742
• –––, 2002, “Taking Luck Seriously”, The Journal of Philosophy , 99(11): 553–576. doi:10.2307/3655750
• –––, 2015, “Moral Luck Reexamined”, in Shoemaker 2015: 136–159.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• The Determinism and Freedom Philosophy Website , edited by Ted Honderich, University College London.
• Flickers of Freedom (multiple contributors, coordinated by Thomas Nadelhoffer, closed 9 February 2017, archive version)
• Eshleman, Andrew, “Moral Responsibility”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/moral-responsibility/ >. [This was the previous entry on this topic in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — see the version history .]

blame | compatibilism | determinism: causal | free will | free will: divine foreknowledge and | incompatibilism: (nondeterministic) theories of free will | incompatibilism: arguments for | luck: moral | moral responsibility: the epistemic condition | responsibility: collective | skepticism: about moral responsibility

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Derk Pereboom for his helpful comments on drafts of this entry.

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Essays About Responsibility: Top 12 Examples and Prompts

We can’t take on the challenge of life without responsibility; If you are writing essays about responsibility, discover our guide below.

The word responsibility describes the state of being accountable for our actions and is one of the main elements that make us human. We are not born with it; instead, it is something to be exercised and improved on over time.

It has often been said that with power or freedom comes responsibility, which could not be more truthful. Each of us is gifted with the ability to make choices, and we are considered superior to all other living things on this planet. However, we have to make informed choices and be responsible for our actions, whether to ourselves, the people around us, and our environment.

5 Top Essay Examples

1. the value of responsibility by simon baker, 2. freedom is not the lack of constraint, but the exercise of responsibility by beulah west, 3. why responsibility is so important by steve rose.

• 4.  The Beneifts of Being Responsible by Frank Terzo
• 5. ​​What It’s like to Feel Responsible for Everything by Duncan Riach

1. The Importance of Responsibility

2. dealing with false responsibility, 3. freedom and responsibility, 4. what is social responsibility, 5. what are your responsibilities, 6. responsibility as a component of success, 7. a time you acted responsibly.

“It’s easy for us to become blinkered or out-of-touch when we’re constantly working with our heads down. Although meeting our commitments is hugely important we bear another responsibility, that is to invest in ourselves and in each other. When we can free our imagination and refresh our minds, we restore perspective and reduce stress. We find time and space to explore new ways to collaborate, be creative and enjoy ourselves to the benefit of our mission.”

Baker writes about why he thinks responsibility is important and discusses factors related to responsibility, namely trust, personal choice, and freedom. A feeling of trust allows you to be more comfortable accepting responsibility, while responsibility allows us to maximize personal choice and freedom. Most importantly, bearing responsibility means freeing our minds, enjoying life, and coming up with great ideas. 

“A lack of constraint means that you can not do everything that you want. In a perfect world this would be fine, but we don’t live in a perfect world. However everyone’s view of a perfect world is different, if this coincides with the law and you are happy, then you can be free still living under laws and legislations. If you believe that freedom is making your own choices then the only way that we can be “free” is if society does not exist.”

West discusses how just as personal freedom is vital to a healthy society, so is accountability for our actions. Freedom also has a negative side; it can be described as a lack of constraint in our choices. Without constraint, our actions may hurt others or even ourselves. Therefore, it must come with the responsibility to make these choices from a more thoughtful, educated perspective. 

You might also be interested in our list of essays about effective leadership . You can also check out these articles and essays about attitude .

“Taking responsibility creates long term resilience and a sense of purpose. This sense of purpose can be fostered by taking responsibility for one’s self by engaging in self-care. Responsibility can also be developed on a familial and societal level, offering a sense of purpose proportional to your ability to contribute your unique abilities.”

Rose explores the importance of being responsible for one’s health. It gives us a sense of purpose and helps us build resilience; however, we must first be responsible for ourselves by practicing self-care. This includes resting, exercising, taking breaks, and going to the doctor if something is bothering us. This makes us more responsible for the people around us, allowing us to perform different societal roles. You might be inspired by these essays about success and essays about overcoming challenges .

4.   The Beneifts of Being Responsible by Frank Terzo

“If we take care of our commitments, even if it something we might like to ignore, we feel better about ourselves. Each step we take towards being responsible and productive helps to raise our self-esteem and our relationships with friends, family and co-workers improve ten-fold. Being responsible pays big dividends – we have much less stress and chaos in our lives and we gain the respect of others.”

In this short essay, Terzo provides insight into the many benefits responsibility can provide you with. We must always be responsible, even if we might not feel like it, because it can improve our productivity, self-esteem, relationships with others, and overall peace. Though it might not always be easy, responsibility is key to achieving a happy life. 

5. ​​ What It’s like to Feel Responsible for Everything by Duncan Riach

“I hold responsibility when others are not taking responsibility. I was holding all of the responsibility, guilt, and shame that Billy McFarland was disowning. It’s a survival mechanism that I developed when I was a child. I had a step-father who was some form of psychopath or malignant narcissist, a person who was completely out of control and completely irresponsible. The only way that I could feel safe in that environment was to try to hold the responsibility myself.”

Riach reflects on a habit by which he constantly felt responsible for things out of his control, things as minor as events he saw on television. He developed this habit due to his upbringing- his childhood and family life were less than ideal. He is fully aware of his problem but still struggles with it. His case is an excellent example of false responsibility. 

6 Writing Prompts on Essays About Responsibility

Responsibility is, without a doubt, essential, but how important is it really? Reflect on the meaning of responsibility and explain its importance. Discuss this from a practical and personal standpoint; combine personal experience and research as the basis for your points. 

False responsibility is an attitude by which one feels responsible for things they are not. This is a widespread issue that encompasses everyone, from humble workers to some of the most influential people in the world. For your essay, research this phenomenon, then define it and explain why it occurs. Give suggestions on how one can identify false responsibility and work to stop feeling that way. 

The topics of freedom and personal responsibility are deeply intertwined; for freedom to work correctly, there must be a certain level of responsibility instilled in people so society can function correctly. In your essay, discuss these two concepts and their connection. Do proper research on this topic, then conclude this issue: are we responsible enough to be given total freedom? You may also link this to topics such as the law and regulations. You might be inspired by these essays about goals .

Social Responsibility seems straightforward and self-defining, but it is broad, especially with society putting a higher value on awareness, community, and social justice. Research this term and its history and discuss it in your essay; define and explain it, then describe what it means. 

Whether in your studies or at work, as a family member, friend, or even a member of society, we have a unique set of responsibilities that vary depending on the person. Reflect on the different roles you play in life and decide what your responsibilities are. Briefly describe each one and explain how you fulfill these responsibilities. You can also check out these essays about conflict .

This value is important because it is present in all successful individuals. Based on your opinions and research, discuss the relationship between responsibility, success, and some other factors or traits that influence success. Give examples of successful people who have shown responsibility, such as government officials, celebrities, and business leaders. 

When we are responsible, we are pretty proud of ourselves most of the time. Think of an experience you are most proud of in which you acted responsibly. Retell the story, reflect on how you felt, and explain why it is important- be as detailed as possible. Or, you may opt to do the opposite, telling the story of a time you did not show responsibility and thinking of what you would do if given a chance to repeat it. 

Grammarly is one of our top grammar checkers. Find out why in this Grammarly review . Tip: If writing an essay sounds like a lot of work, simplify it. Write a simple 5 paragraph essay instead.

Martin is an avid writer specializing in editing and proofreading. He also enjoys literary analysis and writing about food and travel.

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William H. Miller III Department of Philosophy

Freedom and responsibility.

• Hilary Bok (author)
• Princeton University Press , 1998
• Purchase Online

Can we reconcile the idea that we are free and responsible agents with the idea that what we do is determined according to natural laws? For centuries, philosophers have tried in different ways to show that we can. Hilary Bok takes a fresh approach here, as she seeks to show that the two ideas are compatible by drawing on the distinction between practical and theoretical reasoning.

Bok argues that when we engage in practical reasoning—the kind that involves asking “what should I do?” and sifting through alternatives to find the most justifiable course of action—we have reason to hold ourselves responsible for what we do. But when we engage in theoretical reasoning–searching for causal explanations of events—we have no reason to apply concepts like freedom and responsibility. Bok contends that libertarians’ arguments against “compatibilist” justifications of moral responsibility fail because they describe human actions only from the standpoint of theoretical reasoning. To establish this claim, she examines which conceptions of freedom of the will and moral responsibility are relevant to practical reasoning and shows that these conceptions are not vulnerable to many objections that libertarians have directed against compatibilists. Bok concludes that the truth or falsity of the claim that we are free and responsible agents in the sense those conceptions spell out is ultimately independent of deterministic accounts of the causes of human actions.

Clearly written and powerfully argued,  Freedom and Responsibility  is a major addition to current debate about some of philosophy’s oldest and deepest questions.

Freedom and Responsibility

• Published: 25 September 2018
• Volume 35 , pages 585–602, ( 2018 )

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• S. R. Bhatt 1  

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The present paper is an exercise in self-awareness and self-realization by a thoughtful human mind with regard to a very problematic but highly significant enigma of human life concerning the antinomy of freedom and determinism experienced in our concrete day-to-day living in the context of human behavior due to fragmented approach to life and Reality and need for the management of the same in a holistic framework. In this endeavor, we may derive helpful guidance and redemption from the deep insights and enlightening visions of Indian seers and sages. In a meaningful enterprise, the entire wide and variegated Reality is to be kept in view with the main focus on human existence. It has to be a holistic reflection from varied perspectives and multiple approaches. It has to be done with the objective of being benefited by it in shaping the cosmic and human existence for universal well-being. Naturally therefore the individual human existence, human society, natural environment, scientific and technological enterprises and socio-political organizations, etc., become crucial points in a purposeful deliberation. Consideration of deeper issues concerning these areas provides it practical orientation in the context of human life planning, social engineering, science policy and environmental stewardship.

Human Being as Highest Emergent

Human being is the highest emergent in the cosmic process so far. Shaped by genetic endowment, ecological interaction and cultural transformation human existence are multi-relational, multi-dimensional and multi-layered. It has individual, social and cosmic aspects in a holistic and organismic framework. It is intimately related with Nature, other human beings and non-human living species. Human identity, therefore, cannot be determined by any one of these facets alone in isolation from others; it is constituted by the totality and intricate unity of all of them.

Human Being as Rational, Free and Responsible Agent

Human being, ideally speaking, is ratiocinative, goal-oriented, free and responsible agent. He/she is a knower ( jñatā ), responsible agent ( kartā ) and enjoyer ( bhoktā ) through innate competence and overt performance. As a self-conscious and reflective person he/she has the capacity to understand one’s own self as also others. The term used in Indian culture for such a human being is puruṣa. And his/her planned, purposive and methodical action is termed as puruṣārtha (human enterprise and accomplishment). As jñatā human being is endowed with the capacity to know, to discriminate and to form judgment. He/she has freedom of will and can make a choice. He/she is also a responsible agent and has to be accountable for his/her actions. The free will is regulated will. All his/her willful actions should therefore be in the form of puruṣārtha. He has to perform actions with full knowledge, freedom and responsibility. They should be in the form of artha (conducive and leading to well-being) and not anartha (detrimental and harmful). Activity is the law of life and every human being must act as puruṣa for survival, sustenance and for enhancement of quality of life. So there is inclusive alternation between freedom and determinism. Rationality as discriminative ability implies freedom to choose but being guided by certain norms. It also implies responsibility for the consequences so generated by ones actions. The point is that we have to avoid dichotomous approach to freedom and determinism.

Meaning and Significance of Human Life

Human life is unique and special gift which is rare among all the creatures. It is a prized possession acquired through a good deal of meritorious acts in the previous birth(s). It is valuable and is to be valued. A mechanistic understanding of human nature is truncated and cannot explain the spontaneity, creativity and goal-orientation inherent in human nature. Only a teleological, holistic and inclusive understanding of human potentialities, capabilities and achievements can do justice to human aspirations. The knowledge and quest for values and planned efforts to realize them constitute the core of ideal human life. All human beings must participate or made to participate in the process of value-realization. This is our universal responsibility.

Constitution of Human Being

Human being is an intricate psycho-physical complex animated and enlivened by spiritual principle called soul or self. There are varied understandings of human constitution in different cultures and disciplines of knowledge, but the Vedic-Upaniṣadic understanding in terms of five sheaths ( pañcakośa ) is most helpful. They are annamaya (physical), prāṇamaya (vital), manomaya (mental), vijñānamaya (intellectual) and ānandamaya (spiritual). Among these five the physical and vital are material, mental and intellectual are quasi-material, and they are termed as psychical, and spiritual ( adhi  +  ātma ) is transcending these four which are empirical. There is simultaneity as well as hierarchy in them and there is a fine balance in this. It is a very neat and useful classification. But it should be kept in mind that all these five are integrally correlated and cannot be separated. Their distinction is only for classified understanding and practical purposes. In order to understand human nature our attempt should be to know the nature, functioning and interrelationship of all these five in a holistic framework. The fine and subtle constitution of physical body and conative senses, the wondrous play of vital breaths, the wonderful functioning of senses, the marvelous functioning of mind and cognitive senses, the brilliant displays of thoughts, emotions, feelings and volitions are all amazing and astounding, but we have to know all these. The functioning of human mind is astonishing. It is something more than a live computer. But much more significant are beatitudes and bliss of consciousness, the spiritual principle. We at the present juncture of our knowledge and capabilities may have only partial or faltering understanding of all these marvels of human life, but we must steadily continue our efforts to enhance our knowledge.

Significance and Complexity of Human Sociability

Sociability is built in human existence and human nature. Our social dimension is highly complex, complicated and subtle network of relations. Society provides the ground and sustenance for human existence and also for the basic structure and materials for human evolution. The lowest unit of society is family which may be joint or single, but the former has been the traditional form and it has served very useful purpose for smooth happy life in a corporate spirit of mutual care and share. It is called kuṭumba , a replica of viśva , a mode of coexistence in interdependence and interrelation, a supportive mutualism with a spirit of selfsameness. In this samghajīvana or corporate living the roles of grandparents, parents, children and grand children are well defined by socio-cultural norms. In this context the role of paramparā or live tradition is significant. Paramparā is a live tradition deeply embedded in the past, well-footed in the present and envisioning the bright future. It is the accumulative process of transmitting, adjusting and applying the norms and values cherished in a culture. It admits of creative freedom and innovative changes.

Meaning and Significance of Culture

Tradition is rooted in culture. Culture is a mode of being, a pattern of living, a set of commonly shared values and belief patters and practices. It is a complex whole comprising knowledge, beliefs, conduct, morals, laws, custom, artistic, scientific and technological pursuits, humanities and social sciences. It is a total heritage borne by a society. It contributes to the discovery of meaning of life. Therefore, culture has to enhance, enrich, enlarge and encourage the fullness of life, health of the body, delight of the mind, and plenitude of peace and bliss.

On understanding svarajya (Freedom)

It has been a lesson of history that no nation can grow and advance, survive and thrive if its key concepts and guiding principles get fossilized, twisted and distorted and its intellectuals lose the capacity of creative reinterpretation of its past heritage and tradition to suit the new and changing circumstances and their requirements and aspirations. Like the concept of Dharma, etc., the concept of Svarājya has been pivotal to Indian modes of thinking and ways of living right from the Vedic times, though of course its original and basic connotation has become oblivious to us. It will not therefore be a futile and worthless exercise to attend to its proto-meaning and restate the rich and profound ideas inherent in it.

Our present day usage of the word Svarājya along with its colloquial formulation Svarāj has come in practice as a vernacular translation of the English word “Independence” which has a predominant, if not exclusive, political overtone. Though it is not wrong to use this word in this narrow and restricted sense with proper stipulation, it is advisable to be aware of its original spiritual meaning of which cultural, moral, political, economic, etc., are only derivatives.

The present delineation is first to put forth the foundational spiritual and metaphysical aspect of this term in the want of which there cannot be adequate understanding and appreciation of this rich, multifaceted and multi-layered concept. It envelops within its sweep the individual, society, and the cosmos at large. Thus, we can think of Svarājya of individual, of different social formations and organizations, and finally of the entire cosmos. Apart from these layers it has metaphysical, moral, social, political, economic, and cultural and many other dimensions. All these are organically interrelated and in a holistic framework the realization of the one cannot be complete without realization of the other.

At the outset a distinction is to be drawn between Svarājya, svarāj and surāj . Svarāj and surāj are political concepts. The former stands for self-rule or self-governance, and the later stands for good governance, whether it is self-governance in the form of democracy or any other form of governance. Svarāj need not necessarily be surāj and vice versa.

Svarājya , as stated earlier, is much wider and more profound. It is derived from the root rājr ( diptau , to shine). One who possesses Svarājya is svarāt . Svarājya is a state of being svarāt . In the Upaniṣads by the technique known as “Chandas Dīrgham,” it is formulated as Svarājyam ( Svarājah bhavāḥ Svarājyam ).

Etymologically it may mean Svena rājate (i.e., existing by itself or self-luminous). Another etymology can be “Svasmin rājate” (i.e., existing in oneself, self-situated). Any real entity having this characterization is svarāt . The prefix sva may mean “one’s own” or it may also mean ānandam . So sva/svaḥ/svar means bliss. The state of svātantrya (its synonym) is being self-situated, self-luminous and blissful. It is called svarloka where bliss prevails. Bliss is said to be the aspiration of all existence. It is the inherent nature as well as summum bonum of all existence. It is an authentic existence having an intrinsic and inherent worth. This is the goal of Yoga (Tadā dṛṣṭuḥ svarūpe avasthānam ).

Two things must be made clear. From the metaphysical point of view only an Absolute (if we believe in this idea) can be svarāt , but from the empirical point of view since every existence partakes this nature of the Absolute, it is potentially svarāt . Otherwise every empirical existence has dependent origin and interdependent existence in corporate and associated living ( samgha jīvana ). This is the sum and substance of the teachings of the Upaniṣads and Nāgārjuna. Secondly, it is not that conscious being or human alone is or can be svarāt. This property has to be extended to all material existences as well. In this sense it means recognition of intrinsic worth of Nature also in contrast with the present day tendency of exploiting Nature out of ignorance or selfish materialistic considerations. Īśvarakṛṣṇa, the Sāmkhya thinker, has highlighted this facet of Matter when he talks of mukti of Prakṛti . Sri Aurobindo also talks of ascent of matter to supra-mental state.

This idea that every existence has an intrinsic nature and in the cosmic process this must be realized, this has been the vision of the Vedic seers. In the holistic and organicismic approach to Reality the Vedic-Vedāntic thought has maintained that the ultimate nature of Reality is unitary and sui generis ( Ānidavātam svadhayā tadekam ) and it gets diversified out of its own free will ( Ajāyamano bahudhā vijāyate; So akamayat eko’ham bahusyāmii ). Whether it is the state of natura naturata or of natura naturan , the ultimate Reality is independent, as it is second to none in the Vedāntic framework. In the cosmic process ( viśva ) there is mutative world ( jagat ) which is multiplicity arising out of, contained within and sustained by and subsumed under one unifying Whole ( Tajjalān ). The Whole ( Brahmāṇḍa ) is independent, self-existing and blissful, and each individual part ( piṇḍa ) within the Whole is also independent ( pūrṇāt pūrnamudacyate ) in so far as everyone is svarāt but the only difference is that the independence of parts within the Whole is seasoned and conditioned by interdependence and limitations. Every part depends upon other parts at one level and upon the Whole at another level, but this interdependence does not come in conflict with or mar the independence of each part if the process is normal and well regulated. Each has its distinct nature and role and can enjoy its independent and authentic existence within the Whole. In an organicismic approach there is no dichotomy of “exclusive either-or.” Only if we give up this perverted attitude, we can have the unitary vision. This is the nature of Reality given to us in pure experience as corroborated by the Vedic seers and Upaniṣadic sages.

Svarājya constitutes the very essence of Reality whatever be its conception. (It is preferable to use the word freedom rather than independence because of its positive connotation.) It consists in realization of freedom or self-being. In this sense freedom is the summum bonum of all existences. It is a state of perfection. It is both freedom from and freedom to. But it is only to be experienced and not to be conceptualized or verbalized. This is metaphysical freedom, the ultimate Svarājya .

It is in this background one has to understand and approach the concept of “Freedom” ( Svarājya/svātantrya ) in Indian context. Freedom constitutes the very core ( svabhāva ) of Reality, say the Vedic seers. Whether it is the Vedic conception of describing it as Ānidavatam svadhayā tadekam (i.e., That One Ultimate Being which exists by itself independently) or the Buddhist account of Tattva as prapañchaśunya , the ultimate nature of all existence is freedom. The phenomenal nature is due to dependent origination and interdependent existence, which is not original and final. It is a state of circumscription of freedom. But every entity has the innate instinct and potentiality to realize freedom which consists in getting back to its pristine nature (Svarūpavasthāna in Yoga and Pratyabhijñā in Kashmir S’aivism). It is in this sense the Sāmkhya thinker Īśhvarkrṣḥṇa talks of freedom not only of Puruṣa but also of Prakṛiti. Whatever be the account of the nature of final destiny conceived variously, it consists in realization of freedom. In this sense freedom is the sumum bonum of all existence. To repeat, it is a state of existence which can only be experienced and cannot be expressed and described. This is metaphysical freedom.

Svarajya in Ideas

In the context of academic sphere in India when we are to rethink about Svarājya , the most pertinent aspect that should demand our attention immediately and urgently is Svarājya in ideas , a freedom from intellectual slavery, a cultivation of authentic Indian rationality which can be called genuinely Indian, which springs from our soil, which is rooted in our psyche, and which meets our needs and aspirations. It is a tragic incident of history that because of centuries of slavish existence Indian intellectuals have become flunkeyist and in spite of 70 years of political independence we are still languishing under intellectual slavery. Our system of education which we have inherited from the Britishers has made us to wear a mask which has not only made us appear a foreign bābu to our masses of people, it has also clouded our thinking so much so that we think in alien terms, about alien issues, in alien methodology mistaking them as our own. We employ adapted language, borrowed phraseology, superimposed models and unnatural modes of thinking and ways of living, thinking that these are marks of progressiveness and modernity. We are cut off from our roots and feel ashamed to adhere to our traditions even though they may be healthy and conducive to our well-being. For fear of being branded as conservative, orthodox, obscurantist, etc., we are afraid of being associated with our past and crave to cling to alien thoughts, beliefs and practices which demean our existence and make it inauthentic. Let it be made clear that there is nothing wrong in adopting English as a language, or borrowing all that is true, good and beautiful elsewhere, but we have to keep our feet firm in the native soil. We have to keep our mind and eyes open to the world to assimilate all that is desirable and healthy, but we should solidly stand on our feet and should not allow ourselves to be swept away. This is what the Vedic seers enjoined and Mahatma Gandhi averred.

Prof. K. C. Bhattacharya in his seminal paper “Svarāj in Ideas” has lamented long back as to how our thoughts have become “hybrid through and through and inevitable sterile slavery has entered into our very soul.” Referring to the colonization of our mind and hybridization of our ideas as one of the most distressing features, he points out that, “We either accept or repeat the judgments passed on us by western culture, or we impotently resend them, but have hardly any estimate of our own ideas wrung from our inward perception.” He observes that “India’s native soul gets twisted and warped by a shadow mind due to western education” imposed on us but also willingly accepted by us with a slavish mentality. In his view “Slavery begins when one ceases to feel the evil and it deepens when the evil is accepted as good.” He rightly warns that “Intellectual bondage is more enslaving than political subjugation because of its invisibility and silent creeping paralyzing power, unforgivably persist even after political independence.” Of course he is for cultural assimilation, but he opposes cultural subjugation. He writes, “There is cultural subjection only when one’s traditional cast of ideas and sentiments is superseded without comparison or competition by a new cast representing an alien culture which possesses one like a ghost.” Prof. Bhattacharya has argued that “reaffirmation of cultural traditions is the heart of all authentic anti-colonialism” and that “our intellectual inheritance needs renewal and reorientation.” He feels that “the traditional storehouse of truth can serve our civilization’s needs better than imported knowledge and experience.” So he pleads for the “conservation of distinctive values evolved through ages of continuous historical life of Indian society.” There has to be a creative use of the past but as our understanding has become contaminated we have lost our capacity to understand our past. There is a need for reawakening, but unfortunately we are at present incapacitated to do so.

It is high time that we give a halt to and give up this intellectual slavery and cultural superimposition. What we need to day is creation of a new class of intellectuals which can bring about resurgence in the field of ideas. The need is to create new intelligentsia that has ability to overcome the alienated intellectuals of India. Prof. K. C. Bhattacharya opines that “The most prominent contribution of ancient India is in the field of philosophy.” He writes, “It is in philosophy, if anywhere, that the task of discovering the souls of India is imperative for the modern India.” But our mode of doing philosophy at present is doing history of philosophy and not philosophy proper. What is needed is doing darśana or tattvajñāna with pramāṇa and prayojana . This has to be one of the items in rethinking about Svarājya.

In worldly existence political freedom becomes foundational. All other facets of freedom depend on this. If political freedom is lost, all other freedoms are jeopardized. But to safe guard political freedom preservation of ideological freedom is most essential. If intellectual freedom is lost, all other freedoms get endangered. This is what ancient Indian thinkers exhorted and made Kṣātra Teja subservient to Brāhma Tej a. The greatest slavery is flunkeyism. Prof. K. C. Bhttacharya emphasized “Svarāj in Ideas.” His views on this subject are both instructive and inspiring. Mahatma Gandhi also highlighted this point. It is hoped that young Indian mind will pay heed to this. It is unfortunate that even after 70 years of political independence, we have not been able to achieve intellectual freedom. We have remained flunkeyist . It is high time that our young minds cultivate Svarājya in ideas.

Worldly Freedom

The Svarājya that is meaningful and significant for a human being in the worldly state of existence is the individual and social freedom of which cultural, moral, political, economic and other types of freedom are various dimensions. Freedom along with ratiocinative consciousness, creativity and responsibility constitutes the essence of a human being. For a human being freedom is very life and soul. That is why Lokmanya Tilak declared it to be our birth right. Freedom alone provides socio-politico-economic integrity to a human being. Without freedom she/he is as good as dead though alive physically. If human life is just for eating and sleeping, and having clothing and shelter, it is not worthy and meaningful. Only freedom provides dignity and worth to human being. That is why in the history of human civilization we find thousands of people sacrificing their lives for the sake of freedom not only for themselves but also for others, their country and people. We have examples of Maharana Pratap Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and many others in Indian history. They also knew the value of their life and of others. Life was dear to them, but they sacrificed their lives because they thought that they would rather die than live worthless and servile life subjected to others. Of course physical life is precious and dear and people do yearn for a long life in good health, but freedom cannot be bartered with life in slavery. Physical life is valuable but more precious is dignity of life.

Two Aspects of Worldly Freedom

There are two aspects of freedom which are essential and complementary to each other. One is freedom from all limitations, restrictions, etc., which are detrimental to ones legitimate well-being and development. It stands for absence of undue interference from others, of constraints or domination or control or coercion by others. It also means freedom from wants, pain and suffering. Classical Indian thinkers talked of three types of suffering and absolute freedom there from. They longed for freedom which is named as mukti . The other aspect is positive, that of being free to act in such a way as to enable one to realize one’s potentialities in the best possible ways. It means scope to realize one’s inherent potentialities. So freedom is not just absence of external constraints but also availability of objective conditions and practical opportunities for self-realization. Proper education alone is the surest means for this ( Sā vidyā yā vimuktaye ).

Freedom, Consciousness and Creativity

Human beings’ concrete demand for freedom is cognized by consciousness, and creative activity to cognize and transform human and cosmic existence is also due to consciousness. So freedom and consciousness go together. Because of freedom, creativity and consciousness human feels to be superior to other living beings empowered by them. He/she also tries to manage Nature. By virtue of the possession of freedom, ratiocinative consciousness and creativity human being approaches the world not fatalistically but creatively, not passively but actively, to reshape the world not blindly but purposefully and deliberately. Human history has been history of struggle of this type of freedom. All pursuits of science and technology, humanities and social sciences, art and literature have been ideally engineered in this direction only. The transformation of Human, society and Nature are the legitimate objectives of human endeavor. For this it is essential that every individual, every society, every nation and all that come under it should have freedom, which means svarāja in ideas or thought, svātantrya in action, svāvalambana in self-governance, svadeshi in economy, svasāmarthya in self-defense, etc.

Freedom, Equality and Justice

Freedom, equality and justice are commensurate with one another. Human being is a social creature. Only in a social context and in a social framework freedom is meaningful. There are three foundations of sociality, viz., coexistence ( sahavāsa ), cooperation ( sahakāra ) and mutual caring and sharing ( sahabhoga ), and this is possible only in a complementary situation of freedom, equality and justice. Equality and justice do not diminish or curtail freedom rather they make freedom available to all. Equality of opportunity and distributive justice thus constitute two pillars to provide solid foundation to freedom and social solidarity. Freedom and equality are commensurate with each other. Human is a social creature. Only in a social context and social framework where there is sahavāsa, sahakāra, and sahabhoga, freedom is meaningful. This implies mutual care and share which is possible only in a complementary situation of freedom, justice and equality. Equality and justice do not diminish freedom, rather they make freedom available to all. This has been the keynote of many Vedic Ṛchas and averments of the Upaniṣads and the Gītā.

Freedom, Rights and Duties

If the commensurability situation is to be obtained, and it ought to be obtained for peace and prosperity, then it is imperative that there should be system of rights and duties (Ṛṇas and Mahāyajñas) embedded in a democratic framework of society and state. Only in a democratic mode of thinking and living well regulated by dharma in the traditional sense which is sustaining ( dhāraka ), regulating ( niyāmaka ) and enhancing principle ( sādhaka ) of life, rational and free humans can pursue the kind of life best suited to themselves without hurting or thwarting the similar expectations and aspirations of fellow beings. A dharma-based democratic approach ( Dharmocracy ) is organicismic in which individual well-being is tied up with social well-being. It is not either individualistic or totalitarian. It maintains a smooth and fine balance between personal integrity and public interest. It recognizes the value of humans as an end also and not just as means or resource, by reconciling individual self-development and social harmony and progress and world peace.

If each individual is to enjoy a modicum of freedom and be protected from unwarranted trespass, then the interrelation among individuals must be defined by a system of rights and obligations. Likewise, the structure and limits of social organizations should also be so defined and designed as to preserve and promote the primary value of freedom. The relation between freedom and rights is reciprocal. If one is not free one cannot enjoy freedom or fight for freedom. On the other hand, rights safeguard individual’s freedom. In the same way the relation between rights and obligations is also reciprocal. “A” has freedom to do “x” if and only if “A” has a right to do so and every one other than “A” has an obligation not to impede “A” in the exercise of his/her freedom. But “A” also is under obligation not to act illegitimately but to act to help and not hinder in the realization of rights of others. By way of extension the same reciprocity obtains between individual freedom and social authority. Freedom is not license, and it has to be circumscribed by social authority. One cannot take freedom to be unconditional. It is only in the context of and within the contours of social authority that freedom can be preserved and enjoyed. Thus, freedom means freedom of an individual in society. A human’s freedom is carved out in relation to his/her fellow beings. But essentially it is to be understood in terms of his/her awareness of one’s legitimate needs and aspirations, potentialities and capabilities, and scope to exercise choice and options to realize the objectives set forth for a meaningful life as conceived in the theory of puruṣārthas .

Freedom and Authority

Freedom is not license, and it has to be circumscribed by social authority. Freedom and authority are not incompatible. We cannot take freedom to be unconditional. It has to be within the contours of social authority. Thus freedom means freedom of an individual in society. A human’s freedom is carved out in relation to others. But it is also to be understood in terms of one’s awareness of one’s needs, and aspirations, potentialities and capabilities, and scope to exercise choice and options to realize the objectives set forth for ones meaningful existence. For all this authority is a means. And just realization of freedom is an end. The need of authority is due to our demand for freedom. So authority cannot be designed independently of our cherished goals of freedom. In this context a distinction is drawn in Classical Indian thought between “an authority” and “in authority.” “An authority” is impersonal dharma as expounded by brāhma teja and “in authority” is the ruler a person or body of persons which puts the authority in use ( Kṣātra teja ).

Interdependence between freedom and authority is rooted in the social and gregarious nature of human being. Authority is a means, and just realization of freedom is an end. Authority is designed from the perspective of freedom. Whether authority is a matter of historical evolution or social contract is not a significant issue in this context. What is significant here is to know that the need of authority is due to our demand for freedom. So authority cannot be said to be designed independently of our cherished goals of freedom. The point to be noted and emphasized is that keeping the end (i.e., freedom) constant we have to vary the means (i.e., authority) in the light of the degree of protection it is required to give to freedom. In this context the distinction drawn between spiritual authority and temporal power, an authority and in authority becomes meaningful. “An authority” is impersonal law, custom, tradition, etc., but “in authority” is a person or group of persons who puts the authority in operation and use. There is always a possibility of a person in authority making a misuse of authority. A person in authority may be selfish, dishonest, corrupt, inefficient or short tempered or having other evil qualities. Therefore, there must be adequate provisions and sufficient checks for dismissing such persons or making them relinquish such authority. Existence and acceptance of an authority resulting in surrendering some degree of personal freedom should only be in exchange for or to secure guaranteed security of life and betterment of living and if this is not provided by the person in authority who is bearer of an authority, people have every right to oppose and remove him/her. In any good system of governance, there should be adequate mechanism for such a correction.

It has always been an unfortunate occurrence of history that there have been more often than not conflicts between individual freedom and socio-political authority. In dictatorship, monarchy, oligarchy, totalitarianism and even in democracy such situations often arise. However, in an ideal framework of relationship, this can only be regarded as mishap or aberration to be corrected or overcome. The tension between the two cannot be said to be natural or irresoluble. There is a need and scope for conflict-resolution, a democratic liberal welfarism, which I call as Dharmocracy, and which can be said to be most congenial and conducive mode of governance that alone can ensure enjoyment of freedom in true sense. 

Democracy to be Seasoned with Dharma

All is not well in the political arena in the world as it is smeared with violence, terrorism, nepotism and corruption. Though it must be admitted that democracy is the best form of governance evolved so far, it cannot be said to be the best. As Winston Churchill once remarked, “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” (Hansard, November 11, 1947.) There is lot of truth in what Churchill opined. All the three wings of democratic framework, viz., legislature, executive and judiciary are vitiated with several ills and evils all over the world where democracy prevails. This calls for serious rethinking about functioning of democracy. We may have to think going beyond democracy, if need be. Going beyond does not mean rejecting the basic spirit or merits of democracy which are laudable. It only means rejecting all that is not good and beneficial, that which is detrimental to wellness, that which is harmful. Out of several possible alternatives “Dharmocracy” can be considered. Views of contemporary Indian thinkers like Mahatma Gandhi, Acharya Tulsi, Acharya Mahapragya, Jaiprakash Narayana, Deendayal Upadhyaya and others can be helpful in this regard. 

Freedom and Doctrine of Karma

Coming to the moral sphere Indian thinkers have put forth doctrine of Karma to ensure freedom and responsibility. This theory has for centuries exercised an unmitigated and pervasive influence on Indian psyche. It is based on two presuppositions. One is presumption of an order in the moral sphere on causal pattern. The second is the belief in the nature of individual self as a ratiocinative, free and responsible agent to whom attribution of action and retribution of consequences are to be apportioned. Freedom of will is implicit in the notion of moral responsibility. Such a freedom is the intrinsic character of moral agent whose actions are necessarily preceded by free choice. Free agent can be negatively understood as one who does not act under duress, constraint or compulsion. Its anti-thesis is acting freely. The word “free” has different meanings in the context of volition and action. In the case of volition it is freedom from extraneous influences in choosing “A” instead “B,” etc. In case of freedom of action it is freedom to do which has been chosen by the agent which implies availability of means to do “A.” The former entails the distinction between svatantra kartā (free agent) and niyojya kartā (employed agent). The latter distinguishes between upalabdhi or anupalabdhi of sādhana (availability or non-availability of means).

Responsibility as Corollary of Freedom and Need for Ethics

Coming to the issue of responsibility, it is a corollary of and ensues from freedom. As stated earlier, Philosophy is systematic reflection on our lived experiences with a view to be profited from it and one of our most problematic experiences is human behavior which is indeterminate and unpredictable but concerning which paradoxically constant endeavor is made for determination and regulation. Since all pollution and perversion are human making, there is need to regulate human conduct. The discipline of ethics is primarily concerned with postulation of norms for good human life and regulation of human conduct in accordance with these norms. On the presumption that human being is a rational, free and responsible agent ethical considerations, ethical theorizing and ethical judgments are undertaken. It is hoped and believed that human conduct can be regulated and be made norm-abiding. This is the objective of the discipline of ethics. Of course, there is always a gap between theory and practice and our endeavor should be to bridge it as far as possible. A moral norm may not be adhered to in its totality or fullness, but this does not mean that it should be given up as impracticable or utopian. The distinction between mahāvrata and aṇuvrata in the Jaina tradition is a good guide in this regard. The mark of an ideal being actually perused is harmony between the inner and outer reality of the agent, between inner feelings and outward behavior. But this cannot be a fool-proof criterion. Public vigilance helps in norm-following.

Another point to be referred to is that norms are posited to be pursued (They are sādhya and not asādhya ). In ideal situation they are to be practiced spontaneously as a matter of habit or by the force of conscience. But in practice it may not be so. That is why importance of moral education is accepted as it helps in cultivation of moral will. But more often than not because of moral infirmity built in human nature there is a need of external sanctions, social or political. That is why codes and laws are formulated. But this enforcement from outside is always feeble as moral weakness is ingrained in human nature. That is why there is greater need for moral education and constant vigilance. But it should not be overlooked that values are not to be taught but to be imbibed.

Ethical Values (Virtues)

Rationality as discriminative ability implies freedom to choose but being guided by certain norms. The determination and choice of alternatives requires norm-prescription but human freedom also implies a scope for both norm-adherence and norm-violation. Values to be pursued and disvalues to be shunned are both equally central to moral considerations.

Quest for values, pursuit of values and realization of values have to be holistic and integral exercises. They have to pertain to different dimensions of human constitution, as for example, analyzed in the pañcakośa theory of the Taittirīya Upaniṣad. Each dimension of human existence is valuable and must be catered to in a balanced and graduated manner. This is the message of this Upaniṣad. There should not be lopsided endeavor, concentrating on one and excluding the rest. Similarly human existence is situated in multi-layered environment and all layers are to be catered. Human being exists in family, in social and natural surroundings. The Śāntipātha in the Upaniṣads refers to many such layers. Values pertain to each of these layers. The value schema should not be regarded as partite or divisible. Al values in the schema are intertwined and possess inseparability. No one value can be realized without the rest. There is organic unity in the total reality, and this is reflected in value schema as well. In Classical Indian thought, this organic understanding was built-in but now under the impact of western civilization we have neglected it. In our value considerations, we have to go back to the classical thought if we are sincere and honest in our enterprise. We have talked a lot about values, particularly in the context of value-oriented education, without caring about the nature of reality given to us in our concrete experience. The reality we talk about is not the lived reality but abstracted reality, rationalized reality, and therefore we are far away from concrete reality. It is high time that we shad away our bias against Classical Indian thought, revisit Classical Indian thought and do so in a positive and constructive frame of mind. The contemporary mind is looking for new intuitions, fresh insights and innovative thinking and Classical Indian thought has the potentiality to provide the needed guidelines provided we understand it in its true spirits. The onus of responsibility for this guidance lies on young creative Indian minds, and it is hoped that they will prove to be worthy of this task.

Knowledge of Values

Our awareness of values is always prescriptive. It is different from the descriptive awareness concerning facts. A description can be true or false or doubtful, but the logic of prescription has another set of values. A prescription can be good or bad or indifferent. It may be conducive to well-being or harmful or of no effect. A description has to be local with the possibility of universalizability, but a prescription has to be global with the need of being applied to local situations. Accordingly the mode of knowing prescription cannot be the same as the mode of knowing the description. Of course both are to be grounded in experience but the nature of experience cannot be the same. The ideals are conceived in and spring from actual situation, but their source is not sense experience.

Private and Public Values

So far as the question of values in private life and public life is concerned, in a holistic and integral approach the public–private divide is not entertained. Values are to be posited and pursued for both the spheres and they are to be sought conjointly. Public life is more demonstrable and loss of values can be detected with greater ease. External sanctions can operate with greater force. But value-pursuit is a collective and corporate endeavor. It is not a single person enterprise. There has to be an all round effort for this. It is physical–mental–spiritual exercise. It is a yajña to be performed by the collectivity for the collectivity. This is the message of the Vedas and the Upaniṣads. We have this cultural heritage available to us, and it is for us to look to it and be benefited by it.

Professional Values

Activity is the law of life and every human being has to act for survival, for sustenance and for enhancement of quality of life. So, human conduct has to be teleological and goal-oriented. In the choice of conduct, there is freedom as also regulation of freewill. There is inclusive alteration between freedom and determinism. Rationality as discriminative ability implies freedom to choose but being guided by certain norms. It also implies responsibility for the consequences so generated by ones actions. Freedom to choose means availability of alternatives to opt for that which is good, right and conducive to well-being or to opt for that which is bad, wrong and harmful to well-being. A human being can act in either of the two ways, but he has to be responsible for that action. This determination and choice of alternatives requires norm-prescription but human freedom also implies a scope for both norm-adherence and norm-violation. In this context ethical considerations become meaningful since they tell us about the rules and regulations to be adhered to and prohibitions to be avoided. Values to be pursued and disvalues to be shunned are both equally central to moral considerations. In ethical context values are termed as virtues and this relation between values and virtues should be kept in mind.

Need for Multiple Professions

Every human being has to undertake some profession for survival, for self-fulfillment and for social obligation. It has to be performed for self-expression, for self-enhancement and for self-realization. But its immediate aim is to earn livelihood. Every profession for its proper and efficacious performance has to depend upon several factors which may be regarded as its guiding principles. To determine these guiding principles, there is need professional ethos, regulations and management. A broad criterion of end-means-modalities-result can be considered.

Human needs and aspirations are multiple. This requires a variety of vocations and professions. Every human being cannot undertake all the vocations and perform all the functions of every profession. So, inter-professional and intra-professional ethos and management are needed to regulate them. All professions are meant for universal well-being, and we have the universal responsibility of upholding their purity and respectability. Unfortunately we seldom care for this. Every profession has to work out its own norms and regulations keeping in view the ultimate goal of cosmic well-being. A professional ethics is a management ethics. It pertains to the management of a profession in the sense that it regulates knowledge, will, skillful performance and distributive enjoyment of outcome of that profession. Proper education is the only means to achieve this. This education need not be a formal class room education. It can be imparted in very many ways and suiting to that profession and can be devised accordingly. Here some areas can be taken up for consideration.

Every rational human being has to undertake some profession or the other for survival, for self-fulfillment and for social obligation. It has to be performed for self-expression, self-enhancement and self-realization as an ultimate objective, but its immediate aim is to earn livelihood. In an ideal situation there has to be a balance between the ultimate and the immediate objectives, but very often this is overlooked. This calls for professional ethos, regulations and management.

Every profession for its proper and efficacious performance has to depend upon several factors which may be regarded as its guiding principles. There are several criteria on the basis of which the guiding principles can be classified. The most important criterion is the distinction of end-means-modalities-result ( sādhya - sādhana - itikartavyatā - phala ). Every profession is meant to serve some goal, to realize some purpose and to attain some result. It is the basic requirement of every profession to have clarity about the end for which it is to be pursued. An absence of clarity or confusion about the goal very often results in improper or immoral performance.

There is a quadruple principle of knowledge-will-action-result for proper performance a profession. The agent in a profession has to know the knowledge-will-act-result relationship ( jñāna - icchā - kriyaā - phala ). If he/she is knowledgeable of this, he/she is a fit and competent person ( adhikāri ) to undertake that profession. Then only there can be skillful performance of that profession. Role of knowledge is foundational and pivotal. Lack of knowledge is harmful and detrimental to well-being. In all cultural traditions of India, the significance of knowledge is highlighted. But mere knowledge is not enough. It has to generate will and fructify in effort and action. If someone claims to know but does not have a will to act, that knowledge is unripe or incipient or false pretext. In the Pūrva Mīmāmsā, it is emphasized that Śābdībhāvanā must lead to Ārthībhāvanā and then only yajña can be said to have been performed. Knowledge generates will and this stirs up an agent to act, but his/her power lies only in performance of action and not on the results of action. The human being has control on the performance of action and not on the accruing of its results. This is another type of professional management.

The Gita ideal of anāsakta karma or karmayoga is performance of Brahmayajña . It provides a blueprint for professional ethics as it comprehends properly both the quadruple principles referred to above. A proper management of these quadruples has been the keynote of the Bhagavadgītā and Pūrva Mīmāmsā which provide a foundation of professional ethics.

Performance of any profession has to be in the spirit of yajña or universal responsibility understood in the spirit of Yajurveda of which Īśāvāsyopaniṣd is the concluding part. This is the meaning of yajña in the Gītā as well. A yajña is a collective and corporate action for the sake of general well-being ( Brahmārpaṇa ). Brahma stands for totality. Every profession is to be undertaken not for ones selfish end only ( idam na mama ). It is for vyaṣṭi, samaṣṭi and parameṣṭi all the three, though apparently it is done for one’s own self. So the result of action is to be surrendered to the totality ( svāhā ). Every existence is a part of the corporate whole and is integrally related to the whole and its parts. There is fundamental unity of all existences. The basis of yajña is in satya and dharma which are rooted in rta. They are at the base of the cosmic process and sustain it. The cosmic process itself is a yajña . These are the subtle and sublime ideas not to be taken in their ordinary mundane meaning. They are to be understood in the context of the Vedic Samhitās and Brāhmaṇas in ādhyātmika sense. They provide foundation to Indian spirituality which is holistic, integral and unitary approach to reality. These are rich concepts pregnant with profuse meaning for universal well-being. It is unfortunate that in the course of vast temporal span and due to exigencies of history they have lost their original meaning, got distorted and misused. But they need to be re-understood. No culture can survive and thrive if its seminal ideas, key concepts and fundamental doctrines get fossilized and sterilized. Macaulay realized this fact and tried to strike at the very roots of Indian culture and we are witnessing its evil consequences. But it is high time that we become alive to reality.

In the cosmic set up there has to be multiplicity of professions depending upon the needs and aspirations and abilities of the human individual. These professions keep on evolving and dissipating as the societies change. On account of human limitations and large number of wants, there is a need for multiplicity of professions. All professions are equally useful and valuable and therefore they should be treated at par, but it is human selfish nature to prioritize them and to put them in a hierarchy. It is a part of professional ethics to respect all professions and to follow the maxim of “Work is Worship.” All professions are meant for universal well-being, and we have the universal responsibility of upholding their purity and respectability. Unfortunately, we seldom care for this.

Every human individual cannot perform all the actions and fulfill all the wants by himself/herself, and therefore there has to be choice of vocations. This should depend upon ones capacity, ability, interest and need. The Gītā calls it as svadharma. Everyone has to mind ones svadharma . This is professional ethics. Every profession calls for a code of conduct for its proper performance. The code stands for a set of rules and regulations regarding the two types of quadruples referred to above. There rules and regulations are to be both intra-profession and inter-profession. The Gītā emphasizes both these types of professional ethics. Generally we tend to side track inter-professional ethics and mind only intra-professional ethics. In modern times most of the professions have become inter-professional. For example, medical profession has preventive and curative aspects, but it is also intimately related with pharmaceutical, engineering, business, dietary, legal, psychological and many other professions.

There can be as many professional ethics as there are professions. Some professional regulations are common to all professions and cut across all of them in spite of their varied nature, modes of functioning, objectives, etc., but they also require some separate or distinct set of norms as per their specific requirements.

Every professional ethics is management ethics. It deals with proper and effective management of that profession. This can be realized by proper education. This education need not be formal class room education. It can be imparted in many ways suiting to that profession. But this much is certain that without management there cannot be proper performance and without education there cannot be proper management.

Education is a conscious, deliberate and planned process of modification in the natural growth and development of human being and the surroundings. If proper and adequate, it ensures accelerated processes of development in human life in right rhythm. It is therefore a means for betterment and enhancement of quality of life. It is useful for personality development, character-building, and for livelihood. It is a hall mark of civil society. But all this becomes utopia if it is not properly conceived and implemented.

These and related issues may be taken up for threadbare analysis. But apart from theorizing practical concerns must be paramount. Knowledge without action is futile. In the Indian tradition it has been emphasized that right knowledge ( samyak jñāna ) has to fructify in right conduct ( samyak cāritra ) In Jainism great emphasis is laid on proper knowledge ( samyak jñāna ). Knowledge is the only and surest way to spiritual perfection. The Jaina scriptures therefore emphasize that we must draw a clear distinction between samyak jñāna and mithya jñāna . Mithya jñāna entangles us in the vicissitudes of worldly life. It is bewitching and bewildering and it springs from avidya or ignorance. In order to have right knowledge right attitude or right mental make-up is necessary. This is samyak dṛṣṭi . Opposed to this is mithyā dṛṣṭi with which we generally suffer . Samyak dṛṣṭi leads to samyak jñāna, and the latter alone is the path way to mokṣa . Mithyā dṛṣṭi and mithyā jñāna do not serve any genuine purpose and hence they must be discarded. For an aspirant of mokṣa / mukti only samyak dṛṣṭi and jñāna are helpful. This is the main theme of the teachings of the Agamas . Samyak jñāna always leads to samyak cāritra . The value and purpose of knowledge is not theoretical but necessarily practical. Right conduct ensues only from right knowledge. Conduct without knowledge is blind and knowledge without conduct is lame. The two are complimentary to each other. And therefore knowledge has to lead to the corresponding conduct. Without right conduct deliverance from worldly miseries, trials and tribulations is impossible and without complete deliverance from these no permanent happiness can be achieved. As said earlier, these are the three jewels of life which every human being must wear. But this wearing is not decoration but actual practice and concrete realization. However, this is not easy to achieve. It requires tapas and sādhanā , a rigorous control of body, will and mind. So knowledge without conduct is useless. Merely listening to the discourses is wastage of time and futile. It does not help us in any way. What is needed is the ensuing conduct. But unfortunately most of us forget this. We listen to the sermons of the spiritual persons but do not practice them. We take it as a past time or a matter of routine of life. Our knowledge remains mere information at the mental level. The Dasavaikālika sūtra (IV) compares a person having knowledge without practice to a donkey who carries burden of sandal wood without knowing its value or utility. As the donkey bears the burden of sandal wood but has no share in the wealth of his load, similarly a person without practice merely bears the burden of his knowledge. He cannot enjoy spiritual progress which is the real fruit of knowledge. Instead he indulges in evanescent and fleeting worldly pleasures which invariably end up in pain and suffering or mental unhappiness or a feeling of vanity of life. The Āvaśyakaniryukti also avers the same that knowledge is useless without conduct and conduct is useless without knowledge. In Indian culture, philosophy and religion, view and way, theory and practice, are not divorced and segregated . Darśana is not mere reflection upon the nature of reality but also a quest for and a realization of values. Basically it is a mokṣa śāstra . There is a definite purpose in life and reality if we care to know and a definite goal to achieve if we have a will to do so. Our existence is not meaningless. It has a value and significance. But we must first of all know what we are, what is the nature and purpose of life, what we should be in our life and how we can be so, etc. The aim of human existence should be spiritual perfection through material progress. But material progress is only a means and not an end. The end is self-realization which is achieved through the removal of karmic matter and liberation from samsāra . There is potential divinity in human being and there must be effort for divinization. This is the ultimate teaching of all Indian scriptures ( Āgamas ).

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Bhatt, S.R. Freedom and Responsibility. J. Indian Counc. Philos. Res. 35 , 585–602 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-018-0157-7

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Published : 25 September 2018

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-018-0157-7

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The field of study includes personal freedom, freedom of the press, speech, expression, and much more. In this article, we’ve collected a list of great writing ideas and topics about freedom, as well as freedom essay examples and writing tips.

Freedom essays are common essay assignments that discuss acute topics of today’s global society. However, many students find it difficult to choose the right topic for their essay on freedom or do not know how to write the paper.

We have developed some useful tips for writing an excellent paper. But first, you need to choose a good essay topic. Below are some examples of freedom essay topics.

Freedom Essay Topics

• American (Indian, Taiwanese, Scottish) independence
• Freedom and homelessness essay
• The true value of freedom in modern society
• How slavery affects personal freedom
• The problem of human rights and freedoms
• American citizens’ rights and freedoms
• The benefits and disadvantages of unlimited freedom
• The changing definition of freedom

Once you have selected the issue you want to discuss (feel free to get inspiration from the ones we have suggested!), you can start working on your essay. Here are 10 useful tips for writing an outstanding paper:

• Remember that freedom essay titles should state the question you want to discuss clearly. Do not choose a vague and non-descriptive title for your paper.
• Work on the outline of your paper before writing it. Think of what sections you should include and what arguments you want to present. Remember that the essay should be well organized to keep the reader interested. For a short essay, you can include an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion.
• Do preliminary research. Ask your professor about the sources you can use (for example, course books, peer-reviewed articles, and governmental websites). Avoid using Wikipedia and other similar sources, as they often have unverified information.
• A freedom essay introduction is a significant part of your paper. It outlines the questions you want to discuss in the essay and helps the reader understand your work’s purpose. Remember to state the thesis of your essay at the end of this section.
• A paper on freedom allows you to be personal. It should not focus on the definition of this concept. Make your essay unique by including your perspective on the issue, discussing your experience, and finding examples from your life.
• At the same time, help your reader to understand what freedom is from the perspective of your essay. Include a clear explanation or a definition with examples.
• Check out freedom essay examples online to develop a structure for your paper, analyze the relevance of the topics you want to discuss and find possible freedom essay ideas. Avoid copying the works you will find online.
• Support your claims with evidence. For instance, you can cite the Bill of Rights or the United States Constitution. Make sure that the sources you use are reliable.
• To make your essay outstanding, make sure that you use correct grammar. Grammatical mistakes may make your paper look unprofessional or unreliable. Restructure a sentence if you think that it does not sound right. Check your paper several times before sending it to your professor.
• A short concluding paragraph is a must. Include the summary of all arguments presented in the paper and rephrase the main findings.

Do not forget to find a free sample in our collection and get the best ideas for your essay!

• Freedom of Expression Essay For one to be in a position to gauge the eventuality of a gain or a loss, then there should be absolute freedom of expression on all matters irrespective of the nature of the sentiments […]
• Philosophy and Relationship between Freedom and Responsibility Essay As a human being, it is hard to make a decision because of the uncertainty of the outcome, but it is definitely essential for human being to understand clearly the concept and connection between freedom […]
• Freedom Writers: Promoting Good Moral Values The movie portrays a strong and civilized view of the world; it encourages development and use of positive moral values by people in making the world a better place.
• Freedom of Speech in Social Media Essay Gelber tries to say that the history of the freedom of speech in Australia consists of the periods of the increasing public debates on the issue of human rights and their protection.
• Rio (2011) and the Issue of Freedom As a matter of fact, this is the only scene where Blu, Jewel, Linda, Tulio, and the smugglers are present at the same time without being aware of each other’s presence.
• Human Will & Freedom and Moral Responsibility Their understanding of the definition of human will is based on the debate as to whether the will free or determined.
• Freedom and Determinism On the other hand, determinism theory explains that there is an order that leads to occurrences of events in the world and in the universe.
• Freedom and equality According to Liliuokalani of Hawaii, the conquest contravened the basic rights and freedoms of the natives and their constitution by undermining the power of their local leaders.
• Social Values: Freedom and Justice It is evident that freedom and justice are mutually exclusive, as “the theory of justice signifies its implications in regards to freedom as a key ingredient to happiness”.
• Human Freedom in Relation to Society Human freedom has to do with the freedom of one’s will, which is the freedom of man to choose and act by following his path through life freely by exercising his ‘freedom’).
• “Long Walk to Freedom” by Nelson Mandela In the fast developing world, advances and progress move countries and nations forward but at the same time, some things are left behind and become a burden for the people and evolution to better life […]
• The Efforts and Activities of the Paparazzi are Protected by the Freedom of the Press Clause of the Constitution The First Amendment of the American constitution protects the paparazzi individually as American citizens through the protection of their freedom of speech and expression and professionally through the freedom of the press clause.
• Jean-Paul Sartre’s Views on Freedom For example, to Sartre, a prisoner of war is free, existentially, but this freedom does not exist in the physical realm.
• Freedom in Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” Literature Analysis In Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, the main character, Nora is not an intellectual, and spends no time scouring books or libraries or trying to make sense of her situation.
• Rousseau and Kant on their respective accounts of freedom and right The difference in the approaches assumed by Kant and Rousseau regarding the norms of liberty and moral autonomy determine the perspective of their theories of justice.
• Fighting for the Right to Choose: Students Should Have the Freedom to Pick the Courses They Want Consequently, students should be allowed to pick the subjects which they are going to study together with the main one. Thus, students should be allowed to choose the subjects they need in accordance with their […]
• 70’s Fashion as a Freedom of Choice However, with the end of the Vietnam War, the public and the media lost interest in the hippie style in the middle of the decade, and began to lean toward the mod subculture. The 70’s […]
• Power and Freedom in America Although it is already a given that freedom just like the concept love is not easy to define and the quest to define it can be exhaustive but at the end of the day what […]
• Freedom in Antebellum America: Civil War and Abolishment of Slavery The American Civil War, which led to the abolishment of slavery, was one of the most important events in the history of the United States.
• “Gladiator” by Ridley Scott: Freedom and Affection This desire to be free becomes the main motive of the film, as the plot follows Maximus, now enslaved, who tries to avenge his family and the emperor and regain his liberty.
• Personal Freedom in A Doll’s House, A Room of One’s Own, and Diary of a Madman In Chapter Three of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, the protagonist attempts to make sense of the nonsensical elements of female history, namely, how it could be that “in Athena’s city, where women […]
• Four Freedoms by President Roosevelt Throughout the discussion we shall elaborate the four freedoms in a broader way for better understating; we shall also describe the several measures that were put in place in order to ensure the four freedoms […]
• Satre human freedom Sartre continues to explain that freedom is the central factor in human beings and it is permanently connected to the “for-itself” or consciousness. In the end, Sartre’s definition of freedom is that it is the […]
• Freedom and the Role of Civilization The achievements demonstrated by Marx and Freud play a significant role in the field of sociology and philosophy indeed; Marx believed in the power of labor and recognized the individual as an integral part of […]
• Women and Freedom in “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin She is best known for her recurrent theme on the status of women in societal affairs, the challenges and problems facing them as well as repression and gender bias.”The story of an hour” is rhetorically […]
• Nelson Mandela “Freedom in Africa” For example, the struggle for freedom in South Africa is one of the best examples of freedom in Africa so far.
• Review of “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom” From the youth, Mandela started to handle the unfairness of isolation and racial relations in South Africa. In Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, Chadwick’s masterful screen memoir of Nelson Mandela passes on the anguish as […]
• Is the Good Life Found in Freedom? Example of Malala Yousafzai The story of Malala has shown that freedom is crucial for personal happiness and the ability to live a good life.
• Freedom of Speech in China and Political Reform Although the constitution of China has the provision of the freedom of speech, association, press and even demonstration, the freedom is not there in reality since the constitution forbids the undertaking of anything that is […]
• Personal Understanding of Freedom Freedom is essential for individual growth and development, and it helps individuals to make informed decisions that are in alignment with their values and beliefs.
• Chapters 4-6 of ”From Slavery to Freedom” by Franklin & Higginbotham At the same time, the portion of American-born slaves was on the increase and contributed to the multiracial nature of the population.
• Freedom of Expression in the Classroom The NEA Code of Ethics establishes a link between this Freedom and a teacher’s responsibilities by requiring instructors to encourage “independent activity in the pursuit of learning,” provide “access to diverse points of view,” and […]
• Protecting Freedom of Expression on the Campus An annotated version of “Protecting Freedom of Expression on the Campus” by Derek Bok in The Boston Globe.*and these stars are where I have a question or opinion on a statement* For several years, universities […]
• Freedom, Equality & Solidarity by Lucy Parsons In the lecture and article ‘The Principles of Anarchism’ she outlines her vision of Anarchy as the answer to the labor question and how powerful governments and companies worked for hand in hand to stifle […]
• Art and Freedom. History and Relationship The implication of this term is that genus art is composed of two species, the fine arts, and the useful arts. This, according to Cavell, is the beauty of art.
• Human Freedom: Liberalism vs Anarchism It is impoverished because liberals have failed to show the connection between their policies and the values of the community. More fundamentally, however, a policy formulated in such a way that it is disconnected from […]
• Voices of Freedom The history of the country is made up of debates, disagreements and struggles for freedom that have seen the Civil War, and the Cold War which have changed the idea of freedom in the US.
• The meaning of freedom today In order to come up with an agreeable and logical definition of freedom as it is in the contemporary society, people have critically analyzed the input of these philosophers and their definition of freedom in […]
• Concept of Individual Freedom Rousseau and Mill were political philosophers with interest in understanding what entailed individual freedom. This paper compares Rousseau’s idea of individual freedom with Mill’s idea.
• Predetermination and Freedom of Choice We assume that every happens because of a specific reason and that the effects of that event can be traced back to the cause.
• Freedom and Social Justice Through Technology These two remarkable minds have made significant contributions to the debates on technology and how it relates to liberty and social justice.
• Balancing Freedom of Speech and Responsibility in Online Commenting The article made me perceive the position of absolute freedom of speech in the Internet media from a dual perspective. This desire for quick attention is the creation of information noise, distracting from the user […]
• The Effect of Emotional Freedom Techniques on Nurses’ Stress The objectives for each of the three criteria are clearly stated, with the author explaining the aims to the reader well throughout the content in the article’s title, abstract, and introduction.
• The Freedom Summer Project and Black Studies The purpose of this essay is to discuss to which degree the story of the Freedom Summer project illustrates the concepts of politics outlined in Karenga’s book Introduction to black studies.
• Democracy: The Influence of Freedom Democracy is the basis of the political systems of the modern civilized world. Accordingly, the democracy of Athens was direct that is, without the choice of representatives, in contrast to how it is generated nowadays.
• Freedom of Speech as a Basic Human Right Restricting or penalizing freedom of expression is thus a negative issue because it confines the population of truth, as well as rationality, questioning, and the ability of people to think independently and express their thoughts.
• Kantian Ethics and Causal Law for Freedom The theory’s main features are autonomy of the will, categorical imperative, rational beings and thinking capacity, and human dignity. The theory emphasizes not on the actions and the doers but the consequences of their effects […]
• Principles in M. L. King’s Quest for African American Freedom The concept of a nonviolent approach to the struggles for African American freedom was a key strategy in King’s quest for the liberation of his communities from racial and social oppressions.
• Technology Revolutionizing Ethical Aspects of Academic Freedom As part of the solution, the trends in technology are proposed as a potential solution that can provide the necessary support to improve the freedom of expression as one of the ethical issues that affect […]
• The Journey Freedom Tour 2022 Performance Analysis Arnel Pineda at age 55 keeps rocking and hitting the high notes and bringing the entire band very successfully all through their live concert tour.
• Freedom of Speech and Propaganda in School Setting One of the practical solutions to the problem is the development and implementation of a comprehensive policy for balanced free speech in the classroom.
• Twitter and Violations of Freedom of Speech and Censorship The sort of organization that examines restrictions and the opportunities and challenges it encounters in doing so is the center of a widely acknowledged way of thinking about whether it is acceptable to restrict speech.
• Freedom of the Press and National Security Similarly, it concerns the freedom of the press of the media, which are protected in the United States of America by the First Amendment.
• The Views on the Freedom from Fear in the Historical Perspective In this text, fear is considered in the classical sense, corresponding to the interpretation of psychology, that is, as a manifestation of acute anxiety for the inviolability of one’s life.
• Freedom of Speech in Social Networks The recent case of blocking the accounts of former US President Donald Trump on Twitter and Facebook is explained by the violation of the rules and conditions of social platforms.
• Emotion and Freedom in 20th-Century Feminist Literature The author notes that the second layer of the story can be found in the antagonism between the “narrator, author, and the unreliable protagonist”.
• Analysis of UK’s Freedom of Information Act 2000 To preserve potentially disruptive data that must not be released to the public, the FOIA integrates several provisions that allow the officials to decline the request for information without suffering possible consequences.
• Fight for Freedom, Love Has No Labels, and Ad Council: Key Statement The most important part of the message, to me, is the fact that the freedoms mentioned in the PSA are not available to every American citizen, despite America being the land of freedom.
• Teachers’ Freedom of Speech in Learning Institutions The judiciary system has not clearly defined the limits of the First Amendment in learning institutions, and it’s a public concern, especially from the teachers.
• Is There Press Freedom in Modern China? There is a large body of literature in the field of freedom of the press investigations, media freedom in China, and press freedom and human rights studies.
• Freedom of the Press in the Context of UAE It gives the people the ability to understand the insight of the government and other crucial activities happening within the country.
• Freedom of the Press in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) According to oztunc & Pierre, the UAE is ranked 119 in the global press freedom data, classifying the country as one of the most suppressive regarding the liberty of expression.
• Mill’s Thesis on the Individual Freedom The sphere of personal freedom is an area of human life that relates to the individual directly. The principle of state intervention is that individuals, separately or collectively, may have the right to interfere in […]
• Privacy and Freedom of Speech of Companies and Consumers At the same time, in Europe, personal data may be collected following the law and only with the consent of the individuals.
• Expansion of Freedom and Slavery in British America The settlement in the city of New Plymouth was founded by the second, and it laid the foundation for the colonies of New England.
• Power, Property, and Freedom: Bitcoin Discourse In the modern world, all people have the right to freedom and property, but not all have the power to decide who may have this freedom and property.
• Religious Freedom Policy Evaluation Ahmed et al.claim that the creation of the ecosystem can facilitate the change as the members of the community share their experiences and learn how to respond to various situations.
• The Concepts of Freedom and the Great Depression Furthermore, blacks were elected to construct the constitution, and black delegates fought for the rights of freedpeople and all Americans. African-Americans gained the freedom to vote, work, and be elected to government offices during Black […]
• Freedom of Choices for Women in Marriage in “The Story of an Hour” The story describes the sentiments and feelings of Louisa Mallard when she learns the news about her husband. The readers can see the sudden reaction of the person to the demise of her significant other.
• Freedom of Speech in Shouting Fire: Stories From the Edge of Free Speech Even though the First Amendment explicitly prohibits any laws regarding the freedom of speech, Congress continues to make exceptions from it.
• Personal Freedom: The Importance in Modern Society To show my family and friends how important they are to me, I try contacting them more often in the way they prefer.
• Economic Freedom and Its Recent Statements Economic freedom is an important indicator and benchmark for the level of income of companies or individual citizens of a country.
• The Freedom Concept in Plato’s “Republic” This situation shows that the concept of democracy and the freedom that correlates with it refers to a flawed narrative that liberty is the same as equality.
• Freedom of Speech as the Most Appreciated Liberty In the present-day world, the progress of society largely depends on the possibility for people to exercise their fundamental rights. From this perspective, freedom of speech is the key to everyone’s well-being, and, in my […]
• The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom In the introductory part of the book, the author discusses his main theses concerning the link between the development of networks and shifts in the economy and society.
• Freedom of Association for Radical Organizations This assertion is the primary and fundamental argument in the debate on this topic – radical groups should not use freedom of association to harm other people potentially.
• Freedom of Expression on the Internet Randall describes the challenges regarding the freedom of speech raised by the Internet, such as anonymity and poor adaptation of mass communication to the cyber environment.
• Black Sexual Freedom and Manhood in “For Colored Girls” Movie Despite the representation of Black sexual freedoms in men and women and Black manhood as a current social achievement, For Colored Girls shows the realities of inequality and injustice, proving womanism’s importance in America.
• Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom Review He criticizes that in spite of the perceived knowledge he was getting as a slave, this very light in the form of knowledge “had penetrated the moral dungeon”.
• The Essence of Freedom of Contract The legal roots of the notion of freedom of contract are manifested in the ideals of liberalism and theoretical capitalism, where the former values individual freedom and the latter values marker efficiency and effectiveness.
• Why Defamation Laws Must Prioritize Freedom of Speech The body of the essay will involve providing information on the nature of defamation laws in the USA and the UK, the implementation of such laws in the two countries, and the reason why the […]
• Pettit’s Conception of Freedom as Anti-Power According to Savery and Haugaard, the main idea that Pettit highlights in this theory is the notion that the contrary to freedom is never interference as many people claim, but it is slavery and the […]
• Domination in the Discussion of Freedom For this reason, the principle of anti-power should be considered as the position that will provide a better understanding of the needs of the target population and the desirable foreign policy to be chosen.
• Freedom or Security: Homeland Issues In many ways, the author sheds light on the overreactions or inadequate responses of the US government, which led to such catastrophes as 9/11 or the war in Iraq.
• War on Terror: Propaganda and Freedom of the Press in the US There was the launching of the “Center for Media and Democracy”, CMD, in the year 1993 in order to create what was the only public interest at that period. There was expansive use of propaganda […]
• The Freedom of Expression and the Freedom of Press It is evident that the evolution of standards that the court has adopted to evaluate the freedom of expression leaves a lot to be desired. The court has attempted to define the role of the […]
• Information and Communication Technology & Economic Freedom in Islamic Middle Eastern Countries This is a unique article as it gives importance to the role ecommerce plays in the life of the educationists and students and urges that the administrators are given training to handle their students in […]
• The Path to Freedom of Black People During the Antebellum Period In conclusion, the life of free blacks in 19th century America was riddled with hindrances that were meant to keep them at the bottom of society.
• Civil Rights Movement: Fights for Freedom The Civil Rights Movement introduced the concept of black and white unification in the face of inequality. Music-related to justice and equality became the soundtrack of the social and cultural revolution taking place during the […]
• Voices of Freedom: Lincoln, M. L. King, Kirkaldy He was named after his grandfather Abraham Lincoln, the one man that was popular for owning wide tracks of land and a great farmer of the time.
• Freedom: Malcolm X’s vs. Anna Quindlen’s Views However, in reality, we only have the freedom to think whatever we like, and only as long as we know that this freedom is restricted to thought only.
• Net Neutrality: Freedom of Internet Access In the principle of Net neutrality, every entity is entitled access and interaction with other internet users at the same cost of access.
• The Golden Age of Youth and Freedom However, it is interesting to compare it to the story which took place at the dawn of the cultural and sexual revolution in Chinese society.
• Academic Freedom: A Refuge of Intellectual Individualism Also known as intellectual, scientific or individual freedom, academic freedom is defined as the freedom of professionals and students to question and to propose new thoughts and unpopular suggestions to the government without jeopardizing their […]
• The Literature From Slavery to Freedom Its main theme is slavery but it also exhibits other themes like the fight by Afro-Americans for freedom, the search for the identity of black Americans and the appreciation of the uniqueness of African American […]
• John Stuart Mill on Freedom in Today’s Perspective The basic concept behind this rose because it was frustrating in many cases in the context of the penal system and legislation and it was viewed that anything less than a capital punishment would not […]
• Conformity Versus Freedom at University To the author, this is objectionable on the grounds that such a regimen infringes on the freedom of young adults and that there is much to learn outside the classroom that is invaluable later in […]
• US Citizens and Freedom As an example of freedom and obtaining freedom in the US, the best possible subject would be the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, particularly during 1963-64, as this would serve as the conceptual and […]
• Value of Copyright Protection in Relation to Freedom of Speech The phrase, freedom of expression is often used to mean the acts of seeking, getting, and transfer of information and ideas in addition to verbal speech regardless of the model used. It is therefore important […]
• Social Factors in the US History: Respect for Human Rights, Racial Equality, and Religious Freedom The very first years of the existence of the country were marked by the initiatives of people to provide as much freedom in all aspects of social life as possible.
• Freedom of Speech and the Internet On the one hand, the freedom of expression on the internet allowed the general public to be informed about the true nature of the certain events, regardless of geographical locations and restrictions.
• Freedom Definition Revision: Components of Freedom That which creates, sustains, and maintains life in harmony with the natural cycles of this planet, doing no harm to the ecology or people of the Earth- is right.
• Freedom of Information Act in the US History According to the legislation of the United States, official authorities are obliged to disclose information, which is under control of the US government, if it is requested by the public.
• Media Freedom in the Olympic Era The Chinese government is heavily involved in the affairs of the media of that country. In the past, it was the responsibility of government to fund media houses however; today that funding is crapped off.
• Managing the Internet-Balancing Freedom and Regulations The explosive growth in the usage of Internet forms the basis of new digital age. Aim of the paper is to explore the general role of internet and its relationship with the society.
• Ways Liberals Define Freedom Liberals are identified by the way they value the freedom of individuals, freedom of markets, and democratic freedoms. The term freedom is characterized by Liberals as they use it within the context of the relationship […]
• Balance of Media Censorship and Press Freedom Government censorship means the prevention of the circulation of information already produced by the official government There are justifications for the suppression of communication such as fear that it will harm individuals in the society […]
• Boredom and Freedom: Different Views and Links Boredom is a condition characterized by low levels of arousal as well as wandering attention and is normally a result of the regular performance of monotonous routines.
• The Idea of American Freedom Such implications were made by the anti-slavery group on each occasion that the issue of slavery was drawn in the Congress, and reverberated wherever the institution of slavery was subjected to attack within the South.
• Liberal Definition of Freedom Its origins lie in the rejection of the authoritarian structures of the feudalistic order in Europe and the coercive tendencies and effects of that order through the imposition of moral absolutes.
• Newt Gingrich Against Freedom of Speech According to the constitution, the First Amendment is part of the United States Bill of rights that was put in place due to the advocation of the anti-federalists who wanted the powers of the federal […]
• Freedom is One of the Most Valuable Things to Man Political philosophers have many theories in response to this and it is necessary to analyze some of the main arguments and concepts to get a clearer idea of how to be more precise about the […]
• The Enlightment: The Science of Freedom In America, enlightment resulted to the formation of the American Revolution in the form of resistance of Britain imperialism. In the United States of America, enlightment took a more significant form as demonstrated by the […]
• Determinism and Freedom in the movie ‘Donnie Darko’ The term determinism states, the all the processes in the world are determined beforehand, and only chosen may see or determine the future.
• Spinoza’ Thoughts on Human Freedom The human being was once considered of as the Great Amphibian, or the one who can exclusively live in the two worlds, a creature of the physical world and also an inhabitant of the spiritual, […]
• Political Freedom According to Machiavelli and Locke In this chapter, he explains that “It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, is much safer to be feared than […]
• Freedom From Domination: German Scientists’ View He made the greatest ever attempt to unify the country, as Western Europe was divided into lots of feudal courts, and the unification of Germany led to the creation of single national mentality and appearing […]
• The Freedom of Speech: Communication Law in US By focusing on the on goings in Guatemala, the NYT may have, no doubt earned the ire of the Bush administration, but it is also necessary that the American people are made aware of the […]
• Freedom of Speech and Expression in Music Musicians are responsible and accountable for fans and their actions because in the modern world music and lyrics become a tool of propaganda that has a great impact on the circulation of ideas and social […]
• American Vision and Values of Political Freedom The significance of the individual and the sanctity of life were all central to the conceptions of Plato, Aristotle, or Cicero.
• Democracy and Freedom in Pakistan Pakistan lies in a region that has been a subject of worldwide attention and political tensions since 9/11. US influence in politics, foreign and internal policies of Pakistan has always been prominent.
• Spanish-American War: The Price of Freedom He was also the only person in the history of the United States to have attained the rank of Admiral of the Navy, the most senior rank in the United States Navy.
• Male Dominance as Impeding Female Sexual Freedom Therefore, there is a need to further influence society to respect and protect female sexuality through the production of educative materials on women’s free will.
• Interrelation and Interdependence of Freedom, Responsibility, and Accountability Too much responsibility and too little freedom make a person unhappy. There must be a balance between freedom and responsibility for human happiness.
• African American History: The Struggle for Freedom The history of the Jacksons Rainbow coalition shows the rise of the support of the African American politicians in the Democratic party.
• Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Definition of Freedom The case of Nicola Sacco can be seen as the starting point of the introduction of Roosevelt’s definition of freedom as liberty for all American citizens.
• Freedom of Speech and International Relations The freedom of speech or the freedom of expression is a civil right legally protected by many constitutions, including that of the United States, in the First Amendment.
• Canada in Freedom House Organization’s Rating The Freedom in the World Reports are most notable because of their contribution to the knowledge about the state of civil and political liberties in different countries, ranking them from 1 to 7.
• Philosophy of Freedom in “Ethics” by Spinoza Thus, the mind that is capable of understanding love to God is free because it has the power to control lust.
• Slavery Abolition and Newfound Freedom in the US One of the biggest achievements of Reconstruction was the acquisition of the right to vote by Black People. Still, Black Americans were no longer forced to tolerate inhumane living conditions, the lack of self-autonomy, and […]
• Japanese-American Internment: Illusion of Freedom The purpose of this paper is to analyze the internment of Japanese-Americans in Idaho as well as events that happened prior in order to understand how such a violation of civil rights came to pass […]
• The Existence of Freedom This paper assumes that it is the cognizance of the presence of choices for our actions that validates the existence of free will since, even if some extenuating circumstances and influences can impact what choice […]
• Philosophy, Ethics, Religion, Freedom in Current Events The court solely deals with acts of gross human rights abuses and the signatory countries have a statute that allows the accused leaders to be arrested in the member countries.
• Mill’s Power over Body vs. Foucault’s Freedom John Stuart Mill’s view of sovereignty over the mind and the body focuses on the tendency of human beings to exercise liberalism to fulfill their self-interest.
• Rousseau’s vs. Confucius’ Freedom Concept Similarly, the sovereignty of a distinctive group expresses the wholeness of its free will, but not a part of the group.
• The Importance of Freedom of Speech In a bid to nurture the freedom of speech, the United States provides safety to the ethical considerations of free conversations.
• Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox Jefferson believed that the landless laborers posed a threat to the nation because they were not independent. He believed that if Englishmen ruled over the world, they would be able to extend the effects of […]
• Freedom in the Workplace of American Society In the workplace, it is vital to implement freedom-oriented policies that would address the needs of each employee for the successful performance of the company which significantly depends on the operation of every participant of […]
• 19th-Century Marxism with Emphasis on Freedom As the paper reveals through various concepts and theories by Marx, it was the responsibility of the socialists and scientists to transform the society through promoting ideologies of class-consciousness and social action as a way […]
• Political Necessity to Safeguard Freedom He determined that the existence of the declared principles on which the fundamental structure of equality is based, as well as the institutions that monitor their observance, is the critical prerequisite for social justice and […]
• Aveo’s Acquisition of Freedom Aged Care Portfolio The mode of acquisition points to the possibility that Freedom used the White Knight defense mechanism when it approached the Aveo group.
• Aveo Group’s Acquisition of Freedom Aged Care Pty Ltd The annual report of AVEO Group indicated that the company acquired Freedom Aged Care based on its net book value. It implies that the Aveo Group is likely to achieve its strategic objectives through the […]
• Freedom Hospital Geriatric Patient Analysis The importance of statistics in clinical research can be explained by a multitude of factors; in clinical management, it is used for monitoring the patients’ conditions, the quality of health care provided, and other indicators.
• Hegel and Marx on Civil Society and Human Freedom First of all, the paper will divide the concepts of freedom and civil society in some of the notions that contribute to their definitions.
• Individual Freedom: Exclusionary Rule The exclusionary rule was first introduced by the US Supreme Court in 1914 in the case of Weeks v.the United States and was meant for the application in the federal courts only, but later it […]
• History of American Conceptions and Practices of Freedom The government institutions and political regimes have been accused of allowing amarginalisation’ to excel in the acquisition and roles assigned to the citizens of the US on the basis of social identities.
• Canada’s Freedom of Speech and Its Ineffectiveness In the developed societies of the modern world, it is one of the major premises that freedom of expression is the pivotal character of liberal democracy.
• Freedom and Liberty in American Historical Documents The 1920s and the 1930s saw particularly ardent debates on these issues since it was the time of the First World War and the development of the American sense of identity at the same time.
• Anglo-American Relations, Freedom and Nationalism Thus, in his reflection on the nature of the interrelations between two powerful empires, which arose at the end of the 19th century, the writer argues that the striving of the British Empire and the […]
• American Student Rights and Freedom of Speech As the speech was rather vulgar for the educational setting, the court decided that the rights of adults in public places cannot be identic to those the students have in school.
• Freedom of Speech in Modern Media At the same time, the bigoted approach to the principles of freedom of speech in the context of the real world, such as killing or silencing journalists, makes the process of promoting the same values […]
• Singapore’s Economic Freedom and People’s Welfare Business freedom is the ability to start, operating and closing a business having in mind the necessary regulations put by the government.
• “Advancing Freedom in Iraq” by Steven Groves The aim of the article is to describe the current situation in Iraq and to persuade the reader in the positive role of the U.S.authorities in the promoting of the democracy in the country.
• Freedom: Definition, Meaning and Threats The existence of freedom in the world has been one of the most controversial topics in the world. As a result, he suggests indirectly that freedom is found in the ability to think rationally.
• Expression on the Internet: Vidding, Copyright and Freedom It can be defined as the practice of creating new videos by combining the elements of already-existing clips. This is one of the reasons why this practice may fall under the category of fair use.
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• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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The Uneasy Balance Between Freedom and Responsibility

Philosopher hypatia, an inspiration for the ages..

Posted December 18, 2023 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

• True freedom cannot exist without responsibility.
• Fear and intolerance are drivers of blaming others rather than taking responsibility for actions and outcomes.
• You can only reach common ground by going to a higher ground.

I have been intrigued by the life and work of the Greek philosopher and scientist, Hypatia (Υπατία) of Alexandria for many years. Hypatia was one of the few notable Greek female scholars of classical antiquity. Not to say that such women did not exist—only that they were not permitted to demonstrate such intellectual capacity in public view. Hypatia was one of the exceptions and, in the end, was brutally murdered because of her passionate commitment to freedom of thought and expression, her boundless curiosity, her unique perspective on the meaning of life and the workings of the cosmos, and her unbridled influence on those around her. Such attributes made her a clear and present danger to the existing power structures (both religious and secular), which were grounded in fear and intolerance, and, sadly, Hypatia had to pay the ultimate price for speaking her own truth.

In many ways, it seems like not much has changed since 415 AD. Fear and intolerance continue to dominate the public stage, to say nothing about what goes on in the private sector. Unlike Hypatia, for example, I suspect that most managers today, be they in business or government, would be unwilling to die for what they believe in. The same can probably be said for most political leaders along with their counterparts on the higher rungs of the corporate ladder. And, unlike Hypatia, these same leaders and managers, both men and women, don’t appear able or willing to rely on the forces of reason and intuition when making decisions, even those that significantly impact their respective constituencies.

By not doing so and, importantly, by not also committing to sound ethical principles that require authenticity , transparency, and accountability, which are the staples of integrity and servant leadership , their actions in effect mirror those who lived in Greco-Roman Egypt—a no-win situation for everyone!

Moreover, instead of seeking higher ground to reach “common ground,” more often than not, the blame game (fueled again by fear and intolerance) comes into play. Any semblance of personal and collective responsibility goes out the window as finger-pointing takes over in the rush to “CYA” and stay out of the crosshairs of those with whom you may disagree and/or whom you do not understand. With no room for open and focused—that is, authentic —dialogue, the prospects for meaningful engagement and change are dim and become dimmer. 1

Fast-forward from the time when Hypatia walked the halls of the famous Library of Alexandria to the present day. What can we observe that seems oddly familiar in style if not in substance? Are there instances where we can hear the blame game and finger-pointing at work—in other words, echoes of ancient times past?

Let's consider a few possible examples of what I'm referring to here. How many of you have heard the current administration blame the intractable problems facing our country on the previous administration? Moreover, how often is “passing the buck” used by politicians and government officials as a strategy for engaging in power politics , both in domestic and international affairs? And what about the ongoing geopolitical challenges and humanitarian crises that seem to pop up around the planet as if political leaders are playing a futile “whack-a-mole” arcade game rather than seeking real solutions to the world’s most serious, albeit intractable, problems?

Do you remember anyone stepping up to the plate and assuming responsibility for such situations and moving to get them resolved quickly, efficiently, and effectively? Or do you recall, like I do, many days and weeks of questionable tactics on all sides and at all levels, pointing blame on the “other guy"? Isn’t there enough blame to go around for everyone to share? More importantly, isn’t it time for our leaders (and managers) to instill trust and confidence in their leadership by assuming responsibility, being accountable, and taking decisive action?

Let us not forget that with great liberty comes great responsibility. 2 You can’t have one without the other. We can’t always have it “our way” and ignore the consequences of doing so. In this connection, true freedom in a democracy has its price, and it doesn’t come cheap. The Viennese psychiatrist Viktor Frankl had experienced first-hand the horrors of totalitarianism. But he was also aware of the dangers of letting the pendulum swing too far in the other direction when he warned: “Freedom threatens to degenerate into mere license and arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.” 3 For this reason, he proposed that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast of the United States should be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast as a reminder to American citizens that there can be no real freedom without responsibility.

Even freedom of thought and expression, as Hypatia tragically found out, can be difficult to exercise. Striking a balance between freedom and responsibility is no easy task, especially in an era of political correctness and cancel culture. But let’s still try to learn from the past, including our ancient past, so that we may avoid the temptation to regress and simply repeat what, upon reflection, has not really served our highest good as a society or humanity. Let’s also strive to detect the meaning of life’s moments along the way so that we may build a more positive future—one that is no longer grounded primarily in fear and intolerance. As Dr. Frankl would say, “Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!” 4

1. See my previous post, “ The Deeper Meaning of Authentic Dialogue ”

2. Shelton, Ken and Bolz, Daniel, eds. (2008). Responsibility 911 , Provo, UT: Executive Excellence Publishing.

3. Frankl, Viktor E. (1992). Man’s Search for Meaning , 4th ed. Boston: Beacon, p. 134. See also: Pattakos, Alex and Dundon, Elaine (2017). Prisoners of Our Thoughts: Viktor Frankl’s Principles for Discovering Meaning in Life and Work , 3rd ed. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler, pp. 224–226; and my post “ Viktor Frankl and the Statue of Responsibility ”

4. Frankl, Viktor E. (1992). Man’s Search for Meaning , 4th ed. Boston: Beacon, p. 114. See also: Pattakos, Alex and Dundon, Elaine (2017). Prisoners of Our Thoughts: Viktor Frankl’s Principles for Discovering Meaning in Life and Work , 3rd ed. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler, p. 67.

Alex Pattakos, Ph.D. , is the coauthor of two books on the human quest for meaning, Prisoners of Our Thoughts and The OPA! Way .

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Determinism, Freedom, and Moral Responsibility: Essays in Ancient Philosophy

2021, https://www.whsmith.co.uk/products/determinism-freedom-and-moral-responsibility-essays-in-ancient-philosophy/susanne-bobzien/hardback/9780198866732.html

Determinism, Freedom, and Moral Responsibility brings together nine substantial essays on determinism, freedom, and moral responsibility in antiquity by Susanne Bobzien. The essays present the main ancient theories on these subjects, ranging historically from Aristotle followed by the Epicureans, the early Stoics, several later Stoics, and up to Alexander of Aphrodisias in the third century ce. The author discusses questions about rational and autonomous human agency and their compatibility with a large range of important philosophical issues, including their compatibility with divine predetermination and other theological questions; with atomism and continuum theory and with the physical sciences more generally; with the determination of character and its development from childhood through nature and nurture; with epistemic features such as ignorance of circumstances; with theories of necessity, possibility and contingency; with external or internal preceding causes and impediments; and with folk theories of fatalism. Room is also given to the questions of how human autonomous agency is related to moral development, to virtue and wisdom, and to blame and praise. Historically unified, philosophically profound, and methodologically rigorous, Bobzien's essays show that in Classical and Hellenistic philosophy these topics were all debated without reference to freedom to do otherwise or to a free will, and that the latter two notions were fully developed only later. The volume will be of interest both to philosophers and to historians of philosophy, with more than half of the essays accessible to advanced undergraduates.

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Jennifer Daigle

Aristotle says that we are responsible (αἴτιοι) for our voluntary actions and character. But there’s a question about whether he thinks we are morally responsible and, if so, what he thinks makes it such that we are. Interpretations of Aristotle on this question range from libertarian, according to which Aristotle considers us morally responsible in part because we have undetermined choices, to deflationary, according to which Aristotle has no theory of moral responsibility. Despite putative evidence to the contrary, neither interpretation captures Aristotle’s view on the matter, and their rejection paves the way for a compatibilist proposal, one that works both as an interpretation of Aristotle and as an independently attractive view. I detail this view and defend it against one prominent objection. INDEX WORDS: Aristotle, Character, Compatibilism, Incompatibilism, Moral responsibility, Voluntary action ARISTOTLE, DETERMINISM, AND MORAL RESPONSIBILITY

The Inadvertent Conception and Late Birth of the Free-Will Problem

Susanne Bobzien

ABSTRACT: In this paper I argue that the ‘discovery’ of the problem of causal determinism and freedom of decision in Greek philosophy is the result of a combination and mix-up of Aristotelian and Stoic thought in later antiquity; more precisely, a (mis-)interpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy of deliberate choice and action in the light of Stoic theory of determinism and moral responsibility. The (con-)fusion originates with the beginnings of Aristotle scholarship, at the latest in the early 2nd century AD. It undergoes several developments, absorbing Epictetan, Middle-Platonist, and Peripatetic ideas; and it leads eventually to a concept of freedom of decision and an exposition of the ‘free-will problem’ in Alexander of Aphrodisias’ On Fate and in the Mantissa ascribed to him.

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Agency, the theme of my life’s work, consists of efficacy, future-minded optimism, and imagination. I here attempt to trace the history of agency in Western thought over the Greco-Roman epoch. The Iliad presents mortals without any agency, the gods having it all; whereas in the Odyssey, humans have considerable agency, and the gods less. Later, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus and the Stoics postulate full-blown human agency. The emphasis on will, responsibility, and choice continues through early Christianity and then is renounced by Augustine in the fourth century, CE, with human agency relegated to being grace, a gift from God. Human progress seems linked to these beliefs, with strong human agency beliefs linked to progress and weak human agency beliefs linked to stagnation.

Akinola Fagbemi

In this article problems associated with free will and determinism shall be considered, starting by explaining the terms involved, the difficulty (if there is one), and then trying to understand the proposed solutions. The importance of the topic is plain enough: it comes up often, in many contexts, and is one that people can easily understand the relevance of; which is only to say that it isn't just for the philosophers.

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Izabela Jurasz

The relationship between Bardaisan the Syriac (150–221) and Greek philosophy remains the object of several hypotheses. In the past, Bardaisan’s teaching has already been compared with Stoicism and Platonism. Some points in common with Aristotelianism have only been recently suggested by scholars. The present article provides an in-depth analysis of a doctrinal theme for which Bardaisan was well known in the Greek-speaking world: his anti-fatalist polemic deployed in the Book of the Laws of Countries. In this dialogue, in the course of which his disciples put forward various questions, Bardaisan’s answers show a certain resemblance to the theses of Alexander of Aphrodisias’ treatise On Fate, written against the determinism supported by the Stoics. A detailed analysis of the two texts reveals the extent of the similarities (and differences) between them, particularly in the approach to the notions of nature, freedom, and destiny or fate.

Samuel O'Femi Amoran

chikonde kasonde

Both Plato and Aristotle appear to have an unclear view of free will. Although Plato set conditions on the ability of choice, some may argue his belief in free will for the enlightened to be an example of libertarianism. He seemed to think it an ability of only a few individuals, those who had achieved inner justice. In fact, In Plato's Gorgias, he goes as far as to say that nobody does wrong willingly. This seems to indicate that Plato believed to act with poor intent is to act without intent at all, rather one who acts in such as way is a slave to their base desires, void of the enlightenment that spawns an individual's ability to choose.

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My Way: Essays on Moral Responsibility

Fischer, John Martin, My Way: Essays on Moral Responsibility , Oxford University Press, 2006, 260pp, $45.00 (hbk), ISBN 0195179552.

Reviewed by Ishtiyaque Haji, University of Calgary

Moral responsibility has a number of requirements including a control (or freedom), an "authenticity" (or ownership), and an epistemic requirement. The twelve highly insightful and commandingly influential essays in My Way largely address one or more aspects of the first two requirements. The introductory essay is new; the remaining eleven, common currency in the free will literature, have been reprinted with or without minor changes. The fourth and ninth are co-authored, the former with Mark Ravizza, the latter with Eleonore Stump. Rather than give a chapter-by-chapter summary, it will be more helpful to articulate the work's central themes.

A champion of compatibilism, Fischer accepts the conclusion of the Consequence Argument that determinism is incompatible with two-way or regulative control . But he argues that responsibility does not presuppose this species of control largely (though not exclusively) by invoking Frankfurt examples. Responsibility, he proposes, demands only one-way guidance control that can be exemplified in the actual sequence of events culminating in conduct; actions, omissions, and their consequences are symmetric in not requiring alternative possibilities for responsibility. Fischer argues, in addition, against the view that causal determinism in the actual sequence directly--that is, quite apart from expunging alternatives--undermines responsibility. The conclusion of this stream of reasoning is that responsibility can be safeguarded against what some have taken to be the most serious of determinism's threat to it: "genuine" alternatives are non-existent in a determined world.

Fischer seeks to deflect two other alleged threats of determinism to responsibility. One "direct" argument for incompatibilism invokes some version of a transfer of non-responsibility principle. Letting p and q be variables that range over propositions, and taking 'NR( p )' to abbreviate ' p and no one is (now), or ever has been morally responsible for the fact that p ,' one incarnation of this principle says that if NR( p ), and NR(if p , then q ), then NR( q ). If determinism is true, the non-relational facts of the past and the laws entail all present and future truths. But owing to no one's being responsible for the past and the laws, and no one's being responsible for its being the case that the past and the laws entail all future events, it follows from an application of the transfer principle that no one is ever morally responsible for one's behavior. The argument is direct because, if sound, it secures the incompatibility of determinism and responsibility independently of any premise to the effect that responsibility requires alternative possibilities. Fischer, though, rejects this argument by producing counterexamples against various versions of the transfer principle. These examples are, roughly, Frankfurt cases involving simultaneous overdetermination. So, for instance, Betty may well be morally responsible for destroying an enemy camp at a certain time, but even without her scheming, an avalanche for which no one is responsible would still have destroyed the camp at that time.

A second direct argument draws on the thought that a person is responsible for something only if he is an ultimate originator of that thing. This condition attempts to capture the idea that if our actions originate in sources, such as the distant past and the natural laws, over which we lack any sort of control, then we are not responsible for these actions. In response, Fischer proposes that there are compatibilist and incompatibilist notions of ultimate origination. He argues that it is not obvious that moral responsibility requires a conception of origination that involves causal indeterminism, especially if one renounces the thesis that responsibility presupposes regulative control.

It is one thing to argue for responsibility's requiring only one-way guidance control, quite another to develop and defend a substantive account of such control. Rising to the task, Fischer (and his co-author Ravizza) propose that guidance control has two components, neither of which determinism impugns. A distinction is presupposed between the kind of "mechanism"--roughly, the type of process--that actually causally issues in the agent's behavior and other sorts of mechanism. The reasons-responsiveness component requires that the mechanism that produces the action be appropriately sensitive to reasons. The ownership component requires that the mechanism be the agent's own. Briefly put, an agent has guidance control in performing an action if and only if the action issues from his own, moderately reasons-responsive mechanism.

Moderate reasons-responsiveness consists in regular reasons-receptivity, and at least weak reasons-reactivity, of the actual-sequence mechanism that leads to action. Reasons-receptivity is the capacity to recognize the reasons that exist, and reasons-reactivity is the capacity to translate reasons into choices (and subsequent behavior). Regular reasons-receptivity involves an understandable pattern of actual and hypothetical reasons-receptivity. A mechanism of the agent that issues in the agent's performing some action in the actual world is weakly reasons-reactive if there is some possible world with the same laws in which a mechanism of this very kind is operative in the agent, there is sufficient reason to do otherwise, the agent recognizes this reason, and the agent does otherwise for this reason.

It is possible for an agent's actions to issue from a moderately reasons-responsive mechanism whose primary constituents have been induced externally by clandestine manipulation, hypnosis, brainwashing, and so forth. Intuitively, in cases of this sort the agent is not morally responsible for the pertinent actions. Such cases impel Fischer and Ravizza to theorize that the way in which the agent's springs of action are acquired has a pronounced bearing on responsibility; responsibility is, consequently, an essentially "historical" phenomenon. Fischer and Ravizza's prognosis is that in these troubling cases, the mechanism that issues in action is not the "agent's own", the agent having failed to take responsibility for it. Reasons sensitivity, thus, requires supplementation with the mechanism-ownership component to guard against causal springs being acquired in a manner that subverts responsibility.

Taking responsibility, measures by which an agent makes a mechanism "his own", involves three elements: the agent must regard himself as the source of consequences in the world by realizing that his choices have effects in the world; the agent must see himself as an appropriate candidate for morally reactive attitudes as a result of how he affects the world; and these beliefs about himself must be based on his evidence in an appropriate way.

The account of guidance control of actions is extended to guidance control of intentional omissions and the upshots of actions or omissions. Moral responsibility for all these items is, thus, "tied together by a unified deep theory" (17).

Recently, it has been argued that determinism undermines the truth of other pivotal moral judgments such as that of deontic judgments involving moral obligation, right, and wrong. One such argument that I have developed starts with the "ought" implies "can" principle: if one morally ought to [ought not to] do something, then one can do [can refrain from doing] that thing; and the principle: if it is morally wrong for one to do something, then one morally ought not to do it. These principles entail that if it is wrong for one to do something, then one can refrain from doing it. So there is a requirement of alternative possibilities for wrongness. The argument can be extended to show that there is such a requirement for obligation and rightness as well. As determinism effaces alternative possibilities, determinism threatens the truth of deontic judgments. Fischer submits that it would render his semicompatibilism--the view that determinism is incompatible with regulative control but compatible with responsibility--considerably less interesting if determinism undermined other moral appraisals such as deontic ones. Thus, Fischer challenges the sort of argument that I have sketched. He claims that various Frankfurt examples involving omissions give us reason to jettison the "ought" implies "can" principle. Suppose that in one instance of this sort of case, Sally fails to raise her hand, thereby ensuring that a child is not rescued from impending disaster. Sally is blameworthy for this omission even though, given her circumstances, she could not have raised her hand. Fischer reasons that since Sally is morally blameworthy for not raising her hand, "she acted wrongly in failing to raise her hand, and thus that she ought to have raised it" (25). But as she could not have raised it, "ought" does not imply "can."

On various "libertarian" accounts, metaphysically available alternative possibilities, or at least the assumption of such availability, are required for practical reasoning and deliberation. Skeptical of such accounts, Fischer proposes that the point of practical reasoning is not to make a difference in the sense of selecting from available alternatives, but to figure out what one has reason to do, all things considered. A rational agent wants to ensure that her choices conform to her all-things-considered-best judgment concerning what she should choose or do. Such an agent would still have this sort of aim even if she were aware that she lived in a causally determined world in which alternative possibilities were unavailable.

Finally, Fischer inquires into why we value morally responsible action. He proposes that when an agent exhibits guidance control and is thus morally responsible for his conduct, he need not be understood to be making a difference to the world; so the value of moral responsibility cannot be the value of making a difference. Rather, Fischer ventures that we conceive of the value of responsibility somewhat in the fashion in which we conceive of the value of artistic self-expression. Just as an artist's creative activity has value because, in engaging in such activity, he expresses himself in a certain way--the artist does or need not make a difference but he does make a statement--so the distinctive value in acting in such a way as to be morally responsible lies in a certain sort of self-expression. Fischer contends that life has a narrative structure in that "the meanings and values of the parts of our lives are affected by their narrative relationships with other parts of our lives, and the welfare value of our lives as a whole are not simple additive functions of the values of the parts" (116). In this sense, our lives are stories. In performing an action for which we are morally responsible, "we can be understood as writing a sentence in the book of our life" (116).

The essays in this volume, together with Fischer's other pieces, have played a major role in shaping the contemporary debate in the metaphysics of free will. Whether or not one ultimately agrees with the relevant positions that Fischer defends, one can ill afford to ignore the wealth of wisdom in the story of responsibility that Fischer carefully crafts. I confine critical attention to two of its elements.

Fischer concedes too much when he claims that his semicompatibilism would be far less engaging if determinism undermined other central moral assessments such as deontic ones. After all, the conditions of satisfaction for the truth of one species of moral judgment need not coincide with those of another species. Further, Fischer attempts to insulate the integrity of deontic judgments against determinism by appealing to the premise that if a person (like Sally) is morally blameworthy for an action, then it is morally wrong for her to perform that action. If one accepts this premise, and if determinism undermines wrongness, then determinism undermines blameworthiness. But I have argued that this premise is false. Blameworthiness requires not that an agent do wrong but that she perform an action on the basis of the belief that she is doing wrong in performing it.

What Fischer offers on the value of moral responsibility is both intriguing and puzzling. First, there is the rich ambiguity of the terms 'value' and 'valuable.' In their most fundamental senses, to value something is to be favorably disposed toward it, and something is valuable if it is good--if it is worthy of being something toward which one is favorably disposed. But it seems that this is not the sense of 'value' or of 'valuable' at issue. With free action, for instance, one might propose in response to why such action is valuable (in the strict sense) that it is intrinsically good. Fischer suggests another sense of 'value' which is more apt, given the context. He says that when an agent exhibits guidance control and is, hence, morally responsible, "it is unattractive to think that the explanation of his moral responsibility--the intuitive reason why we hold him morally responsible--is that he makes a difference to the world. Rather…he expresses himself in a certain way" (114). The proposal is that the sense of 'value' at issue is associated with an intuitive explanation of why the person is morally responsible when she is so responsible. Elaborating, Fischer writes:

[S]ome of the debates about whether alternative possibilities are required for moral responsibility may at some level be fueled by different intuitive pictures of moral responsibility. It may be that the proponents of the regulative control model are implicitly in the grip of the "making-a-difference" picture, whereas the proponents of the guidance control model are implicitly accepting the self-expression picture…. [P]resenting the self-expression picture can be helpful for the following reason. The debates about whether alternative possibilities are required for moral responsibility have issued in what some might consider stalemates; …I do not know of any decisive arguments (employing Frankfurt-type examples) for the conclusion that only guidance control, and not regulative control, is required for moral responsibility. My suggestion is that if one finds the self-expression picture of moral responsibility more compelling than the making-a-difference picture, then this should incline one toward the conclusion that guidance control exhausts the freedom-relevant component of moral responsibility. (119)

On this estimation of the significance of the self-expression picture, it is not transparent why the value of guidance control is tied to narrative value. Part of what it is to have narrative value, Fischer submits, is that the overall welfare value of one's life is not merely a function of adding up all the momentary levels of well-being. Suppose that one does not (as I do not) renounce "additiveness." Assuming that there are "atoms" of well-being, basic intrinsic value states whose sum in a life exhausts the welfare value of the life for the person who lives that life, why could it not be that self-expression is still tied in some fashion to the agent's "writing sentences" in the story of his life? Second, would shifting the focus of the debate on whether responsibility does in fact require alternative possibilities to the intuitive pictures to which Fischer calls our attention help to break the stalemate between the relevant rivals? I have my doubts. If the value of guidance control is analogous to that of artistic self-expression, one would expect libertarians to plump for the position that artistic creativity, including genuine artistic self-expression, presupposes the falsity of determinism; either such creativity or self-expression requires the sort of authorship or ultimate origination that determinism precludes or it requires indeterministic causation of the constellation of behavior constitutive of such creativity or self-expression.

Responsibility and Freedom

• Political Culture
• Rights and Liberties

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RESPONSIBILITY AND FREEDOM

The more comprehensive and diversified the social order, the greater the responsibility and the freedom of the individual. His freedom is the greater, because the more numerous are the effective stimuli to action, and the more varied and the more certain the ways in which he may fulfill his powers. His responsibility is greater because there are more demands for considering the consequences of his acts; and more agencies for bringing home to him the recognition of consequences which affect not merely more persons individually, but which also influence the more remote and hidden social ties.

Liability. –Freedom and responsibility have a relatively superficial and negative meaning and a relatively positive central meaning. In its external aspect, responsibility is liability . An agent is free to act; yes, but–. He must stand the consequences, the disagreeable as well as the pleasant, the social as well as the physical. He may do a given act, but if so, let him look out. His act is a matter that concerns others as well as himself, and they will prove their concern by calling him to account; and if he cannot give a satisfactory and credible account of his intention, subject him to correction. Each community and organization informs its members what it regards as obnoxious, and serves notice upon them that they have to answer if they offend. The individual then is (1) likely or liable to have to explain and justify his behavior, and is (2) liable or open to suffering consequent upon inability to make his explanation acceptable.

Positive Responsibility. –In this way the individual is made aware of the stake the community has in his behavior; and is afforded an opportunity to take that interest into account in directing his desires and making his plans. If he does so, he is a responsible person. The agent who does not take to heart the concern which others show that they have in his conduct, will note his liability only as an evil to which he is exposed, and will take it into consideration only to see how to escape or evade it. But one whose point of view is sympathetic and reasonable will recognize the justice of the community interest in his performances; and will recognize the value to him of the instruction contained in its assertions of its interest. Such an one responds, answers, to the social demands made; he is not merely called to answer. He holds himself responsible for the consequences of his acts; he does not wait to be held liable by others. When society looks for responsible workmen, teachers, doctors, it does not mean merely those whom it may call to account; it can do that in any case. It wants men and women who habitually form their purposes after consideration of the social consequences of their execution. Dislike of disapprobation, fear of penalty, play a part in generating this responsive habit; but fear, operating directly, occasions only cunning or servility. Fused, through reflection, with other apprehensiveness, or susceptibility to the rights of others, which is the essence of responsibility, which in turn is the sole ultimate guarantee of social order.

The Two Senses of Freedom. –In its external aspect, freedom is negative and formal. It signifies freedom from subjection to the will and control of others; exemption from bondage; release from servitude; capacity to act without being exposed to direct obstructions or interferences form others. It means a clear road, cleared of impediments, for action. It contrasts with the limitations of prisoner, slave, and serf, who have to carry out the will of others.

Effective Freedom. –Exemption from restraint and from interference with overt action is only a condition, though an absolutely indispensable one, of effective freedom. The latter requires (1) positive control of the resources necessary to carry purposes into effect, possession of the means to satisfy desires; and (2) mental equipment with the trained powers of initiative and reflection requisite for free preference and for circumspect and far-seeing desires. The freedom of an agent who is merely released from direct external obstructions is formal and empty. If he is without resources of personal skill, without control of the tools of achievement, he must inevitable lend himself to carrying out the directions and ideas of others. If he has not powers of deliberation and invention, he must pick up his ideas casually and superficially from the suggestions of his environment and appropriate the notions which the interests of some class insinuate into his mind. If he have not powers of intelligent self-control, he will be in bondage to appetite, enslaved to routine, imprisoned within the monotonous round of an imagery flowing from illiberal interests, broken only by wild forays into the illicit.

Legal and Moral. –Positive responsibility and freedom may be regarded as moral, while liability and exemption are legal and political. A particular individual at a given time is possessed of certain secured resources in execution and certain formed habits of desire and reflection. In so far, he is positively free. Legally, his sphere of activity may be very much wider. The laws, the prevailing body of rules which define existing institutions, would protect him in exercising claims and powers far beyond those which he can actually put forth. He is exempt from interference in travel, in reading, in hearing music, in pursuing scientific research. But if he has neither material means nor mental cultivation to enjoy these legal possibilities, mere exemption means little or nothing. It does, however, create a moral demand that the practical limitations which hem him in should be removed; that practical conditions should be afforded which will enable him effectively to take advantage of the opportunities formally open. Similarly, at any given time, the liabilities to which an individual is actually held come far short of the accountability to which the more conscientious members of society hold themselves. The morale of the individual is in advance of the formulated morality, or legality, of the community.

Relation of Legal to Moral. –It is, however, absurd to separate the legal and the ideal aspects of freedom from one another. It is only as men are held liable that they become responsible; even the conscientious man, however much in some respects his demands upon himself exceed those which would be enforced against him by others, still needs in other respects to have his unconscious partiality and presumption steadied by the requirements of others. He needs to have his judgment balanced against crankiness, narrowness, or fanaticism, by reference to the sanity of the common standard of his times. It is only as men are exempt from external obstruction that they become aware of the possibilities, and are awakened to demand and strive to obtain more positive freedom. Or, again, it is the possession by the more favored individuals in society of an effectual freedom to do and to enjoy things with respect to which the masses have only a formal and legal freedom, that arouses a sense of inequity, and that stirs the social judgment and will to such reforms of law, of administration and economic conditions as will transform the empty freedom of the less favored individuals into constructive realities.

RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS

The Individual and Social Rights and Obligations.

–That which, taken at large or in a lump, is called freedom breaks up in detail into a number of specific, concrete abilities to act in particular ways. These are termed rights . Any right includes within itself in intimate unity the individual and social aspects of activity upon which we have been insisting. As a capacity for exercise of power, it resides in and proceeds from some special agent, some individual. As exemption from restraint, a secured release from obstruction, it indicates at least the permission and sufferance of society, a tacit social assent and confirmation; while any more positive and energetic effort on the part of the community to guarantee and safeguard it, indicates an active acknowledgment on the part of society that the free exercise by individuals of the power in question is positively in its own interest. Thus a right, individual in residence, is social in origin and intent. The social factor in rights is made explicit in the demand that the power in question be exercised in certain ways. A right is never a claim to a wholesale, indefinite activity, but to a defined activity; to one carried on, that is, under certain conditions . This limitation constitutes the obligatory phases of every right. The individual is free; yes, that is his right. But he is free to act only according to certain regular and established conditions. That is the obligation imposed upon him. He has a right to use public roads, but he is obliged to turn in a certain way. He has a right to use his property, but he is obliged to pay taxes, to pay debts, not to harm others in its use, and so on.

Correspondence of Rights and Obligations. –Rights and obligations are thus strictly correlative. This is true both in their external employment and in their intrinsic natures. Externally the individual is under obligation to use his right in a way which does not interfere with the rights of others. He is free to drive on the public highways, but not to exceed a certain speed, and on condition that he turns to right or left as the public order requires. He is entitled to the land which he has bought, but this possession is subject to conditions of public registration and taxation. He may use his property, but not so that it menaces others or becomes a nuisance. Absolute rights, if we mean by absolute those not relative to any social order and hence exempt from any social restriction, there are none. But rights correspond even more intrinsically to obligations. The right is itself a social outcome: it is the individual’s in so far as he is himself a social member not merely physically, but in his habits of thought and feeling. He is under obligation to use his rights in social ways. The more we emphasize the free right of an individual to his property, the more we emphasize what society has done for him: the avenues it has opened to him for acquiring; the safeguards it has put about him for keeping; the wealth achieved by others which he may acquire by exchanges themselves socially buttressed. So far as an individual’s own merits are concerned these opportunities and protections are unearned increments, no matter what credit he may deserve for initiative and industry and foresight in using them. The only fundamental anarchy is that which regards rights as private monopolies, ignoring their social origin and intent.

Classes of Rights and Obligations. –We may discuss freedom and responsibility with respect to the social organization which secures and enforces them; or from the standpoint of the individual who exercises and acknowledges them. From the latter standpoint, rights are conveniently treated as physical and mental: not that the physical and mental can be separated, but that emphasis may fall primarily on control of the conditions required to execute ideas and intentions, or upon the control of the conditions required to execute ideas and intentions, or upon the control of the conditions involved in their personal formation and choice. From the standpoint of the public order, rights and duties are civil and political. We shall consider them in the next chapter in connection with the organization of society in the State. Here we consider rights as inhering in an individual in virtue of his membership in society.

I. Physical Rights. –These are the rights to the free unharmed possession of the body (the rights to life and limb), exemption from homicidal attack, from assault and battery, and from conditions that threaten health in more obscure ways; and positively, the right to free movement of the body, to use its members for any legitimate purpose, and the right to unhindered locomotion. Without the exemption, there is no security in life, no assurance; only a life of constant fear and uncertainty, of loss of limb, of injury from others and of death. Without some positive assurance, there is no chance of carrying ideas into effect. Even if sound and healthy and extremely protected, a man lives a slave or prisoner. Right to the control and use of physical conditions of life takes effect then in property rights, command of the natural tools and materials which are requisite to the maintenance of the body in a due state of health and to an effective and competent use of the person’s powers. These physical rights to life, limb, and property are so basic to all achievement and capability that they have frequently been termed “natural rights.” They are so fundamental to the existence of personality that their insecurity or infringement is a direct menace to the social welfare. The struggle for human liberty and human responsibility has accordingly been more acute at this than at any other point. Roughly speaking, the history of personal liberty is the history of the efforts which have safeguarded the security of life and property and which have emancipated bodily movement from subjection to the will of others.

Unsolved Problems: War and Punishment.–While history marks great advance, especially in the last four or five centuries, as to the negative aspect of freedom or release from direct and overt tyranny, much remains undone on the positive side. It is at this point of free physical control that all conflicts of rights concentrate themselves. While the limitation by war of the right to life may be cited as evidence fro the fact that even this right is not absolute but is socially conditioned, yet that kind of correspondence between individual activity and social well-being which exacts exposure to destruction as its measure, is too suggestive of the tribal morality in which the savage shows his social nature by participation in a blood feud, to be satisfactory. Social organization is clearly defective when its constituent portions are so set at odds with one another as to demand from individuals their death as their best service to the community. While one may cite capital punishment to enforce, as if in large type, the fact that the individual holds even his right to life subject to the social welfare, the moral works the other way to underline the failure of society to socialize its members, and its tendency to put undesirable results out of sight and mind rather than to face responsibility for causes. The same limitation is seen in methods of imprisonment, which, while supposed to be protective rather than vindictive, recognize only in a few and sporadic cases that the sole sure protection of society is through education and correction of individual character, not by mere physical isolation under harsh conditions.

Security of Life.–In civilized countries the blood feud, infanticide, putting to death the economically useless and the aged, have been abolished. Legalized slavery, serfdom, the subjection of the rights of wife and child to the will of husband and father, have been done away with. But many modern industries are conducted with more reference to financial gain than to life, and the annual roll of killed, injured, and diseased in factory and railway practically equals the list of dead and wounded in a modern war. Most of these accidents are preventable. The willingness of parents on one side and of employers on the other, conjoined with the indifference of the general public, makes child-labor an effective substitute for exposure of children and other methods of infanticide practiced by savage tribes. Agitation for old-age pensions shows that faithful service to society for a lifetime is still inadequate to secure a prosperous old age.

Charity and Poverty.–Society provides assistance and remedial measures, poorhouses, asylums, hospitals. The exceedingly poor are a public charge, supported by taxes as well as by alms. Individuals are not supposed to die from starvation nor to suffer without any relief or assistance from physical defects and disease. So far, there is growth in positive provision for the right to live. But the very necessity for such extensive remedial measures shows serious defects farther back. It raises the question of social reponsibility for the causes of such wholesale poverty and widespread misery. Taken in conjunction with the idleness and display of the congested rich, it raises the question how far we are advances beyond barbarism in making organic provision for an effective, as distinct from formal, right to life and movement. It is hard to say whether the heavier indictment lies in the fact that so many shirk their share of the necessary social labor and toil, or in the fact that so many who are willing to work are unable to do so, without meeting recurrent crises of unemployment, and except under conditions of hours, hygiene, compensation, and home conditions which reduce to a low level the positive rights of life. The social order protects the property of those who have it; but, although historic conditions have put the control of the machinery of production in the hands of a comparatively few persons, society takes little heed to see that great masses of men get even that little property which is requisite to secure assured, permanent, and properly stimulating conditions of life. Until there is secured to and imposed upon all members of society the right and the duty of work in socially serviceable occupations, with due return in social goods, rights to life and free movement will hardly advance much beyond their present largely nominal state.

II. Rights to Mental Activity.–These rights of course are closely bound up with rights to physical well-being and activity. The latter would have no meaning were it not that they subserve purposes and affections; while the life of mind is torpid or remote, dull or abstract, save as it gets impact in physical conditions and directs them. Those who hold that the limitations of physical conditions have no moral signification, and their improvement brings at most an increase of more less materialistic comfort, not a moral advance, fail to note that the development of concrete purposes and desires is dependent upon so-called outward conditions. These conditions affect the execution of purposes and wants; and this influence reacts to determine the further arrest or growth of needs and resolutions. The sharp and unjustifiable antithesis of spiritual and material in the current conception of moral action leads many well-intentioned people to be callous and indifferent to the moral issues involved in physical and economic progress. Long hours of excessive physical labor, joined with unwholesome conditions of residence and work, restrict the growth of mental activity, while idleness and excess of physical possession and control pervert mind, as surely as these causes modify the outer and overt acts.

Freedom of Thought and Affection.–The fundamental forms of the right to mental life are liberty of judgment and sympathy. The struggle for spiritual liberty has been as prolonged and arduous as that for physical freedom. Distrust of intelligence and of love as factors in concrete individuals has been strong even in those who have proclaimed most vigorously their devotion to them as abstract principles. Disbelief in the integrity of mind, assertion that the divine principles of though and love are perverted and corrupt in the individual, have kept spiritual authority and prestige in the hands of the few, just as other causes have made material possessions the monopoly of a small class. The resulting restriction of knowledge and of the tools of inquiry have kept the masses where their blindness and dullness might be employed as further evidence of their natural unfitness for personal illumination by the light of truth and for free direction of the energy of moral warmth. Gradually, however, free speech, freedom of communication and intercourse, of public assemblies, liberty of the press and circulation of ideas, freedom of religious and intellectual conviction (commonly called freedom of conscience), of worship, and to some extent the right to education, to spiritual nurture, have been achieved. In the degree the individual has won these liberties, the social order has obtained its chief safeguard against explosive change and intermittent blind action and reaction, and has got hold of the method of graduated and steady reconstruction. Looked at as a mere expedient, liberty of thought and expression is the most successful device ever hit upon for reconciling trangquillity with progress, so that peace is not sacrificed to reform nor improvement to stagnant conservatism.

Right and Duty of Education.–It is through education in its broadest sense that the right of thought and sympathy become effective. The final value of all institutions is their educational influence; they are measured morally by the occasions they afford and the guidance they supply for the exercise of foresight, judgment, seriousness of consideration, and depth of regard. The family; the school, the church, art, especially (to-day) literature, nurture the affections and imagination, while schools impart information and inculcate skill in various forms of intellectual technique. In the last one hundred years, the right of each individual to spiritual self-development and self-possession, and the interest of society as a whole in seeing that each of its members has an opportunity for education, have been recognized in publicly maintained schools with their ladder from kindergarten through the college to the engineering and professional school. Men and women have had put at their disposal the materials and tools of judgment; have had opened to them the wide avenues of science, history, and art that lead into the larger world’s culture. To some extent negative exemption from arbitrary restriction upon belief and thought has been developed into positive capacities of intelligence and sentiment.

Restrictions from Inadequate Economic Conditions.–Freedom of thought in a developed constructive form is, however, next to impossible for the masses of men so long as their economic conditions are precarious, and their main problem is to keep the wolf from their doors. Lack of time, hardening of susceptibility, blind preoccupation with the machinery of highly specialized industries, the combined apathy and worry consequent upon a life maintained just above the level of subsistence, are unfavorable to intellectual and emotional culture. Intellectual cowardice, due to apathy, laziness, and vague apprehension, takes the place of despotism as a limitation upon freedom of thought and speech. Uncertainty as to security of position, the welfare of a dependent family, close to men’s mouths from expressing their honest convictions, and blind their minds to clear perception of evil conditions. The instrumentalities of culture–churches, newspapers, universities, theatres–themselves have economic necessities which tend to make them dependent upon those who can best supply their needs. The congestion of poverty on one side and of culture on the other is so great that, in the words of a distinguished economist, we are still questioning whether it is really impossible that all should start in the world with a fair chance of leading a cultured life free from the pains of poverty and the stagnating influences of a life of excessive mechanical toil. We provide free schools and pass compulsory education acts, but actively and passively we encourage conditions which limit the mass of children to the bare rudiments of spiritual nurture.

Restriction of Educational Influences.–Spiritual resources are practically as much the possession of a special class, in spite of educational advance, as are material resources. This fact reacts upon the chief educative agencies–science, art, and religion. Knowledge in its ideas, language, and appeals is forced into corners; it is overspecialized, technical, and esoteric because of its isolation. Its lack of intimate connection with social practice leads to an intense and elaborate over-training which increases its own remoteness. Only when science and philosophy are one with literature, the art of successful communication and vivid intercourse, are they liberal in effect; and this implies a society which is already intellectually and emotionally nurtured and alive. Art itself, the embodiment of ideas in forms which are socially contagious, becomes what is so largely, a development of technical skill, and a badge of class differences. Religious emotion, the quickening of ideas and affections by recognition of their inexhaustible signification, is segregated into special cults, particular days, and peculiar exercises, and the common life is left relatively hard and barren.

In short, the limitations upon freedom both of the physical conditions and the mental values of life are at bottom expressions of one and the same divorce of theory and practice,– which makes theory remote, sterile, and technical, while practice remains narrow, harsh, and also illiberal. Yet there is more cause for hope in that so much has been accomplished, than for despondency because mental power and service are still so limited and undeveloped. The intermixture and interaction of classes and nations are very recent. Hence the opportunities for an effective circulation of sympathetic ideas and of reasonable emotions have only newly come into existence. Education as a public interest and care, applicable to all individuals, is hardly more than a century old; while a conception of the richness and complexity of the ways in which it should touch any one individual is hardly half a century old. As society takes its educative functions more seriously and comprehensively into account, there is every promise of more rapid progress in the future than in the past. For education is most effective when dealing with the immature, those who have not yet acquired the hard and fixed directing forms of adult life; while, in order to be effectively employed, it must select and propagate that which is common and hence typical in the social values that form its resources, leaving the eccentric, the partial, and exclusive gradually to dwindle. Upon some generous souls of the eighteenth century there dawned the idea that the cause of the indefinite improvement of humanity and the cause of the little child are inseparably bound together.

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Responsibility and Freedom

Updated 15 April 2021

Subject Emotions ,  Lifestyle ,  Scientific Method

Downloads 44

Category Life ,  Science

Topic Freedom ,  Responsibility ,  Theory

A lot of thinkers have sought to understand how independence derives from obligation and whether we, as human beings, can truly be free agents by attempting to look at the forces that connect individuals to free will. This paper would also look at the theories of Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus and Peterson on equality and obligation. Why resentment comes in Nietzsche's theory has shown, over time, to be very intricate and philosophical, not as easy to understand. Not only are they elusive, but it is also not shocking to find conflicting points in the process of looking at his ideas. His philosophical works have therefore over time been centrally placed especially since his works in the later years generally contradict the works that he wrote earlier on. Part of his contradictory works could be linked to the fact that he tries to explore a very controversial area; free will as described by Leiter (2007). It is quite possible that at one point he feels there is a chance at freedom and being free and at another different given time, he feels that there may be no such thing as free will. It is plausible that no one can be totally independent from their moral responsibility. Nietzsche explains that being a sufficient free agent, one would need to be the cause of oneself, which is quite unachievable in reality, and thus it is not quite possible that one can completely be a free agent. According to Leiter (2007), the very concept that Nietzsche tries to bring out, of not being able to be free agents based on the fact that one cannot because of oneself is in itself quite contradictory and complex to say the least. In regards to freedom and responsibility, he also points out that mortals do not have adequate self-control over the actions that they choose to engage in, in order to claim that they were actually acting out these actions out of their own free will. Hence, this assumption taken into consideration with his first one on the lack of oneself therein means that human beings lack self-cause which satisfactorily endorses provenances and any allegations thereof of any ethical accountability. Nietzsche argues out that it is our customs and traditions, both ethically and religiously that conspire to keep individuals from ever becoming free agents as Leiter (2007) describes. Individuals are therefore bound by what their traditions want them to do and the consequent repercussions in the case that they do not live by the rules of ethics or religion. Sartre on the other hand seemed to be of the view that all individuals are always free and thus is sufficiently responsible for their actions as well as their circumstances. He further on points out that we may not be responsible for finding ourselves in this world but we bear the responsibility of what happens to us as we exist thereafter as Churchill (2014) explains. He seems to have a point here as individuals have no control whatsoever in making a decision on existing but they are actually in total command of their existence. As an atheist, Sartre is of the belief that without the belief that there is a supreme being in control of the universe, individuals would not live under the presence that their lives are supposed to be lived in accordance to some ostentatious celestial plan. This would certainly mean that without the belief that there is this supreme power running the universe, people would definitely live in the knowledge that whatever happens to them whether good or bad would be their own doing and not the works of some external forces that are apparently beyond their control. The lack of this supreme being would therefore mean that there is nothing that governs right from wrong which would equate to individuals being free agents who decide what is morally upright or wrong and in this sense therefore, they would be solely responsible for whatever happened to them, their actions and the circumstances they might find themselves into according to their understanding of right and wrong, good and evil. He happened to share most of his ideologies with Camus and the two felt that individuals must make a choice to exist in this world and more so hold it up to themselves to project their own meaning to the world so they can be able to understand it better according to Solomon (2001). This would mean people being free agents acting out of their own free will and bearing the burden that comes with freedom which is an appalling, incapacitating, accountability to exist and act realistically. Sartre and Camus were philosophically drawn together by the idea of freedom and the burden of responsibility which they seemed to unanimously agree on. Quite clearly, all the four philosophers seem to think that the presence of traditions and religious and ethical beliefs have played a major role in ensuring people do not get to practice their own free will and live as free agents. It is however difficult and almost impossible to picture what a world with free agents would be like. Individual persons would be responsible for deciding what was right or wrong and this would ultimately mean that each and every individual would have varied ideologies on what was right and what was wrong. What would appear morally right to one person would be considered as morally wrong to another and thus still there wouldn’t be so much of that free will after all as Solomon (2014) explains. It is for this controversial reason that Nietzsche may have been branded a contradictory philosopher although it is quite not easy to define how much freedom and responsibility there is in free will. It also seems that if freedom were to be given to all individuals and the same individuals held accountable for their actions, then there would definitely emerge the issue of resentment. Freedom is unanimous to all individuals, hypothetically, but would their thoughts be in sync with one another’s? Would it be possible for them to agree on what would be right and wrong? Wouldn’t that be a compromise to the definition of freedom and free will? It would definitely bring about the question of whether free will existed anymore, leading to resentment as people would want what they believe in construed as what is right and wrong. Eventually, certain individuals would have the upper hand and impose their free thoughts on the rest and eventually a system would have been created where there was no acting out of free will and someone was in authority. In as such, it is therefore a question of just how much does the pursuit for free will coupled by the weight of the responsibility of freedom has to do with gender and resentment. Women have been viewed as the inferior weaker gender for a long time now. Their actions more stringently governed by traditions and costume and authority harshly clouding their attempts to be free and heard. It is however possible to point out that over the centuries, a lot has changed in regard to gender and freedom. At one point, it was not even possible for women to choose who their leaders would be, and a woman owning property was even a more laughable scenario. This has most certainly brought a lot of contradictions as more movements that sought to empower women were formed and gender equality and equity has been quite sang in the latter years. While this had most definitely raised the alarm on the negligence of the girl child and more so her suppressed voice, it has also angered the male gender who might be of the sentiment that the whole idea of liberating the female is overbearing to say the least. Gender might plausibly be one of the boxes that have individuals locked in as is religion or ethical standings. One cannot simply act in a certain manner because they are of a particular gender, one is not allowed in certain places because, well, gender does not allow it. Gender biasness and particularly towards the female is no strange topic. Women have been denied to air voices on matters concerning politics because they are simply women. As Peterson put it, it is beyond an individual’s reach and power to control who they are but what they do with who they are is what they need not blame anyone for. Sartre also points out that no one has control on finding themselves as part of this universe but they sure can control how they live and what becomes of them as they exist. Probably what women fight for; to make their own mark in their own way and to have a voice and an opinion. While all everyone is trying to do is earn their freedom and be a free agent, why would there be resentment really? Is it that there are double standards when it comes to freedom? I mean, men can be quite as free as they want to be but for women, there is some degree of freedom that is attainable. Why would there be any sort of resentment towards a goal that is set to make the world a better place void of any authority only free will and ones responsibility towards their actions and situations? This would only take us back to Nietzsche, whose writings despite being considered contradictory may have found it too hard to explain the concept of free will. He might actually have a very solid point by pointing out that there is no such thing as free will really. The knowledge that we exist comes together with the understanding that there are certain forms of tradition that we must follow and adhere to. From the moment individuals are able to tell of their own existence, they are also hit with the reality of religious perspectives, traditional bindings, gender roles and a lot of other aspects that will infiltrate their minds and tie them down to a specific way of life. Perhaps it is the will to break away from this, and the criticism from those who ensure that authority is followed to the latter that builds resentment or the idea that the other person is more ambitious and too focused on achieving their freedom that brings about umbrage and bitterness. It does make more sense that an individual setting a goal and acting in such a way that the goal is achieved can be quite the definition of free will. Working towards a goal, set by some other individual cannot really be defined as free will. In light of finding a solution for the resentment, it is important for individuals to will themselves to the affirmation that they are solely responsible for themselves as individuals. It is also fundamental that they understand that freedom does not mean being in a state of denial as pertaining to one’s instincts. In the event that free will was attainable, there would be a need for all aspects that are a hindrance towards the achievement of free will to be categorically eliminated as this would also aid in the elimination of resentment. This would include religious and traditional ties, gender roles and other ethical aspects as well. This simply means that there is need to be freed from reliance on this freedom binding aspect while at the same time being able to achieve freedom to emphatically rebuff them. There is therefore no easier solution to fight resentment as pertaining to gender and freedom through to responsibility but via the freeing of the mind from any aspects that bind it to believe that there is actually no free will. Irrespective of this, it is quite justifiable that there is no free will and that means that individuals remain slaves of aspects that have been created by others for them. In conclusion, realistically, achieving free will for the human race is a long shot away especially in respect to being able to make individual decisions without having to worry about the rest of the population. However, if we choose to understand free will as our capacities to set goals and work towards the achieving of these goals, then a certain degree of freedom is certainly achieved. Also, freeing ourselves from the very nature of the traditions and customers that bind us and being able to freely reject them allows us to enjoy free will and at the same time gives us a sense of responsibility towards our actions as individuals. Resentment in regard to gender in this case, only shows the difficulty in being wholly freed especially from our own minds.ReferencesChurchill, S. & Reynolds, J. (2014). Jean-Paul Sartre: Key Concepts. London/New York: Routledge.Leiter, B. (2007). Nietzsche’s Theory of Free Will. Philosopher’ Imprint. Solomon, R. C. (2001). From Rationalism to Existentialism: The Existentialists and Their Nineteenth Century Backgrounds. Rowman and Littlefield.

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Essay on Freedom and Responsibilities

Human rights and freedoms are key concepts in the study of human history. Indeed, the contemporary societies have been built through progressive debates that focused on equality of human beings, the respect for the fundamental rights, and the position of an individual in all these. A person, as a member of the society, has a responsibility towards his environment, and most important towards the advancement of social interests and the welfare of fellow human beings. Walter Hubert Annenberg, the voice behind A Philosophy of Freedom and Social Responsibility, placed freedom and social responsibility at the center of human existence. He posited that man must first enjoy all his alienable freedoms before he succeeds in life. He also suggested that once a man becomes successful, he ought to strive towards the advancement of his fellow kind. Similar sentiments were aired by Margaret Sanger in 2009. She said that it was her responsibility as a woman to bring peace in homes by raising strong families. This social responsibility, she says, placed her at odds with the police, but she succeeded because she was true to her course. The two social activists spark an important discussion question. Their works point to an observation that pursuing social responsibility may curtail individual freedoms, but how is this so?

Freedom and social responsibility must not only complement each other but must also coexist. Annenberg after his observation of the resilience of man concluded that man must have an area of freedom in which to develop his fullest potentialities, including not only his creative ability but also that insignia of his maturity, social responsibility (Annenberg n.p) Due to political injustices and the evident loss of accountability by the government towards its people, freedom is not easy to come by, and so social responsibility is hampered.

There is an apparent disagreement between what the public gets from the government and the actual needs of the people. Social support and welfare, for instance, needs to come from the government through different programs. However, many families break up under the watch of the authorities who should otherwise prevent them. Sanger notes that she was baffled at the tremendous personal problems of life, of marriage, of living. When she intervened in these problems, she went in and out of police courts and higher courts, meaning that the government did not appreciate her work to the society. Her struggles are evident that social responsibility may at times be traded with an individuals comfort.

Fortunately, after observing the reluctance of the government to serve their interests, the people side with social activists to bring change that is direly needed. Despite facing opposition from the government, Sanger noted that women and mothers whom she wanted to help also wanted to help her (Sanger n.p). She succeeded in her endeavors due to the support she received from women that she eventually convinced to want children before they gave birth to them.

There is evidence that lack of freedom may prevent people from being socially responsible. Although Annenberg places social responsibility next to freedom, Sanger proves that one can be forced to forego the latter in pursuit of the former. Due to the difference in wealth and service distribution among the population, people eventually decide to follow the path that contributes to their social and economic emancipation regardless of the costs involved.

Works Cited

Annenberg, Walter Hubert. "A Philosophy of Freedom and Social Responsibility." This I Believe Inc., 2007. Web. 22 June 2017. <http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16335/>.

Margaret Sanger. "When Children Are Wanted." This I Believe Inc., 2009. Web. 22 June 2017. <http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16953/>.

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