Chapter dzǷ: Free Will and Ethics ȁȇȄĻese distinctions help explain, then, how a person could conceivably
be choosing and acting free from compulsion even when his choices and
actions are causally determined and in principle predictable. Ļe opposite,
presumably, would be choices made and actions taken by sheer chance or
baseless caprice. Choices and actions need not be stochastic or capricious
to be properly called free.
If their choices and actions were totally unfree, people could not prop-
erly be held answerable for them. We do not blame a person for firing
a shot if someone stronger forced the gun into his hand and pulled his
finger against the trigger. We do not hold someone guilty of a crime if he
was genuinely insane and lacked any control over his decision and action.
It would be pointless to hold the man whose hand was forcibly manip-
ulated or the insane person accountable for an action not truly his own.
Neither is responsible because neither enjoyed freedom of choice and will
over his act. (Clear-cut examples like these should not, however, invite
multiplying excuses to relieve persons of responsibility for their actions.)
Responsibility presupposes a point for applying a motive, such as
desire to avoid blame or punishment or to win praise or reward. Frequently
it makes eminent sense to apply motives to people and hold them respon-
sible for their choices and actions. Ļis could not be true if no grounds
existed for attributing freedom to people. Hence therearegrounds for
belief in freedom in some sense associated with responsibility.
More exactly, perhaps, the whole free-will /determinism controversy
is a chimerical basis for questioning ordinary ethical concepts. Schlick’s
argument comes across to me as I have summarized it.
C.A. Campbell (ȀȈȄȀ/ȀȈȅȅ) finds Schlick’s distinction between descrip-
tive and prescriptive laws irrelevant. Ļe usual reason for thinking that
moral freedom presupposes some breach in causal continuity is not a belief
that causal laws compel in the way legislation compels but instead is the
belief that an unbroken causal chain leaves no one able to choose and act
other than as he does.
Moral responsibility isnotthe same, says Campbell, as scope for sensi-
bly applying motives. Dogs can be trained with punishments and rewards;
yet we do not hold dogs morally responsible for what they do. We can
judge dead men morally responsible for particular actions without being
able to affect those past actions. Perhaps we might reinterpret Schlick as
meaning that a person is morally responsible when his motive couldin
principlebe affected by reward or punishment, whether or not the judges
or observers are in a position to apply it. But this modification would