An Introduction to Ethics by Besong Brian

Author:Besong, Brian [Besong, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781498298902
Publisher: Wipf & Stock Publishers
Published: 2018-01-08T08:00:00+00:00

4.3 Freedom and Moral Responsibility

One of the most frequently discussed aspects of moral responsibility is freedom. In this section, I will not wade into the rich and contentious debate about what freedom amounts to. That would be the subject of another book, or several books. Instead, I will seek to lay out what I take to be a plausible account of free will, an account articulated by Thomas Aquinas—one that harmonizes with what has already been said about freedom and our intuitions regarding moral responsibility. Though subject to contemporary debate, which for practical purposes I will seek to largely avoid, the account provided by Aquinas is one with a long history of defense and one that fits contemporary and commonly-held positions regarding what it means to be free.

4.3.1 *The Thomistic account

What is freedom? For Aristotle, we are free to the degree that we are “masters of our own acts from beginning to end” (Nicomachean Ethics, book III). What does that mean? Freedom is that power by which the will determines its own acts, the power by which the will is the “master” of itself, selecting for itself ends and means. We are thus free to the degree that our power to choose is itself the primary cause of our choices. Conversely, we are not free to the degree that a choice originated not from our own power to choose, but rather from some other source.

Saying that we are free when our will is the primary source of its own acts is different from saying that we are free to the degree that our act arises from the will, for the will can act in some natural and predetermined way over which it has no choice and likewise is not the primary cause. Analogously, an act of a well-programmed robot could arise from an internal capacity for choice, despite not intuitively being free because the robot’s internal capacity for choice was not self-determining. A robot’s choices are characteristically all preprogrammed. The difference is that a robot’s predetermined choices are not predetermined by him, whereas free acts of ours are all consequences of our own choices.

Our will, in contrast to the robot’s, is only “preprogrammed” in one very general way. For as we saw in chapter 2 (section 2.1), the will is naturally and uncontrollably inclined to pursue happiness. We should not feel constrained by this natural pursuit, of course, since happiness is good for us. Happiness, however, is a broad and abstract goal. We are not free to choose another final or ultimate goal besides happiness, and in this respect our capacity to choose is predetermined and has limits. But all the same, having this ultimate goal does not prevent our being free in a variety of concrete circumstances. For we are not, as such, preprogrammed to believe certain goods are essential to happiness, even though we have natural inclinations to certain goods (arising from our natural appetites) that people ordinarily see as being conducive to happiness. We typically also have

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