next up previous contents
Next: Positive versus Negative Liberty Up: INTRODUCTION Previous: INTRODUCTION   Contents

I

THE first of the four essays in this book appeared in the mid-century number of the New York periodical Foreign Affairs; the remaining three originated in lectures.1 They deal with various aspects of individual liberty. They are in the first place with the vicissitudes of this notion during the ideological struggles of our century; secondly, with the meaning it is given in the writings of historians, social scientists, and writers who examine the presuppositions and methods of history or sociology; thirdly,, with the importance of two major conceptions of liberty in the history of ideas; and, finally, with the part played by the ideal of individual liberty in the outlook of one of its most devoted champions, John Stuart Mill.

The first and last of these essays evoked little comment. The second and third stimulated wide and, as it seems to me, fruitful controversy. Since some of my opponents have advanced objections that seem to me both relevant and just, I propose to make it clear where I think that I stand convicted of mistakes or obscurities; other strictures (as I hope to show) seem to me mistaken. Some of my severest critics attack my views without adducing facts or arguments, or else impute to me opinions that I do not hold; and even though this may at times be due to my own lack of clarity, I do not feel obliged to discuss, still less to defend, positions which,, in some cases, appear to me as absurd as they do to those who assail them.2

The main issues between my serious critics and myself may be reduced to four heads: firstly, determinism and its  relevance to our notions of men and their history; secondly , the place of value judgments, and, in particular, of moral judgments, in historical and social thinking; thirdly the possibility and desirability of distinguishing, in the realm of political theory, what modern writers have called `positive' liberty from `negative' liberty, and the relevance of this distinction to the further difference between liberty and the conditions of liberty, as well as the question of what it is that makes liberty, of either sort, intrinsically worth pursuing or possessing; and finally, the issue of monism, of the unity or harmony of human ends. It seems to me that the unflavourable contrast sometimes drawn between `negative' liberty and other, more obviously positive, social and political ends sought by men -- such as unity, harmony, peace, rational self-direction, justice, self-government, order, co-operation in the pursuit of common purposes -- has its roots, in some cases, in an ancient doctrine according to which all truly good things are linked to one another in a single, perfect whole; or, at the very least, cannot be incompatible with one another. This entails the corollary that the realization of die pattern formed by them is the one true end of all rational activity, both public and private. if this belief should turn out to be false or incoherent, this might destroy or weaken the basis of much past and present thought and activity; and, at the very least, affect conceptions of, and the value placed on, personal and social liberty. This issue, too, is therefore both relevant and fundamental.

Let me begin with the most celebrated question of all as it affects human nature: that of determinism, whether causal or teleological. My thesis is not, as has been maintained by some of my most vehement critics, that it is certain (still less that I can show) that determinism is false; only that the arguments in favour of it are not conclusive; and that if it ever becomes a widely accepted belief and enters the texture of general thought and conduct, the meaning and use of certain concepts and words central to human thought would become obsolete or else have to be drastically altered. This entails the corollary that the existing use of these basic words and concepts constitutes some evidence, not, indeed, for the proposition that determinism is false, but for the hypothesis that many of those who profess this doctrine seldom, if ever, practise what they preach, and (if my thesis is valid) seem curiously unaware of what seems, prima facie, a lack of correspondence between their theory and their real convictions, as these are expressed in what they do and say. The fact that the problem of free will is at least as old as the Stoics; that it has tormented ordinary men as well as professional philosophers; that it is exceptionally difficult to formulate clearly; that medieval and modern of discussion of it,, while they have achieved a finer analysis of the vast cluster of the concepts involved, have not in essentials brought us any nearer the solution; that while some men seem naturally puzzled by it, others look up such perplexity as mere confusion, to be cleared away by some single powerful philosophical solvent -- all this gives determinism a peculiar status among philosophical questions. I have, in these essays, made no systematic attempt to discuss the problem of free will as such, but principally its relevance to the idea of causality in history. Here I can only restate my original thesis that it seems to me patently inconsistent as assert, on the one hand, that all events are wholly determined to be what they are by other events( whatever the status of this proposition3), and , on the other, that men are free to chose between at least two possible courses of action -- free not merely in t he sense of being able to do what they choose to do (and because they choose to do it), but in the sense of not being determined to choose what they choose by causes outside their control. If it is held that every act of will or choice is fully determined by its respective antecedents, then (despite all that has been said against this) it still seems to me that this belief is incompatible with the notion of choice held by ordinary men and by philosophers when they are not consciously defending a determinist position. More particularly, I see no way round the fact that the habit of giving moral praise and blame, of congratulating and condemning men for their actions, with the implication that they are morally responsible for them, since they could have behaved differently, that is to say, need not have acted as they did (in some sense of `could' and `need' which is not purely logical or legal, but in which these terms are used in ordinary empirical discourse by both men in the street and historians), would be undermined by belief in determinism. No doubt the same words could still be used by determinists to express admiration or contempt for human characteristics or acts; or to encourage or deter; and such functions may be traceable to the early years of human society. However that may be without the assumption of freedom of choice and responsibility in the sense in which Kant used these terms; one, at least, of the ways in which they are now normally used is, as it were, annihilated. Determinism clearly takes the life out of a whole range of moral expressions. Very few defenders of determinism have addressed themselves to the question of what this range embraces and (whether or not this is desirable) what the effect of its elimination on our thought and language would be. Hence I believe, that those historians or philosophers of history who maintain that responsibility, and determinism are never incompatible with one another are mistaken whether or not some form of determinism is true;4 and again, whether or not some form of belief in the reality of moral responsibility is justified; what seems clear is that these possibilities are mutually exclusive: both beliefs may be groundless, but both cannot be true. I have not attempted to adjudicate between these alternatives; only to maintain that men have, at all times, taken freedom of choice for granted in their ordinary discourse. And I further argue that if men became truly convinced. that this belief was mistaken, the revision and transformation. of the basic terms and ideas that this realization would call for would be greater and more upsetting than the majority of contemporary determinists seem to realize. Beyond this I did not go, and do not propose to go now.

The belief that I undertook to demonstrate that determinism is false--on which much criticism of my argument has been based--is unfounded. I am obliged to say this with some emphasis, since some of my critics (notably Mr. E. H. Carr) persist in attributing to me a claim to have refuted determinism:. But this, like another odd view ascribed to me, namely that historians have a positive duty to' moralize, is a position that I have never defended or held; this is a point to which I shall have occasion to revert later. More specifically, I have been charged with confusing determinism with fatalism.5 But this, too, is a complete misunderstanding. I assume that what is meant or implied by fatalism is the view that human decisions are mere by-products, epiphenomena, incapable of influencing events which take their inscrutable course independently of human wishes. I have never attributed this implausible position to any of my opponents. The majority of them cling to `self-determinism'--the doctrine according to which men's characters and `personality structures' and the emotions, attitudes, choices, decisions, and acts that flow from them do indeed play a full part in what occurs, but are themselves results of causes, psychical and physical, social and individual, which in turn are effects of other causes, and so on, in unbreakable sequence. According to the best-known version of this doctrine, I am free if I can do what I wish and, perhaps, choose which of two courses of action I shall take. But my choice is itself causally determined; for if it were not, it would be a random event; and these alternatives exhaust the possibilities; so that to describe choice as free. in some further sense, as neither caused nor random, is to attempt to say something meaningless. This classical view, which to most philosophers appears to dispose of the problem of free will, seems to me simply a variant of the general determinist thesis, and to rule out responsibility no less than its `stronger' variant. Such `self-determinism' or `weak determinism', in which, since its original formulation by the Stoic sage Chrysippus, many thinkers have come to rest, was described by Kant as `a miserable subterfuge'. William James labelled it `soft determinism', and called it, perhaps too harshly, `a quagmire of evasion'.

I can't see how one can say of Helen not only that hers was the face that launched a thousand ships but, in addition, that she was responsible for (and did not merely cause) the Trojan War, if the war was due solely to something that was the result not of a free choice--to elope with Paris--which Helen need not have made, but only of her irresistible beauty. Mr. Sen, in his clear and moderately worded criticism, concedes what some of his allies do not--that there is an inconsistency between, at any rate, some meanings attached to the contents of ordinary moral judgment on the one hand, and determinism on the other; He denies, however, that belief in determinism need eliminate the possibility of rational moral judgment, on the ground that such judgments could still be used to influence men's, conduct, by acting as stimuli or deterrents. In somewhat similar terms, Professor Ernest Nagel, in the course of a characteristically scrupulous and lucid argument,6 says that, even on the assumption of determinism, praise, blame, and assumption of responsibility generally could affect human behaviour--e.g. by having an effect on discipline, effort, and the like, whereas they would (presumably) not in this way affect a man's digestive processes or the circulation of his blood. This may be true but it does not affect the central issue. Our value judgments--eulogies or condemnations of the acts or characters of men dead and gone--are not intended solely, or even primarily, to act as utilitarian devices, to encourage or warn our contemporaries, or as beacons to posterity. When we speak in this way we are not attempting merely to influence future action (though we may, in fact, be doing this too) or solely to formulate quasi-aesthetic judgments--as when we testify to the beauty or ugliness, intelligence or stupidity, generosity or meanness of others (or ourselves)--attributes which we are then simply attempting to grade according to some scale of values. If someone praises or condemns me for choosing as I did, I do not always say either `this is how I am made; I cannot help behaving so',or `please go on saying this, it is having an excellent effect on me: it strengthens (or weakens) my resolution to go to war, or to join the Communist Party'. It may be that such words, like the prospect of rewards and punishments, do affect conduct in important ways, and that this makes them useful or dangerous. But this is not the point at issue. It is whether such praise, blame, and so on, are merited, morally appropriate, or not. One can easily imagine a case where we think that a man deserves blame, but consider that to utter it may have a bad effect, and therefore say nothing. But this does not alter the man's desert, which, whatever its analysis, entails that the agent could have chosen, and not merely acted, otherwise. If I judge that a man's conduct was in fact determined, that he could not have behaved (felt, thought, desired, chosen) otherwise, I should regard this kind of praise or blame as inappropriate to his case. If determinism is true, the concept of merit or desert, as these are usually understood, has no application. If all things and events and persons are determined, then praise, and blame do indeed become purely pedagogical devices--hortatory and minatory; or else they are quasi-descriptive--they grade in terms of distance from some ideal They comment on the quality of men, what men are and can be and do, and may themselves alter it and, indeed, be used as deliberate means towards it, as when we reward or punish an animal; save that in the case of men we assume the possibility of communication with them, which we cannot do in the case of animals. This is the heart of the `soft' determinism--the so-called Hobbes-Hume-Schlick doctrine. If, however, the notions of desert, merit, responsibility, etc., rested on the notion of choices not themselves fully caused, they would, on this view, turn out to be irrational or incoherent; and would be abandoned by rational men. The majority of Spinoza's interpreters suppose him to have maintained precisely this, and a good many of them think that he was right. But whether or not Spinoza did in fact hold this view, and, whether or not he was right in this respect, my thesis is that, however it may be with Spinoza, most men and most philosophers and historians do not speak or act as if they believe this. For if the determinist thesis is genuinely accepted, it should, at any rate to men who desire to be rational and consistent, make a radical difference. Mr. Sen with admirable consistency and candour does indeed explain that, when determinists use the language of moral praise and blame, they are like atheists who still mention God, or lovers who speak of being faithful `to the end of time';7 such talk is hyperbolic and not meant to be taken literally. This does at least concede (as most determinists do not) that if these words were taken literally something would be amiss. For my part I see no reason for supposing that most of those who use such language, with its implication of free choice among alternatives, whether in the future or in the past, mean this not literally, but in some Pickwickian or metaphorical or rhetorical way. Professor Ernest Nagel points out that determinists, who, like Bossuet, believed in the omnipotence and omniscience of Providence and its control over every human step, nevertheless freely attributed moral responsibility to individuals; and that adherents of determinist faiths--Moslems, Calvinists, etc.--have not refrained from attribution of responsibility and a generous use of praise and blame.8 Like much that Professor Ernest Nagel says; this is perfectly true.9 But it is nothing to the issue: the fact that not all human beliefs are coherent is not novel These examples merely point to the fact that men evidently find it perfectly possible to subscribe to determinism in the study and disregard, it in their lives. Fatalism has not bred passivity in Moslems, nor has determinism sapped the vigour of Calvinists or Marxists, although some Marxists feared that it might. Practice sometimes belies profession, no matter how sincerely held.

Mr. E. H. Carr goes a good deal further. He declares: `The fact is that all human actions are both free and determined, according to the point of view from which one considers them.' And again: `Adult human beings are responsible for their own. personality.'10 This seems to me to present the reader with an insoluble puzzle. If Mr. Carr means that human beings can transform the nature of their personality, while all antecedents remain the same, then he denies causality; if they cannot, and acts can be fully accounted for by character,then talk of responsibility (in the ordinary sense of this word in which it implies moral blame) does not make sense. There are no doubt many senses of `can' ; and much light has been shed on this by important distinctions made by acute modern philosophers. Nevertheless, if I literally cannot make my character or behaviour other than it is by an act of choice (or a whole pattern of such acts) which is itself not fully determined by causal antecedents, then I do not see in what normal sense a rational, person could hold me morally responsible either for my character or for my conduct. Indeed the notion of a morally responsible being becomes, at best, mythological; this fabulous creature joins the ranks of nymphs and centaurs. The horns of this dilemma have been with us for over two millennia, and it is useless to try to escape or soften them by the comfortable assertion that it all depends on the point of view from which we regard the question. This problem which preoccupied Mill (and to which,in the end, he returned so confused an answer) and from the torment of which William James escaped only as a result of reading Renouvier, and which is still well to the forefront of philosophical attention, cannot be brushed aside by saying that the questions to which scientific determinism is the answer are different from those which are answered by the doctrine of voluntarism and freedom of choice between alternatives; or that the two types of question arise at different `levels', so that a pseudo-problem has arisen from the confusion of these `levels' (or the corresponding categories). The question to which determinism and indeterminism, whatever their obscurities, are the rival answers is one and not two. What kind of question it is --empirical, conceptual, metaphysical, pragmatic, linguistic--and what schema or model of man and nature is implicit in the terms used are major issues; but it would be out of place to discuss them here.

Nevertheless, if only because some of the sharpest criticisms of my thesis come from philosophers concerned with this central issue, it cannot be entirely ignored. Thus Professor J. A. Passmore11 urges two considerations against me: (a) that the concept of Laplace's observer who can infallibly predict the future, since he has all the relevant knowledge of antecedent conditions and laws that he needs, cannot in principle be formulated, because the notion of an exhaustive list of all the antecedents of an event is not coherent; we can never say of any state of affairs `these are all the antecedents there are; the inventory is complete'. This is clearly true. Nevertheless, even if determinism were offered as no more than a pragmatic policy: `I intend to act and think on the assumption that every event has an identifiable sufficient cause or causes', this would satisfy the determinist's demand. Yet such a resolve would make a radical difference, for it would effectively take the life out of any morality that works with such notions as responsibility, moral worth, and freedom in Kant's sense, and do so in ways and with logical consequences which determinists as a rule either forbear to examine, or else play down. (b) That the more we find out about a prima facie morally culpable act, the more we are likely to realize that the agent, given the particular circumstances, characters, antecedent causes involved, was prevented from taking the various courses which we think he should have adopted; we condemn him too easily for failing to do or be what he could not have done or been. Ignorance, insensitiveness, haste, lack of imagination darken counsel and blind us to the true facts; our judgements are often shallow, dogmatic, complacent, irresponsible, unjust, barbarous. I sympathize with the humane and civilized considerations which inspire Professor Passmore's verdict. Much injustice and cruelty has sprung from avoidable ignorance, prejudice, dogma, and lack of understanding. Nevertheless to generalize this--as Professor Passmore seems to me to do--is to fall into the old tout comprendre fallacy in disarmingly modern dress. If (as happens to those who are capable of genuine self-criticism) the more we discover about ourselves the less we are inclined to forgive ourselves, why should we assume that the opposite is valid for others, that we alone are free, while others are determined? To expose the deleterious consequences of ignorance or irrationality is one thing; to assume that these are the sole sources of moral indignation is an illicit extrapolation; it would follow from Spinozist premises, but not necessarily from others. Because our judgments about others are often superficial or unfair, it does not follow that one must never judge at all; or, indeed, that one can avoid doing so. As well forbid all men to count, because some cannot add correctly.

Professor Morton White attacks my contentions from a somewhat different angle.12 He concedes that one may not; as a rule, condemn (as being `wrong') acts which the agent could not help perpetrating (e.g. Booth's killing of Lincoln, on the assumption that he was caused to choose to do this, or anyway to do it whether or not he so chose). Or at least Mr. White thinks that it is unkind to blame a man for a causally determined action; unkind, unfair, but not inconsistent with determinist beliefs. We could, he supposes, conceive of a culture in which such moral verdicts would be normal. Hence it may be mere parochialism on our part to assume that the discomfort we may feel in calling causally determined acts. right or wrong is universal, and springs from some basic category which governs the experience of all possible societies. Professor White discusses what is implied by calling an act `wrong'. I am concerned with such expressions as `blameworthy', `something you should not have done', `deserving to be condemned'--none of which is equivalent to `wrong' or, necessarily, to each other. But even so, I wonder whether Professor White, if he met a kleptomaniac, would think it reasonable to say to him: `You cannot, it is true, help choosing to steal, even though you may think it wrong to do so. Nevertheless you must not do it. Indeed, you should choose to refrain from it. If you go on, we shall judge you not only to be a wrongdoer, but to deserve moral blame. Whether this deters you or not, you will deserve it equally in either case.' Would Professor White not feel that something was seriously amiss about such an approach, and that not merely in our own society, but in any world in which such moral terminology made sense? Or would he think this very question to be evidence of insufficient moral imagination in the questioner? Is it merely unkind or unfair to reproach men with what they cannot avoid doing, or, like much cruelty and injustice, irrational too? If you said to a man who betrayed his friends under torture that he should not have done this, that his act was morally wrong, even though you are convinced that, being what he is, he could not help choosing to act as he did, could you, if pressed, give reasons for your verdict? What could they be? That you wished to alter his (or others') behaviour in the future? Or that you wished to ventilate your revulsion? If this were all, questions of doing him justice would not enter at all. Yet if you were told that in blaming a man you were being unfair or wickedly blind, because you had not troubled to examine the difficulties under which the man laboured, the pressures upon him, and so on, this kind of reproach rests on the assumption that in some cases, if not in all, the man could have avoided the choice that you condemn, only a good deal less easily than you realize, at the price of martyrdom, or the sacrifice of the innocent, or at some cost which your critic believes that you, the moralizer, have no right to demand. Hence the critic rightly reproaches you for culpable ignorance or inhumanity. But if you really thought that it was (causally) impossible for the man to have chosen what you would have preferred him to choose, is it reasonable to say that he should nevertheless have chosen it? What reasons can you, in principle, adduce for attributing responsibility or applying moral rules to him (e.g. Kant's maxims which we understand whether or not we accept them) which you would not think it reasonable to apply in the case of compulsive choosers--kleptomaniacs, dipsomaniacs, and the like? Where would you draw the line, and why? If the choices in all these cases are causally determined, however different the causes, in some cases being compatible (or, according to some views, identical) with the use of reason, in others not, why is it rational blame in one case and not in the other? I exclude the utilitarian argument for praise or blame or threats or other incentives, since Mr. White, rightly in my view, ignores it too, to concentrate on the moral quality of blame: I cannot see why it is less unreasonable (and not merely less futile) to blame a man psychologically unable to refrain from it for acting cruelly than a physical cripple for possessing a deformed limb. To condemn a murderer is no more or less rational than to blame his dagger; so reasoned Godwin. At least he was consistent in his fanatical way. Although his best-known book is called Political Justice, it is not easy to tell what justice, as a moral concept, would mean to a convinced determinist. I could grade just and unjust acts, like legal and illegal ones, like ripe and unripe peaches. But if a man could not help acting as he did, how much would it mean to say that something `served him right'? The notion of poetic justice, of just deserts, of moral desert as such, would, if this were the case, not merely have no application, but become scarcely intelligible. When Samuel Butler in Erewhon makes crimes objects of sympathy and pity, but ill health an offence which leads to sanctions, he is set on emphasizing not the relativity of moral values, but their irrationality in his own society--the irrationality of blame directed at moral: or mental aberrations, but not to physical or physiological ones. I know of no more vivid way of bringing out how different our moral terminology and conduct would be if we were the really consistent scientific determinists that some suppose that we ought to be. The more rigorous sociological determinists do indeed say precisely this, and consider that not only retribution or revenge, but justice too--outside its strictly legal sense--conceived as a moral standard or canon not determined by alterable rules, is a prescientific notion grounded in psychological immaturity and error. As against this Spinoza and Mr. Sen seem to me to be right. There are some terms which, if we took determinism seriously, we should no longer use, or use only in some peculiar sense, as we speak of witches or the Olympian Gods. Such notions as justice, equity, desert, fairness would certainly have to be re-examined if they were to be kept alive at all and not relegated to the role of discarded figments-- fancies rendered harmless by the match of reason, myths potent in our irrational youth, exploded, or at any rate rendered innocuous, by the progress of scientific knowledge. If determinism is valid, this is a price that we must pay. Whether or not we are ready to do so, let this prospect at least be faced.

If our moral concepts belong only to our own culture and society, then what we should be called upon to say to a member of Mr. White's unfamiliar culture is not that he was logically contradicting himself in professing determinism and yet continuing to utter or imply moral judgments of Kantian sort, but that he was being incoherent, that we could not see what reasons he could have for using such terms, that his language, if it was intended to apply to the real world, was no longer sufficiently intelligible to us. Of course the fact that there have been, and no doubt may still be, plenty of thinkers, even in our own culture, who at one and the same time profess belief in determinism, and yet do not feel in the least inhibited from dispensing this kind of moral praise and blame freely, and pointing out to others how they should have chosen, shows only, if I am right, that some normally lucid and self-critical thinkers are at times liable to confusion. My case, in other words, amounts to making explicit what most men do not doubt--namely that it is not rational both to believe that choices are caused, and to consider men as deserving of reproach or indignation (or their opposites) for choosing to act or refrain as they do.

The supposition that, if determinism were shown to be valid, ethical language would have to be drastically revised is not a psychological or a physiological, still less an ethical hypothesis. It is an assertion about what any system of thought that employs the basic concepts of our normal morality would permit or exclude. The proposition that it is unreasonable to condemn men whose choices are not free rests not on a particular set of moral values (which another culture might reject) but on the particular nexus between descriptive and evaluative concepts which governs the language we use and the thoughts we think. To say that you might as well morally blame a table as an ignorant barbarian or an incurable addict is not an ethical proposition, but one which emphasizes the conceptual truth that this kind of praise and blame makes sense only among persons capable of free choice. This is what Kant appeals to; it is this fact that puzzled the early Stoics; before them freedom of choice seems to have been taken for granted; it is presupposed equally in Aristotle's discussion of voluntary and involuntary acts and in the thinking of unphilosophical persons to this day.

One of the motives for clinging to determinism seems to be the fear on the part of the friends of reason that it is presupposed by scientific method as such. Thus Professor S. N. Hampshire tells us that:

In the study of human behaviour, philosophical superstition might now easily take over the role of traditional religious superstitions as an obstruction to progress. In this context superstition is a confusion of the belief that human beings ought not to be treated as if they were natural objects with the belief that they are not in reality natural objects: one may so easily move from the moral proposition that persons ought not to be manipulated and controlled, like any other natural objects, to the different, and quasi-philosophical, proposition that they cannot be manipulated and controlled like any other natural objects. In the present climate of opinion, a very natural fear of planning and social technology is apt to be dignified as a philosophy of indeterminism.13

This strongly worded cautionary statement seems to me characteristic of the widespread and influential feeling I have mentioned that science and rationality are in danger if determinism is rejected or even doubted. This fear appears to me to be groundless; to do one's best to find quantitative correlations and explanations is not to assume that everything is quantifiable; to proclaim that science is the search for causes (whether this is true or false) is not to say that all events have them. Indeed the passage that I have quoted seems to me to contain at least three puzzling elements:

(a) We are told that to confuse `the belief that human beings ought not to be treated as if they were natural objects with the belief that they are not in reality natural objects' is superstitious. But what other reason have I for not treating human beings `as if they were natural objects' than my belief that they differ from natural objects in some particular respects--those in virtue of which they are human--and that this fact is the basis of my moral conviction that I should not treat them as objects, i.e. solely as means to my ends, and that it is in virtue of this difference that I consider it wrong freely to manipulate, coerce, brainwash them, etc.? If I am told not to treat something as a chair, the reason for this may be the fact that the object in question possesses some attribute which ordinary chairs do not, or has some special association for me or others which distinguishes it from ordinary chairs, a characteristic which might be overlooked or denied. Unless men are held to possess some attribute over and above those which they have in common with other natural objects-- animals, plants, things, etc.--(whether this difference is itself called natural or not), the moral command not to treat men as animals or things has no rational foundation. I conclude that, so far from being a confusion of two different kinds of proposition, this connexion between them cannot be severed without making at least one of them groundless; and this is certainly unlikely to forward the progress of which the author speaks.

(b) As for the warning not to move from the proposition that persons ought not to be manipulated and controlled' to the proposition that `they cannot be manipulated or controlled like any other natural object', it is surely more reasonable to suppose that if I tell you not to do it, that is not because I think persons cannot be so treated, but because I believe that it is all too likely that they can. If I order you not to control and manipulate human beings, it is not because I think that, since you cannot succeed, this will be a sad waste of your time and effort; but on the contrary, because I fear that you may succeed all too well, and that this will deprive men of their freedom, a freedom which, if they can only escape from too much control and manipulation, I believe they may be able to preserve.

(c) `Fear of planning and social technology' may well be most acutely felt by those who believe that these forces are not irresistible; and that if men are not too much interfered with they will have opportunities of choosing freely between possible courses of action, not merely (as determinists believe) of, at best, implementing choices themselves determined and predictable. The latter may in fact be our actual condition. But if one prefers the former state--however difficult it may be to formulate--is this is a superstition, or some other case of `false consciousness'? It is such only if determinism is true. But this is a viciously circular argument. Could it not be maintained that determinism itself is a superstition generated by a false belief that science will be compromised unless it is accepted, and is therefore itself a case of `false consciousness' generated by a mistake about the nature of science? Any doctrine could be turned into a superstition, but I do not myself see any reason for holding that either determinism or indeterminism is; or need turn into, one.14

To return to non-philosophical writers. The writings of those who have stressed the inadequacy of the categories of the natural sciences when applied to human action have so far transformed the question as to discredit the crude solutions of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century materialists and positivists. Hence all serious discussion of the issues must now begin by taking some account of the world-wide discussion of the subject during the last quarter of the century. When Mr. E. H. Carr maintains that to attribute historical events to the acts of individuals (` biographical bias') is childish, or at any rate child-like, and that the more impersonal we make our historical writing the more scientific, and therefore mature and valid, it will be, he shows himself a faithful--too faithful--follower of the eighteenth-century dogmatic materialists.15 This doctrine no longer seemed altogether plausible even in the day of Comte and his followers, or, for that matter, of the father of Russian Marxism, Plekhanov, who, for all his brilliance, in his philosophy of history owed more to eighteenth-century materialism and nineteenth-century positivism than to Hegel or the Hegelian elements in Marx. Let me give Mr. Carr his due. When he maintains that animism or anthropomorphism--the attribution of human properties to inanimate entities--is a symptom of a primitive mentality, I have no wish to controvert this. But to compound one fallacy with another seldom advances the cause of truth. Anthropomorphism is the fallacy of applying human categories to the non-human world. But then there presumably exists a region where human categories do apply: namely the world of human beings. To suppose that only what works in the description and prediction of non-human nature must necessarily apply to human beings too, and that the categories in terms of which we distinguish the human from the non-human must therefore be delusive--to be explained away as aberrations of our early years --is the opposite error, the animist or anthropomorphic fallacy stood on its head. What scientific method can achieve, it must, of course, be used to achieve. Anything that statistical methods or computers or any other instrument or method fruitful in the natural sciences can do to classify, analyse, predict, or `retrodict' human behaviour should, of course, be welcomed; to refrain from using these methods for some doctrinaire reason would be mere obscurantism. However, it is a far cry from this to the dogmatic assurance that the more the subject-matter of an inquiry can be assimilated to that of a natural science the nearer the truth we shall come. This doctrine, in Mr. Cart's version, amounts to saying that the more impersonal and general, the more valid; the more generic, the more grown up; the more attention to individuals, their idiosyncrasies and their role in history, the more fanciful, the remoter from objective truth and reality. This seems to me no more and no less dogmatic than the opposite fallacy-- that history is reducible to the biographies of great men and their deeds. To assert that the truth lies somewhere between, these extremes, between the equally fanatical positions of Comte and Carlyle, is a dull thing to say, but may nevertheless be closer to the truth. As an eminent philosopher of our time once drily observed, there is no a priori reason for supposing that the truth, when it is discovered; will prove interesting. Certainly it need not prove startling or upsetting; it may or may not; we cannot tell. This is not the place to examine Mr. Carr's historiographical views,16 which seem to me to breathe the last enchantments of the Age of Reason, more rationalist than rational, with all the enviable simplicity, lucidity, and freedom from doubt or self-questioning which characterized this field of thought in its unclouded beginnings, when Voltaire and Helvétius were on their thrones; before the Germans, with their passion for excavating everything, ruined the smooth lawns and symmetrical gardens. Mr. Carr is a vigorous and enjoyable writer, touched by historical materialism, but essentially a late positivist, in the tradition of Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and H. G. Wells; what Montesquieu called un grand simphficateur, untroubled by the problems and difficulties which have bedevilled the subject since Herder and Hegel, Marx and Max Weber. He is respectful towards Marx but remote from his complex vision; a master of short ways and final answers to the great unanswered questions.

But if I cannot here attempt to deal with Mr. Carr's position with the care that it deserves, I can at least try to reply to some of his severest strictures on my own opinions. His gravest charges against me are threefold: (a) that I believe determinism to be false and reject the axiom that everything has a cause, `which', according to Mr. Carr, `is a condition of our capacity to understand what is going on around us'; (b) that I `insist with great vehemence that' it is the duty of the historian to judge Charlemagne, Napoleon, etc., for their massacres', i.e. to award marks for moral conduct to historically important individuals; (c) that I believe that explanation in history is an account in terms of human intentions, to which Mr. Carr opposes the alternative concept of `social forces'.

To all this I can only say once again: (a) that I have never denied (nor considered) the logical possibility that some version of determinism may, in principle (although, perhaps, only in principle), be a valid theory of human conduct; still less do I hold myself to have refuted it. My sole contention has been that belief in it is not compatible with beliefs deeply embedded in the normal speech and thought either of ordinary men or historians, at any rate in the Western world; and therefore: that to take determinism seriously would entail a drastic revision of these central notions--an upheaval of which neither Mr. Carr's nor any other historian's practice has, as yet, provided any conspicuous examples. I know of no conclusive argument in favour of determinism. But that is not my point; it is that the actual practice of its supporters, and their reluctance to face what unity of theory and practice in this case would cost them, indicate that such theoretical support is not at present to be taken too seriously, whoever may claim to provide it. (b) I am accused of inviting historians to moralize. I do nothing of the. kind. I merely maintain that historians, like other men, use language which is inevitably shot through with words of evaluative force, and that to invite them to purge their language of it is to ask them to perform an abnormally difficult and self-stultifying task. To be objective, unbiased, dispassionate is no doubt a virtue in historians, as in anyone who wishes to establish truth in any field. But historians are men, and are not obliged to attempt to dehumanize themselves to a greater degree than other men; the topics they choose for discussion, their distribution of attention and emphasis, are guided by their own scale of values, which, if they are either to understand human conduct or to communicate their vision to their readers, must not diverge too sharply from the common values of men. To understand the motives and outlook of others it is not, of course, necessary to share them; insight does not entail approval; the most gifted historians (and novelists) are the least partisan; some distance from the subject is required. But while comprehension of motives, moral or social codes, entire civilizations does not require acceptance of, or even sympathy with them,it does presuppose a view of what matters to individuals or groups, even if such values are found repulsive. And this rests on a conception of human nature, human ends, which enters into the historian's own ethical or religious or aesthetic outlook. These values, particularly the moral values which govern, their selection of facts, the light in which they exhibit them, are conveyed, and cannot but be conveyed, by their language as much and as little as are of anyone else who seeks to understand and describe men. The criteria which we use in judging the work of historians are not, and need not, in principle, be different from those by which we judge specialists in other fields of learning and imagination. In criticizing the achievements of those who deal with human affairs we cannot sharply divorce `facts' from their significance. `Values enter into the facts, and are an essential part of them. Our values are an essential part of our equipment as human beings.' These words are not mine. They are the words of none other (the reader will surely be astonished to learn) than Mr. Carr himself.17 I might have chosen to formulate this proposition differently. But Mr. Carr's words are quite sufficient for me; on them I am content to rest my case against his charges. There is clearly no need for historians formally to pronounce moral judgments, as Mr. Carr mistakenly thinks that I wish them to do. They are under no obligation as historians to inform their readers that Hitler did harm to mankind, whereas Pasteur did good (or Whatever they may think to be the case). The very use of normal language cannot avoid conveying what the author regards as commonplace or monstrous, decisive or trivial, exhilarating or depressing. In describing what occurred I can say that so many million men were brutally done to death; or alternatively, that they perished; laid down their lives; were massacred; or simply, that the population of Europe was reduced, or that its average age was lowered; or that many men lost their lives. None of these descriptions of what took place is wholly neutral: all carry moral implications. What the historian says will, however careful he may be to use purely descriptive language, sooner or later convey his attitude. Detachment is itself a moral position. The use of neutral language (`Himmler caused many persons to be asphyxiated') conveys its own ethical tone. I do not mean to say that severely neutral language about human beings is unattainable . Statisticians, compilers of intelligence reports, research departments, sociologists and economists of certain kinds, official reporters, compilers whose task it is to provide data for historians or politicians, can and are expected to approach it. But this is so because these activities are not autonomous but are designed to provide the raw material for those whose work is intended to be an end in itself--historians, men of action. The research assistant is not called upon to select and emphasize what counts for much, and play down what counts for little, in human life. The historian cannot avoid this; otherwise what he writes, detached as it will be from what he, or his society, or some other culture regards as central or peripheral, will not be history. If history is what historians do, then the central issue which no historian can evade, whether he knows this or not, is how we (and other societies) came to be as we are or were. This, eo facto, entails a particular vision of society, of men's nature, of the springs of human action, of men's values and scales of value-- something that physicists, physiologists, physical anthropologists, grammarians, econometricians, or certain sorts of psychologists (like the providers of data for others to interpret) may be able to avoid. History is not an ancillary activity; it seeks to provide as complete an account as it can of what men do and suffer; to call them men is to ascribe to them values that we must be able to recognize as such, otherwise they are not men for us. Historians cannot therefore (whether they moralize or not) escape from having to adopt some position about what matters and how much (even if they do not ask why it matters). This alone is enough to render the notion of a `value-free' history, of the historian as a transcriber rebus ipsis dictantibus, an illusion.

Perhaps this is all that Acton urged against Creighton: not simply that Creighton used artificially non-moral terms, but that in using them to describe the Borgias and their acts he was, in effect, going some way towards exonerating them; that, whether he was right or wrong to do it, he was doing it; that neutrality is also a moral attitude, and that it is as well to recognize it for what it is. Acton had no doubt that Creighton was wrong. We may agree with Acton or with Creighton. But in either case we are judging, conveying, even when we prefer not to state, a moral attitude. To invite historians to describe men's lives but not the significance of their lives in terms of what Mill called the permanent interests of mankind, however conceived, is not to describe their lives. To demand of historians that they try to enter imaginatively into the experience of others and forbid them to display moral understanding is to invite them to tell too small a part of what they know, and to deprive their work of human significance. This is in effect all that I have to say against Mr. Carr's moral sermon against the bad habit of delivering moral sermons.

No doubt the view that there exist objective moral or social values, eternal and universal, untouched by historical change, and accessible to the mind of any rational man if only he chooses to direct his gaze at them, is open to every sort of question. Yet the possibility of understanding men in one s own or any other time, indeed of communication between human beings, depends upon the existence of some common values, and not on a common 'factual' world alone. The latter is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of human intercourse. Those who are out of touch with the external world are described as abnormal, and in extreme cases, insane. But so also and this is the point are those who wander too far from the common public world of values. A man who declares that he once knew the difference between right and wrong, but has forgotten it, will scarcely be believed; if he is believed, he is rightly considered deranged. But so too is a man who does not merely approve or enjoy or condone, but literally cannot grasp what conceivable objection anyone could have to; let us suppose, a rule permitting the killing of any man with blue eyes, with no reason given. He would be considered about as normal a specimen of the human race as one who cannot count beyond six, or thinks it probable that he is Julius Caesar. What such normative (non-descriptive) tests for insanity rest on is what gives such plausibility as they have to doctrines of natural law, particularly in versions which refuse them any a priori status; Acceptance of common values (at any rate some irreducible minimum of them) enters our conception of a normal human being. This serves to distinguish such notions as the foundations of human morality from such other notions as custom; or tradition, or law, or manners, or fashion, or etiquette--all those regions in which the occurrence of wide social and historical, national and local, differences and change are not regarded as rare or abnormal, or evidence of extreme eccentricity or insanity, or indeed as undesirable at all; least of all as philosophically problematic.

No historical writing which rises above a bare chronicler's narrative, and involves selection and the unequal distribution of emphasis, can be wholly wertfrei. What then distinguishes moralizing that is justly condemned from that which seems in escapable from any degree of reflection on human affairs? Not its overtness: mere: choice of apparently neutral language can well seem, to those who do not sympathize. with an author's views, even more insidious. I have attempted to deal with what is meant by bias and partiality in the essay on Historical Inevitability. I can only repeat that we seem to distinguish subjective from objective appraisal by the degree to which the central values conveyed are those which are common to human beings as such, that, is, for practical purposes, to the great majority of men in most places and times. This is clearly not an absolute or rigid criterion; there is variation, there are, virtually unnoticeable (as well as glaring) national, local, and historical peculiarities, prejudices, superstitions, rationalizations and their irrational influence. But neither is. this criterion wholly relative or subjective, otherwise the concept of man would become too indeterminate, and men or societies, divided by unbridgeable normative differences, would be wholly unable to communicate across great distances in space and time and culture. Objectivity of moral judgment seems to depend on (almost to consist in) the degree of constancy in human responses. This notion cannot in principle be made sharp and unalterable. Its edges remain blurred. Moral categories and categories of value in general are nothing like as firm and ineradicable as those of, say, the perception of the material world, but neither are they as. relative or as fluid as some writers have too easily, in their reaction against the dogmatism of the classical objectivists, tended to assume. A minimum of common moral ground-- interrelated concepts and categories --is intrinsic to human communication. What they are, how flexible, how far liable to change under the impact of what `forces'--these are empirical questions, in a region claimed by moral psychology and historical and social anthropology, fascinating, important, and insufficiently explored. To demand more than this seems to me to wish to move beyond the frontiers of communicable human knowledge.

(c) I am accused of supposing that history deals with human motives and intentions, for which Mr. Carr wishes to substitute the action of `social forces'. To this charge I plead guilty. I am obliged to say once more that anyone concerned with human beings is committed to consideration of motives, purposes, choices, the specifically human experience that belongs to human beings uniquely, and not merely with what happened to them as animate or sentient bodies. To ignore the play of non-human factors; or the effect of the unintended consequences of human acts; or the fact that men often do not correctly understand their own individual behaviour or its sources; to stop searching for causes; in the most literal and mechanical sense, in accounting for what happened and how all this would be absurdly childish or obscurantist, and I did not suggest anything of this kind. But to ignore motives and the context in which they arose, the range of possibilities as they stretched before the actors, of most which never were, and some never could have been, realized; to ignore the spectrum of human thought and imagination--how the world and they themselves appear to men whose vision and values (illusions and all) we can grasp in the end only in terms of our own would be to cease to write history. One may argue about the degree of difference that the influence of this or that individual made in shaping events. But to try to reduce the behaviour of individuals to that of impersonal `social-forces' not further analysable into the conduct of the men who, even according to Marx, make history is `reification' of statistics, a form of the `false consciousness' of bureaucrats and administrators who close their eyes to all that proves incapable of quantification, and thereby perpetrate absurdities in theory and dehumanization in practice. There are remedies that breed new diseases, whether or not they cure those to which they are applied. To frighten human beings by suggesting to them that they are in the grip of impersonal forces over which they have little or no control is to breed myths, ostensibly in order to kill other figments--the notion of supernatural forces, or of all-powerful individuals, or of the hidden hand. It is to invent entities, to propagate faith in unalterable patterns of events for which the empirical evidence is, to say the least, insufficient, and `which by relieving individuals of the burdens of personal responsibility breeds irrational passivity in some, and no less irrational fanatical activity in others; for nothing is more inspiring than the certainty that the stars in their courses are fighting for one's cause, that `History', or `social forces', or `the wave of the future' are with one, bearing one aloft and forward. This way of thinking and speaking is one which it is the great merit of modern empiricism to have exposed. If my essay has any polemical thrust, it is to discredit metaphysical constructions of this kind. If to speak of men solely in terms of statistical probabilities--ignoring too much of what is.specifically human in men--evaluations, choices, differing visions of life, is an exaggerated application of scientific method, a gratuitous behaviourism, it is no less misleading to appeal to' imaginary forces. The former has its place; it describes, classifies, predicts, even if it does not explain. The latter explains indeed, but in occult, what I can only call neo-animistic terms. I suspect that Mr. Carr does not feel anxious to defend either of these methods. But in his reaction against naiveté, smugness, the vanities of nationalistic or class or personal moralizing, he has permitted himself to be driven to the other extreme--the night of impersonality, in which human beings are dissolved into abstract forces. The fact that I protest against it leads Mr. Carr to think that I embrace the opposite absurdity. His assumption that between them these extremes exhaust the possibilities seems to me to be the basic fallacy from which his (and perhaps others') vehement criticism of my real and imaginary opinions ultimately stems. At this point I should like to reiterate some commonplaces from which I do not depart: that causal laws are applicable to human history (a proposition which pace Mr. Carr, I should consider it insane to deny); that history is not mainly a dramatic conflict' between individual wills;18 that knowledge, especially of scientifically established laws, tends to render us more effective19 and extend our liberty, which is liable to be curtailed by ignorance and the illusions, terrors, and prejudices that it breeds;20 that there is plenty of empirical evidence for the view that the frontiers of free choice are a good deal narrower than many men have in the past supposed, and perhaps still erroneously believe;21 and even that objective patterns in history may, for all I know, be discernible. I must repeat that my concern is only to assert that unless such laws and patterns are held to leave some freedom of choice--and not only freedom of action determined by choices that are themselves wholly determined by antecedent causes--we shall have to reconstruct our view of reality accordingly; and that this task is far more formidable than determinists tend to assume. The determinist's world may, at least in principle, be conceivable: in it all that Professor Ernest Nagel declares to be the function of human volition will remain intact; a man's behaviour will still be affected by praise and blame as his metabolism (at any rate directly) will not;22 men will continue to describe persons and things as beautiful or ugly, evaluate actions as beneficial or harmful, brave or cowardly, noble or ignoble. But when Kant said that if the laws that governed the phenomena of the external world turned out to govern all there was, then morality--in his sense--was annihilated; and when, in consequence, being concerned with the concept of freedom presupposed by his notion of moral responsibility, he adopted very drastic measures in order to save it, he seems to me, at the very least to have shown a profound grasp of what is at stake. His solution is obscure, and perhaps untenable; but although it may have to be: rejected, the problem remains. In a causally determined system the notions of free choice and moral responsibility, in their usual senses, vanish, or at least lack application, and the notion of action would have to be reconsidered.

I recognize the fact that some thinkers seem to feel no intellectual discomfort in interpreting such concepts as responsibility; culpability, remorse, etc., in strict conformity with causal determination. At most they seek to explain the resistance. of those who dissent from them by attributing to them a confusion of causality with some sort of compulsion. Compulsion frustrates my wishes but when I fulfil them I am surely free, even though my wishes themselves are causally determined; if they are not, if they are not effects of my general tendencies, or ingredients in my habits and way of living (which can be described in purely causal terms), or if these, in their turn, are not what they are entirely as a result of causes, physical, social, psychological, etc., then there is surely an element of pure chance or randomness, which breaks the causal chain. But is not random behaviour the very opposite of freedom, rationality, responsibility? And yet these alternatives seem to exhaust the possibilities. The notion of uncaused choice as something out of the blue is certainly not satisfactory. But (I need not argue this again) the only alternative permitted by such thinkers--a caused choice held to entail responsibility, desert, etc.--is. equally untenable. This dilemma has now divided thinkers for more than two thousand years. Some continue to be agonized or at least puzzled by it, as the earliest Stoics were; others see no problem at all. It may be that it stems, at least in part, from the use of a mechanical model applied to human actions; in one case choices are conceived as links in the kind of causal sequence that is typical of the functioning of a mechanical process; in the other, as a break in this sequence, still conceived in terms of a complex mechanism. Neither image seems to fit the case at all well. We seem to need a new model, a schema which will rescue the evidence of moral consciousness from the beds of Procrustes provided by the obsessive frameworks of the traditional discussions. All efforts to break away from the old obstructive analogies, or (to use a familiar terminology) the rules of an inappropriate language game, have so far proved abortive. This needs a philosophical imagination of the first order, which in this case is still to seek. Professor White's solution--to attribute the conflicting views to different scales of value or varieties of moral usage--seems to me no way out. I cannot help. suspecting that his view- is part of a wider theory, according to which belief in determinism or any other view of the world is, or depends on, some sort of large scale pragmatic decision about how to treat this or that field of thought or experience, based on a view of what set of categories would give the best results. Even if one accepted this, it would not be easier to reconcile. the notions of causal necessity, avoidability, free choice, responsibility, etc. I do not claim to have refuted the conclusions of determinism; but neither do I see why we need be driven towards them. Neither the idea of historical explanation as such, nor respect for scientific method, seems to me to entail them. This sums up my disagreements with Professor Ernest Nagel, Professor Morton White, Mr. E. H. Carr, the classical determinists, and their modern disciples.


next up previous contents
Next: Positive versus Negative Liberty Up: INTRODUCTION Previous: INTRODUCTION   Contents
Administrator 2001-02-25