Paradoxes of Free Will

Author(s): Gunther S. Stent

Source: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society , 2002, New Series, Vol. 92,
No. 6 (2002), pp. i-iii+v-ix+xi-xii+1-261+263-273+275-284
Published by: American Philosophical Society

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4144913

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 Chapter One

Prologue

Limits of Rationality. Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth century Ger-

man philosopher, and Niels Bohr, the twentieth century Danish physicist,
both noted that driving human reason too far in the analysis of deep
problems often leads to irresolvable contradictions. Kant (1784) epito-
mized his insight into this fundamental limitation of our-on the whole
admirably serviceable-reason with his aphorism "Out of timber so
crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be
built." And Bohr (1949) drew attention to the limits of human reason by
citing what he referred to as an 'old saying,' according to which there are
two kinds of truths: "To the one kind belong statements so simple and
clear that the opposite assertion obviously could not be defended. The
other kind, the so-called 'deep truths,' are statements whose opposite also
contains deep truth." Most likely, the 'old saying' was Bohr's paraphrase of
an epigram by his Danish philosopher-compatriot, Seren Kierkegaard,
who asserted that "in the end, every truth is true only up to a certain de-
gree. Once it transcends that degree, the truth meets its negation and
turns into a falsehood." (Heiberg, P.A., V. Kuhr, and E. Torsting, 1909)

Free Will. Following Kant, we shall consider free will as our principal
(but not sole) example of a deep truth that reflects the ultimate limits of
human reason. The notion of free will attributes to persons the capacity
to choose autonomously among possible alternative actions. This pre-
sumed autonomy of the will does not imply that a person's volition is to-
tally immune to influence by other persons or by the natural world. What
it does imply is that such heteronomous influences on a person's will not
withstanding, there remains a substantial residue of independence of
them, by virtue of which her rational faculty remains the final arbiter of
what she actually wills. The outcome of this autonomous arbitration
process is not capricious or random, but determined by the person's soul.

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 TRANSACTIONS
of the
AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY
Held at Philadelphia
For Promoting Useful Knowledge
Volume 92, Part 6

PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

Gunther S. Stent

American Philosophical Society

Philadelphia * 2002

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Copyright ? 2002 by the American Philosophical Society for its Transactions series. All
rights reserved.

ISBN: 0-87169-926-5
US ISSN: 0065-9746

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stent, Gunther S. (Gunther Siegmund), 1924-

Paradoxes of free will / Gunther S. Stent.
p. cm. - (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, ISSN 0065-9746;
v. 92, pt. 6)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-87169-926-5 (pbk.)
1. Free will and determinism. I. Title. II. Series.

BJ1461 .S69 2002

123'.5-dc21 2002038602

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 To Judith Martin

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 Contents

Chapter One
Prologue

Limits of Rationality 1 Theodicy Paradox 8

Free Will 1 Divine Foreknowledge 8
Soul 2 Utopia 9
Moral Responsibility 2 Self-referential Paradoxes 9
Determinism 2 Mind-Body Problem 12
Metaphysics 3 Brain Science 12
Morals and Ethics 4 Critical Idealism 14
Origins of Morals and Moral Evolutionary
Philosophy 5 Epistemology 15
Paradoxes 7 Complementarity 16

Chapter Two
Civilization

Prehistoric Mankind 19 Israel 33

Rise of Civilization 21 Moses and Monotheism 34

Egypt 22 Mankind in God's Image 38
Sumer 28 The Fall of Man 39

Chapter Three
Moral Philosophy

Socrates 41 Buddha 49
Plato 43 Confucius 50
Aristotle 44 Lao-Tzu 52
Three East Asian Immanuel Kant 55

Teachings 48
V

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 CONTENTS

Chapter Four
Theodicy

Christian Philosophy 59 Confessions and City of God 65

Zoroaster 60 On the Free Choice
Manicheanism 60 of the Will 67
Pharisees, Essenes and Peter Abelard 71
Sadducees 62 St. Thomas Aquinas 72
St. Augustine 63 Summa Theologica 74
Ambrose 64 Candide 76

Chapter Five
Personhood

Identity Definition 79 Cloning 85

Psychological Definitions 80 Personhood of Animals 87
Second-Order Volitions 81 Vegetarianism 88
Abortion 82 Animal Experimentation 89
Uniqueness 85 Actual and Potential Persons 91

Chapter Six
Responsibility

Causal and Moral Exculpations 99

Responsibility 95 Coercion 101
Criteria for Moral Brainwashing 101
Responsibility 96 Insanity 102
Determinism 97 A Way without Crossroads 104
Paradox of Moral
Responsibility 98

Chapter Seven
Determinism

Natural Law 109 Behaviorists, Immaterialists,

Pierre Simon de Laplace 110Libertarians and
Compatibilists 110

vi

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 CONTENTS

Determinism and Prediction vs. Retrodiction in

Predictability 117 History 120
Chaos 118 True Indeterminism of
Quantum Physics 121

Chapter Eight
Freedom

Meaning of Freedom 125 Frankfurt's

Constraints 126 Counterexample 129
Principle of Alternate Blameworthiness 130
Possibilities 127 Limitations of
Martin Luther 128 Counterexamples 132

Chapter Nine
Mind-Body Problem

Physicalist-Mentalist Cartesian Physiology 143

Dualism 137 Brain Science 146
Substances and Attributes 137 Mental Phenomena and
Platonic Dualism 138 Brain States 147
Aristotelian Monism 140 Modern Monism 148
Augustinian Dualism 141 Interactionism 150
Cartesian Substance Persistence of Dualism 152
Dualism 141

Chapter Ten
Critical Idealism

A priori-Synthetic Resolution of the Paradox of

Propositions 156 Moral Responsibility 161
Four Antinomies 157 Resolution of the Quandary of
A Copernican Revolution in A Priori Synthetic
Philosophy 158 Propositions 163
Critical Idealism 158 Resolution of the Antinomies 164
Epistemic Dualism 160 Existence of God 166

vii

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 CONTENTS

Immortality of the Soul 167 Reconciliation of Ancient East

Death of God 169 Asian Philosophy with
Critical Idealism 170

Chapter Eleven
Etiquette

Manners 175 Etiquette as a Symbolic

Origins of Etiquette 176 System 183
Noble Savage 176 Etiquette as a Ritual
History of Etiquette 177 System 184
Changing Rules of Etiquette 178 Natural and Positive
Etiquette as a Regulative Etiquette 186
System 179 Is Etiquette a Social Evil? 187
Social Regulation of Smoking 180 Ethics and Etiquette as a
Etiquette and the Continuum 188
Administration of Law 182 Confucianism and Etiquette 189

Chapter Twelve
Evolutionary and Genetic Epistemology

Pure Reason and Nietzsche's Genetic Epistemology 201

Will to Power 193 Invariance, Assimilation
Evolutionary Epistemology 194 and Accommodation 202
Brain Evolution 195 Development of Pure
Macrocosm, Mesocosm, and Theoretical Reason 204
Microcosm 195 Numbers 205
Classical Physics 197 Time and Space 206
Relativity Theory 197 Causality 207
Visualizability 198 Development of Pure Practical
Antinomies Revisited 200 Reason 211

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 CONTENTS

Chapter Thirteen
Scientism

Francis Bacon and the Rise of Selfish Gene 224

Scientism 215 Star Wars 225
Evolutionary Origins of Utility of Objectively
Morals 216 False Beliefs 227
A Hard-Core Bioscientistic Heredity and Intelligence 227
Definition of Moral Limits of Scientism 229
Virtue 218 Machiavelli 230
Naturalistic Fallacy 219 Evolutionism vs. Creationism
Sociobiology 222 in the Schools 232

Chapter Fourteen
Complementarity

Paradoxes of Quantum Uncertainty Principle 243

Physics 237 Complementarity 244
Exchange of Energy Between Conspiracy of Nature 245
Light and Matter 238 Criticisms of
Rayleigh's Distribution Complementarity 251
Formula 239 Lao-Tzu and Bohr 252
Planck's Distribution Formula Kant and Bohr 253
and the Discovery of the Biology and
Quantum 241 Complementarity 256
Einstein's Wave-Particle Niels Bohr's Last Lecture 259
Antinomy 2422 Max Planck's Last
Quantized Bohr Atom 243 Lecture 260

References 263

Glossary 269

Sources of Illustrations 275

Index 277

ix

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 I thank Gonzalo Munevar for critical discussions
and helpful advice and gratefully acknowledge the
financial support of this project provided by the
Committee on Research of the Berkeley Division of the
Academic Senate of the University of California.

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 IMMANUEL KANT (1724-1804)
Engraving by Dbbler (1791)

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

Soul. Despite the virtual disappearance of the old-fashioned term

'soul' from contemporary moral discourse held in secular rather than reli-
gious contexts, in this essay we shall continue to speak of 'soul' as well as
of 'self,' the latter-day psychological term that has largely replaced 'soul.'
For as Sigmund Freud's most brilliant disciple and eventual critic and ad-
versary, Otto Rank (1930), pointed out, the principal goal of psychology
is, and has always been, the elucidation of the soul, a concept that has
been passed on to us from times immemorial by popular belief, religion
and mythology. And yet, psychology has done its best to deny the exis-
tence of the soul, the very agency of which its practitioners are actually
in search.

We will make a verbal distinction, however, between the quasi-syn-

onyms of 'soul' and 'mind.' Both terms refer to the seat of consciousness,
thought volition, emotions, and feelings, with the choice of one or the
other word depending on the historical or disciplinary context of our dis-
cussion. We are going to speak of 'mind' when dealing with these mental
phenomena in a natural (that is, amoral or secular) context. But we will
speak of these same mental phenomena as 'soul' when dealing with them
in, what Kant referred to as a 'non-natural' (that is, moral or religious)
context.

Moral Responsibility. Free will presents us with one of the old

most vexatious philosophical problems, dating back to the very
nings of moral philosophy in ancient Greece. This problem is we
unavoidable within that tradition, because free will provides the b
one of its central concerns, namely moral responsibility. This term re
the human intuition that persons can be judged as praiseworthy or
worthy for the volitions that motivated their actions. These jud
are based on established ethical criteria, such as those found in t
Commandments of Book 2 (Exodus) of the Israelite Torah.

Determinism. One necessary condition for holding persons m

responsible for their actions is to presume that they willed them free
though just what is, or ought to be meant by 'freely' has been, as
see, subject to considerable controversy. Yet, whatever reasonabl
ing we may attribute to the phrase 'willed them freely,' the con
free will cannot help but contradict another human intuition. Thi
belief, to which philosophers refer as 'determinism,' according to

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 PROLOGUE

seamless web of causal connections governs whatever happens i

world. Thus the free will of morally responsible persons and the cau
of all of the world's happenings by the inexorable forces of determ
jointly exemplify the kind of deep truths of which Bohr had said that t
opposites are deep truths as well. Moreover, according to Kant, the
ure of philosophers to find an acceptable resolution of this contradi
aspect of such pairs of deep truths is attributable to the timber fr
which man is made being so crooked that nothing entirely straigh
be built from it.

Metaphysics. The branch of philosophy that deals with the troub

some conceptual relations between free will, moral responsibility, an
terminism is known as metaphysics. The term 'metaphysics' was coin
Andronikos of Rhodes, an editor of Aristotle's manuscripts, 300 ye
after Aristotle's death in 322 BCE, to designate the part of Aris
writings that Andronikos placed after (meta) the part that dealt with
ural or physical things (ta physika). Upon the rise of Christian Philo
in the early Middle Ages, 'metaphysics' took on a more general me
than that intended by Andronikos, although, as is the case also for
terms of central importance for philosophical discourse, there is no
eral agreement on what that meaning actually is. For the purpose
discussions we shall adopt the definition of metaphysics provided b
third edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. "It is the bra
speculation which deals with the first principles of things, including suc
cepts as being, substance, essence, time, space, cause, identity, etc; theor
philosophy as the ultimate science of being and knowing."
A derogatory connotation came to be attached to 'metaphysics' in
eighteenth century, especially by French and British philosophers o
Enlightenment. They laid the groundwork for such disciplines as p
chology and psychiatry that were meant to provide a scientific acco
morally relevant human behavior, and they relegated free will to th
egory of subjective metaphysical illusions. So by the first half
twentieth century, scientifically sophisticated people had come
lieve that the more we learn about someone's personal history, the l
can hold that person morally responsible for his behavior, and the
concept of moral responsibility would be vacuous. (Hook, 1981)
upon my first exposure to philosophy as an undergraduate at the U
sity of Illinois in the early 1940s, my teachers left me with the imp

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

that metaphysics is mainly hot air about how many angels can dance on
the head of a pin.
In the wake of the Second World War, however, and the existential
problems raised by the unprecedented scale of the crimes against
mankind then recently perpetrated by Nazi Germany and other totalitar-
ian states, metaphysics regained respectability. The problem of moral re-
sponsibility now loomed larger than ever. It would have taken a lunatic
to forgive Hitler or Stalin for their voluntarily committed crimes, on the
scientific grounds that poor Adolph and poor Joseph started their lives as
babies who had inherited the genes (causally) responsible for the com-
plexes and obsessions that turned them into world-class monsters. Thus,
in our present, postmodern era, metaphysics came to be widely appreci-
ated as the most interesting, and, in New-Age California-speak, the most
relevant branch of philosophy.

Morals and Ethics. Two other key philosophical terms on which

there is no general agreement regarding their proper usage are 'morals'
and 'ethics,' except that it is widely admitted that the two terms-the for-
mer of Latin and the latter of Greek origin-do not refer to the same
thing. Bernard Williams (1985), one of the foremost contemporary moral
philosophers, wants "morals to be understood as a particular develop-
ment of the ethical." This definition, however, matches none of the sev-
eral definitions of 'ethics' offered by the third edition of the Shorter Ox-
ford English Dictionary and seems to have a direct inverse relation to
'morals' as that implied by at least one of them. For the purpose of our
discussions, we shall adopt as the meaning of 'morals' the principles of
right and wrong that we are about to identify with the set of value-laden,
tacitly held human intuitions designated by Immanuel Kant as categories
of pure practical reason. This set of categories includes good and evil, free
will, duty, compassion, and sacredness of the person. And as the meaning
of 'ethics' we shall adopt the set of rules, or laws, that are intended to reg-
ulate social behavior in conformance with those principles of right and
wrong.

In metaphysical discourse, the principles of right and wrong are said

to be transcendental, an adjective that Kant used to refer to ideas or con-
cepts that we apply to rather than derive from experience. We will elu-
cidate in Chapter 12 how it is possible for us to understand words whose
meaning does not arise from experience, and merely note for the time

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 PROLOGUE

being that 'God' and 'soul,' are further examples of such transcend
concepts.
Origins of Morals and Moral Philosophy. How did the belief arise
that humans are moral beings who know the difference between good
and evil and can tell right from wrong? Some suggestive clues regarding
the high antiquity of moral beliefs of prehistoric people are provided by
archeological finds, such as burial plots, clay statuettes, and cave paint-
ings. But the earliest available explicit information about ancient moral
beliefs dates back about 5000 years, to the long-dead civilizations of an-
cient Egypt and Sumer. (McNeil, 1963). All these ancient beliefs had in
common that, though they may acknowledge an anatomical and behav-
ioral affinity between humans and animals, they set humans apart from
animals as uniquely moral beings. [Unless stated explicitly otherwise, in
this essay the meaning of the term "animal" does not include the species
Homo sapiens, which from a biological point of view is, of course, a mem-
ber of the animal kingdom.]
These beliefs hold that humans are partly animal and partly divine,
that humans live in nature, as do the animals, and that humans also live
outside of nature, as does Divinity but as the animals do not. This hybrid
theory of human nature was eventually reformulated in terms of the con-
cept of the human being as a moral person, comprised of a body and a
soul. The human body was considered as being endowed with the natural
attributes that it shares with the bodies of animals, such as its anatomy
and physiology, and which are amenable to study by physical methods.
The human soul, on the other hand, was thought to be endowed with
non-natural attributes, which it shares with Divinity, such as uniqueness,
irreplaceability and being an end in itself, and which are amenable to
study only by metaphysical methods.
Secular (rather than religion-based) moral philosophy arose as an
identifiable subject of intellectual inquiry independently in Greece, as
well as in India and China, during the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. In
Greece this development was set off by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and
in East Asia by the 'Three Teachings' of Buddha, Confucius and Lao-Tzu.
Socrates was the first Western philosopher to recognize the importance
of making a rational analysis of the meaning of such moral concepts as
'the Good,' 'right,' 'just,' and 'virtuous,' and of detailing the criteria for as-
cribing them to people. He was Plato's teacher, and Plato, in turn, was
Aristotle's teacher. All three agreed in identifying the individual Good

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

with the social Good and in defining moral categories, such as justice and
virtue, in terms of their role in achieving the Good. Moreover, they used
similar terminology and shared many principles and attitudes expressive
of the rationality of Hellenic culture.
Nevertheless, Plato's method of inquiry and his conception of the role
of moral principles in human affairs were different enough from Aristo-
tle's that teacher and student founded two everlasting rival metaphysical
approaches to the world, namely 'materialism' and 'idealism.' Neither of
these terms means the same thing in philosophical discourse as it does in
ordinary, everyday conversation. In the street, 'materialism' and 'ideal-
ism' refer to alternative personal attitudes towards life, with materialism
denoting a preoccupation with material goods, such as BMW convert-
ibles or jewelry, and idealism denoting a preoccupation with ideals, such
as democracy or environmentalism. In the philosophers' ivory tower,
however, the paired opposites refer to alternative conceptions of the na-
ture of reality. There, materialism denotes the doctrine that physical
matter is the only essential reality of the world and that all beings,
processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of
matter. And idealism is the philosophers' opposite of materialism, denot-
ing the doctrine that the essential reality of the world is transcendental
and exists only in our consciousness and reason.
Plato was an idealist. He believed in the independent reality of ideas,
or 'Forms,' while he considered the reality of the material world as being
merely relative to that of the ideal world of the Forms. The fundamental
moral Form, according to Plato, is that of the Good-an ideal model of
virtue that serves as a standard for moral judgments. Actions are right,
laws are just, and people are virtuous insofar as they conform to that ideal
model. And the only possible way for people to recognize the Good when
they encounter it is that they are born into the world with an innate,
transcendental knowledge of its Form. According to Plato, the Form of
the Good, as well the Forms of all other moral categories, such as Justice,
is stored in the soul rather than in the body. He asserted that the soul is
immaterial, imperceptible, and immortal, while the body is material, per-
ceptible, and mortal. Thus Plato charted an idealistic direction for fath-
oming the meanings of moral categories in a realm of timeless, universal,
and transcendental Forms.
Aristotle was a materialist and rejected Plato's theory of the independ-
ent existence of Forms. He thought that all Forms are merely immanent

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 PROLOGUE

in matter and have no independent existence, especially not

Forms such as the Good. According to Aristotle, the highest Goo
mankind is the balanced satisfaction of its desires, which he called
monia-meaning 'happiness' or material and spiritual well being
daemonia ought to be attainable by the exercise of our most p
specifically human endowment, namely our reason. Aristotle sou
understanding of the principles of eudaemonia through the study
entific disciplines such as biology, psychology, and physics.

Paradoxes. Kant's, Bohr's, and Kierkegaard's statements regardin

ultimate bounds of human reason reflect their perception of par
generated by our rational faculty. According to the original Gre
of the term, a 'paradox' is a statement that is seemingly self-contr
or goes against generally accepted opinion, as did the paradoxical
of Aristarchus of Samos in the third century BCE that our obviou
tionary Earth rotates about the obviously moving sun. This parad
eventually resolved by observational evidence indicating that the
ally accepted opinion was wrong.
Earlier, in the fifth century BCE, the philosopher Zeno of Elea h
veloped some paradoxes that were meant to show the impossibility
viding up space or motion. The best known of these is 'Achilles a
Tortoise,' whose conclusion is that if in a race between the two t
toise has a head start, Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise, no m
how fast he runs. For, according to Zeno, after speedy Achilles h
down the distance between himself and the slow tortoise by half
cut down the remaining distance by half again. But since he alway
cut in half whatever distance still remains between them, he can
reach the tortoise. Today, we know that this is not a genuine para
cause it was based on Zeno's lack of knowledge about convergent
mathematical series.
However, the 'Liar's Paradox' devised in the fourth century BCE by
Eubulides of Miletus, which asks "does a man who says he is now lying
speak the truth?" is still of interest today because, as we shall see, its reso-
lution is not all that obvious.
In modern times, the term 'paradox' took on a more precise meaning.
A paradox may consist of an, on first sight reasonable proposition, but
which, on second sight, turns out to be self-contradictory. Or it may con-
sist of two paired propositions, either of which, when considered alone, is

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

supported by apparently sound arguments but which, when they are con-
sidered together, turn out to be mutually contradictory.
Thus the incompatibility of our intuitive (and unavoidable) concepts
of free will and determinism qualifies as a paradox, to which we will refer
henceforth as The Paradox of Moral Responsibility.

Theodicy Paradox. A new era began in the history of Western moral

philosophy, as Christian philosophy arose in the fourth century CE as a
fusion of secular Greek philosophy with Jewish monotheism. Of these,
the former grounded morals in rational principles and the latter in God's
commandments revealed in the Torah. [Strictly speaking, this Hebrew
term designates the Five Books of Moses, or speaking more loosely, all of
those parts of the Bible that Christians call The Old Testament.] These
doubly-based, Judeo-Greco morals confronted Christians with the baf-
fling paradox eventually called 'Theodicy,' according to which our one-
and-only, all-powerful, righteous, and benign God rules over a world that
abounds in evil and misery.
St. Augustine, the first philosopher among the Christian church fa-
thers, offered a resolution of the Theodicy paradox by focusing on the
concept of evil. As we will consider in Chapter 4, Augustine argued that
what appears to be evil turns out to be a necessary element in the percep-
tion of the Good. God has to allow the existence of evil to provide
mankind with a contrasting background that makes the Good shine
more brightly and thus more easily perceptible to the dim-witted mortals.

Divine Foreknowledge. Augustine addressed also another paradox in-

herent in the free will concept, which is entailed by the all but universal
belief, shared also by Christianity, that God has foreknowledge of the fu-
ture. How can our will be free if God knew how we were going to act long
before we actually did will freely how to act? Such divine foreknowledge
does not seem to allow for the kind of free will that would provide a ra-
tional basis for moral responsibility in the first place. How can God be just
in rewarding us for our good deeds and punishing us for our evil deeds, if
these had all been foreordained by Him? Augustine's answer was that
God's foreknowledge of movements of the human will does not create their
necessity. The will He gave us could not be a will unless it remained in our
power rather than in His. According to Augustine, God's foreknowledge of
how we are going to use that power does not take away its freedom.

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 PROLOGUE

Utopia. The sixteenth century Italian statesman and political th

Niccolo Machiavelli published a most disturbing insight that no v
ary ideologue could accept, namely that the ensemble of our utop
pirations for a perfect society is paradoxical. Utopian writers, fro
(the inventor of the genre) with his Republic, through St. August
his City of God, Thomas More (the inventor of the name of the
with his 'Utopia,' and Francis Bacon with his New Atlantis, to on
final utopists, Edward Bellamy (1888), with his socialist vision Lo
Backward, 2000-1887, all differed in their vision of a perfect
and/or in how to go about achieving it. Yet, they all shared the sa
vent belief that such a thing as a perfect society is possible. (
Clayes, and Sargent, 2000). As Machiavelli was the first to poi
however, this fervent belief is mistaken, since all these visions i
two mutually incompatible aims and values. (Berlin, 1971). Th
freedom and justice for the individual, on the one hand, and
order for the society, on the other. From this Machiavellian disc
followed that the belief that the correct, objectively valid solution
question of how men should live can in principle be discovered is
in principle, not true. Utopia cannot be achieved on Earth, not b
of the frailties and imperfections of mankind, but because every
able ideal society is meant to satisfy mutually incompatible, that i
doxical, goals.

Self-referential Paradoxes. Moral responsibility, Theodic

utopian social goals are only three of the many metaphysical par
with which our, on the whole reasonably functional reason has sad
Upon the revival of the study of formal logic at the turn of the
eth century, the attention of modern logicians was drawn to self-r
tial paradoxes, of which the 'Liar's Paradox' of Eubulides was an e
ample. A modern example is Kurt Grelling's paradox about au
words, words whose meaning applies to themselves (such as 'shor
'polysyllabic'), and heterological words, that is, words for which th
the case (such as 'French' and 'monosyllabic'). So, is the word 'het
ical' heterological? If it were, then it would be autological. But if
autological, then it would be heterological.
Another self-referential paradox is Bertrand Russell's story ab
Barber of Seville, who shaves all those men of Seville, and on
men, who do not shave themselves. So does the Barber shave him

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

the Barber is a man of Seville, the conclusion is that if he shaves himself,

he does not, and if he does not shave himself, he does.
The easy way to resolve such self-referential paradoxes is to point out
that their premises are impossible. There can be no lexical categories
such as 'liar,' 'autology/heterology,' or 'Barber of Seville' with their stipu-
lated attributes, because they engender paradoxes. This eliminative pro-
cedure may be acceptable in cases where, as in these examples, the prem-
ises are of no existential importance for us. But it is not acceptable in
cases where our intuition tells us that the premises have to be true. Ad-
mittedly, some paradoxes were explained out of existence as breaches of
one or another rule of logic, and others were at least tamed by the devel-
opment of the mathematical doctrine of sets. But paradoxes still re-
mained a source of concern for logicians and mathematicians, and deal-
ing with paradoxes exerted a profound influence on thought about the
validity of the foundations of their disciplines.
It seemed especially urgent to demonstrate that mathematics is free of in-
consistencies and genuine paradoxes because it provides the principal
medium for the rigorous description and rational analysis of complex scien-
tific data. Thus any inadequacy of the descriptive and analytical powers of
mathematics would place a limit on the depth of our ultimate understand-
ing of nature. To eliminate that dire possibility, the eminent mathematician
David Hilbert set out in the early years of the twentieth century to demon-
strate the descriptive and analytical adequacy of mathematics. He hoped to
prove that it is consistent (that is, free of paradoxes) and complete (that is,
free of propositions whose truth is undecidable). By mid-century, Hilbert's
project had failed spectacularly, when Kurt Gbdel showed that arithmetic is
neither consistent nor complete. On first thought, it seemed inconceivable
that nature herself is inconsistent and incomplete, even if mathematics
should turn out to embody some annoying rational deficits. But as the de-
velopment of quantum physics that we will consider in our last chapter soon
showed, this is not only conceivable but it also happens to be the case.
Bohr, who played a crucial role in these ominous scientific developments,
was led by them to state his paradoxical proposition about deep truths, which
I conjectured to be his paraphrase of Kierkegaards' epigram. Like Bohr and
many other Danes, Kierkegaard was a devotee of paradoxes, about which he
said that they are "a passion of thought; and the thinker who is without par-
adox is like a lover without passion-an inconsiderable fellow.... Take away
the paradox from the thinker and you have the professor." (Gates, 1960)

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 PROLOGUE

SOREN KIERKEGAARD (1813-1855)

Drawing made by Soren's cousin
Niels Christian Kierkegaard in 1840.

This Danish love of paradoxes was not shared by hard-nosed, m

British and American twentieth century, 'analytical' philosophers
regarded the logical analysis of language as the way to settle many
unsolved philosophical problems. One of them, D. J. O'Connor
asserted in his essay entitled Free Will that "the existence of suc
doxes [as that of freedom vs. determinism] is proof that we are in
tellectual muddle, and such muddles can be cleared up in one
ways. Either we must show that at least one of the offending prop
is false, or we must show that each does not really, despite of first app
ances, entail the negation of the other." But it is O'Connor w
muddled, not Kant, Kierkegaard, or Bohr.

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

Mind-Body Problem. To find a place for mankind as free-willed crea-

tures in a world, whose events are governed by determinism, that is, to
resolve the Paradox of Moral Responsibility, the Ancient Greeks saddled
us with another existential headache, namely the evergreen philosophi-
cal chestnut known as the 'mind-body problem.' It poses the question
whether there is not some basic difference between the human body-
the target of nature's forces of determinism-and the human mind-the
seat of an autonomous free will.
The Greeks noted that the physicalist statements we make about peo-
ples' bodies are different in kind from the mentalist statements we make
about their thoughts and feelings. But that difference does not necessar-
ily imply that mentalist statements do not refer to some special kind of
bodily functions. If mental phenomena, including willing, were nothing
other than ordinary bodily functions, a view that came to be known as
monism, they would be governed by determinism, and the Paradox of
Moral Responsibility could not be resolved. But if mental phenomena
were more than, or basically different from ordinary bodily functions, a
view that came to be known as dualism, some mental phenomena, espe-
cially willing, might not be governed by determinism. In that case, the
will could enjoy the freedom, or autonomy of choice, required for the res-
olution of the Paradox of Moral Responsibility. We will examine in
Chapter 9 how some philosophers since Greek Antiquity have tried to
deal with the mind-body problem and in the meanwhile merely note that
Plato favored dualism and Aristotle monism.

Brain Science. Where are the choices made--or the acts of willing
done-which are the manifestations of free will? Ever since the great
Alexandrine physician, Galen, had shown in the second century CE that the
brain is the seat of consciousness, it has been known that this is where will-
ing is done. So it ought to be feasible to ascertain by neurobiological studies
of the human brain whether peoples' will is subject to the natural laws of
causal determination, or whether, by any chance, it happens to be independ-
ent of them. Thus far, neurobiological studies of the brain leave no doubt
that its overall function, just as the overall function of the rest of the human
body, is governed by the laws of physics and chemistry. But these studies have
not yet managed to fathom in detail the mechanisms of many important
mental phenomena (including willing). So it could be argued that the belief
in free will is still an option not yet ruled out by scientific evidence.

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 PROLOGUE

This last-ditch proviso notwithstanding, contemporary investiga

of the human brain generally consider the question of the existen
free will as a pseudo-problem and its discussion as a waste of time. M
them are confident that the recent great advances in brain researc
soon allow us to account for all mental processes in neurobiol
terms, and they regard the dualism doctrine as a crackpot idea that
ought to be-dead and gone.
The philosopher Patricia Churchland became a prominent expone
that view when she published a book in the 1980s entitled Neurophil
(Churchland, 1986). What is 'Neurophilosophy'? Its subject is w
Churchland called the "mind-brain," and its agenda is to produce, by
of an interdisciplinary interaction among philosophers, psychologist
neuroscientists a unified monist theory that explains the mind-brain.
Thus far, Churchland's Neurophilosophy has failed to make any s
ing progress towards producing the unified mind-brain theory. It
achievement thus far, in my opinion at least, is to have put forwa
convincing theoretical refutation of the claims by some philosopher
psychologists that a reductionist explanation of mental process
thoughts and feelings-in terms of neurobiological brain processes
possible in principle. (Stent, 1990)
The neurophilosophical obituary notices of dualism are prematur
flecting merely the failure of devotees of monism to fathom the
depth of the mind-body problem. For the deep question to be resolv
connection with that problem, at least as it pertains to the Parado
Moral Responsibility, is not the empirical question whether the m
in possession of a free will, which-from the human subjective per
tive-it obviously is. Rather it is the transcendental question wh
our notions about the natural world can accommodate creatures exer
ing free will. As we will see, the answer to that question is 'negativ
However incisive and illuminating may have been the neurobiolo
progress made in recent years in the study of the brain, monism re
the existentially unsatisfactory solution of the mind-body problem t
has always been. While monism may be an adequate, or maybe even
only way to deal with mind as a natural phenomenon, it cannot gi
satisfactory account of mind as a moral phenomenon. For such an
tentially satisfying account, dualism has to be invoked, which i
dualism turns out to be alive and well and likely to be with us as l
there are people who live as social beings.

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

Critical Idealism. In mid-seventeenth century, the French philoso-

pher Rene Descartes (1637, 1650) proposed a dualist solution of the
mind-body problem, according to which human beings are comprised of
two distinct substances. One of them he supposed to be the substance of
the body, which, being material, is subject to determinism. The other he
supposed to be the substance of the mind, which, being non-material, is
not subject to determinism and from which we derive our free will and
the responsibility for our actions. By the latter part of the eighteenth
century, however, the explanatory success of Isaac Newton's physics in
the natural world of material substances had discredited Descartes' con-
cept of a non-material mind substance.
Rather than abandoning dualism, Immanuel Kant, put forward a radi-
cally different dualist resolution to the mind-body problem, to which I
will refer as 'epistemic dualism' (Stent, 1998, 2002), and which we will
consider in more detail in Chapter 10. Kant's epistemic dualist resolution
of the mind-body problem and of the Paradox of Moral Responsibility is
based on his revolutionary epistemological theory of critical idealism.
(Kant, 1934) The point of departure of Kant's critical idealism is Plato's in-
sight that our direct contact with things is limited to their appearances in
a sensible world of phenomena, which we perceive via our sensory facul-
ties, such as sight, smell, hearing, and touch. According to Kant, we
manage to make sense of these phenomena by interpreting their sources
as real things-in-themselves, or 'noumena,' of an 'intelligible' (that is, un-
derstandable) world. For this interpretative process we resort to tran-
scendental concepts, or categories, that arise a priori in our rational faculty
rather than being inferred a posteriori from our experience.
Thus Kantian critical idealism is a blend of Aristotelian materialism
and Platonic idealism. It is materialist in the sense that it posits the exis-
tence of a real external source-the noumena-of the phenomena we
perceive in the phenomenal world. However, it is idealist as well, in that
the intelligible world is of our own mental construction, based on our ap-
plication of transcendental categories (or Platonic Forms) to the per-
ceived phenomena, and in that the true nature of the noumenal source of
the phenomena is, in principle, unknowable.
The gist of Kant's epistemic dualism is that it envisages two meta-
physically distinct sets of transcendental categories, by use of which we
construct two metaphysically distinct realms of the intelligible world.
One realm, the natural/amoral realm, we construct by use of one set of

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 PROLOGUE

transcendental categories, such as space, time and causality, to

Kant referred as pure theoretical reason. The noumena of that rea
material objects. The other realm, the non-natural/moral realm, w
struct by use of another set of transcendental categories, suc
good/evil, sacredness and free will, to which Kant referred as pure p
cal reason. The noumena of that other realm are human subjects. (
1949) According to Kant, to be human means to live as a dualist in
realms of the intelligible world and struggle with the paradoxe
arise from their incompatibility.

Evolutionary Epistemology. How can it be that if our mind bring

transcendental categories of Kantian critical idealism to the se
world of phenomena a priori, they happen to fit that world so well
answer was provided in mid-twentieth century by the Austrian st
of animal behavior (or 'ethologist') Konrad Lorenz (1944), on the ba
the evolutionary history of biological species. According to Lo
what is a priori for individual animals is a posteriori for their specie
experience has as little to do with the matching of the Kantian
gories with reality, as has the matching of the fin structure of a fis
the properties of water. Lorenz pointed out that the success of the
of Homo sapiens in constructing an intelligible world that is
matched with the phenomenal world is simply another product of
Darwinian natural selection process that guided the development o
human brain in the course of mankind's evolution. Any early hom
who happened to think that before is after, or that near is far, or
failed to apprehend that phenomenon A is the cause of phenomeno
left few descendants. Lorenz' evolutionary explanations of the orig
the Kantian categories gave rise to a discipline at the interface bet
biology and philosophy called 'evolutionary epistemology.' (Cam
1974)
Characterization of the Kantian categories as a priori for the individual
does not mean, however, that they are present already full-blown at a
person's birth. Instead, as the cognitive developmental studies that Jean
Piaget (1971) initiated in the 1920s and designated by him as 'genetic
epistemology' have shown, the Kantian categories arise in our mind post-
natally. They are the result of a reciprocal interaction between the
genome-controlled development of the infantile nervous system and the
sensible world.

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

Complementarity. In putting forward his epistemic dualism in the lat-

ter part of the eighteenth century, Kant anticipated the epistemic dual-
ism of 'complementarity' of quantum physics put forward by Niels Bohr
(1928) in the first part of the twentieth century. In his use of 'comple-
mentarity,' Bohr did not refer to its ordinary, everyday meaning, namely
the aspects of two different parts of a thing that make them a whole.
Rather, under Bohr's meaning, complementary aspects of the world give
rise to rationally irreconcilable concepts, whose inconsistency can never
be demonstrated empirically.
As we will consider in more detail in our final Chapter 14, Bohr intro-
duced his complementarity concept upon the advent of quantum me-
chanics and its epistemological paradoxes, such as the incoherent de-
scription of the electron in terms of a wave as well as a particle.
According to Bohr, the wave-like mode of electron propagation, on the
one hand, and the particulate nature of electron effects, on the other,
each expresses an important feature of the phenomena associated with
electrons. These features are 'complementary' aspects of reality because,
although they are irreconcilable from a conceptual point of view, there
are no observational setups under which they can be shown to be in di-
rect contradiction. For mutually exclusive observational setups are re-
quired for demonstrating either the wave or the particle nature of the
electron.
Bohr's lesson of the need for mutually exclusive observational setups
for the analysis of the complementary aspects of the electron revealed
that Kant's principle of epistemic dualism is not restricted to meta-
physics, which is widely regarded as a soft discipline in which anything
goes. Bohr showed that epistemic dualism applies also to physics, which
is widely regarded as the hardest of disciplines, which brooks no irra-
tional inconsistencies.

Coda. Our intuitive attribution of free will to the person is incompat-

ible with our attribution of causal necessity to nature. Yet as rational be-
ings, we cannot abandon the idea of non-natural moral autonomy any
more than we can abandon the idea of natural causal necessity. Indeed,
those rare individuals who have abandoned either of these ideas are usu-
ally diagnosed as irrational psychopaths, and most of them live in prisons
or mental institutions. It seems unlikely that philosophers will be able to
develop a solution to the mind body problem that is much of an im-

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 PROLOGUE

provement over Kant's plausible, albeit intrinsically incoherent

temic dualism.
Being the bizarre creatures that we are, we have no choice other
to consider the beastly and the divine-the natural and the non-
ral-as complementary aspects of the person. That is the essence of
deeply paradoxical nature of the mind that Homo sapiens drew in th
tery of organic evolution.

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 MOSES IS SHOWING THE TABLES
OF THE LAW TO THE PEOPLE.

Painting by Rembrandt (1659)

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 Chapter Two

Civilization

Ancient peoples were no more and no less rational in the existential-

especially moral-aspects of their religious beliefs than are we moderns,
and many of those olden beliefs have been essentially conserved over the
ages. (Eliade, 1978; Ferm, 1950). They were conserved because the human
mind tends to deal with the metaphysical problems of existence in terms of
Platonic Forms, which, being innate, and hence inherited, we still share
with our-on an evolutionary time scale-not very remote ancestors living
at the beginning of recorded history. Moreover, as we briefly noted in
Chapter 1 and will discuss in more detail in later chapters, there is another
reason for this lack of philosophical progress across the ages: Application of
in-depth logical analyses to Platonic Forms in the moral realm leads, more
often than not, to irresolvable paradoxes.
Fortunately, this troublesome rational limitation in dealing with exis-
tential problems does not apply to epistemological-especially cosmologi-
cal and scientific-problems (aside from a few exceptions, such as those
that we will consider in our final Chapter 14). That is why it was possible
to make such great scientific progress in recent centuries in our under-
standing of the natural world and in making it do our bidding. Because of
that progress many of the beliefs about the natural world embedded not
only in ancient but also in not-so-ancient religions are no longer credible,
indeed strike us moderns as ludicrous.

Prehistoric Mankind

Chronology (BCE)
50,000 Graves
30,000-9,000 Painting
8,000 Agriculture
4,000 Statuettes
3,000 Writing

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

It is a not uncommon surmise that in the course of the intellectual

evolution of mankind its beliefs have progressed from the simple and un-
complicated concepts of our distant ancestors to the ever more complex
ideas of modern people. The history of religion shows otherwise, how-
ever, in that over the millennia, the fantastically complex religious be-
liefs of our ancestors became ever simpler.
The earliest indications about mankind's metaphysical beliefs date
back to about 50,000 years, provided by graves, rock paintings and stat-
uettes. These ancient artifacts show that Early Stone Age people living
on all five continents went to some trouble to dispose of their deceased in
a ritual manner, rather than letting the human cadavers be eaten by scav-
engers or simply rot wherever they happened to fall dead. One well-nigh-
universal funerary ritual was the dusting of corpses with red ocher, gener-
ally interpreted by paleoanthropologists as a token of blood and as an
indication of a belief in life after death. Such a belief may envisage either
the survival of an immortal, disembodied soul leaving the cadaver or the
bodily resurrection of the deceased in a transcendental land of the dead.
The prevalence of the latter belief is supported by the discovery of two
widespread ancient customs: burying the corpse in a bent-over, fetal posi-
tion to facilitate its rebirth and providing the grave with food, tools or
adornments that will be helpful to the deceased in after-life.
Rock paintings provide the most important figurative testimonials of
prehistoric human beliefs. Many of these treasures of Early Stone Age art
were found in decorated caves dispersed over the European Continent,
from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains. One striking aspect of
these paintings is their uniformity of style and content over time and ge-
ographical location. They changed very little in the period from 30,000
BCE to 9,000 BCE, and, for any given era, they are virtually the same at
sites ranging from Northern Spain to the River Don. Since the paintings
are mostly located at barely accessible sites at considerable distances from
the entrances of mostly uninhabitable caves, there is a strong presump-
tion that they were meant to serve some ritualistic or occult rather than
practical purpose. That the depicted bears, lions, and other wild animals
are often riddled with arrows has been interpreted in terms of the
hunters' sympathetic magic, as have been some dancing human figures
clad in animal skins.
The statuettes are representations of women, carved in stone, bone or
ivory, ranging from two to ten inches in height. They date back to about

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 CIVILIZATION

4,000 BCE, the time of the last Ice Age, and have been found ove
area of Eurasia, extending from southwestern France to Lake Bai
Siberia. These female figures lack the realism of the rock painting
abdomens are exaggerated in size, their heads have no facial featur
their bodies are decorated with diverse geometric designs, among
the swastika. Paleoanthropologists are generally agreed that these
uettes had some religious or magical function, but they disagree
what this function might have been. Some scholars conjecture th
statuettes represent feminine sacredness and hence the magico-re
powers of goddesses. Others hold that they were portable mini-sa
ies with the same symbolic structure and magical powers as the de
caves.

The Rise of Civilization. A dramatic change in the

known as the 'agricultural-urban revolution,' too
Stone Age, in about 8,000 BCE. It was set off by the
breeding of wild animals and plants and by the resu
creases in the food supply over that previously avail
bands of hunter-gatherers. These first regular food
history brought about by this Mother of All Biot
tions meant that it was no longer necessary for all of
all of their time looking for their next meal. A profe
of labor now became possible, which resulted in the d
social roles of various members of the society, such as
or artisan, who rendered expert services to their fello
turn, were provided with food by the farmers. In thi
civilizations and their large settlements in the part o
extending from the Persian Gulf northward to the
nia, southward to North Africa, and westward to th
No doubt, there existed some rules that regulated t
between people even prior to the rise of civilizations
horizon of human social life did not reach beyond th
scribed group of the hunter-gatherer family or clan,
the regulation of social relations would be known to
every member of the clan. In contrast to a life lived w
and clan, however, civilized life in large urban settle
codified imperatives of social behavior. To that end, t
were devised as systems of rules for dealing with strange

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

belonging to a wide range of social types, from slave to priest and king.
Such laws had to consist of easily intelligible and ecumenical formula-
tions of the rules of conduct, to provide for predictability, coherence,
peace and harmony in the lives of the citizenry, by demanding that each
person surrenders some of her freedom of action for the common Good.
It is no coincidence, therefore, that the appearance of formal religion,
with its professional priesthood and religious precepts, and of jurispru-
dence, with its professional judges and secular law, accompanied the rise
of civilization.

Egypt

Chronology (BCE)

Ca. 3000 Hieroglyphic script.

3100-2258 Old Kingdom.
2500-2300 Pyramid Texts
2258-2000 First Interregnum
2000-1786 Middle Kingdom
1786-1570 Second Interregnum, Hyksos occupation
1570-332 New Kingdom
1419-1402 Amenhotep IV; Atonist Monotheism
332 Conquest of Egypt by Alexander
30 Roman province
642 CE Invasion by Arabs. End of Roman provin
Once upon a time, the North African plateau had plentif
supported rich vegetation, teemed with wild animals, and pro
ideal habitat for Stone Age hunters. Then, about 40,000 years
fall declined, bringing on a drought that transformed this fer
into the vast desert that we now call 'Sahara.' However, there
the narrow fertile corridor of the lower Nile Valley, irrigated by
brought northward by the Nile from the mountains of tropi
Africa. This corridor, which came to be called 'Egypt,' offere
placed hunters a refuge with inexhaustible natural resources,
from invaders by impenetrable deserts to the East, South, and
by the Mediterranean Sea to the North.
By the thirty-first century BCE, an Egyptian state-the
dom,' ruled by a pharaoh-had arisen, the earliest known

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 CIVILIZATION

organization of people in history. This date roughly corresponds

beginning of Egypt's historic period, since hieroglyphic writing
vented at just about the same time. The Nile Valley's uniquely fa
geography turned it into an isolated social laboratory in which th
first great civilization could develop for two millennia, undisturbe
waves of rapacious invading barbarians to which most other civi
emerging elsewhere at that time were periodically subject.
The political and social structure of the first Egyptian state be
theological model for understanding how the natural world w
evoked the conception of a kingdom-like, divinely ruled nature,
important god being called 'pharaoh,' that shaped Egyptian relig
the next two millennia. Under a stable government ruling by st
of justice, there arose in Egypt the earliest known conception of
order, with the first explicit articulation of moral values, as we
them. Much of our knowledge about Egyptian theology is derive
the world's oldest and still extant collection of literature, the Py
Texts. They were inscribed on the stone walls of some pyramids b
ing the latter part of the Old Kingdom and had been compiled b
arly priests.
The Egyptian religion was polytheistic, in that it held that many di-
vinities rule the world. Some of them are benign (and worshipped) and
others malign (called 'demons' and abhorred). The highest gods in the
Egyptian Pantheon were those identified with the most important phe-
nomena of nature. The sky was the goddess Nut, while the sun was the
god Re. Other deities were identified with important attributes of phe-
nomena. For instance, fertility was identified with the god Osiris, marital
fidelity with Osiris' sister-wife Isis, and truth with the goddess Maat.
Some deities were represented as animal-human chimeras, such as Horus,
the son of Osiris and Isis, who was depicted as a falcon-headed man. But
in whatever form they appeared, the Egyptian gods were endowed with a
human personality. They suffered, took revenge, and even died. (Mercer,
1950)
The Egyptians developed a multifaceted existential doctrine of human
nature, according to which, in addition to the body, many other elements
go into making up a person. The most important of these elements is the
ka, a ghostly double given to each person at birth. As long as persons are
alive, they are masters of their ka. But as soon as they die, their ka begins a
separate existence, resembling the body to which they had been formerly

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

attached and needing food for their subsistence. The ka became the cen-
ter of the cult of the dead. In addition to the ka, there is the ba, or soul,
which upon a person's death leaves the body in the form of a human-
headed bird. The person's name (ren), which has an independent exis-
tence, is the person's permanent essence. In addition to these distinctive
elements of personhood, there is the khu (intelligence), the ab, (heart),
the sakhem (ruling power), and the khaybet (shadow). This ancient
Egyptian doctrine of personhood provides a dramatic example of the gen-
eral trend of initially very complex religious beliefs becoming simpler
rather than ever more complex in the course of social evolution.
No ancient people believed in a life after death more fervently than
did the Egyptians. Although the body obviously becomes inert upon
death, it does not vanish. Death consists merely of a changed relation-
ship between a person's ka and her ba. To insure the post-mortem persist-
ence of the ka as a home for the deceased's immortal ba, the Egyptians
took great care to preserve the dead body. It was embalmed and mummi-
fied and laid in a coffin on its side like a sleeper, and all the utensils that
a living person might possibly need, along with vessels for food and water,
weapons and toilet articles, were placed in the grave. The most impor-
tant ceremony connected with burial was the opening of the eyes,
mouth, ears, and nose of the deceased. This ceremony guaranteed the
continued existence the ka and made it possible as the home of the ba.
After death came the judgment of the moral rectitude of the life of the
deceased. Each case was heard by a panel of forty-two judges in the pres-
ence of Osiris, sitting upon his throne. If the judges found the person guilty
of having led a life lacking in virtue, her ka was devoured on the spot by a
large beast also present at the hearing. If the panel found in favor of the
person, her ka and ba whereas ferried on board the divine bark to the fields
of eternal afterlife, to enjoy an ever-lasting companionship with the gods.
The intense concern of the Egyptians with the immortality of the soul
addressed an existential paradox that is not resolved by simply declaring
the belief in a life-after-death to be nonsense or self-serving priestly lies, as
we will consider in more detail in Chapter 9. Since death evidently anni-
hilates saints and sinners alike, the paradoxical conclusion would follow
that, in the end, it makes no difference whether a person's moral behav-
ior-from the cradle to the grave-was good or evil. So the paradox is re-
solved by the belief that the account is settled with deceased person's
immortal soul during an eternal afterlife in heaven or in hell.

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 CIVILIZATION

If the morals of a people may be defined by their conception of

purity, faithfulness, truth and justice and of evil, impurity, faith
falsehood and injustice, the Egyptian would stand high morally a
the peoples of the ancient past. Thus the Egyptologist, James H. B
(1933) had good reasons to name his account of the rise of Egypt
ilization The Dawn of Conscience. That is not to say, of course, tha
modern standards the religion and laws of ancient Egypt did not
many defects. The Egyptians' idea of a deity was very anthropom
The gods were created and died; married and suffered; they intrig
could be coerced. They accepted human sacrifices, and magi
could control them. In family life, polygamy was permissible, co
nage was common; in social life punishments were very severe; s
and forced labor were legal; and in international affairs, cruelty
tives was common. Yet, the Egyptians were devoted to their gods
of their love, righteousness, truth, and justice.
The Old Kingdom lasted for nearly a thousand years, towards t
of which the centralized, initially highly efficient administrative
ery run by a small number of bureaucrats and presided over
pharaoh began to fall apart, because of excessive nepotism and cr
in the national government. Local princelings and regional ba
sumed sovereign power, several of them even claiming supreme r
thority. Before long, the Old Kingdom disintegrated, and there
period of disorder which historians call 'First Interregnum.'
The collapse of the Old Kingdom was perceived a national ca
phe. The formerly happy-go-lucky outlook on life of the Egypti
replaced by the earliest known period of national pessimism and
sionment. It was during those troubled times that there arose in
the first known instance of Messianism, that is, of the belief in a
eous ruler yet to come who would set things aright and usher in
Age of Justice for all mankind.
In the middle of the twenty-first century, a local lord from T
gained military ascendancy over other would-be pharaohs and
Egypt once more. This ended the First Interregnum and inaugur
Middle Kingdom. Although some of the centralized rule of the Ol
dom was restored, the authority of the pharaohs of the Middle
was less exalted and absolute than it had been in the Old Kingdom
by the beginning of the eighteenth century BCE, the country h

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

once more its political cohesion, and the Egyptians were unable to ward
off a threat they had never-before-faced in their history: They were in-
vaded and conquered in 1786 BCE by the Hyksos, foreign barbarians
from Southwestern Asia. The Hyksos were a Semitic people, who had
crossed the Sinai desert and overwhelmed the Egyptian infantry by use of
a novel war engine, the horse-drawn chariot. Thus ended the Middle
Kingdom and began the Second Interregnum.
At the times of the Old and Middle Kingdoms, geographical barriers to
foreign contacts had allowed the inhabitants of the Nile Valley to regard
themselves as infinitely superior to all other peoples. The Hyksos con-
quest rudely challenged this chauvinistic belief. But after the Hyksos
were finally expelled in 1570 BCE and the New Kingdom had been es-
tablished, Egypt became a colonial power in Southwestern Asia, lording
it over the Semitic natives. This imperial adventure made it impossible
for the traditionally isolationist Egyptians to ignore foreign ideas and
practices. With the expansion of trade under the empire, new cities at-
tracted nests of foreigners to the soil of Egypt itself, while the imperial
Egyptian armies were recruited largely from neighboring barbarian peo-
ples. Thus as conqueror and defender of strange lands, and as Comman-
der-in-Chief of an army composed largely of foreign mercenaries, the
pharaoh was constantly exposed to foreign customs. Therefore there was
a real danger of his turning away from established Egyptian mores.
A young pharaoh, who ascended the throne in about 1380 BCE under
the name Amenhotep IV, did in fact become a royal revolutionary of the
most radical sort. He forced a new religion-Atonism--on his subjects.
In contrast to the traditional polytheistic Egyptian worship of many
gods-some major and others minor-Atonism was monotheistic, de-
voted to the worship of a single, all-powerful deity, the sun god Aton, an
upgraded version of the sun god, Re, of Old Kingdom polytheism. Aton-
ism was the first known strictly monotheistic religion in history. Its ad-
vent in Egypt brought on a novel ideology that was previously unknown
to the ancient world, namely religious intolerance. Amenhotep IV sup-
pressed all extant polytheistic faiths devoted to the worship of other gods
and made the worship of Aton-and of himself as the self-proclaimed
son of Aton-the sole religion of the Egyptian Empire. He renamed him-
self 'Ikhnaton,' which means 'Aton is pleased.'

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 CIVILIZATION

Atonist doctrine conceived the power of the deified sun dis

tending equally to all peoples, whether within or without the bo
the Egyptian empire. Such universalism may have reflected a rad
tional reaction to the religious diversity of mankind-a diversity
had come to Egyptian attention with all the force of a new r
when their imperial armies and officials had begun to move in d
lands and among alien people. Pious and devout souls, disturbed b
religious variety, the Egyptians may well have been struck by t
doubted presence of the sun in every part of the world, shin
majesty and overwhelming brightness upon all men. Here was cl
true God, manifest and indubitable, unique, universal and benef
comparison, other so-called deities appeared to be false, distorte
made. Yet only a minority of Egyptians embraced Atonism, and
unlikely that the movement would have attained any importanc
without the support of the pharaoh's power. Amenhotep's backe
to have been mainly social upstarts and soldiers, so that it is pos
interpret the Atonist movement as a struggle between army and
hood for primacy in the state.
Atonism collapsed upon Amenhotep's death. And once the fana
of Atonist reform had been abandoned, the Egyptian priests and
whose privileges Amenhotep had abrogated saw to it that all
what they regarded as barbarian religious subversion were er
Amenhotep's palaces and temples were razed, and his new c
Amarna was abandoned, never to be reoccupied. Amenhotep's
creed left few traces, except that, as we shall soon consider, it p
gave rise to the Mosaic religion of the Israelites.
The ancient Egyptian national way of life began to disappear u
conquest of the country by Alexander the Great in 330 BC
though Alexander did not seek to annex Egypt. On the contr
wanted to rule it as an Egyptian pharaoh and had himself d
Alexander's successors, the Ptolemies, actively encouraged the pr
tion of Egyptian life and religion. For the Greeks generally adm
Egyptians and learned much from them. Thus during the Ptolom
riod, the deities of Egypt remained mainly the same. The great
Osiris, Isis and their son Horus, remained supreme, but they cam
called by their Greek equivalents, Zeus, Hera and Ares. When Eg
came a Roman province in 30 BCE, there was no essential change
ligion and worship, except that some new deities were introduce

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

Rome, such as the Jupiter, Juno and Mars triad, chiefly for the benefit
and comfort of Roman officials and soldiers. The passion of Osiris and
mysteries of Isis became very popular with the Romans, and the religion
of Ancient Egypt spread over the highways of the Roman Empire, even
as far as France, the Rhineland and England. Its definitive end came in
642 CE, when the Arabs invaded the Valley of the Nile and put an end
to the Roman Empire in Egypt.

Sumer

Chronology (BCE)

3000 Rise of Sumerian culture; development of cuneiform

script.
2350 Conquest of Sumer by Sargon of Akkad
2000 Sumerian language ceases to be spoken but is retained
in liturgy.
1792-1750 Hammurabi, Amorite sovereign of Babylon,
1500 End of the creative period of Sumerian thought.

In a historical context, the whole part of southwestern Asia designated

as the 'Fertile Crescent' (that is, modern Turkish Anatolia, Iraq, Iran,
and Palestine) can be considered as a single cultural region. Its ancient
Greek name was 'Mesopotamia,' although, strictly speaking, that name
(meaning 'between rivers') denotes only to the territory lying in present-
day Iraq between the two great rivers, Tigris and Euphrates. Just as is the
case for Egypt, the earliest archeological indications of a civilized
Mesopotamian state date back to the fourth millennium BCE. By that
time, artificially irrigated agriculture had been developed and permanent
settlements established in the plain of Sumer in southern Mesopotamia,
whose people are known as 'Sumerians.' Despite the known presence of
other ethnic groups in that region, it is usual to refer to the earliest
Mesopotamian civilization as 'Sumerian.'
The development of the main lines of Sumerian civilization took place
during the pre-historic period, i.e. before the invention of cuneiform
script in about 3000 BCE. This is evident from Sumerian works of art,
whose major forms, motifs and styles had already been developed before
the earliest appearance of written records. Similarly, as shown by the

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 CIVILIZATION

archeological record, the development of Sumerian technology

cluster of great inventions-irrigation, wheeled vehicles, sailin
metallurgy, and oven-baked and wheel-turned pottery-also da
to the pre-historic period.
The problem of who the Sumerians were and whence they cam
not been solved. Their language seems unrelated to any other
tongue, and their skeletons provide no definitive morphological c
garding their racial origins. Sumerian religion and art gave specia
nence to animals, suggesting that its background was pastoral. Un
cient Egyptian society, which developed for millennia in the
Lower Nile Valley by the undisturbed descendants of the original
barbarian invaders from all sides periodically inundated the easil
sible plains of Mesopotamia. Thus by the beginnings of recorded h
a mixture of peoples were already populating the Fertile Crescen
earliest available records show Sumerians living side by side with
ers of Semitic languages. Though Sumerians predominated in the
and Semites in the north, there was extensive ethnic intermingl
many areas.
The Sumerian religion, like that of ancient Egypt, was polytheistic,
embracing a panoply of local deities. As in Egypt, the high gods of the
land were conceived in human form, each personifying an important
phenomenon of nature-sky, sun, earth, water and wind. The rounds of
the seasons were accounted for by a myth of an annual life-death cycle of
a God of Vegetation. His disappearance into the underworld in the fall
causes plant life to wither, until his springtime return to the living world
revives it.

The Sumerian myth of the creation of mankind by divine agency has

an important feature in common with the Torah's story of Genesis 1 (of
which it is likely to be the source); namely that mankind is partly animal
and partly divine. This implied that there is no impassable distance be-
tween the divine mode of being and the human condition. Although
mankind was created to serve the gods, who, their great supernatural
powers notwithstanding, need to be fed and clothed, humans are not
merely servants but also imitators of the gods, and hence their coworkers
rather than their slaves.
Since the gods are responsible for the cosmic order, people must obey
the divine decrees that insure the well-being of the world. These decrees

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

determine the destiny of every being, of every form of life, of every divine
and human enterprise. Yet, the cosmic order established by the gods is
continually troubled by mankind's crimes, faults, and errors, which must
be expiated and purged by means of various rites. Thus the Sumerians an-
ticipated the Paradox of Moral Responsibility, by holding people morally
responsible for their actions which, being determined or foreordained by
the gods, they could not have chosen freely.
The myth of the Flood-which was common to several ancient reli-
gions and undoubtedly reached the Torah from a Sumerian source as
well-is another early example of the Paradox of Moral Responsibility.
Although the details of the myth as told by different traditions vary, the
Flood stories generally agree in attributing the cause of the Flood to di-
vine displeasure over the sins of the morally decrepit mankind in a world
that the gods (or God) created. Thus by drowning the whole lot in the
waters of the Flood, they (or He) make room for morally superior folks to
populate a new and better world after their (or His) having another try at
Creation. The myth of the Flood is also an early version of theodicy, the
baffling theological paradox of a God who is omnipotent and omniscient
and yet can make mistakes and fail to foresee the regrettable results of his
handiwork. The paradox is sharper, of course, in the context of an un-
compromisingly monotheistic faith, such as that of the Israelites with its
one-and-only almighty God. It is less acute in the context of polytheistic
pagan religions, such as the Sumerian, and the Greco-Roman, with their
Pantheons of many gods, none of whom is wholly devoid of human frail-
ties. Whereas the attribution to God of having made a mistake in creat-
ing Adam and Eve would be sacrilegious, the tales of pagan deities, such
as Marduk and Zeus/Jupiter and their consorts, abound in errors and
foibles of their divine personages.
The Sumerians divided the irrigated land into large agricultural es-
tates, tended by many serf-like resident farmers. Ownership of an indi-
vidual estate was nominally vested in a local god residing in an on-site
temple, whose priests provided the visible members of the divine house-
hold. The priests looked after the wants of their divine squire through
ceremonies and sacrifices. They also acted as mediators between the god
and the temple's work force. An agglomeration of several such temple
communities constituted a Sumerian city.
As the agricultural temple estates flourished in Sumer, they too produced
more food than was needed to feed their farmers. This surplus allowed

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 CIVILIZATION

the priestly managers to withhold a substantial part of the harves

the farmers, for storage in the temple granaries. Far from being
parasitic on the farmers, however, the priests performed vital ma
functions without which Sumerian civilization could not have com
existence in the first place or long survived. The priests supervised
location of land, maintained boundary markers, and directed the g
laborers who maintained the irrigation canals and strengthen
dikes. Moreover, only the priests had the skills needed for reckon
seasonal calendar, laying out the canals and keeping accounts. Mo
portant still for the legitimization of the priests' power was their
the chosen communication channel linking the immortal gods an
mortal people.
Priestly management of the agricultural surplus led to the eme
of a class of workers who rendered services that were no longer d
connected with the production of food but provided the farmer
technical support, such as administrators, craftsmen, or soldiers. T
Sumerian temple-estate community with its agricultural surplus
vided the first institution in human history at which non-agricu
specialists could make a living. These people became the city d
whose relief from backbreaking labor allowed them to become th
ators, sustainers, and organizers of civilized life.
The Sumerian city-temples were unified in the twenty-fourth c
BCE upon the conquest of Sumer by a Semitic king, Sargon, of A
northern Mesopotamia. He transformed the ancient pattern of S
political life by changing the agglomeration of city-states of ess
equal standing into an empire administered from a newly built c
city and reaching beyond the limits of Sumer. The Sumerian lan
ceased to be a spoken tongue, but retained its function as a liturg
guage in religious ceremony, as was the case later also for Sanskr
brew, Latin, and Old Slavic.
In contrast to the millennia-long political stability of Egypt as
tion-state, Mesopotamia was in constant turmoil, with no state a
defend itself for long against invasion and takeover by fierce ba
hordes. No sooner had one of the barbarian invaders settled down to
found a new state and assimilated the civilized Sumerian way of life than
another barbarian horde turned up at the gates for the next conquest-as-
similation-cycle. Among the ancient successor states to Sumer, Babylo-
nia is the one whose name remained better known in the Western

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

World than that of any of the others, long after southwestern Asia had
ceased to be a focal point of the civilized world. No doubt, the reason for
this preferential remembrance is Babylonia's prominent mention in the
Torah as the country where the Israelites were held captive in the sixth
century BCE.
Babylon, an ancient town located on the River Euphrates not far
downstream from modern Baghdad, became the most important city in
Sumer when Hammurabi, king of the Barbarian Amorite invaders, made
it the capital of his empire in 1750 BCE. Hammurabi was of vital impor-
tance for the development of formal ethics because, as far as is known, he
was the first sovereign in the history of mankind to promulgate an ex-
plicit code of laws for the regulation of social behavior. Its text came
down to us in 3,600 lines of cuneiform script carved on a stone column
found in the ancient Persian city of Susa. (Hammurabi's code anticipated
by about 500 years the meanwhile better known code that Moses brought
down to the Israelites from Mount Sinai). Hammurabi's code provides for
some cruel and unusual punishments meanwhile outlawed by the U.S.
Constitution, such as the precursor of Moses' 'eye for eye' principle men-
tioned in Exodus 21:24. But, on the whole and for its time, it was reason-
ably humane.
The polytheistic Babylonian religion was derived from an elder
Sumerian theology. As were the gods of both Egypt and Sumer, so were
also the gods of Babylon regarded as divine sovereigns responsible for
the world's being orderly rather than chaotic. During Hammurabi's
reign there began a trend towards monotheism, in that Marduk, the
patron god of Babylon, became the omniscient, all-powerful deity of
the Babylonian Pantheon-the creator of mankind and the God of
Light and Life. Moreover, by way of a conceptual extension of Ham-
murabi's creation of social order out of chaos in human affairs by the
promulgation of his moral code, the idea arose in Babylon that Marduk
legislated explicit natural laws whose obeisance by nature generated
cosmic order out of chaos. Thus the metaphysical concept of univer-
sally valid 'laws of nature' promulgated by superlunary divinity, whose
discovery is the Holy Grail of modern science, turns out to be a
metaphorical extension of the laws of human affairs promulgated by
sublunary legislators.

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 CIVILIZATION

Israel

Chronology (BCE), according to the Torah

1800 Patriarch Abraham. Israelites from the city

of Ur settle in northwestern Mesopotamia.
1700 Jacob leads southward migration of
Israelites to Canaan (Palestine).
1600 Israelites migrate to and are enslaved in Egypt.
1300-1250 Exodus from Egypt. Adoption of Yahwistic monotheism.
1200 Israelites return to Canaan (Palestine) under
leadership of Joshua.
1000 Saul, first king of the Israelites.
900-300 First five books of the Torah written.

Many of the moral and religious traditions that are characteristic for
the modern Western world are rooted in ideas that came down to us from
the IsraeliteTorah. Its earliest version was written as late as the ninth
century BCE, or some five hundred years after the Israelite Exodus from
Egypt, as told in the Torah. Our direct knowledge of these ancient tradi-
tions was greatly extended, however, once Egyptian hieroglyphic as well
as Sumerian cuneiform script had finally been deciphered in the first part
of the nineteenth century CE. Then it transpired from documents dating
back to the thirtieth century BCE that many elements of the Mosaic reli-
gion of the Israelites were derived from the much older traditions of
Egypt and Sumer, the two main cradles of Western civilization. (McNeil,
1963). Despite the doubtful authenticity of the Torah's account of early
Israelite history, it does provide a deep perspective of the source of some
of the beliefs and metaphysical views in which contemporary (Western)
moral philosophy is rooted.
In about 1800 BCE-according to the Torah-the Israelites, a peri-
patetic Semitic tribe hailing from the city of Ur in the southernmost part of
Mesopotamia, migrated to its northwestern part under the leadership of
the Patriarch Abraham. Two generations later, Abraham's grandson, Jacob,
led the Israelites in a southwestward migration to Palestine, then popu-
lated by the Canaanite people. It was from Jacob, who was later called, 'Is-
rael' [srah+el = fight+God], that the Israelites derived their name.

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

To escape the consequences of a famine in Palestine in about 1600

BCE, some Israelites migrated southward to Egypt. After making them-
selves at home in the fertile Nile delta, then only recently liberated from
the occupation by the Semitic Hyksos invaders, the Israelites were en-
slaved by the first pharaohs of the New Kingdom and remained enslaved
for nearly three centuries. Finally, in about 1300 BCE, the Israelites
found a dynamic leader in Moses. He freed them from bondage, by lead-
ing their flight from Egypt to the Sinai desert. Once safely in the desert,
Moses persuaded his Israelite followers to adopt a monotheistic religion,
which entailed the worship of the one and only, all-powerful, ecumenical
God, nicknamed 'Yahweh' because his (unknown) real name was too
holy to be uttered.
One reason why many modern scholars doubt the authenticity of this
account of Israelite history provided by the Torah is the absence of any
archeological evidence that a substantial number of Israelites ever were
enslaved in Egypt. In view of written records of Egyptian history dating
back to 2000 BCE, it seems unlikely that-had they really happened-
the three-century-long presence of Israelites in Egypt and the dramatic
events connected with their eventual escape would have gone un-
recorded.

Moses and Monotheism. Who was Moses, if he indeed existed? Ac-

cording to the Torah's chapter Exodus 2:5-10, an Egyptian princess saved
Baby Moses from the waters of the Nile, where he had been abandoned
by his Israelite parents. She gave him his name, which was supposedly de-
rived from a Hebrew phrase meaning 'he who was pulled from the water.'
Even among those historians, however, who believe that Moses was a his-
torical person, few accept this Biblical story, not least because it seems
highly improbable that an Egyptian princess would have given the
foundling a Hebrew name. According to J.H. Breasted's history of Egypt,
the name 'Moses' is derived from the Egyptian word 'mos' meaning
'child.'
In his fascinating but much-maligned book, Moses and Monotheism,
Sigmund Freud (1939) (who believed that Moses was a historical person)
addressed the mystery of Moses' origins. In accord with Otto Rank's
(1914) psychoanalytic interpretation of the ubiquitous theme of the hero
as a foundling in mythic biographies, Freud concluded that Moses was
not a child abandoned on the Nile by his Israelite parents. Rather-so

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 CIVILIZATION

Freud conjectured-Moses was a highborn Egyptian, perhaps a prin

priest.
But what could have motivated a highborn Egyptian to make himself
the leader of a crowd of down-and-out Israelite slaves and leave his na-
tive Egypt with them. Freud finds it noteworthy that Moses not only be-
came the Israelites' political leader but that he also foisted a novel reli-
gion on them, which is called 'Mosaic' to this day. But how likely is it
that Moses, however highborn, would have created a new religion from
scratch? Would it not have been much more probable that Moses simply
converted the downtrodden Israelites, who undoubtedly had some kind
of religion when they arrived in Egypt three centuries earlier, to the tra-
ditional Egyptian religion?
No, this could not have been the case, since there are profound differ-
ences between the Mosaic and the Egyptian faiths. The Mosaic religion
is as purely monotheistic as a religion can get. There is only one God-
unique, omnipotent, unapproachable. The sight of His countenance can-
not be borne; one must not make any image of Him, nor even breathe
His name. The traditional Egyptian religion, by contrast, acknowledged a
bewildering diversity of deities, differing in their origin, importance, and
special competence. As we noted previously, some of these deities were
personifications of concrete natural phenomena, such as heaven and
earth, sun and moon. Others personified abstractions, such as justice and
truth. The shape of Egyptian deities is often that of an animal, as if the
gods had not yet overcome their origin in the totem animals of the Old
Stone Age. Moreover, the dominion of most traditional Egyptian deities
was local rather than global, dating back to the time when the Egyptian
state was split into many provinces.
There is yet another difference between the Mosaic and the Egyptian
faiths. No other people of antiquity did so much to deny death as the
Egyptians. They made elaborate provisions for an after-life and wor-
shipped Osiris, the god of death and ruler of the netherworld, as their
most popular deity. The Mosaic faith, on the other hand, does not believe
in immortality and does not mention the possibility of a life after death.
This is all the more remarkable in that the later rise of Christianity
showed that a belief in a life-after-death is compatible with monotheism.
Thus the faith to which Moses allegedly converted his Israelite follow-
ers was not the traditional polytheistic Egyptian religion. Instead, it would
have had to be the short-lived, revolutionary monotheistic Atonism that

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

briefly held sway in Egypt under Amenhotep IV, alias 'Ikhnaton,' a few
decades before the Israelite's Exodus from Egypt under Moses' leadership.
Admittedly, there are some striking differences between Atonism and
the Mosaic faith (in addition to God's different name), one of them
being that Mosaic monotheism is even more uncompromising than that
of Atonism. The Mosaic faith forbids all visual representations of God
and abandoned His Atonist identification with the sun.
In considering why Moses, if he was indeed an Egyptian, was moti-
vated to convert the downtrodden Israelites to Atonism and lead them
out of Egypt, Freud suggests the following, highly speculative but not im-
plausible scenario. Suppose that Moses was a noble and distinguished
Egyptian, perhaps a member of the royal household, as the Torah has it.
Highly intelligent, ambitious and energetic, he saw himself as a future
leader of his people, a governor of the Empire. Inspired by pharaoh
Amenhotep/Ikhnaton, Moses became a devout convert to Atonism,
whose basic principles he made his own. However, upon the suppression
of Atonism and restoration of Amonism following Amenhotep/Ikhna-
ton's early death, Moses saw all his hopes and prospects destroyed. He re-
alized that he had no political future in Egypt if he were not to recant the
new Atonist faith. So Moses sought to found his own empire, by looking
for a hapless group of people whom he could convert to the monotheistic
religion that his fellow Egyptians had rejected and lead them to settle
outside of Egypt. The people who turned out to be willing to follow
Moses were the enslaved Israelites.
For all its plausibility, there inheres at least one obvious defect in
Freud's Moses and Monotheism story: Freud does not mention what kind of
religion he thinks the Israelites had at the time they came to Egypt and
were enslaved. According to the Torah, the Israelites not only had been
monotheists for at least 200 years before they ever migrated to Egypt, but
they were even partners with the one-and-only God in a covenant made
on their behalf by the Patriarch Abraham. That covenant established the
Israelites as His chosen people. So they wouldn't have needed Moses to
tell them about Yahweh (alias Aton).
One might have expected the Israelites to assimilate the traditional
Egyptian and Sumerian modes of thought, since these were supported by
such vast prestige. But assimilation was not a characteristic Israelite trait.
On the contrary, the Israelites held out with a peculiar stubbornness
against the religions of their neighbors. Admittedly, one can detect many

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 CIVILIZATION

reflections of Egyptian and Sumerian myths and beliefs in the

for the student of comparative religion the Torah evokes more a
sion of originality than of derivation.
The outstanding tenet of Mosaic theology is the absolute
dence of God. He is not in nature. Neither earth, nor sun, nor
divine; even the most powerful natural phenomena are merely r
of His greatness. It is not even possible to name Him properly
of Israel is pure holiness, which means that all spiritual values
mately attributes of Him alone and that all concrete values are
ated. It may be true that under Israelite belief mankind and n
not necessarily corrupt; but both are valueless before God. Suc
ception of God led the Israelites to their iconoclasm vis-a-vis t
nature-based Gentile religions. An effort of the imagination is
appreciate the shattering boldness of Israelite contempt for the
theological imagery of their particular time and historical setti
western Asian religious fervor not only inspired verse and rit
sought expression in sculpture and painting. But the Israelites w
the party. They eschewed 'graven images' of God because the b
cannot be rendered in a finite form. He could not be other than offended
by any representation of Himself, whatever the skill and the devotion
that went into its making. Every finite reality shrivels into nothingness
before God's absolute value.
And it was this God whose will the Israelites believed was focused on
them as His chosen people. According to Exodus 19:6, He said to them
in Sinai: "Ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation."
This myth of a chosen people, of a divine promise made, imposed a terri-
fying moral burden on the Israelites. They were not merely the servants
of divinity, as were the Sumerians; nor were they placed, as were the
Egyptians, at a pre-ordained station in a static universe that could not be
questioned. Rather, the Israelites thought of themselves as the inter-
preters and persons of God, honored by the assignment of seeing to it
that God's will be done. Thus the Israelites were bound to unending ef-
forts that were doomed to fail because of their own shortcomings. In the
Torah one finds the Israelites endowed with a novel kind of freedom and
a novel burden of responsibility.
According to the Egyptian and Sumerian traditions, people were dom-
inated, but also supported, by the great rhythm of nature. If in their dark
moments they felt caught and held in the net of unfathomable decisions,

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

their involvement with nature had, on the whole, a soothing character.

They were gently carried along on the perennial cosmic tides of the sea-
sons. The depth and intimacy of peoples' relations with nature found ex-
pression in the ancient pagan symbol of the nurturing mother-goddess.
But Israelite thought ignored this pagan symbol entirely. It only recog-
nized God-the-stern-Father.

Mankind in God's Image. Some of the passages in the Torah that are
most relevant for appreciating the robustness of the ancient Western tra-
dition of mind-body dualism occur in the first Book of Moses in the de-
scription of God's final acts of creation of the animals and mankind on
the sixth day. Thus, according to Genesis 1:26-31:

"After God had filled the sea and the air with fish and birds on
the fifth day of creation, he made land animals on the sixth. Later
on the sixth day, God said: 'Let us make mankind in Our image,
after Our likeness. Mankind shall rule the fish of the sea, the birds
of the sky, the cattle, the whole earth, and all the creatures that
creep on the earth.' And God created mankind in His image, the
image of God. He created them, male and female. God blessed
them and said to them, "Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and
master it, and rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and all
the living things that creep upon the earth."

What is this creation in God's image supposed to consist of? It can

hardly be mankind's bodily form, which is obviously that of an animal.
And what's more, the Israelite God isn't supposed to have a bodily form in
the first place! No, God made mankind in His image by virtue of its spiri-
tual form, by virtue of endowing mankind with a transcendental soul that
He breathed into them. Thus the Torah passed on to us an ancient, albeit
paradoxical doctrine of human nature, which holds that we are both
beastly as well as divine, that we live both in as well as out of nature.
The centerpiece of that paradoxical doctrine of human nature is the
person, who is comprised of both a body and a soul. The person's body is
endowed with natural properties, which it shares with the bodies of ani-
mals and which are amenable to study by the scientific methods of biol-
ogy. The person's soul is endowed with a set of non-natural properties, such
as uniqueness, irreplaceability, and sacredness or being an end in itself
and, above all, a free will. The soul shares these non-natural properties,

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 CIVILIZATION

which are beyond the reach of scientific study, with God rather t
the animals. It is because of the difficulty of rejecting that ancien
out of hand that, since the time of the Ancients, philosophers an
gians have struggled with the semi-divine, semi-animal paradox o
nature and put forward dualist solutions to the mind-body problem

The Fall of Man. How did mankind turn into moral beings who
good and evil, right and wrong? Genesis 2:7 to 3:24 provides a not
coherent answer with its account of Adam and Eve's expulsion f
paradise of the Garden of Eden. In the middle of the Garden, wh
occupied by the animals as well as the first two humans God
stands a magical 'Tree of Knowledge.' Eating the fruit of this tree
the knowledge of good and evil, which is a non-natural attribute
vine prerogative that animals lack. God forbids Adam and Eve to
of the tree's fruit, but they do so anyhow and illicitly achiev
standing. It was God, of course, who empowered them to defy Hi
first place, by having created them in His image, and endowed th
non-natural free will. Thus He had personally seen to it that, unli
fellow animals in the Garden, Adam and Eve were capable of
ting sin. Adam and Eve's awareness of their freely willed, sinful d
ence resulted in their shame and guilt and expulsion from Eden.
Biblical scholars argue that this story was foreign to Egyptian
theology and has to stem from that part of Israel's inheritance of
western Asian mythology that was either passed on directly from
to Israelite ancestors during the Middle Bronze Age or indire
Canaanite culture. Most scholars reject the eighteenth century E
enment's Promethean interpretation of the myth, namely that
of Knowledge provided mankind with secular knowledge, cul
reason, by means of which humans can rival God's power in the
ment of secular affairs.
Coda. The deep psychological insight provided by the bottom l
the Southwest-Asian myth of the Tree of Knowledge seems to b
only sinners, but neither morally innocent animals nor morally
angels can be truly human.

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 SYMPOSION

Painting by Anselm Feuerbach (1866)

Left to right: Agathon (standing), Socrates (seated, turning his back on

Agathon), Aristophanes (seated, facing Socrates)

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 Chapter Three

Moral Philosophy

In the sixth century BCE, the seafaring Greeks came into contact with
all the then leading centers of the Western civilized world, including
Egypt and Southwestern Asia. These contacts set off a rapid development
of Greek culture. But it is not so easy to pinpoint the Greeks' cultural in-
debtedness to specific elder civilizations, because most of what the Greeks
borrowed from other peoples they transmuted and improved. And this un-
certainty regarding its pre-Hellenic roots applies also to philosophy
(meaning 'love of wisdom'), whose practice as an identifiable intellectual
discipline emerged in Greece at that time. As conceived by the Greeks,
who founded the world's first philosophical school in the harbor city of
Miletus on the Eastern shore of the Aegean Sea, one branch of philosophy
seeks to provide insights into the nature of existence (ontology) and of our
knowledge about the world (epistemology). Two further branches of philos-
ophy seek to provide criteria for artistic judgment (aesthetics) and for valid
reasoning (logic). The distinctly novel feature of Greek philosophy was
that its inquiries were undertaken in a wholly secular context, independ-
ently of the religious beliefs and theological dogmas that had provided ear-
lier approaches to these problems in Egypt and Southwestern Asia.

Socrates. Greek society was changing from an agrarian monarchy to

a commercial and industrial democracy in the century following the birth
of philosophy in Miletus. The archaic religious and secular traditions gov-
erning social transactions that had been handed down from one genera-
tion to the next came to be disdained by the uncouth commercial class of
nouveaux riches, scornful of the ancestral way of life. A novel metaphysi-
cal basis was therefore needed for justifying rules of moral conduct for a
democratic market society, in which wealth counted for more than noble
birth, and people-the buyers and sellers-had to be considered as social
equals. Socrates, a secular rather than religious prophet, who was born in

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

Athens in 469 BCE, met that need. His self-appointed mission was to
awaken mankind to the need for rational criticism of its moral beliefs and
rules of conduct, and to find an answer to the central existential ques-
tion: 'How should one live?'
Socrates held that by use of reason, mankind can devise a universal
moral code that reconciles personal self-interest with the Common Good
and applies to all people at all times. Thus he sought a rational rather
than divinely ordained justification of morals. Rejecting the self-validat-
ing claims of religious tradition, Socrates searched for rational answers to
questions such as 'What is justice? 'What is piety?' 'What is courage?' and
'What is virtue?' In this search, he rejected all attempts to explicate con-
cepts laden with moral value, such as justice, piety, courage, and virtue,
in terms of morally neutral facts. Indeed, he wondered how a question
such as 'What is justice?' could be answered at all, because our under-
standing of the meaning of 'justice' cannot be based on our personal ex-
perience, since no two actual instances of justice in the world are exactly
alike. So a wholly unambiguous statement about what constitutes moral
perfection is no more possible than is moral perfection itself. In other
words, not knowing exactly what it is, the morally perfect life is an ideal
which, at best, we can only approximate. All the same, by virtue of de-
manding rational grounds for moral judgments and by calling attention
to the lack of connection between moral values and morally neutral
facts, Socrates became the founder of moral philosophy.
Socrates did not manage to discover the universally valid and self-evi-
dent rational basis for a moral code he had set out to find. Yet he proclaimed
that, absent such a basis, mankind's actions would lack moral justification.
Even though Socrates may be considered the first moral philosopher, he nei-
ther produced any written philosophical texts nor established a philosophi-
cal school. He merely attracted a coterie of disciples, with whom he met reg-
ularly at drinking parties, or symposia, for philosophical discussions held in
the style of the question-and-answer 'Socratic dialogue.'
It is one of the great ironies of history that in 399 BCE, Socrates-who
devoted his life to the search for a rational foundation of morality-was
tried and condemned to death on a charge of morally corrupting young peo-
ple and propagating noxious religious heresies. At the time, it was widely
believed in Athens, however, that the real reason for Socrates' execution
was to punish him for his collaboration with pro-Sparta traitors to the
Athenian cause during the Peloponesian War between Athens and Sparta.

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 MORAL PHILOSOPHY

Although Socrates' role as the Founding Father of moral philosop

generally acknowledged, Plato and Aristotle, his two most influ
successors laid down the framework of moral philosophy as a cohere
tional discipline. It has been said of Plato and Aristotle that all of s
quent (Western) philosophy is merely a commentary on their work

Plato. A habitue of Socrates' symposia and his most renowned

ple, Plato, was born in Athens in 428 BCE. Most of Socrates' philoso
ical ideas have come down to us via Plato's written accounts of the
cratic dialogues that went on at the symposia. After Socrates' d
Plato founded his own philosophical school in Athens, which he
'Academy,' after the name of the garden in which his house was lo
He remained the Academy's head until his death in 347 BCE.
One of Plato's main philosophical preoccupations was the searc
answers to such questions as 'What is justice?' 'What is piety?' 'Wha
courage?' or 'What is virtue?' that had been asked but not answered
Socrates. To resolve Socrates' vexing quandary of how anyone can
come to know what justice is when no two actual instances to whic
concept of justice might apply are ever exactly alike, Plato develop
novel epistemological theory, the 'Theory of Forms.' According to
theory, there exists a perfect, unambiguous and eternal exemplar of
tice-its 'Form'-with a dim knowledge of which we are born int
world. This innate Form allows us to recognize justice when we enco
it. Plato's Theory of Forms is meant to apply not only to moral categ
such as justice and virtue, but also to all objects of possible knowle
Plato divided the objects of possible knowledge into two main sets.
set comprises sensible (that is, perceptible to our senses) concrete ob
And the other set comprises imperceptible, abstract objects, namel
Forms. Our knowledge of sensible, concrete objects is inaccurate and
ble, since the aspects concrete objects present to our senses are in con
flux. Our knowledge of imperceptible abstract Forms, however, is ac
and stable, since Forms, being eternal exemplars, are unchanging.
To support his claim of the unreliability of our knowledge about
true nature of concrete, sensible objects, Plato developed his Parabl
the Cave. In this tale, he likened persons who believe only what they
ceive as concrete objects to prisoners chained since childhood t
floor of an underground cave. All that the prisoners can see, and h
ever seen, are the shadows of objects thrown by a fire behind them

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

a wall in front of them. According to Plato, our direct knowledge of the

real world provided by sensory impressions of sensible objects is as in-
complete as would be that of the prisoners. It is only thanks to our capac-
ity to interpret our sensory impressions in terms of imperceptible abstract
Forms that we can fathom the world's ultimate realities.
Plato divided the category of abstract Forms into two sub-categories, one
consisting of mathematical, and the other of moral Forms. The philosophi-
cally more important of the two categories is that of the moral Forms. And
the most important of all moral Forms is that of the Good, because all ob-
jects must be defined relative to it if they are to be adequately evaluated.
Thus, according to Plato, moral knowledge is the highest and most rigorous
kind of knowledge, surpassing even mathematics. Unfortunately, it is also
the most difficult knowledge to acquire. Mathematics leads us away from re-
liance on visual images and sense perception towards reliance on abstract
thought. Morality demands an even greater effort of abstraction, because
the objects of moral knowledge are even less visualizable than geometrical
forms and numbers: Moral knowledge consists of categories and principles
ultimately unified under the all-encompassing Form of the Good.

Aristotle. Aristotle was Plato's most renowned disciple, as Plato had

been Socrates.' He was born in Macedonia in northern Greece in 384
BCE, socially well connected as the son of the court physician to Amyntas,
King of Macedonia, father of Philip II and grandfather of Alexander the
Great. Aged 17, Aristotle went down to Athens to study under Plato at the
Academy, where he remained for nearly 20 years, until Plato's death in 347
BCE. Failing to be appointed to the directorship of the Academy as Plato's
successor, a disgruntled Aristotle left Athens. King Philip II of Macedonia
engaged him as the tutor of Prince Alexander, who would presently emerge
as the mightiest conqueror of classical antiquity and terminator of the
3000-year-long governance of Egypt by her native dynasties.
After an absence of eight years, Aristotle returned to Athens, where he
founded his own philosophical school, the Lyceum, named after a nearby
temple consecrated to the worship of Apollo. Aristotle's learned interests
covered a much wider range than Plato's did. He produced major works on
ethics, metaphysics and logic, as well as on subjects as diverse as physics, bi-
ology, meteorology, mathematics, psychology, rhetoric, dialectics, aesthet-
ics and politics. The development of Aristotle's philosophical thought
continued for most of his life and can be subdivided into three periods.

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 MORAL PHILOSOPHY

In the first, or Academy period, lasting until Plato's death and

parture of the 37-year-old Aristotle from Athens, he was an ent
proponent of Platonism and accepted Plato's Theory of Form
second, or Macedonian period, lasting until the return of the 49-
Aristotle to Athens, he became increasingly critical of Platonism
all, of Plato's Theory of Forms. In Aristotle's opinion, asking 'W
substance?' is the central question for the resolution of the min
problem. [As we mentioned briefly in Chapter 1, this problem
the question whether there is not some basic difference bet
human body-the target of nature's forces of determinism
human mind-the seat of an autonomous free will.] For Aris
come to believe that asking whether some thing is a substance i
mount to asking whether it exists in the first place. This questio
tinct from asking what the thing is, since if something does not
cannot be anything.
In the third, or Lyceum period, lasting until his death at the a
Aristotle was feeling his way towards a new type of thinking. H
towards materialism, moving ever further away from Plato's ide
stressing the epistemological importance of observation of recurr
terns in nature. While Plato's paradigm of science had been
mathematics, Aristotle's became concrete biology (a discipline w
invented) and physics. And while Plato's goal for moral philosop
to make human nature conform to an ideal blueprint, Aristotle
tailor his moral principles to fit the evident demands of human
Aristotle's most influential contribution to the literature of m
losophy was his treatise Nicomachean Ethics. In this work he def
subject matter of ethics and outlined the methodology for its stu
ing on and revising the moral beliefs of the Greek society of h
(Aristotle, 1999). To explicate the notion of the Good, A
searched for the common feature of all things people consider
Plato had taught that there is an abstract Form of the Good that
passes all good things. But Aristotle held that there are many d
senses of 'the Good,' each of which must be defined separately fo
cumscribed realm of human experiences to which it applies.
sense of 'the Good' is relevant for only one of the diverse practic
sciences, such as economics, warfare, medicine, or naval architect
the goals of these disparate endeavors can be arranged as a hiera
importance, so that the Supreme Good can be identified with th

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

the paramount endeavor to which all the other goals are subordinate. Ac-
cording to Aristotle, that paramount endeavor in the personal or private
sphere is morality, whose goal is happiness, while the paramount endeavor
in the interpersonal or social sphere is politics, whose goal is the general wel-
fare. And since the Good of the whole ranks above the Good of one of its
parts, personal morality is subordinate to politics. However, for Aristotle
this proposition does not entail that persons must defer their interests to
those of the community, except under exceptional conditions, such as war.
Thus, Aristotle identified happiness as the supreme personal Good,
which he defined as the exercise of our natural mental functions in ac-
cordance with our virtues. 'So what are these virtues?' According to Aris-
totle, a virtue is the skill needed for properly exercising some particular
mental function. He distinguished two kinds of virtues-intellectual and
moral. Intellectual virtue comprises the skills needed for intuitive under-
standing, logical reasoning, practical wisdom, and creating works of art
and science. Moral virtue, on the other hand, comprises the skills needed
for making felicitous compromises between the extremes of conflicting
emotional or rational motivations for action. For instance, the virtue of
courage is a compromise between having too much or too little fear. The
virtue of temperance is a compromise between wanting to eat or drink
too much and too little. And the virtue of justice is a compromise be-
tween wanting to reward or punish too much or too little.
So what is the source of these moral virtues? According to Aristotle it is
human reason, which he considered as one of mankind's most precious pos-
sessions. As social creatures we can attain happiness only through social in-
teractions with other people, because the good life is the common goal of
our moral and political striving. These social interactions, which are
guided by reason, are optimally realized in the Greek city-state, or polis.
Aristotle considered the polis as the most perfect kind of human society be-
cause, while it includes smaller social groups, such as the family or the vil-
lage, it is large enough to provide within itself everything necessary for the
good life. Yet, in contrast to a national state comprising many cities, the
polis was also small enough so that deliberations could take place and deci-
sions are made in face-to-face discussions among all citizens. These deliber-
ations, in turn, provided the necessary conditions for people to take a crit-
ical view of the relation of the individual to the collectivity. Thus, for
Aristotle, citizenship was not a matter of passively enjoying rights but of
participating actively in the many-sided, rationally guided life of the polis.

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 MORAL PHILOSOPHY

The bulk of the Nicomachean Ethics consists of a detailed list for iden-
tifying particular moral virtues. The bottom line of Aristotle's investiga-
tion of morals is the definition of happiness and the good life as an activ-
ity in accordance with virtue, and thus as the harmonious fulfillment of
one's natural tendencies.
This Aristotelian emphasis of happiness and human welfare as the
Supreme Good represents a pagan approach to morality, rejected by the
austere moral principles of Judaism and of its Christian and Muslim deriv-
atives. Anyone advocating it publicly in Medieval Europe would have
risked being burnt on the stake. But upon the advent of the Enlighten-
ment, the eighteenth century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham re-
vived it under the name of 'utilitarianism.' Bentham held that the greatest
happiness for the greatest number is the fundamental and self-evident cri-
terion of morality. Although this criterion may seem self-evident on first
sight, on second sight it turns out to provide a license for the majority to
trample on the rights of a minority in a complex, heterogeneous society.
Plato had considered the concept of moral responsibility only
obliquely. He believed that no one does evil voluntarily. Hence evil ac-
tions are always due to intellectual error. Aristotle dealt with responsibil-
ity more directly in his Nicomachean Ethics, however, although somewhat
inconclusively. He noted that since virtue is concerned with actions and
passions, praise or blame is conferred only if they were voluntary, while
pardon (and sometimes also pity) is granted if they were involuntary.
Hence for fathoming the nature of virtue, as well as for meeting out re-
wards or punishments, it is necessary to distinguish between the volun-
tary and the involuntary. Actions and passions that are involuntary arise
accidentally or from coercion, meaning that they are brought about by
force, dire threat, or authority applied to the agent by other persons or by
circumstances beyond the agent's control.
But, so Aristotle pointed out, there are some situations in which it is
not obvious whether an action is involuntary or voluntary, such as an evil
action undertaken only to avoid an even greater evil, or to achieve some
higher purpose. By way of an example he mentioned compliance with an
order of a tyrant, who has one's parents or children in his power, to carry
out an evil action under the threat that in case of refusal, one's beloved
would be put to death. Aristotle thought that the attribution of moral re-
sponsibility to a person who is faced with such a dilemma is not all that
clear-cut. He judged that an action undertaken in response to a dire

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

threat is actually more voluntary than involuntary. For the agent was of-
fered a choice at the time he acted. Hence the distinction between 'vol-
untary' and 'involuntary' can be made, and the moral justification of the
goal of an action can be judged, only by taking into account the entire
context of the occasion in which the action occurred. Strictly speaking,
all human actions (other than reflexes and movements implemented by
the autonomic nervous system) are 'voluntary' (and designated as such
by neurophysiologists) in the concrete. An action, therefore, can be re-
garded as 'coerced' only in the abstract, namely by supposing that the
person would never have chosen to carry it out in the absence of the dire
threat. [We will return to this argument in Chapter 8, under the rubric of
the Principle of Alternate Possibilities.]
According to Aristotle, intellectual error has to be distinguished from
moral vice, since error, unlike vice, is involuntary. To distinguish culpable
evil from innocent mistakes, he explained vice as due to wrong desire as
well as to poor judgment. For Aristotle, the will is a rational desire, formed
by moral education and training. But since natural tendencies and early
training determine even voluntary action, Aristotle searched for an addi-
tional factor to account for the freedom (or autonomy) of choice necessary
for moral responsibility. He thought he found the factor in deliberation, that
is, in the consideration of reasons for and against a course of action.
Aristotle did not address the question whether persons actually have any
real choice when they deliberate, and consequently bear any responsibility
for the outcome of their deliberations. As we will consider in Chapter 7, it
remains an unsettled issue, debated by Determinists and Libertarians. Deter-
minists hold that every action is causally necessitated by prior states of the
world and by the laws of nature. Libertarians hold, to the contrary, that de-
spite what happened in the past and given the present state of affairs and
ourselves just as they are, we could have chosen or decided differently
from what we did choose or decide. Hence we could have made the fu-
ture different from what it would otherwise have been.

Three East Asian Teachings. At about the same time as secular

moral philosophy arose in Greece, there developed in India and China
three philosophico-ethical systems (or Godless religions), referred to col-
lectively as the 'Three Teachings' of Buddhism, Confucianism and Tao-
ism, which still govern East Asian social life in large measure today. The
defining characteristic of East Asian moral philosophy is the belief that

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 MORAL PHILOSOPHY

human beings are morally perfectible, by self-effort in ordinary d

rather than by divine grace. Accordingly, the primary focus of th
Teachings is self-knowledge. None of them even trouble to reject a
sibility the Judeo-Sumerian conception of a divine Creator as the
mate legislator and guarantor of morals. Rather, the East-Asian a
to personal moral development focuses on learning how to be a rig
human being by self-examination and self-transformation. Moral
edge so conceived is not a cognitive grasp of a particular ensemble
jective truths but a critical understanding of one's own subjective
states and feelings. (Tu, 1980)
But how can a critical understanding of one's own subjective me
states and inner feelings serve as a guide to objective, generally vali
truths? According to the Three Teachings, this is possible because e
body-simply by virtue of being human-has an innate knowled
Sacred Way of Life. This is the right Way, the ideal Way of Human
tence, the Way of the Cosmos, or the Generative-Normative
which, once it is understood, can guide the adept to righteous soc
havior. Buddha referred to this Sacred Way as the ariya atthangita
or 'Noble Eightfold Path,' while Confucius and Lao Tzu, called it 'T

Buddha. The atheistic religion of Buddhism was founded in Nor

India by Siddharta Gautama. He was an Indian prince born in 563
who was later called 'Buddha' (meaning 'Enlightened One'). Hi
goal was to find an ultimate solution to the problem of the suffer
herent in the human condition. The solution he found was incorp
into the basic Buddhist doctrine of the dharma, or 'Four Noble Tr
They are that existence means suffering; that suffering has a
namely craving; that an end to suffering, or nirvana, is possible by sto
to crave; and that the way to nirvana is provided by the Noble Ei
Path. The eight stages on that Noble Path are the right world vie
right aspiration, the right speech, the right conduct, the right w
making a living, the right effort, the right mindfulness, and the righ
templation. The moral laws of Buddhism are articulated as 'Fi
cepts.' They forbid the taking of life (including animal life), thef
chaste sex, slander, and imbibing intoxicants.
Buddha rejected the idea of a divine Creator, mainly for the
(which we will consider in greater detail in Chapter 4 under the ru
'theodicy') that the existence of evil and suffering is an insuperable

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

to a belief in God. Moreover, Buddha deemed cosmological and metaphys-

ical questions, such as the finitude of the cosmos in space and time or the
immortality of the person, as intrinsically unanswerable. According to
Buddha, the person is a transient dualist composite of mentalist and physi-
calist states, and the concept of an inner soul is superfluous as well as false.
This is in accord with his doctrine of impermanence, which implies that all
entities can be resolved into a series of transitory states.
After Buddha's death, his teachings were transmitted, at first by oral
tradition and later by texts written in the second and first centuries BCE.
Different Buddhist sects eventually arose with varying views on diverse
religious and philosophical issues, as Buddhism spread North- and East-
ward from India to become one of the world's major religions.

Confucius. The sixth century BCE, during which moral philosophy

got its start in China, as it did in Greece, was the era of the waning reign
of the Chou dynasty (which dated back to the twelfth century BCE). At
that time, China-just as did Greece-consisted of several independent,
constantly feuding states. Yet, despite the general political disorder, both
China and Greece were then flowering in their classical cultural periods.
The most influential of the Chinese philosophers of that era-and prob-
ably of any Chinese era-was Confucius, who lived in the state of Lu
(the modern Chinese province of Shantung) from about 550 to about
480 BCE. As was the case also for the teachings of Socrates, who was
born a decade after Confucius died, Confucian philosophy is known to us
only second hand, through a collection of his sayings and dialogues
recorded by his disciples. In the West, this collection is known as the
Confucian Analects, (from the Greek analegein, to collect).
According to the Analects, Confucianism is a set of ethical guidelines
for the proper management of society. Its precepts are based on the fun-
damental premise that people are social creatures and that, therefore,
there is virtue in harmonious social relations. The relations are made
harmonious, not by obedience to universally valid abstract moral princi-
ples, such as freedom and justice, but by exact adherence to a combina-
tion of prescribed etiquette and ritual. (We will consider the philosophi-
cal distinction between etiquette and ethics in Chapter 11.)
The Analects present a thoroughly humanist view of the world, and, ac-
cordingly, its Sacred Way of Life, or Tao, emphasizes human nature, behav-
ior, and social relationships. The two most important, constantly recurring

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 MORAL PHILOSOPHY

themes in the Analects are ritual (li) and virtue (jen), with two ce
components of the jen theme being conscientiousness (chung) and
gations entailed by familial-social relationships (shu). According t
worldly, practical humanism of the Analects, one's moral and spiri
complishments do not depend on divine grace, good luck or on any
purely external determinants. Instead, they depend on the so
which one happens to be endowed innately and on the amount an
ity of study and good hard work that one puts into shaping it. T
has to labor long and hard to learn the ii, whose root meaning is
'holy ritual' or 'sacred ceremony.' It is characteristic of Confucian
ing that the language and the imagery of the ii is the medium tha
it possible to talk about the entire corpus of human mores, or mor
cisely, about the authentic tradition and reasonable conventions o
ety. People become truly human as their cravings are shaped by the
cause it shows the way to their civilized fulfillment. Rather than b
formalistic dehumanization of personal desires, ii is a specifically h
izing guide for the dynamics of interpersonal relations.
Confucius did not elaborate on the categories of free will, choic
moral responsibility, no more than did his Indian and Chinese con
poraries. In fact, Confucius did not even have a language in which
press the concepts of 'choice' and 'responsibility,' which were so c
for his contemporaries in Greece and Southwestern Asia. Occas
he used terms roughly akin to them. But he did not develop them
ways so characteristic of their central import in Western philosop
religious understanding of mankind.
The language and imagery that is elaborated and that forms the
frame of Confucius' teachings presents a strange yet intelligi
harmonious picture. For Confucius, a human being is not a sovereig
son who is innately endowed with an autonomous power of decision
lect among real alternatives and thereby to shape a life for himself
Confucius considers people to be born 'raw,' in need of being refined
ucation to become truly human. To accomplish this, one must lea
Tao, to which one ought to be attracted by virtue of its own nobil
the nobility of those people who walk it. The motivation for follow
Tao is not conceived as an enhancement of personal power over th
or physical environment. Rather, it is seen as the desire for sharpen
steadying one's social aim or orientation to the point where one can
viatingly walk the one true Way and turn into a civilized human

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

Walking the Way incarnates in people the vast spiritual dignity and
power that resides in the Tao.
Confucius recognized four different causes for moral infractions. (1) The
person was not taught well enough to be able to recognize which actions are
and which are not in line with the Tao. (2) The person has not yet acquired
the necessary skills to follow the Tao. (3) The person does not persist in the
required effort (for lack of strength rather than by choice). (4) The person is
not wholly committed to the Tao. Although the person knows enough about
the Way that she could perform the actions that are called for, she either acts
erratically or perverts the rites of li to serve her own personal advantage.
Yet, despite this essentially down-to-earth, secular morality, one can
also find an occasional comment in the Analects that reveals a belief in
magical powers, thanks to which some persons can implement their will
directly through ritual or incantation. Magic can produce great effects ef-
fortlessly, marvelously, with an irresistible force that is itself intangible,
invisible, and covert. The user of magic simply wills the end accompa-
nied by proper ritual gesture and words. Confucius' suggestion of a magi-
cal dimension to human virtue constitutes an obstacle, of course, in the
way of acceptance of his otherwise very reasonable doctrines by us so-
phisticates of the twenty-first century CE.

Lao Tzu. More or less contemporary with the rise of Confucianism

there appeared also a rival brand of moral philosophy in fifth century BCE
China. Its essential doctrines-just as those of Confucianism-are embod-
ied in a Sacred Way, or Tao. Unfortunately, the traditional designation of
this rival philosophy to Confucianism is 'Taoism,' even though Confucian-
ism is no less 'Taoist' than is Taoism. It is in their conception of the essence
of the Sacred Way that Confucianism and Taoism differ significantly.
The Taoist philosophical system is derived chiefly from the Tao-te-
ching, a book that was probably written as late as mid-third century BCE
and whose authorship is traditionally ascribed to the legendary founder
of Taoism, Lao Tzu. He was allegedly born at the turn of the fifth century
BCE, but in contrast to Confucius, about whose existence there is no
doubt, there is no evidence that Lao Tzu was really a historical person.
The Tao-te-ching describes the path taken by natural events that proceed
without effort, either by spontaneous activity, such as the effortless
downward flow of water, which wears away the hardest substance, or by
regular alternations of phenomena, such as day invariably following

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 MORAL PHILOSOPHY

night. Like flowing water, persons following the Tao must abjure a
ing, and, accordingly, the ideal state of being is freedom from desi
The main difference between the Tao of Confucianism and the Ta
Taoism is that Confucianism stresses the Tao of non-natural human
ety while Taoism stresses the Tao of natural phenomena. Thus the
manistic Sacred Way of Confucianism, being concerned with the
cal order and the practical life of the person, tries to deal wi
problems inherent in social relationships. It prescribes social norm
moral precepts, for which the ways of nature are of little relevan
natural Sacred Way of Taoism, by contrast, is a transcendental mo
losophy, whose main relevance is for the person's inner life rathe
for her social relations. Taoist precepts are based on the funda
premise that mankind is part of nature and that, therefore, hum
must follow the Tao of natural phenomena. Besides abjuring all st
in following the natural Tao, people must distrust reason and att
attain a mental state in which they are as free from desire and sens
periences as possible. The political doctrines developed by the Taoi
flect their quietist philosophy of withdrawal from worldly affairs
believe that the duty of a ruler is to protect his subjects from exp
ing material wants or strong passions and to impose a minimum
ernment. The Taoists rejected the social values embraced by the C
cians as symptoms of excessive government. Neither Confucianism
Taoism invokes God or Eternal Reason as the source of its authori
does either posit the existence of any natural law or human r
Rather, both systems endeavor to provide for mankind's harmony
environment-the social environment in the case of Confucianism and
the natural environment in the case of Taoism.
The original division of labor between Confucianism and Taoism at
the time of their emergence twenty-five centuries ago is still reflected in
contemporary Chinese social and political life. While Confucianism
continues to guide Chinese political affairs (including the homegrown
brand of Chinese Communism), Taoism is manifest chiefly in Chinese
cultural life-in art and literature.
A basic tenet of the Tao-te-ching is that the human world is merely a
part of the natural world. This tenet brought Taoism into conflict with
the Confucian emphasis on the non-natural, magical aspects of human
behavior and social relationships, such as ritual, virtue, and obligations
entailed by familial-social relationships. The anti-Confucian Taoists

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

taught that one should strive to restore the continuity between mankind
and nature by freeing the person from the unnatural, restrictive influence
of social norms, moral precepts and worldly goals. Eventually, a more or
less symbiotic relation developed between Confucianism and Taoism. In
this symbiosis, the Confucian bureaucracy ran the state, while the Taoist
intelligentsia provided spiritual and cultural leadership.
Taoism, with its focus of attention on nature, also became the intellec-
tual fountainhead for the development of Chinese science. But since
Taoism mistrusts the powers of reason and logic and does not provide for
the (Sumerian) idea of laws of nature, the evolution of Chinese science
took a course very different from that of Western science. Joseph Need-
ham (1969) epitomized this difference in the following terms: "With
their appreciation of the relativism and the subtlety and immensity of the
universe, [the Chinese scientists] were groping after an Einsteinian world
picture without having laid the foundations for a Newtonian one."
Since Taoism regards the workings of nature to be inscrutable for the
theoretical intellect, Chinese science developed along mainly empirical
lines. This empirical development was slow but steady, and by Renais-
sance times, Chinese science and the technology it had inspired were
considerably more advanced than anything that had been achieved in
the West. Indeed, much of pre-Renaissance European science fed on
Chinese discoveries that had percolated from East to West. Many of the
key inventions that eventually produced the transformation of medieval
into modern Europe, such as gunpowder, movable type, the mechanical
clock, the magnetic compass, the stern post rudder, and pasta, were of
Chinese origin. But lacking the spiritual incentive to integrate its empir-
ical discoveries into a general theoretical framework, Chinese science re-
mained an intellectually fragmented enterprise.
Backward Western science began its meteoric rise with Galileo's dis-
covery that models built on mathematically expressible laws dealing with
exactly measurable quantities can give a useful account of reality. Thanks
to that discovery, Western science soon left Chinese science far behind.
For it turned out that, contrary to the Taoist doctrine, the working of na-
ture is not all that inscrutable for the intellect. Provided that the ques-
tions one asks of nature are not too deep, satisfactory answers can usually
be found. Difficulties arise only when, as we will note in Chapters 12 and
14, the questions become too deep, and their answers are no longer fully
consonant with rational thought or intuition.

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 MORAL PHILOSOPHY

Immanuel Kant. Shifting to fast forward in our survey of the

ment of moral philosophy, onwards from its origins twenty-five
years ago in the Mediterranean Basin and East Asia, to the Ag
lightenment in the eighteenth century CE, we encounter Im
Kant, the towering figure of modern moral philosophy.
Kant's approach to morality is designated as deontological, whic
that in judging the moral praise- or blameworthiness of peoples
one evaluates the intrinsic principles of rightness and wrongne
intentions that motivated them. Thus Kant differed fundamenta
Aristotle's and Bentham's utilitarian approaches to morality. As w
earlier in this chapter, the utilitarian crux of moral action is the
tion of a socially felicitous goal or purpose, especially the attain
human happiness and the good life as a harmonious fulfillment
ples' natural inclinations. According to Aristotle, the highest Go
mankind is eudaemonia, or material and spiritual well being, wh
tham's paramount utilitarian end was epitomized as the goal of
about the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.
From the viewpoint of the person, the utilitarian approach to m
tion is straightforward, provided one has some eudaemonian Hap
mind. One may be mistaken, of course, in expecting that one's ac
actually bring about the end one desired, or, in case it does bring
desired end, whether the end's consequences were, in fact, thos
sired. The deontological approach is much less straightforward,
How can one know whether one's intended action is in accord wit
trinsic requirements of morality? Kant proposed a solution for this q
One must apply his test of the categorical imperative, which comman

"Act only on that maxim (that is, general rule or principle)

which you can at the same time will to be a universal law."

Since the categorical imperative demands that one selects maxim

basis of their eligibility as universal law, it presupposes that one is ab
regard one's personal inclinations and thoughts about one's own h
in choosing a morally righteous course of action. The categorical i
became Kant's most famous, albeit not his most important, contr
moral philosophy. It was controversial when Kant first put it forwar
still remains so today. One of the common objections raised by Kant's
has been directed against his sharp distinction between categorical and
thetical imperatives. According to Kant, the categorical imperativ

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

You ought to do Y!

commands an action as of itself rationally necessary and endowed with

an automatic reason-giving force, without regard to any other end. A hy-
pothetical imperative, however, commands an action only as a means to
some other end:

If you want X, you ought to do Y!

This objection to Kant's sharp distinction between the two kinds of

imperatives does not appear unreasonable. For it seems improbable that
there are any moral imperatives with an automatic reason-giving force
arising ex nihilo from pure reason, independently of our personal inclina-
tions and thoughts about our own happiness. For, according to Kant's
contemporary, the Scottish philosopher David Hume (whom Kant cred-
ited with waking him from his 'dogmatic slumber'), reason is, and ought
to be, the slave of the passions. Thus the reason-giving force of all imper-
atives, including that of categorical imperatives, would have to derive
from the implied hypothetical proposition

If you want, (or believe, or care about) X, you should do Y!

Another troublesome problem inherent in Kant's formulation of the

categorical imperative arises from its demand that the person must be
able to will the maxim to be 'a universal law.' What does it mean to be
able to will a maxim to be a universal law? Critics of Kant's categorical
imperative have no trouble putting forward counterexamples that refute
any candidate maxim nominated for standing as a universal law. For in-
stance, one of the many possible counterexamples refuting the universal
validity of the categorical imperative 'thou must not tell a lie' invokes a
Gestapo officer who barges into a house in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam
and asks the householder "Where is Anne Frank hidden?" According to
the maxim, the Dutchman ought to reply truthfully: "She's hidden in the
attic; Sir. Second door to the left." But the Dutchman lies and replies:
"Anne Frank? Never heard of her." Is the Dutch liar acting immorally?
No, he is not, because he is perfectly able to will as universal law an
amendment to the maxim, to wit "thou must not tell a lie, except when
you can save an innocent life."
Since Kant's time, many deontologically inclined moral philosophers
have tried to provide a more secure rational basis for his categorical

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 MORAL PHILOSOPHY

imperative. One of the best-known contemporary attempts was p

ward by John Rawls (1971) in his book A Theory of Justice. T
Kant's demand that in choosing maxims eligible for the status of u
sal moral law, people have to be able to disregard their personal i
tions and thoughts about their own happiness, Rawls invokes w
calls an 'original position.' In that position people are under a 'vei
norance.' They do not know their own place in society-their
personal traits, race, and social class, or even their (utilitarian) co
of the good life. Hence, according to Rawls, they can make their
judgments as unbiased representatives of every member of society
Neither Rawls' nor anyone else's modification of the categorical
perative was any more immune to philosophical criticism than ha
Kant's original formulation. The most obvious defect of Rawl's 'or
position' is that it is not a practical guide to moral action in any
ciety, even for moral people of good will. For its applicability is lim
the lucky members of a utopian, ideal democratic society, unl
arise any time soon in the sublunary sphere.
Despite the not wholly unwarranted criticism calling attention
conceptual flabbiness, Kant's categorical imperative remains a plau
(albeit not infallible) guide to willing morally relevant actions in
plex social situations for which no non-trivial, exceptionless rules
explicitly articulated. Although not infallible, the categorical imp
may still be the best rule of thumb for judging whether a contem
action is in accord with deontological criteria of morals in an imp
world. Being imperfect, in such a world some willable maxims m
more universal validity than others, just as on Orwell's Anima
some may be more equal than others.

Coda. It is one of the curious facts of world history that the first te
of secular moral philosophy appeared independently in Europe and
Asia during the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. In Greece, this deve
was set off by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and in India and China
'Three Teachings' of Buddha, Confucius, and Lao Tzu. Among thes
cient founders of moral philosophy, Buddha and Confucius were th
and Chinese analogs of Plato, whereas Lao Tzu was the Chinese an
Aristotle. The dominant influence of Greek moral philosophy in the
Christian-Muslim world and that of the Three Teachings in Ea
reaches down twenty-five centuries to our own times.

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ST. AUGUSTINE (354-430) IN HIS STUDY
Painting by Sandro Botticelli (1480)

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 Chapter Four

Theodicy

Christian Philosophy. Christianity spread through the Roman Empire

onwards from the second century CE, offering the poor and oppressed
hope for otherworldly bliss, to compensate them for all their worldly suf-
fering. This promise of future happiness in a life after death provided for
an optimistic and fervent approach to life before death with which the
more pessimistic and intellectual teachings of Platonic and Aristotelian
philosophy could not compete. By the fourth century, Christian beliefs
had come to dominate Western world.
Having converted the masses, the time had come for the Church to
win over the intelligentsia, by devising a credible system of Christian
metaphysics. A new era now began in the history of moral philosophy, as
Christian philosophy arose as a fusion of secular Greek philosophy with
the monotheistic Israelite belief in a personal God. Greek philosophers
had sought the foundations of morals in rational principles, while Jewish
theologians derived their ultimate source of moral authority from God's
commandments conveyed in the Torah. Upon the rise of Christian phi-
losophy, these two disparate sources of moral standards-human reason
and divine commandments-came to stand side-by-side in a single moral
system, and the tension between them led to the divergent interpreta-
tions of theological doctrines that have caused sectarian strife in Chris-
tendom ever since.
Early Christian philosophers were confronted with the baffling para-
dox inherent in most monotheistic religions, namely that they embrace
the transcendental belief in a one-and-only, all-powerful, righteous, be-
nign God, despite the obvious empirical fact that the world He created
abounds in evil. This paradox derived its modern name, theodicy, [which
is a composite of the Greek words theos (God) and dikd (justice)], from the
title of a book published in the early eighteenth century by the German

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The kinds of

evil usually invoked under the rubric of theodicy are the physical suffer-
ing and the mental anguish of innocent people caused either by other
people or by natural disasters (such as epidemic diseases, floods, and
earthquakes).
Long before it received its modern name, however, the theodicy para-
dox had been acute in the context of the Judeo-Christian faith and the
Torah's account of God's creation of the World. According to Genesis
1:26-31, God created mankind in His 'image.' So why, if He really did
create mankind in His image, didn't He incorporate His own most im-
portant moral qualities of righteousness and virtue into his creatures?

Zoroaster. The theodicy paradox had not been as acute in the context
of Judeo-Christianity's ancient polytheistic precursor religions, such as
those of the Egyptians, Sumerians, or Greco-Romans. Although their
pagan Pantheons usually included a righteous God-in-Chief, such as Re,
Marduk, or Zeus/Jupiter, He was not all-powerful and had to contend
with lesser, sometimes-malign fellow deities, who were regarded as the
main sources of evil in the World. One ancient version of this polytheis-
tic account of the source of evil, whose theological influence survived
well into the Middle Ages, was the doctrine promulgated in the sixth
century BCE by the Persian prophet Zoroaster (whom the Greeks called
'Zarathustra'). He taught that of the gods of the Pantheon only one,
Ahura Mazda, was good and righteous. All the other gods, called collec-
tively 'Angra Mainyu,' were malign. They opposed Ahura Mazda, whose
power was evenly matched with theirs, so that in this everlasting divine
struggle of good versus evil, it was win some and lose some for both sides.
The Zoroastrian doctrine presaged also the hopeful vision of a Messianic
redemption of mankind at the end of history, when good Ahura Mazda
was going to score an eschatological Final Victory over the evil Angra
Mainyu crowd.

Manicheanism. In the third century CE another Persian prophet,

Mani, adapted the Zoroastrian resolution of the paradox of theodicy for
the rising tide of monotheism that had been energized by Christianity in
the first centuries CE. According to Mani's monotheistic religion of
Manicheanism, which presented a farrago of the teachings of Zoroaster,
Buddha, Plato, and Jesus, there rages an everlasting struggle between the

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 THEODICY

divine forces of good and of evil. In this struggle, the forces of

in the realm of the one-and-only God and are represented by
spirit, while the forces of evil arise in realm of the fallen ang
are represented by darkness and matter. Mani regarded women
the forces of Satan. They seduce men, so that, if women have
the day of emancipation from darkness and matter will never c
the Zoroastrians in Persia martyred Mani as a heretic in 276 C
gion spread rapidly throughout the Roman Empire and Sou
Asia. By the sixth century CE, however, Manicheanism had di
along with the Roman Empire.
Some early Christian theologians offered another way of reso
theodicy paradox in the terms of Plato's mind-body dualism. T
that the Biblical phrase 'in God's image' refers only to our sou
virtue we share with Him. But our body, which is a separate s
and obviously very similar to the body of many non-human cr
share with the animals rather than with God. Thus our animal
Divine Grace and is the repository of the evil that is within u
ing to that dualist view, our evil deeds arise as the result-after
nal struggle-of a victory of evil flesh over righteous soul, or
matter over benign spirit.
Another resolution of the paradox of theodicy was provid
doctrine of free will. Suppose that He did make mankind's
image and that one of God's most potent attributes is the free
will. In that case He surely passed on that mark of His distinc
humans He created. Yet, He took a considerable risk in creatin
with free will, since the gift of freedom entailed the possibilit
creatures might turn against Him, as they indeed did accordin
events told in the Torah's Genesis 3, known as the 'The Fall of
try out their God-given free will Adam and Eve violated thei
edict, set themselves against Him and even sought to be His p
Free will turned out to be an even more contentious theolog
than the origin of evil that free will had been thought cap
plaining. In fact, free will became the crucial moral issue upon
Christianity, because of the Judeo-Christian belief that God h
knowledge of the future. How can our will be free if He knew
were going to decide long before we actually did decide freely
Such divine foreknowledge did not seem to allow for the kind o
that would provide a rational basis for the notion of moral res

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

in the first place. How can God be just in rewarding us for our good deeds
and punishing us for our evil deeds, if these were all foreordained by
Him?

Pharisees, Essenes, and Sadducees. At the time of Jesus' birth there

flourished three Jewish sects in Palestine: the Pharisees, the Sadducees
and the Essenes. They differed in their interpretation of the Torah, in the
strictness of their observance of religious ritual and dietary law, in their
social class, and, most importantly in the context of our discussions of the
Paradox of Moral Responsibility, in their views about free will. (Stem-
berger, 1995)
Until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in mid-twentieth century,
our knowledge about these sects was based on only two contemporary
sources: the Gospels of the Christian Evangelists-especially that ac-
cording to St. Paul-and the writings of the Jewish historian, Josephus
Flavius. Both Paul and Josephus described themselves as Pharisees, the
sect that comprised upper class Jews, including the priesthood and col-
laborators with the Roman Imperial administration, and whom the
Gospels portray in an unfavorable light.
In his treatise, The Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus noted that the three
sects differ in their opinions regarding the causation of human actions.
The Essenes affirmed that fate determines all actions, and that nothing
befalls mankind but what is determined by fate. They therefore rejected
the role of free will in the causation of human actions and accepted the
view that became known as 'determinism.'
The Sadducees held that fate plays no role in human affairs, there
being no such thing as fate in the first place. They supposed that all our
actions are within our control, so that our own righteousness is the cause
of our doing what is good and that we are driven by our own folly to
doing what is evil. Hence Sadducees believed in free will.
Finally, the Pharisees ascribed the cause of all human actions to fate.
Yet they allowed that acting according to what is right or what is wrong
is mainly within our own power, even though fate plays some causative
role in every action. The Pharisees' argument regarding the compatibility
of fate (and God's foreknowledge of it) with the exercise of human free
will was adopted some 300 years later by St. Augustine.

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 THEODICY

St. Augustine. The task of developing the novel Christian philo

was taken on by several Church Fathers. Among them, Augus
the philosophically most influential, since he provided the main t
ical link between pagan classical antiquity and Christian Midd
Augustine was born in 354 CE near Carthage in the Roman prov
Africa (in what is now Tunisia) to a pagan father and a Chr
mother-the future Santa Monica. At that time, ancient Grec
paganism was still widely practised in the Roman Empire, even
the emperors had been Christians since Constantine the Great's
sion at the beginning of the fourth century. The Empire's last gre
revolt and the temporary disestablishment of Christianity still
in Augustine's youth. His life thus spanned the years of transitio
Roman Empire from Greco-Roman paganism to the adoption of
tianity as the official state religion. He witnessed the social tran
tions, political upheavals, and military disasters that eventually le
fall of the Roman Empire.
Augustine belonged to the world of late Roman antiquity, who
cational system had a decisive and lasting role in shaping his mi
system's aim was to enable its alumni to emulate the great litera
terpieces of the past and thus tended to encourage a conservative
antiquarianism. The culture it produced rarely rose above the st
of polite letters and generally had little contact with the deeper
work in its contemporary society. There were many creative mind
work, but even their best work was largely derivative. This is e
true of the philosophy of the fourth and fifth centuries.
It was in the context of this jejune culture that eighteen-year-o
gustine set out on his search for truth and wisdom, which led h
afield. Looking back on this search in his forties, Augustine dec
his autobiographical Confessions that it changed his interests an
his work a new direction and purpose, namely the search for a ro
would lead him back to God. According to Augustine, his way to
tianity was prepared by his reading the works of the Neo-Platoni
flourished in the Empire in the third to fifth centuries CE and ur
contemporaries to return to Plato's idealist teachings. In a famous
in his Confessions Augustine describes how he had discovered th
tinctive Christian doctrines about God and His Word, the creation

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

world, and the presence of the divine light in the books of the Neo-
Platonists before reading of them in the Scriptures. What he had failed to
find anticipated in the Neo-Platonist writings, however, were the beliefs
in the Incarnation in Jesus Christ as the union of humanity and divinity
and the Gospels' account of His life and death. Later in life, Augustine
came to see a wider gulf between Greco-Roman philosophy and Christ-
ian faith. But he never ceased to regard much of philosophy, especially
that of the Neo-Platonists, as containing a large measure of truth and
hence as capable of serving as a preparation for Christianity.
The problem of evil, and especially the Theodicy paradox, was a life-
long preoccupation of Augustine's, and the main lines of thought that he
eventually developed in the effort to resolve it have been followed by
most of the Christian philosophers ever since. Before his conversion to
Christianity, Augustine had fallen under the spell of Manicheanism. But
he had become increasingly dissatisfied with Manicheanism, not least
because it implicitly denied the existence of an all-powerful God and in-
voked Satan as an equally powerful anti-God.

Ambrose. Augustine's studies took him from his native North Africa
to Italy, first to Rome and then to Milan, where he joined Bishop Am-
brose and his group of Neo-Platonist Christians. From Ambrose's circle
he learned what impressed him as better philosophical approaches to the
theodicy paradox than those provided by the Manichean doctrine. Thus,
under the influence of his new friends in Milan, Augustine broke with
Manicheanism. Moreover, he felt that he had finally encountered a more
satisfactory interpretation of Christianity than he had previously found
in the simple, nai've faith of his Christian mother, Monica. There was no
deep gulf between the Christianity of Ambrose's circle and the resur-
rected Platonic philosophy, so that Augustine saw no need to sort out ex-
actly what belonged to Christian and what to Platonic teaching. On the
contrary, it struck him how much Christianity and Platonism had in
common. This blend of Platonism and Christian belief won his adher-
ence, and in 386 CE Augustine had himself formally baptized by Am-
brose as a Christian.

To resolve the theodicy paradox, Augustine reexamined the concept

of evil. He decided that what appears to be evil when seen in isolation or
in too limited a context actually turns out to be a necessary element in
the perception of the Good when the world is viewed as a whole. For evil

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 THEODICY

provides a contrasting background that makes the Good to sh

brightly. According to Augustine, a world that contains as man
kinds of entities as are possible-good as well as bad-expresses m
equately His creativity than a world that contains only the hi
of created beings. The immense hierarchy of forms of created
in which each creature has its own proper place in the scheme
is good and glorifies its creator. Those creatures that rank low
scale of being are not on that account evil. They merely repres
ent Goods and contribute in their own way to the perfect
world.

Confessions and City of God. Augustine returned to Nor

from Milan and retired to a quasi-monastic life with like
friends, until he was ordained to assist the elderly bishop o
city about 100 miles East of Carthage. All of Augustine's w
after was devoted to the service of' the Church. Preaching, ad
tion, travel, and an extensive correspondence took much of
Despite this multifarious activity, Augustine never ceased
thinker and a scholar, but his talents and achievements wer
increasingly to pastoral work and to the service of the episcop
The Scriptures took a deeper hold on his mind, eclipsing t
philosophical interests of the years immediately preceding and
ing his conversion.
Augustine became bishop of Hippo in 395, and shortly th
began writing his Confessions. They eventually ran to thirteen
set the pattern for a novel literary genre of self-critical rather
glorifying autobiography. The first nine books of the Confessio
how God opened Augustine's own mind and heart to himse
end, Divine Providence had arranged his intellectual conversio
encounter with Platonist writings and the moral influence on h
vent Christians, especially that of his devout mother. The tent
veals Augustine's spiritual state after his conversion and at the
he was writing the Confessions. They are a frank self-examin
which he squarely faces the struggle and conflict of Christian
the confidence provided by grace and hope. Not the misery of
but the mercy of God is their theme. Augustine confesses the
tions to which he was still subject from the lust of the flesh, t
the eyes, and the pride of life. The last three books present A

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

meditations on the Scriptures, leading to his personal reflections on time

and eternity.
Despite the demands made on him by his ecclesiastical duties, Augus-
tine did not give up his philosophical interests. He shared with his con-
temporaries the opinion that it was the mission of philosophy to discover
the way to wisdom and thereby show mankind the way to blessedness.
Accordingly, Augustine thought of Christianity as a brand of philosophy,
in that its aim to find wisdom is the same as that of the pagan philoso-
phers. The chief difference between Christianity and pagan philosophy is
that only Christianity holds that the way to blessedness was provided for
mankind by Jesus Christ and that the ultimate source of salvation is re-
vealed in the Scriptures. According to Augustine, the Scriptures su-
perceded the teachings of philosophers as the gateway to truth. Thus re-
ligious authority rather than reason and faith rather than understanding
became the essence of Augustinian Christian philosophy. Admittedly,
pagan philosophers had discovered much of the truth proclaimed by the
Christian Gospels. But what their abstract speculation had not, and
could not have reached was the kernel of the Christian faith: the belief
in the contingent historical facts that constitute the history of salva-
tion-the Gospel narrative of the earthly life, death, and resurrection of
Jesus.
According to Augustine, mankind differs from other creatures in that
the motivations that drive mankind to action are very much more com-
plex. Mankind has many desires and drives, impulses and inclinations-
some of them conscious, others subliminal. And it often happens that the
satisfaction of one motivation entails the foiling of another, so that the
harmonious satisfaction of our desires that forms the overall objective of
mankind's activity is a scarcely attainable goal. The source of this frustra-
tion of our overall objective is not merely the multiplicity of desires that
go into the making of human nature. A further and more important
source is the incoherence and disorder of the ensemble of mankind's de-
sires, which have lost their original state of harmony. Augustine inter-
preted this troublesome aspect of the human condition as God's punish-
ment for Adam and Eve's sin and the Fall of Man. Augustine argues, for
instance, that the shame that accompanies lust is the just penalty for that
disobedience, although he wonders-not unreasonably-how mankind,
had it not sinned, would have been able to propagate itself without lust.

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 THEODICY

Next to the Confessions, Augustine's best-known work is his C

God, which is a massive defense of Christianity against its pagan
Here Augustine argues that all of history can be regarded as God'
ration for two cities, one heavenly-the City of God-and th
earthly-the City of the Devil-and in one or the other of w
mankind will ultimately reside. Augustine tells how the two cit
formed by the separation of the good angels from the bad angels
onciles his account with the Torah's Book of Genesis, especially w
Fall of Man, and argues that the advent of Christ signifies God'
enable mankind to merit salvation, despite its sinfulness. The City
Devil is inhabited by people who refuse to believe in Christ's miss
to repent; they will not be saved. But the City of God is inhabit
people who believe in Christ's mission and are genuinely rep
They will establish eternal communion with God on the Day o
ment.

On the Free Choice of the Will. One of Augustine's most endu

contributions to moral philosophy was his consideration of the prob
of free will, which has come down to us via his treatise On the Free Ch
of the Will. Its text is styled in the form of a Socratic dialogue with his d
ciple Evodius, who asks Augustine to explain to him why God gav
free will, when we wouldn't have been able to sin if He hadn't given i
us in the first place. Augustine asks Evodius how he can be so sure th
really was God who gave us free will. Evodius replies that there isn't
one else who could have given us free will. After all, we owe our very
istence to God, and He decreed, moreover, that for the sake of justice
deserve punishment for sinning and deserve reward for doing right.
Evodius wonders, how it is possible that, given that God is the sourc
everything that is good-and justice is good-that justice demands
sinners be punished and the righteous be rewarded? How could God
just if He Himself is the cause of the unhappiness of the sinners and
happiness of the righteous, when both sinners and righteous are of
making?
While Augustine admits that it is true that sinners could not sin with-
out free will, he insists that it is equally true that the righteous couldn't
do right without free will either. So God didn't give us free will so that
sinners can sin but so that the righteous can do right, which would be

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

equally impossible without free will. The very fact that God punishes
anyone who uses free will to sin shows that free will was given to us to en-
able us live righteously, for such punishment would be unjust if the pur-
pose of having given us free will had been to live righteously as well as
sinfully. After all, how could someone be justly punished for using free
will for the very purpose for which it was given? When God punishes a
sinner, isn't he saying, "Why didn't you use your free will for the purpose
for which I gave it to you, namely living righteously?'
And as for the virtue that we so admire in God's justice-His punish-
ing sins and rewarding good deeds-how could virtue even exist if
human beings lacked free will? No action would be either right or wrong
if it was not attributable to the will: punishment as well as reward would
be unjust if human beings lacked free will. So God did right to give free
will to mankind.
Evodius accepts the logic of Augustine's argument. Yet he still wonders
why, if God gave us free will for the purpose of living righteously, He did
not prevent us from perverting free will and misuse it for sinning. Why
isn't it like justice, which God also gave to mankind to enable it to live
well? No one can use justice to live wickedly. In the same way it ought to
be the case that no one could use the free will to sin, if, indeed, it was
given to us for acting righteously.
Augustine replies, with some casuistic legerdemain, that he hopes that
Evodius can work this out on his own, possibly with a little help from
God. Didn't Evodius just affirm hat he is sure that it was God who gave
us free will? But if he now doubts that it actually was a good gift then he
can't be all that sure that it was a gift of God, from whom the soul derives
all its good gifts. So if we find that free will is not a good gift, then we
must infer that God couldn't have been its donor, since it is impious to
blame God for anything. But if it is quite certain that God did give us free
will, then we must admit that it ought to have been given. And in exactly
the way that it was given; for God gave it, and his deeds are utterly be-
yond reproach.
Though driven into a corner, Evodius does not give up. He assures Au-
gustine that his faith in God is unshaken, but, all the same, he would like
to understand better why free will was given to us for doing right when it
can also be used for doing wrong. For if it is uncertain that free will was
actually given for doing right, then it's also uncertain whether it ought to
have been given in the first place. This means in turn that maybe he,

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 THEODICY

Evodius, was wrong in being so sure that free will was God's gift, if
gustine says, it's impious to believe that God gave us somet
shouldn't have been given. So Evodius asks whether free will sh
included among the good things we have, for if this can b
Evodius will reaffirm that God gave it to us and concede th
right to do so.
Augustine reminds Evodius that they had already agreed t
when we find good things in the body that we can use wrongly,
say that they ought not to have been given to the body, for we
they are, in fact, good. So why should it be surprising that the
good things in the soul that we can use wrongly, but since they
good, can only have been given by Him from whom all goo
come? Evodius should consider what a great Good a body is mis
has no hands. And yet people use their hands wrongly in comm
olent or shameful acts. If one sees someone who has no feet, o
that his well being is impaired by the absence of so great a Goo
one would not deny that someone who uses his feet to harm som
or to disgrace himself is using them wrongly.
Or, by way of another example, we see light and we distingu
forms of objects by means of our eyes. They are the most beaut
in our bodies, and we use them to preserve our safety and to se
other good things in life. Nonetheless, many people use their e
evil things, and yet one realizes what a great Good is missing i
that has no eyes. But when they are present, who gave them, if
the generous giver of all things? Thus, just as one approves of t
things in the body and praise God who gave them, while disre
those sinners who use their eyes for evil purposes, one should a
free will, without which no one can live rightly, is a good gift.
condemn those who misuse this good gift rather than saying th
gave it shouldn't have given it.
Evodius is not satisfied by this argument. He wants Augu
prove, as he has requested all along, that free will is a good th
this proof he will concede that God gave free will to us, sin
course, admits that all good things come from God.
Augustine now sets out to prove to Evodius that free will is n
good thing but that it ranks among the very highest of good t
simply perverse of Evodius to doubt the virtue of free will, w
those who lead the worst of lives admit that no one can live r

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

without it. He asks which is better: something without which we can live
righteously, or something without which we cannot?
Evodius admits that something without which we cannot live right-
eously is far superior and concedes that Augustine has finally shown to
his satisfaction that free will should be included among the good things
given to us by God. But now he wants Augustine to explain to him the
source of the force that moves the will from good towards evil. He wants
to know this because if God gave us the will in a way such that it is
driven from good towards evil by a force of nature, then the will turns to-
wards evil by necessity. So, how can there be blame for the evildoer if na-
ture and necessity determined his will's movement?
Augustine responds with a question. Doesn't Evodius agree that the
movement that occurs when a stone falls to the ground by its own weight
is a movement of the stone?

Yes, Evodius agrees, but he remarks that in seeking the lowest place,
the stone performs a natural movement. And if that is the kind of move-
ment the will makes, then its movement is natural as well. So if the will
is moved naturally, it cannot be blamed when it turns towards something
evil, being compelled to do so by its own nature. However, since we do
not doubt that a will's movement towards evil is blameworthy, we have to
deny that it is natural, and is therefore unlike the natural movement of a
stone.

Augustine concedes that the two cases are unlike but points out
the difference between them is that the stone has no power to ch
downward movement while the soul cannot be moved to abandon
eousness and turn to evil unless it wills to do so. In other wor
movement of the stone is indeed natural, but that of the will is vol
and therefore blame- or praiseworthy. So why is there any n
Evodius to ask about the source of the force that moves the will from
good to evil?
Evodius wants to know the source of the force because he can't under-
stand how God can have foreknowledge of everything in the future-as
he surely does-if the movement of any person's will either away from or
towards evil is voluntary rather than necessitated by nature. How can our
will be free if God foreknew that it is going to move us towards evil?
Augustine's answer, which Evodius accepts, is that God's foreknowl-
edge of movements of the will does not create their necessity. The will
He gave us could not be a will unless it remained in our power rather

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 THEODICY

than in His. God's foreknowledge of how we are going to use t

does not take away its freedom.
Thus, this very early discussion of the crucial role of the con
will in the realm of moral responsibility already ended in a par
so did all subsequent efforts to find a coherent, existentially sa
way of dealing with free will, from the dawn of the Middle A
fifth century to modern times. Resolution of the paradox turne
possible only by considering the problem of free will in two or
tually exclusive, or in what we will refer to in Chapter 14 as co
tary contexts. In Augustine's case, the complementary cont
Christian faith and Hellenist logic.
Augustine died in 430 CE at the age of 76, as the invadin
hordes were closing in on his bishopric Hippo.

Peter Abelard. Throughout the Middle Ages, Christian,

and Judaic philosophy was dominated by Platonic idealism
cupied with religious faith and salvation. One of the few p
cally noteworthy persons during that long, intellectually dark
period was the Parisian monk and highly original thin
Abelard (1079-1142). In addition to his ever-lasting fame f
been the unfortunate lover of his student, the beautiful
Abelard is remembered also for his rediscovery some of the p
moral philosophy left unresolved by the Early Church Fa
brought into clear view the distinctive feature of Christian et
plicit in Augustine's work, in particular the split between reli
secular considerations that separates Christian from Gree
Abelard held that morals are an inner quality that relates to o
tives or intentions rather than to the consequences of one
This view of the nature of morals came to be stressed in the
Reformation of the fifteenth century and attained its fullest
ment in the eighteenth century in the ethical system of
Kant. Abelard taught that one can attain virtue through reaso
as faith, and, on first sight heretical proposition in the conte
dieval Christianity. In this way Abelard paved the way for St
Aquinas, the towering figure of late medieval Christian p
whose elaboration of this proposition came to be incorporated
canon of the Roman Catholic Church. Thomas provided the
cal link between the Christian Middle Ages and the Renais

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

as Augustine had provided the link between Greco-Roman paganism

and medieval Christianity.

St. Thomas Aquinas. Thomas was born in the Kingdom of Naples in

1225, as a member of the family of the Counts of Aquino. Educated at
the Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino and the University of
Naples, he entered the Dominican Order of mendicant preacher-friars
at the age of nineteen. He spent the rest of his life exemplifying the
Order's commitment to studying and preaching. Thomas died in the
Cistercian monastery of Fossanova near Rome in 1274 and was canon-
ized in 1323.

Early in his career, Thomas came under the influence of Albertus Mag-
nus, the great Dominican scholar who had become acquainted with the
works of Aristotle. During the Middle Ages Aristotle had been largely
forgotten in the Christian West, but by the thirteenth century knowl-
edge of his works had begun to percolate back from the Muslim East to
their European source. Albertus had been one of the first Christian the-
ologians to realize the need for reconciling Aristotelian philosophy with
Christianity. So Thomas made it his aim to square Aristotelian material-
ist science and naturalism with Augustinian Platonic idealism, after the
latter had held sway over Christian theology and philosophy for eight
centuries. What Thomas set out to prove was the compatibility of Aris-
totelian materialism with Christian idealist dogma and to construct a
unified view of nature, mankind, and God.
The task Thomas had cut out for himself was not easy. Aristotle's
ethics was relativistic and rational while Augustinian ethics was abso-
lutist and fideist (that is, grounded in faith rather than reason). Evi-
dently, at least one of these rival moral theories is totally misguided, or
else there must be room in the world for two very different systems of
moral concepts and principles. Thomas adopted the latter alternative
and divided the ensemble of moral concepts into two realms, the 'natu-
ral' and the 'theological.' He thought that by proper training and exercise
of reason one can attain the natural virtues accounted for by Aristotle,
while attainment of theological virtues-faith, hope and love-requires
divine grace. Thomas also distinguished two supreme Goods, or para-
mount goals of life: worldly happiness and eternal beatitude. The former
is attained through natural virtue and the latter through the Church and
its sacraments. Thomas, the Aristotelian, thus expressed a considerably

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 THEODICY

more optimistic attitude toward the possibility of improving m

lot on earth through knowledge of nature and rational action th
Augustine, the Platonist. Thomas helped prepare the climate
Western rebirth of natural science, whose first stirrings came in
own thirteenth century.
Thomas' influence on Christian theological thought of succ
centuries was immense, in that his theological ideas became part
mainline teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. They
Thomas' proposition that there are two distinct routes to knowl
God, one of them being revelation and the other human rea
other notion put forward by Thomas that still looms large in pre
Catholicism is the belief that each rational human soul is origina
divine creation from nothing. Thus human parents are not t
cause of their offspring; they share the work of procreation wi
This is why the Catholic Church puts so much stress on the dign
sanctity of human reproduction, which it regards as more than
profane biological function.
As for the paradox of theodicy, Thomas accepted Augustine
ment that even a perfectly benign God has to allow evil to exist
the existence of evil is a necessary condition for making ma
things possible. For instance, Thomas pointed out that if there w
death of their animals of prey, there would be no life for lions, and i
were no persecution from tyrants, there would be no occasion f
heroic suffering of the martyrs. Thomas, however, went beyond
tine's argumentation by introducing an additional, essentially co
consideration. He pointed out that since we lack an insight in
nature, we must struggle with the question of how to understan
terms used in the Scriptures to describe God. What do terms
'good,' 'wise,' and 'just' mean when they are attributed to God
meaning as divine attributes cannot be the same as that of their
as human attributes, because if they were the same, we would hav
sight into God's nature that we obviously lack. Should the terms
fore be understood merely as the opposites of human attributes th
understand, such as 'good' meaning 'not wicked,' 'wise' meani
foolish,' and so on? Thomas rejected this solution of the theodic
dox championed by the Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonide
twelfth century, on the grounds that the Scriptures must mean m
mere opposites of human attributes when they apply them to Go

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

Thomas' own answer was that when referring to God, these terms are
used only metaphorically. Since we cannot have an adequate conception
of God's nature, that is, since our ideas of Him fall short of reality, we
have to recognize that the qualities that 'good' and 'wise' signify exist in
God at a higher level than in ourselves. It is not that God is not really, or
not in the fullest sense, good, wise, just, and so on. On the contrary, He
has these qualities to the fullest perfection in the most complete way pos-
sible, and it is we mortal creatures who fall short of perfection.
According to Thomas, God's perfect qualities include His perfect
knowledge. He knows everything knowable. He knows the world He cre-
ated, not as a spectator comes to know things he happens to encounter.
Being their absolute first cause, God's knowledge of things is not even de-
pendent upon their prior existence. On the contrary, it is the act of His
knowing them that brings the things into existence in the first place. We
can, so Thomas suggests, get a crude idea of the nature of God's knowl-
edge of things before they even exist, by analogizing it with the kind of
knowledge an architect has of a house before it has been built. It is be-
cause of the conception of the house in the architect's mind that the
house comes into existence, whereas it is because the house already exists
that the passer-by comes to know it.
Thomas succeeded to a large degree in blending Aristotelianism with
Christianity, by arguing for the truth of both systems and refuting argu-
ments of his predecessors and contemporaries that purported to show
their incompatibility. Thomas held that human reasoning alone can val-
idate the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, although for
the benefit of those who cannot engage in such strenuous mental exer-
cise, these metaphysical propositions are also divinely revealed for ac-
ceptance by faith. Divine revelation, however, extends beyond reason to
validate the acceptance of such further Christian truths as the Sacred
Trinity of God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Thomas
thus supported the general (though not universal) Christian view that
revelation supplements, rather than cancels or replaces, the theories of
rational philosophy.

Summa Theologica. One of the unsolved problems of moral philoso-

phy that Thomas rediscovered was free will, on which there had been lit-
tle movement in the eight centuries that had elapsed since Augustine's
death. He devoted two sections to the problem in his major treatise,

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 THEODICY

Summa Theologica, written between 1265 and 1273. One section

titled 'Free Choice' and the other 'The Voluntary and the Invol
(Aquinas, 1947)
Thomas' account of free will and moral responsibility was ge
similar to that of Augustine's. Like Augustine, Thomas held tha
not only exists but also is compatible with God's foreknowledge
tions. But Thomas' concept of free will was more fully develop
Augustine's, since Thomas associated the exercise of free will w
tional self-determination by a process of judgmental deliberat
than with a mere absence of external causal influences. To make this
point, Thomas pointed to some things that act without judgment, such as
stones, which, whenever given the opportunity, move downwards. And
although animals do act with judgment, they act without judgmental de-
liberation. A sheep seeing a wolf , for instance, judges the wolf a thing to
be shunned. But this is a natural but not a free judgment, because the
sheep judges by natural instinct rather than by rational deliberation.
Mankind's actions, by contrast, are determined by freely willed judg-
ments, because, thanks to our capacity for rational thought, we are free to
decide whether something should be shunned or sought.
What is the rational basis for the freely willed decisions we make? Ac-
cording to Thomas, it is our rationally guided desires, formed by our
moral education and training. The will's freedom of choice then inheres
in the process of our deliberating the reasons for and against a particular
action. He pointed to our habits, our desires, our knowledge, and our de-
liberations as the faculties to which our will resorts in deciding on actions
for which we may be held responsible. Thomas did not, however, address
the further question whether these faculties are within our personal con-
trol, that is, whether we really are 'free' to choose the habits and desires
that determine our will. Perhaps we are not wholly 'free' after all, since,
according to Thomas, our rationally guided desires are determined by our
moral education and training. Thus, in the end, Thomas too fell short of
resolving the Paradox of Moral Responsibility.
Later theologians tended to interpret Augustine as stressing predesti-
nation and Thomas as stressing free will. Yet, it may be argued to the
contrary that Augustine's conception of free will as an inexplicable and
non-natural attribute of the soul allows the person more autonomy of his
characterological traits than does Thomas' notion of the determinative
role of education and training. Yet, for that very reason, Thomas'

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

account is more congenial to a scientific, especially psychological, out-

look on mankind.

Candide. In the early eighteenth century, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

considered the problem of evil in his philosophical book, Theodicy, pub-
lished at the very onset of that secular and humanistic modern age. Leib-
niz accepted Augustine's contention that there is no paradox of theodicy
because of the existentially unavoidable linkage between good and evil
that even the Almighty Himself could not dissolve. But, so Leibniz ar-
gued, God's essential virtue and benevolence towards mankind is mani-
fest in His creation of the best of all possible worlds. It is the best, not
because it contains no evil but because any other possible world would
contain even more evil.

Leibniz's thesis was famously demolished in mid-eighteenth century by

Voltaire in the most popular of all his works, his satire Candide, in which
Voltaire also takes potshots, en passant, at one of his pet hates, namely re-
ligion. The young protagonist, Candide, and his mentor, Doctor Pan-
gloss, suffer a series of incredible misfortunes and hardships, while Pan-
gloss steadfastly insists on the Leibnizian mantra that this is 'the best of
all possible worlds.' Candide, in the end disillusioned, decides that this is
not the best of all possible worlds. He concludes that we simply have to
bear our misfortunes bravely, be tolerant, do the very best with whatever
bad hands we have been dealt, and simply 'cultivate our garden.' Thus
Candide's resolution of the paradox of theodicy is simply that since God
either does not exist, or if He does, He obviously lacks essential virtue
and benevolence towards mankind, and everybody has to look after his
or her own interest.

As we will note in Chapter 10, Voltaire's way of resolving the paradox

of theodicy led the nineteenth century German philosopher, Friedrich
Nietzsche, to declare that the philosophers of the eighteenth century En-
lightenment had managed to kill the God we thought we all knew. Thus,
according to Nietzsche, with God dead, everything has become morally
permissible and mankind is about to sink into a moral abyss.

Coda. The ancient metaphysical paradox of theodicy inherent in the

belief in a one-and-only, all-powerful, righteous, benign God still awaits its
satisfactory resolution. The perennial failure of theologians and philoso-
phers to account for God's seemingly flawed, quasi-schizoid character

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 THEODICY

became especially troublesome in the wake of the Second W

Admittedly, Augustine's argument may be rationally sound. P
does have to allow the existence of evil to provide mankind w
trasting background that makes the Good shine more brightly
more easily perceptible to the dim-witted mortals. But this arg
hardly be emotionally acceptable to survivors, or to relatives o
of the Nazi Holocaust.

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ARISTOTLE CONTEMPLATING A BUST OF HOMER

Painting by Rembrandt (1663)

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 Chapter Five

Personhood

Virtually every moral issue hinges on the unique metaphysical standing

of persons, since personhood confers on its bearers rights and responsibil-
ities that render interactions among them radically different from inter-
actions between them and other living creatures that lack personhood,
such as animals. Or, in terms of L. E. Lomasky's (1992) homely character-
ization of this difference, "one eats animals but sleeps with persons; any
inversion of this procedure is apt to occasion considerable attention."
As we noted in Chapters 2 and 3, the belief in the unique moral stand-
ing of persons dates back far into human history. Yet, while the rights and
duties of persons are what moral discourse is all about, it is not easy to
provide an unambiguous definition of the kind of creatures to which
those rights and duties entailed by personhood actually pertain. Despite
its standing as a category of what Kant designated as 'pure practical rea-
son,' personhood has remained an elusive metaphysical concept. That is
not to say that we do not usually recognize a creature as a person when we
see one. For just as Plato conjectured that we recognize 'justice' when we
see it because there exists a perfect, unambiguous, and eternal example of
justice-its 'Form'-in our mind, so can we conjecture that there exists
also in our mind a perfect, unambiguous, and eternal Platonic person-
hood 'Form.' We will develop the concept of personhood as a Platonic
'Form' further in later chapters, after we have considered Kant's philoso-
phy of critical idealism in more detail.

Identity Definition. According to the standard modern definition,

such as that provided by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, "a person is
an individual human being; a man, woman or child," where 'human
being' denotes a member of the biological species, Homo sapiens. The tra-
ditional taxonomic criteria for setting specimens of H. sapiens apart from
other creatures not belonging to their species was a subjective, fuzzy set of

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

anatomical, physiological, and hereditary properties. But by the end of

the twentieth century, in the wake of the revolution brought to the life
sciences by molecular-biology, those traditional criteria had come to be
replaced by a novel, more precise, and objective criterion: the nucleotide
base sequence of the DNA comprising the creature's genome. We will
refer to this latter-day definition of personhood as the 'identity definition'
because it can be stated in the form of an identity function.

Person - Carrier of Human DNA Nucleotide Base Sequence

in Genome

Although the identity definition is not problematical in natural,

moral-value-free contexts, it can be very troublesome in non-natural/
moral-value-laden contexts in which moral considerations are at issue
since its scope is both too broad and too narrow. Its scope is too broad be-
cause there are some circumstances under which many people do not re-
gard possession of a human genome by a living entity as sufficient to qual-
ify it as a person entitled to the rights and duties devolving from
personhood. And its scope is too narrow because there are other circum-
stances under which many people do not regard possession of a human
genome by a living entity as necessary to qualify it as a person. In any
case, the identity definition provides no rational justification for confer-
ring special moral rights and duties on just one single biological species-
namely our own-by virtue of its unique DNA nucleotide base sequence.

Psychological Definitions. Aristotle-the inventor of the concept of

biological species-seems to have been aware of the philosophical short-
comings of the identity definition of personhood. For he questioned the
validity of an attribution of a value-laden moral quality such as person-
hood to a creature on the basis of the value-free anatomical or physiolog-
ical criteria by which it is assigned membership in a particular biological
species. So Aristotle based his definition of personhood on the psycholog-
ical criterion of rationality, which he considered mankind's unique pos-
session, one that sets people apart from animals. He noted that, like
other creatures, humans move from place to place and perceive phenom-
ena via their senses, but only mankind has the capacity to reason. So
Aristotle classified humans as the species of rational animals.
Jewish and Christian traditions perpetuated into modern times the
Aristotelian criterion of rationality as a uniquely human characteristic.

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 PERSONHOOD

This belief is epitomized in the biblical proposition of Genesis

that God created mankind in His image, where 'image' has to ref
likeness of His sublime spiritual form. In other words, God e
mankind, and only mankind, with a mind, that, like His own, can
and know the difference between right and wrong.

Second-Order Volitions. In the first half of the twentieth c

upon the rise of the scientific study of animal behavior, biologi
chologists came to reject the unique attribution of rationality to
ens. They argued that many species of animals, especially those be
to the class of mammals, manifest behaviors that meet the criterio
tionality, and yet are not generally considered to qualify for pers
So, to save the Aristotelian criterion of rationality as the acid test
sonhood, some latter-day moral philosophers searched for one or
special aspect of rationality that they considered as uniquely hum
The Princeton philosopher, Harry Frankfurt (1971), put forwa
such special aspect, to which he gave the name 'second-order volit
a necessary and sufficient condition for personhood. Frankfurt
that human beings, as well as many species of animals, have
which can be described by the statement 'A wants to X.' If X is an
such as taking a particular drug, then the statement refers to wha
furt calls a first-order desire. Such a first order desire may be
strong, present in or absent from A's conscious awareness, and i
mented or not implemented by A, possibly because A wants to Y
than to X. That is to say, A's first-order desire may or may not b
tive, and therefore, according to Frankfurt, is not 'coextensive'
will. However, if the action X is itself the act of desiring to X,
statement turns into what Frankfurt calls a second-order desire, n
wants to want to X.' Moreover, if, as is almost always the case in i
of second-order desires, A wants the desire to X to be his will, the
furt refers to it as a 'second order volition.'
Frankfurt asserts that creatures with first-order desires but lack
ond order volitions, are wantons (meaning that they act without r
what is right or wrong) and hence, being amoral creatures, they
qualify for personhood. According to Frankfurt, the class of wan
cludes all animals, some of which-though contra Aristotle but p
ern students of animal behavior-may be endowed with rati

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

Frankfurt justifies his disqualification of wantons for personhood stand-

ing by asserting that the second order volitions wantons lack are, in fact,
the essence of free will.
It is the case that, as Frankfurt implies, the attribution of free will to an
agent is a necessary condition for the agent's inclusion in the category of
persons. But Frankfurt's identification of second order volitions as indica-
tors of the presence of free will begs the critical, morally relevant ques-
tion of their autonomy. He evidently takes it for granted that second
order volitions meet the essential criterion of autonomy inherent in the
(moral) concept of free will, rather than being subject to the all-perva-
sive, heteronomous governance of determinism that gives rise to the Para-
dox of Moral Responsibility in the first place.
Frankfurt's postulation of the existence of first order desires as a prel-
ude to second order volitions is not unreasonable, but obviously irrele-
vant for the resolution of the Paradox. We will consider another instance
of Frankfurt's shortcomings as an analyst of the free will problem in
Chapter 8.

Abortion. The too-inclusive scope of the identity definition is exem-

plified by its begging the practical question whether such immature and
anatomically incomplete carriers of a human genome as fertilized ova,
embryos and fetuses, have the rights and duties devolving from person-
hood. Thus the identity definition would stigmatize abortion as the mur-
der of a person and therefore deny to a prospective mother the 'freedom
of choice' to terminate her pregnancy, in accord with the arguments put
forward by 'right-to-life' opponents of abortion.
I first became aware of the moral irrelevance of biological criteria for jus-
tifying or refusing the ascription of personhood to an immature human
being when I attended a conference misleadingly entitled 'Biology and the
Future of Man.' It was held in the Grand Amphithdatre of the Sorbonne in
the spring of 1975 (Stent, 1976b). As I soon discovered, the real agenda of
the conference's organizers had not been to prognosticate the Future of
Man but to create a favorable intellectual climate for the legalization of
abortion in France, which was then under consideration by the French par-
liament. The international bevy of conference participants included only
biologists and biomedical scientists, because the organizers had evidently
thought that your woolly-headed philosophers and theologians had noth-
ing useful to contribute to the difficult moral problem under discussion.

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 PERSONHOOD

The participants were generally agreed that the rights of pe

clude a right to life and that the intentional termination of a pe
is murder, which they, like bien-pensants all over, thought oug
legal. So the avowed aim of the discussions was to provide the
Nationale with an objective, scientific (that is, natural) cri
defining the critical stage in prenatal human development at w
biologically immature human fetus turns into a person. Pri
stage-so the reasoning went-there could be no moral obje
abortion.
Various speakers proposed this or that developmental stage as
ical time of onset of personhood. Each speaker supported his o
posal with bio-scientific arguments based on descriptive, natur
ties of the little creature, ranging from gastrulation of the embryo
establishment of the three germinal layers designated 'ectoder
derm' and 'endoderm'), through the onset of fetal heartbeat or
brain activity, to birth. All of these speakers provided counte
for the person=H. sapiens identity definition, since their prop
plicitly denied that the mere presence in an entity of the gen
sapiens is a sufficient condition for its personhood.
The only speaker who did not provide a counterexample for
tity definition was the eminent French cytogeneticist, Jerom
who had discovered the chromosomal basis of Down Syndrome
Lejeune, a devout Catholic and a leader of the French anti
movement at that time, argued that personhood begins with the
ovum, because it is at that stage that the unique genetic ident
person is established. Thus he ruled out abortion altogether.
None of the speakers-not even the devout Lejeune-referr
categories of Kantian pure practical reason, such as uniqueness,
and free will, as a part of the ensemble of non-natural propertie
fer personhood on a being. In fact, no one mentioned the soul
some people did mention the brain) as the feature whose earlie
development was the actual subject of the discussion. It seemed
the participants of the Paris conference addressed the ethics of
the Sorbonne's Grand Amphithdatre in wholly naturalistic terms, w
ing the bigger-than-life statue of Rene Descartes, which graces
was half-expecting Descartes' statue, like the Commendatore's in
Don Giovanni, to quicken in anger and drag the discussants to
they paid no heed to Descartes' judgment (which we will conside

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

detail in Chapter 9) that the moral law applies only to persons but not to
automata. According to Descartes, automata lack personhood, not because
only persons have this or that body part that an automaton may lack, but
because persons (and only persons) have souls.
How, then, has the moral problem of legislating the latest permissible
time of abortion, i.e. the advent of the moral threshold of personhood,
been resolved in those jurisdictions that do allow abortion at all? At the
earliest developmental stages-zygote, blastula, or gastrula-the embryo is
certainly alive and contains a human genome that (as Lejeune emphasized)
will eventually give rise to a biologically unique person. But the general
perception in jurisdictions where abortion is permitted is that at its earliest
stages of development the embryo is not yet a person. It is a mere blob of
protoplasm devoid of any appearance of uniqueness. At some later stage of
development, the fetus does take on some overt human features that may
make it look like a person. But at just what stage the fetus does begin to
look that way is a highly subjective call. For most, though transhistorically
and transculturally not necessarily all people, that stage will be reached no
later than the time of birth. This sociological claim finds support in the
fact that while the latest stage of permissible abortion is the subject of vig-
orous contention, few people-except some hard-core anti-abortionists-
consider abortion morally indistinguishable from infanticide.
The subjectivity of the criterion by which the personhood of an imma-
ture human creature is actually assessed is evident from the records of tri-
als in which abortionists were charged with the murder of a fetus. Very
often, the prosecution showed photographs of the abortus to the jury,
and-not surprisingly-the chance of a verdict of 'guilty' was the greater
the more advanced was its developmental stage. When asked for the
grounds on which they reached their verdict, the jurors rarely mentioned
any of the (objective) biological criteria put forward at the Sorbonne
conference. Rather, most often they said that they found for 'guilty' when
pictures shown by the prosecution evoked the (subjective) impression
that the abortus had a recognizably human face.
Another counterexample for the identity definition of personhood is
provided by the diminished personhood of insane people. We will discuss
this counterexample in more detail in Chapter 6 in connection with the
concept of moral responsibility. But in the meanwhile, we may note that
insanity is a condition under which some adult specimens of H. sapiens are
denied full moral standing as persons by an abridgment of some of their

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 PERSONHOOD

rights and duties. This denial occurs when human beings are ju
afflicted with a defective power of reasoning due to a disease o
that prevents them from knowing the nature and quality of th
especially from knowing whether what they are doing is right or w
sane people are not, however, denied the rights and protectio
by virtue of the uniqueness and sacredness of their residual per
Aristotle, who morally justified the Greek practice of slavery
ing the category of 'natural slaves,' already appreciated the lim
identity definition. As the inventor of the biological speci
Aristotle was certainly aware of the cross-fertility of free Greeks
unfree slaves and did not deny that slaves are ostensibly memb
human species. Yet he classified them as 'natural slaves,' whos
faculty is underdeveloped or absent. According to Aristot
slaves are persons only in a secondary sense and therefore lack
of the rights and duties that come with primary personhood.

Uniqueness. The necessity of our perceiving a human be

unique creature for bestowal of the rights and duties of person
another counterexample to the identity definition. For instanc
dency of members of a foreign race to look all alike seems to b
dition of racism. By thus being depersonalized, the people of an
are deprived of their souls, and racists can make themselves c
in the belief that these inferior creatures are little more than automata in
human form. A similar process of depersonalization occurs in war, when
soldiers suspend the normal dictates of their private morals regarding the
sacredness of personhood. As many accounts of front-line wartime expe-
rience show, this suspension occurs more readily in brief encounters with
an unknown, or even invisible enemy than vis-at-vis a particular member
of the enemy camp (especially if he is of the same race), provided that an
opportunity has been afforded to establish the uniqueness of his person.
The faceless, homogeneous, and collective enemy has no soul; he is
merely a dangerous beast outside the bounds of morals. Once recognized
as a unique individual, however, the enemy acquires a soul, joins the fam-
ily of man, and comes within the purview of morals.

Cloning. The intuitive belief that uniqueness is a necessary condition

for granting personhood came to the fore in recent years by a biotechno-
logical development that had been held to belong to the fantasies of

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

science fiction. This is the asexual reproduction, or cloning, of humans,

which has been achieved for some mammalian species, such as sheep and
mice. The procedure consists of the transfer of diploid nuclei from the so-
matic tissues of a single adult donor animal-male or female-into artifi-
cially enucleated eggs harvested from a donor female of the same species.
Upon reimplantation of such genetically manipulated eggs into the wombs
of host females there will arise a clone of genetically identical offspring, all
endowed with the hereditary identity of the single donor individual.
This procedure, which is bound to provide enormous benefits for ani-
mal husbandry, has aroused great concern among so-called 'bioethicists,'
as well as among the general public. They fear that, before long, the
cloning technology will be applied to the human species since it offers
the tempting prospect of enriching our society by the artificial breeding
of people with genes proven for their capacity to develop individuals
with outstandingly desirable physical and mental qualities. But it seems
most unlikely that the prospect of populating our planet with clones of
genetically identical people is tempting at all. While it would be fun to
have Kant, Beethoven, Edith Wharton, Einstein, Picasso, Clark Gable
and Marilyn Monroe live on our block, the thought of having hundreds
or thousands of their replicas in town is a nightmare. Why? Because the
thought of beholding a horde of look-alike human stereotypes is abhor-
rent even to people who are quite unaware of and who lack the scientific
sophistication to appreciate the long-term biological dangers inherent in
such a cloning program. The reason for their horror is the intuitive belief
in the uniqueness of the person. The horde of look-alike cloned humans
would not seem to be real persons but creepy automata in human shape.
In addition to such cases in which a perceived lack of uniqueness may
result in the denial of personhood to authentic human beings, counter
examples can be cited that show that the perception of uniqueness may
suffice to qualify a non-human entity for inclusion in the category of per-
son. For instance, a child may bestow personhood on a favorite doll, by
endowing this non-living artifact with rights, duties, sacredness, and free
will (and treat it accordingly, including even loving it). However, the
currently most vexing moral problem connected with the extension of
personhood to non-human entities concerns not the treatment of dolls
or other lovable inanimate objects, such as my own, precious 1963 white
Cadillac convertible, or a Stradivarius violin, but the moral standing of
animals.

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 PERSONHOOD

Personhood of Animals. The least vexing aspect of the gran

personhood to animals concerns the treatment of household pets
which domesticated cats and dogs provide the most common exa
Cats and dogs are in a particularly favorable position for elevation
sonhood, not least because they were bred from their wild a
species for the very purpose of providing companionship for the
masters. The masters generally acknowledge their pets' individual
ceive them as unique specimens of their kind, and attribute to t
mind with non-natural Kantian categories of pure practical reas
as free will and being an end in itself. The masters extend the pr
of the moral law to their pets, give them personal names and tre
with the same consideration as that granted to the human mem
the household. Moreover, they also tend to ascribe moral respon
to their pets as well. Thus the master may scold, or even punish
mal for soiling the carpet with excrement or killing a song-bird
garden, while also praising, or even rewarding their pets for killin
hold vermin, such as rats or mice.
Most animal species are not likely candidates for elevation to p
hood, however. They belong to invertebrate phyla, such as the a
mollusks, and insects, about which it is hard to believe that the
soul that provides them with consciousness and rational thoug
even among the vertebrate species there is only the class of m
that includes some creatures whose behavior is sufficiently com
attributing to them a conscious and rational mind might cross the
old of credibility. Yet even among those mammalian candidat
few specimens attain personhood status, because of their lack of
nity to be recognized as unique individuals by a human being
granted moral standing by virtue of the authority vested in We t
sapiens people to confer that honor.
In the context of the Western religious and moral traditions,
sophical discussions regarding personhood were only rarely c
with animals prior to the end of the eighteenth century, except b
a counterexample illustrating the difference between mindless br
thinking human beings. No doubt, the identity definition, w
cludes animals from personhood, is a legacy of those times. D
like his philosophical predecessors and contemporaries, still cons
animals as unthinking automata, whose behavior is wholly accou
by bodily functions. The possibility that animals might have mi

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

not taken seriously beyond the context of the fairy tale until the latter
part of the nineteenth century, when the recognition of the evolutionary
continuity between animals and humans lent it some credence, at least
among biologists. And by the middle of the twentieth century the topic
of animal mind came to be more widely discussed, upon the rise of ethol-
ogy, the discipline that is dedicated to the evolutionarily oriented study
of animal behavior.
So, maybe some animal species do have minds capable generating con-
sciousness, rational thoughts, intentions, and feelings. It would not nec-
essarily follow from that hypothetical premise, however, that we have to
believe that the minds of these species also include the non-natural prop-
erties, such as uniqueness, sacredness, and free will that are ascribed to
the human soul. That is, even if animals do have minds, they might still
fail to qualify for personhood and lack the moral standing claimed on
their behalf by the advocates of 'Animal Rights.' (Radner and Radner,
1989)

Vegetarianism. There is one context in which the personhood of an-

imals was at stake long before the end of the eighteenth century,
namely vegetarianism. In fact, the view that we should avoid eating an-
imal meat has moral roots reaching back three millennia to Hindu be-
liefs about the sacredness of all life and the reincarnation of deceased
persons in animal form. Vegetarianism also had some philosophical
support in classical Greece and Rome. For instance, in the sixth cen-
tury BCE Pythagoras, abstained from eating animals because of his be-
lief that humans and animals do share a common soul. And in the first
century CE the Hellenist philosopher and historian, Plutarch, provided
a detailed argument for vegetarianism in his essay On Eating Flesh, on
the grounds of justice and humane treatment for animals. The Judeo-,
Christian or Muslim Scriptures provided little support for vegetarian-
ism, however. So it remained a rare custom in the Western and Near-
Eastern worlds until interest in vegetarianism was revived in the
nineteenth century, inspired not only by idealistic moral concerns
about the humane treatment of animals but also by pragmatic dietary
considerations.

Notable British proponents of vegetarianism included the poet Percy

Shelley, the writer George Bernard Shaw, and especially Henry Salt, who
coined the term 'Animal Rights' by way of the title of an influential

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 PERSONHOOD

book he published in 1892. The German philosopher Arthur

hauer, too, thought that, for moral reasons, we ought to beco
tarians. To his regret Schopenhauer noted, however, that w
free to give up meat because mankind cannot survive without
on it.

Since the advent of postmodernity in the 1970s, the populari

vegetarianism has risen greatly in the (mainly Protestant) countrie
the Western world, swayed by ecological as well as moral argum
The ecological argument against eating meat is two-pronged.
prong is directed against hunting (or fishing) animals living in the
which used to provide the only source of meat for human consum
until the agricultural-urban revolution of the late Stone Age. L
hunting and fishing became vilified, however, because they are sai
impoverish or even destroy, the natural environment and lead
evolutionarily harmful reduction in the diversity of biological spe
The other ecological argument is based on the contention that r
animals as a source of food is very inefficient. Typically, grain is
on fertile agricultural land and fed to animals confined indoors or
the case of cattle, in crowded feed lots. Much of the nutritional va
the grain is lost in the process, and this form of animal husbandry
energy-intensive. So the concerns for world-hunger, for the land,
for energy conservation are claimed to provide an ecological as wel
moral basis for a vegetarian diet, or at least one in which mea
sumption is minimized.
Arguments for a reassessing the moral standing of animals have
ported vegetarianism as well. People who believe that animals
rights, i.e. are entitled to have their interests given equal consider
with the similar interests of human persons, naturally infer that t
no moral justification for killing animals and dining on them for ou
ends. Moreover, from the viewpoint of Aristotelian moral utilitaria
(according to which pleasure and the satisfaction of desires as the so
ement of the Good) it has been argued that it is immoral to raise an
as a source of food. For by doing so we inflict more suffering on an
than people gain pleasure by eating them.

Animal Experimentation. The personhood of animals is at sta

well in the controversy regarding the permissibility of using them f
entific experiments. The parties to this dispute generally try to disq

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

their opponents by claiming that they are morally unworthy discussion

partners. On the one hand, the opponents of animal experiments usu-
ally attribute selfish motives to their adversaries, even claiming that bio-
medical scientists do their experiments mainly to satisfy a sadistic yen
for torturing animals. Accordingly, they allege that one cannot expect
that just those researchers who are most qualified to evaluate the scien-
tific or medical need for animal experimentation would actually meet
their moral responsibility vis 'a vis the creatures they victimize. On the
other hand, the biomedical scientists under attack maintain that they
not only try to treat animals humanely in their experiments, but also
that the principal goal of their research efforts is precisely to avert pain
and suffering of animals as well as of humans. According to them, the
Animal Rights movement comprises mainly sentimental fools and hyp-
ocrites, who, though they have managed to gain a disproportionately
powerful political influence, cannot be engaged in any rational dis-
course.

As a formerly practicing neurobiologist, I recognize

necessity of the conduct of animal experiments, witho
to imagine progress in biomedical research. Yet, I was
that representatives of the Animal Rights movement
disputation easily defeated the arguments put forward
mal experiments by my colleagues. For instance, man
tists profess that they have a moral duty to protect lif
imals in particular. So they concede that they are f
problem in the killing of animals to provide people wit
ing, destroying them as pests and vermin, and condem
tinction in their natural state by ever-expanding our
they do claim that putting humans and animals on
chimera that puts into question the human primacy
Western moral tradition, and thus of human existence
in the same passage of Genesis 1:26, which report
mankind in His image, it is said also that he let mankin
over the fish in the sea, and over the fowl of the air, a
and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing
the earth." Thus, within the context of Biblical canon
ends in themselves, and their exploitation use for hum
no moral problem.

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 PERSONHOOD

The adherents of the Animal Rights movements stoutly reject t

medical scientists' claim that putting humans and animals on a p
chimera. They point out that in the United States it was not
long ago that putting women and black Africans on a par wit
males was also considered a chimera. Admittedly, this histori
parison does not provide a logically compelling argument, but
same, the claim that the granting of Animal Rights would repre
goal representing moral progress over Biblical canon cannot
missed all that easily. After all, there have long existed Far-East
tures whose moral traditions are based on the atheistic ethics of
dhism, according to which animals and humans are considered on
to a much greater extent than they are in the West. Since Budd
not believe in God in the first place, they can hardly hold that
ated mankind, but not the animals, in His own image. All the sa
ting mankind and animals on a moral par is a belief whose ge
ceptance would bring about a radical transformation of the Occi
life style that even the adherents of the Animal Rights doctrin
be unlikely to welcome.
A comparison of Sweden and the United States is instructive in
connection. On the one hand, the regulations governing animal e
mentation are much more stringent in Sweden than in the
States. As far as I know, neurophysiological experiments with
mammals, not to speak of primates, are almost impossible to carr
Sweden. But the regulations governing human experimenta
much more lax in Sweden than in the United States. Thus the Sw
legislature is apparently much closer to the chimera of the moral
humans and animals than is the American.

Actual and Potential Persons. There is an assumption that h

derlain our discussion of personhood thus far, which is implicit
identity definition as well as in Aristotle's and Frankfurt's psyc
definitions. This is the assumption that persons and only per
morally considerable beings, which establishes a threshold that
a moral discontinuity. To fall on one side of the threshold is to b
ture qualified for the full panoply of rights and duties that cha
persons; while to fall on the other side is to be, strictly speaking
without any moral standing at all. But as all the practical cases r

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

judgments regarding personhood we have discussed-abortion, slavery,

insanity, uniqueness, and animals-showed, if rigidly applied, these all-
or-none thresholds lead to counterintuitive moral judgments in some, by
no means far-fetched instances.
For that reason, some philosophers have sought to smooth the discon-
tinuity by distinguishing between actual and potential persons. Actual per-
sons bear full moral responsibility for their willed actions, while the
moral status of potential persons is intermediate between that of actual
persons and non-persons (or mere things). Unfortunately, there inhere at
least two difficulties in this approach. One is that while it is not too diffi-
cult to distinguish between actual persons and non-persons (or things), it
is far from obvious how one is supposed to tell that something is a bona-
fide potential person. To what criteria can one resort for deciding
whether one is dealing with an actual person, or with a potential person,
or with a non-person thing? One problem posed by this approach is that
it may be difficult to specify the kinds of beings that qualify as potential
persons. If newborn babies are clear instances of potential persons, what
about fetuses, embryos, or fertilized ova? The other problem is that if po-
tentiality is a matter of more or less, how is one to devise a system of
moral criteria that covers a broad range of approximations of the status of
actual personhood?
To highlight this difficulty with the (on the whole, not unreasonable)
category of potential persons, Lomasky presented the following analogy.
The individual who is actually the president of the United States pos-
sesses constitutionally (and otherwise) defined rights and duties. For in-
stance, he or she has the right to veto congressional legislation and is also
entitled to Secret Service protection. Let us suppose that a candidate for
the presidency is a potential president. This individual does not have the
right to veto legislation but does have a right to Secret Service protec-
tion. It is not, however, the logic of rights that generates these results.
Reasoning analogously, from the proposition that actual persons enjoy a
right not to be killed, nothing follows concerning whether potential per-
sons do possess a similar right not to be killed. Thus an entire additional
and independent set of ethics might be needed to spell out the claims of
potential persons.

Coda. Creatures--human or animal-are actual persons, provided

they have been granted full moral standing, that is, have moral duties as

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 PERSONHOOD

well as moral rights; and have a rational mind to which we

uniqueness, being an end in itself, and free will. This statemen
meant to be normative, but merely intended to call attention to
jective operational criteria by which the judgment of personhoo
ally made, even by those people who may profess other criter
gious, biological, or humanistic grounds.

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 DAVID HUME (1711-1776)
Portrait by Allan Ramsay (1766)

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 Chapter Six

Responsibility

Causal and Moral Responsibility. In everyday speech, the word 're-

sponsibility' may refer to at least two different concepts. One of them is
causal responsibility, which denotes the relation that obtains between two
events, of which one causes, or helps to cause, the other. It is exemplified
by the statement that hitting an iceberg was responsible for the sinking of
the Titanic. Causal responsibility is a descriptive concept, in that it refers to
what the speaker believes to be an empirical fact. Causal responsibility is
always implied when the event identified as the cause is not the action of
a person. A personal action may, of course, be identified as an instance of
causal responsibility as well, as exemplified by the statement that the
helmsman's sudden turn of the wheel was responsible for the Titanic's
veering leeward.
The other concept is moral responsibility, which denotes the relation
that obtains between an action performed by a person and the duties and
obligations of that person. According to the British philosopher of law,
H.L.A. Hart (1951, 1968), moral responsibility is an ascriptive concept,
which attributes duties and obligations to a person that devolve from
moral, legal, or ritual imperatives. The concept of moral responsibility
forms the basis of our judgmental interpretation of a person's action.
Two different kinds of moral responsibility, prospective and retrospective,
can be distinguished. Prospective moral responsibility is exemplified by
the proposition that the Titanic's captain was responsible for the safety of
his ship's passengers. This statement implies that it was the captain's duty
and obligation to ensure the passengers' safety. In this example the re-
sponsibility was prospective (because that for which the person was re-
sponsible lay in the future). Thus to bear prospective moral responsibility
for something means to have a duty or obligation to see to it that this
thing will occur or obtain.

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

The other kind, retrospective moral responsibility, is exemplified by

the statement that the Titanic's captain was responsible for the passen-
gers' deaths. The intended meaning of this proposition is not that it was
the captain's duty to ensure the passengers' death. On the contrary, since
the deaths referred to lie in the past rather than in the future, what is
meant is that the captain acted in a blameworthy manner in a past action
by failing to perform his duty. Retrospective moral responsibility can also
imply praise- rather than blameworthiness, as exemplified by the state-
ment that the Titanic's first mate was responsible for saving many lives by
his diligent command of the lifeboats. Our further discussion of responsi-
bility will be restricted to the retrospective moral kind, since it is for their
past actions that people are judged morally and legally. Thus unless oth-
erwise specified, in these pages the locution 'moral responsibility' will
refer to 'retrospective moral responsibility.'
The intuitive concept of moral responsibility, which provides the ra-
tional foundation for regarding persons as moral creatures in the first
place, is embodied in both religious and secular laws. The concept would
be incoherent unless persons' actions were attributable to their very own,
freely willed choices. Free will, moreover, is more than a mere theoretical
speculation. It is a direct personal, or subjective, experience, since sane
persons have no doubt that they are in control of their own volitions.

RESPONSIBILITY

Causal Responsibility Moral responsibility

(descriptive) (ascriptive)
Always implied when the cause Implied only
of an action is not a person. of an action i

Retrospective Prospective

Criteria for Moral Responsibility. To simplify our

take it for granted that persons are morally responsib
tions, even though this stipulation is not universally
stance, it is widely held among Christian moralists a
people can be held blame- or praiseworthy also for t
tions, desires, and other mental states that did not ne

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 RESPONSIBILITY

actions. Thus, President Jimmy Carter once confessed publicly th

accord with the Christian gospels (Matthew 5:27-28), he was blam
thy for 'lusting' after women other than his wife, even though,
some of his predecessors and successors in the White House, he u
took no actions to satisfy his sinful lust.
That is not to say, of course, that the mental states of people a
highly relevant for the judgment whether some particular action o
was praise- or blameworthy in the first place. As Peter Abela
pointed out in the eleventh century, morality is not an outer quali
we infer from the consequences of their actions. Rather, moralit
inner quality that we ascribe to peoples' motives. In other words,
are not praise- or blameworthy for the effects that their actions a
produced. What they are responsible for are the motives that led t
perform their actions in the first place, depending on whether th
tives do or do not conform to the imperatives of ethics.
As is the case for the meaning of many terms of moral discours
the meaning of 'moral responsibility' rooted in our preformed, mos
tuitive and tacitly held (Platonic) Forms that we bring to any dis
about deserved praise or blame. Four criteria are usually considered
sary and sufficient for holding a person morally responsible for an

(1) The person was causally responsible for the action.

(2) The action was related to the person's duties and obligatio
volving from moral, legal, or ritual imperatives.
(3) The person was aware that in acting as she did, she was
moral right or wrong and was not mistaken in that awareness.
(4) The person willed to undertake the action autonomously, i.e.
open to her to choose not to undertake it.

Determinism. As we briefly discussed in Chapter 1, the fourth o

criteria, namely being able to will something autonomously, co
with another of our transcendental intuitions, namely determini
cording to determinism, there exists a seamless web of causal conn
that governs whatever happens in the world. Hence, any event w
an effect of (or necessitated by) a chain of prior events that were
selves necessitated by yet earlier events. This belief in determinism
a mere superstition, in that it provides the rational foundation for
tuitive concept of an orderly world and thus for our scientific u
standing and highly successful manipulation of nature.

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

Determinism thus implies that all the world's future events, including
any person's willing to perform an action, are fully decided in advance. In
other words, freedom of the will would be an illusion if persons were not
able to will their actions differently from how they actually do will them.
So it would make no sense to hold them morally responsible for having
willed to act in one way rather than in another if that decision was not
autonomously their own but forced on them by the unbreakable causal
chain of the world's past events.

Paradox of Moral Responsibility. Thus criterion (4) for holding a per-

son morally responsible for an action, namely that she autonomously
willed to undertake it, confronts us with the Paradox of Moral Responsibil-
ity. The Paradox can be stated in terms of two premises, an argument,
and a conclusion.

Premise 1: Some of the world's events are governed by determinism

and the remaining events occur as a result of random chance.
Premise 2: Persons are morally responsible only for those of their
actions that they will autonomously.
Argument: To the extent that the will of persons to perform an ac-
tion is governed by determinism, it is predetermined. Thus persons
could not have willed differently from how they did will, and their
will was not free. To the extent that their will to perform an action
is not governed by determinism, they could have willed differently
from how they did will. But since, according to premise 1, events
that are not governed by determinism occur as the result of random
chance, the will of persons is no more under their direct control in
the absence of determinism than in its presence.
Conclusion: It follows from premises 1 and 2, therefore, that per-
sons are never morally responsible for their actions. Although this
conclusion seems to flow logically from two reasonable premises, it
is self-contradictory, and hence paradoxical in the light of our moral
intuition.

The Paradox of Moral Responsibility dates back to the very beginnings

of philosophy in ancient Greece, but it became especially vexing in re-
cent times because, being the beneficiaries of a science-oriented culture,
we modern people are rationally committed to the determinism doctrine.

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 RESPONSIBILITY

Lately, moreover, we have also turned into politically correct,

egalitarians, to whom the belief in free will ought to appear as the
of species-chauvinist conceit. How can we believe that our human
the only causal force in the world that can escape determination
unbreakable chains of natural causes and effects that govern all t
ers of the world's events? Yet, at the same time, we find it equally
sible to believe that our own actions actually do form part of tho
breakable cause-effect chains, that is, that we are not real person
mere automata.

The Paradox of Moral Responsibility would not be reso

contrary to our intuition, determinism does not obtain unive
as we will note in Chapter 14, determinism does not obtain i
atomic and subatomic (or microcosmic) realm, where there d
events that are not fully determined in advance. Hence if hu
were among those events, people could sometimes have wille
from how they did will. However, as set forth in the Argument
dox of Moral Responsibility, such random events would be n
the autonomous control of persons than fully predeterm
Philosophers who accept this as a genuine, irresolvable
known as 'Incompatibilists,' in contrast to the 'Compatibilists'
the Paradox of Moral Responsibility is false, or can be reso
consider some Compatibilist arguments in Chapter 7.

Exculpations. So far we did not take into account that the

exculpations from blameworthiness for actions for whic
morally responsible and that are clearly violations of the im
ethics, but on which, nevertheless, no blameworthiness is co
Moral philosophers recognize two distinct kinds of exculp
blameworthiness, justifications and excuses.
(1) A justification is an argument for exculpation that can
under a condition that renders an action permissible, or ev
thy, even though it would have been impermissible and blam
the absence of that condition. For instance, a driver would b
exceeding a posted speed limit on his way to the hospital wi
injured person on board. Thus a normally impermissible acti
sible provided that it is justifiable.
(2) An excuse is an argument that can be invoked unde
that leaves an action still impermissible, yet not blamewor

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

even be praiseworthy, because it was inspired by noble motives. For in-

stance, Jean Valjean, the protagonist of Victor Hugo's novel, Les Mis-
&rables, may be excused for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving
child. (The French court that condemned Valjean to the galleys for this
theft did not see it that way, of course.)
An alternative theory of excuses was put forward by David Hume
(1740). According to Hume, persons may be excused from wrongdoing if
their actions were not the result of a morally reprehensible character trait.
By 'character trait' Hume meant an enduring personality attribute
(which may be either a social asset or a social liability) that is itself
within our voluntary control or expresses itself in behavior that is within
our voluntary control. Thus courage and generosity are character traits,
whereas intelligence and a sense of humor are not. On this view of ex-
cuses, Jean Valjean has an excuse for his theft of the loaf of bread because
his action was attributable to the noble character trait of compassion
rather than to the ignoble trait of thievishness.
Hume's theory of excuses does not take into account the possibility
that the origin of a person's reprehensible motivational state (that fore-
closes excuses) may not have been under her voluntary control. How can
one hold a person blameworthy (or praiseworthy) for her ignoble (or
noble) character traits when her biological heredity and her personal his-
tory are likely to have played a major role in their development? Hume
rejected such retrospective deterministic reasoning about the origins of
character traits because it would entail a causal regress all the way back to
Adam and Eve. So he resolved the Paradox of Moral Responsibility by
simply denying any role to free will in decisions about moral-value-laden
actions. As Hume saw it, persons with reprehensible character traits per-
form blameworthy actions, and those with laudable character traits per-
form praiseworthy actions. For Hume, the moral value of an action-
blameworthy or praiseworthy-depends only on the moral character of
agents, regardless of how they acquired it and came to be that way.
The importance of clarifying the grounds for excusing persons from
blameworthiness for impermissible actions for which they are causally re-
sponsible extends beyond the satisfaction of our intellectual quest for in-
sights into moral philosophy. Such clarification is essential for the ad-
ministration of criminal justice in the law courts, which are the
workshops of applied moral philosophy, where moral responsibility is the
paramount problem to be addressed.

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 RESPONSIBILITY

Coercion. Actions that persons were coerced to undertake

threat applied to them by other persons belong to a special cate
excusable, albeit impermissible, and ordinarily blameworthy
we noted in Chapter 3, Aristotle had emphasized that an agent m
excused from blameworthiness for an, on first sight impermissib
the agent undertook it only to avoid an even greater evil, or to
some higher purpose. By way of an example, Aristotle mention
pliance with an order to undertake an evil action by a tyrant wh
agent's parents or children in his power, under the dire threat th
of refusal, the agent's beloved would be put to death. Aristotle
out, however, that justifying an excuse from blameworthiness of
who is faced with such a moral dilemma is not all that clear-cut
after all, the agent was offered a choice at the time he acted. H
excuse from blameworthiness attributable to a morally righteou
an action can be vindicated only by taking into account the ent
text of the occasion in which the action occurred. Strictly speak
human actions (other than reflexes and movements implemente
autonomic nervous system) are voluntary (and designated as
neurophysiologists) in the concrete. An action, therefore, ca
garded as 'coerced' only in the abstract, namely by supposing th
person would never have chosen to carry it out in the absence of
threat.

Brainwashing. The need for taking into account the entire context in
which a morally relevant action took place in judging its blameworthi-
ness is shown by the condition of brainwashing. Let us consider an au-
thoritarian state. For many years, the rulers of that state have so success-
fully controlled what its citizens read, what views they encounter, and
how in their youth their minds and dispositions were skillfully molded by
their teachers so that almost all of them desire what their rulers desire
them to desire. Hence these citizens do not know that there are alterna-
tives to the life style to which they are accustomed, or that their freedom
to choose has in any way been circumscribed. Thus they are not aware of
any coercion or constraints on the satisfaction of their desires. Yet, we
would scarcely concede that the citizen of that state enjoyed much free-
dom, even though there is no overt coercion in the usual sense. In fact,
coercion by the rulers had become unnecessary. So it is at least arguable
that, despite the absence of overt coercion, a citizen of that state is not

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

blameworthy for some actions that would entail their blameworthiness in

a less authoritarian society.

Insanity. The foregoing discussions have taken it tacitly for granted

that the persons to whom moral responsibility can be ascribed are of
sound mind. But what about insane people who are not of sound mind,
that is, are afflicted with a mental disorder? Are they to be held responsi-
ble-morally and/or legally-for their freely willed offenses, just as is any
sane person? The attempts to resolve the problem whether insanity is an
exculpating condition have provided some of the most cogent debates on
the justification of excuses for blameworthy actions. How should insanity
be defined, and why does it-if it does-excuse a person? On some ac-
counts, insanity exculpates just because it is a special case of other
generic excuses, such as ignorance and compulsion. On other accounts,
insanity has to be understood as a unique kind of excuse that must not be
conflated with ignorance or compulsion.
It is widely accepted in most modern liberal and compassionate soci-
eties that a person afflicted with a mental disorder may be excused for an
offense for which a sane person is judged blameworthy. Such a demand
for a general, non-specific excuse relief of mentally disordered persons
from moral responsibility is obviously too broad, however. For instance,
while an exhibitionist might be excused for exposing his private parts in
public, he ought to be held morally responsible for a theft. Conversely,
while a kleptomaniac may be exculpated for a theft, he ought to be held
morally responsible for a rape. The principle governing exculpation in
such cases is that there must exist some close connection between the
nature of the person's mental disorder and the offense for which exculpa-
tion is sought.
But even though the existence of a close connection between an of-
fense and a mental disorder may be a necessary condition, it is not a suffi-
cient condition for exculpation. For instance, suppose that a person is
caught stealing some merchandise from a department store and it is then
discovered that he is afflicted with kleptomania. Should this provide an
automatic excuse for his theft? One commonly held opinion is that, in
view of his particular mental disorder, the thief should be excused. For, so
it is argued, his disordered mind did not allow him to do otherwise, and he
is therefore not responsible for his action. The validity of this reason for
exculpation cannot be taken for granted, however, since a kleptomaniac

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 RESPONSIBILITY

thief is not automatically compelled by his disorder to steal as he w

compelled by the patellar reflex to kick out his lower leg by a well
tap on his kneecap. Rather, kleptomania is a disorder that m
merely more difficult, but not impossible, for an afflicted person t
an impulse to steal. So why, if there was still the possibility of his resis
the impulse, should the kleptomaniac thief be excused from failing
sist it?

The issues surrounding exculpation of the insane have been fierc

debated in the courts, foremost among them being the definition
sanity itself. Under American criminal law the first and most com
insanity test is the M'Naghten rule, which excuses defendants
mental disorder caused them to be ignorant of the nature, quality
blameworthiness of the action for which they stand accused. This
rion of legal insanity was formulated in 1843 by English judges in
sponse to the public outcry that resulted when Daniel M'Naght
acquitted on grounds of insanity of murdering the private secretary
Robert Peel (the organizer of the first modern police force, the L
'Bobbies'). M'Naghten had mistaken the secretary for Peel and kill
secretary while suffering from paranoid delusions about Peel's evil
tions towards him.
The judges sought to provide a morally sound, legally workable
rion for determining whether the murderer was entitled to acqui
the grounds of insanity. The criterion they promulgated declares t
establish a defense on the ground of insanity it must be clearly p
that, at the time of committing the action, the accused was suffering f
a disease of the mind that produced so great a defect of reason that
not know the nature and quality of his action.
Or, more simply stated, the crux of the M'Naghten rule is wheth
accused knew the difference between right and wrong at the t
committed his blameworthy deed. A different kind of insanity def
sometimes produced on behalf of accused persons who do know th
ference between right and wrong and who are fully aware of the cr
nature of their actions. That defense-which is often advanced on
of wealthy shoplifters-alleges that the defendant's offence was cau
an irresistible and possibly subliminal psychopathological compuls
There exists a substantial minority opinion, however, which
the doctrine that persons afflicted with a mental disorder should

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

cused from responsibility for blameworthy actions for which a normal per-
son could be held responsible. For instance, the British sociologist, Bar-
bara Wootton (1963), maintained that-the M'Naghten rule notwith-
standing-no rationally coherent criterion of criminal insanity can be
formulated in the first place. Starting from a determinist position, she as-
serted that all efforts to formulate an adequate criterion of mental disor-
der, and in the final analysis, of responsibility itself, founder on the Argu-
ment of the Paradox of Moral Responsibility. Since, according to that
Argument, the will of every person-sane or insane-is ultimately be-
yond that person's autonomous control, there is no point in assessing
moral responsibility in the context of the criminal law. According to
Wootton, the law should be concerned solely with treating offenders so
that they will not repeat their offenses. It is clear that Wootton's deter-
minist approach to the criminal law would sweep away not only the M'-
Naghten rule but any kind of excuse on the grounds of insanity for what,
on first sight, would appear to be blameworthy actions.
Like Wootton, the Hungarian-American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz
(1973) argued for the abandonment of any kind of insanity plea, but for
reasons that are diametrically opposed from Wootton's. Szasz does not
deny the existence of an autonomous free will and enthusiastically en-
dorses the concept of responsibility. But he rejects the notion of mental
illness as a noxious metaphor, claiming that mental illness is not a gen-
uine disease and that psychiatry is not a bona fide medical specialty. Ac-
cording to Szasz, insane persons are not really ill and psychiatrists are not
really doctors. To treat insane people as if they were sick is to confuse
medicine with morals. He argued that if and insofar as it is deemed that
so-called 'mental patients' endanger society, society can, and ought, to
protect itself from the 'mentally ill' in the same way it does from the
'mentally healthy'-that is by means of the criminal law.

A Way without Crossroads. The foregoing discussion was meant to

show that the concept of responsibility is a central, foundational, and yet
troublesome problem of morals. As we noted, upon analysis of its prem-
ises-especially that of 'choice'-within the context of (Western) moral
philosophy 'moral responsibility' turns out to be a philosophically ambigu-
ous, indeed paradoxical concept. It is noteworthy, therefore, that Confu-
cius, in his account of the ethics of the humanistic Tao, does not mention
the concepts 'choice' and 'responsibility.' Terms roughly equivalent to

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 RESPONSIBILITY

them occasionally turn up the Analects, but Confucius does not

or elaborate them in a way commensurate with their overarching
tance for the Western philosophical understanding of morals. D
to defining and illuminating what we would call moral issues, h
Confucius fail to consider the complex of moral notions cent
'choice' and 'responsibility?'
No doubt, people in sixth century BCE China did make (w
would consider) morally relevant choices and some people did ac
(what we would consider) responsibly than others. Yet Confuciu
Chinese contemporaries did not even have a language with which
press the concepts of 'moral choice' and 'moral responsibility' th
of such great concern to their contemporaries in Greece and Sou
ern Asia. As we noted in Chapter 3, what the Ancient Chinese d
about was the Tao, the right or normative Way or Path of Life t
human existence. In this figurative context, the concept of mor
could have been easily captured by the metaphor of taking one of
forks at a crossroads along the Way. Yet Confucius never u
metaphor. Why not? Because for him following the correct f
crossroads is not a matter of choice but of having learned which
the right one. There is no scope for free autonomous decisions. O
more general terms, Confucius did not view the moral life as a
freely willed choices between alternative actions but as a series
fications of actions as objectively right or wrong, accordin
learned scheme of virtue, or jen.
Confucius tells the story of a man called 'Upright' Kung whos
stole a sheep. Kung testifies against his father. The Duke, who r
this case to Confucius, praises what he considers to be Kung's up
ness. But Confucius disagrees with the Duke. He tells the Duk
Confucius' own homeland of Lau they teach that a son who
rather than incriminates his father is the one who is considered
(or, in the context of our discussion, 'praiseworthy').
This story serves as a model for demonstrating the dilemma of
to choose between two conflicting moral obligations. A Western
almost always emphasize that when two weighty obligations conf
up to us to choose which of them to honor, because the seed of tr
punishment, of guilt and remorse lies in the necessity to make a
choice for which one bears moral responsibility. But however obv
problem of internal moral conflict exemplified by the 'Upright

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

story may be for a Westerner, Confucius' fails to see or to mention it. This
failure is of a piece with the absence from the Analects of any discussion
of moral responsibility and its associated problems. These problems do
not exist for Confucius because he does not believe that moral decisions
involve any choice in the first place.
Classical Western morality embedded in the Greco-Judeo-Christian
tradition regards punishment as a retributive response to past moral
wrongdoing. Its function is to erase the guilt incurred by morally respon-
sible persons. Their repentance is not simply a device that is appropriate
or not depending on its psychological consequences on the malefactors.
Rather, repentance is meant to remove the moral disequilibrium present
in the world due to the existence of an unpunished, blameworthy action.
This was not Confucius' view of the function of punishment, because he
lacked the concept of morally responsible agents. He shared the view
generally prevalent in Ancient China (and among the strain of Western
moral philosophers inspired by Aristotle), that punishment serves as a
utilitarian deterrent for the commission of future crimes, rather than as a
just retribution to erase guilt for past crimes.
The central moral issue for Confucius is, therefore, not the responsibil-
ity of a person for actions she has by her own free will chosen to perform,
but the factual question of whether a person has been properly taught the
Way and whether she has the desire to learn it diligently. According to
the Confucian view, the proper response to a failure to conform to the
prescribed ritual order of the li is not guilt for having made a blamewor-
thy autonomous choice, but self-education to remedy a deficiency in
one's moral development.

Coda. The concept of moral responsibility provides the rational founda-

tion for regarding human beings as moral creatures in the first place. It
refers to the human intuition that persons can be judged as praiseworthy
or blameworthy for the volitions that motivated their actions, with the
judgment being based on established ethical criteria, such as those found
in the Torah's Ten Commandments. The following three conditions are
generally considered necessary and sufficient for holding a person
morally responsible for an action:

1. Her action was related to her duties and obligations.

2. She freely willed to undertake the action (i.e. that it was open to
her to choose not to undertake it).

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 RESPONSIBILITY

3. She was aware that in acting as she did, she was doing moral r
or wrong.

The condition that persons are held morally responsible for an action
only if they freely willed it leads to the Paradox of Moral Responsibility, ac-
cording to the Conclusion of which persons can never be held morally re-
sponsible for their actions. For some of the world's events are governed by
determinism and the remainder occur as a result of random chance. To the
extent that the will of a person is governed by determinism, it is not free
and the person could not have willed differently from how she did will.
And to the extent that the will of a person is the result of random
chance, it is no more under her direct control than it would have been
under the governance of determinism. Although this Conclusion seems
to flow logically from two reasonable premises, it is self-contradictory and
hence paradoxical in the light of our moral intuition.
There exist two kinds of exculpations from blameworthiness for actions
for which persons are morally responsible and that are clearly violations
of the imperatives of ethics, but on which no blameworthiness is con-
ferred. One kind, justification, is an argument for exculpation that can be
invoked under a condition that renders an action permissible, or even
praiseworthy, even though it would have been impermissible and blame-
worthy, in the absence of that condition. The other kind, excuse, is an ar-
gument that can be invoked under a condition that leaves an action still
impermissible, yet not blameworthy, or may even be praiseworthy, be-
cause it was inspired by noble motives.

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 P I

PIERRE SIMON, M
Commemorative stamp

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 Chapter Seven

Determinism

Natural Laws. By the eighteenth century BCE the Sumerians had de-
veloped the idea that Marduk-patron god of Babylon-had ordained
explicit natural laws whose obeisance by nature generated cosmic order
out of cosmic chaos. The Sumerians had thereby laid the rational founda-
tion for the project that eventually came to be known as 'science,' dedi-
cated to the discovery of those divinely ordained natural laws. The con-
cept of natural laws entails the doctrine of determinism, according to
which all events in the world are necessitated by a chain of past events
that were themselves necessitated by yet earlier events. Hence by con-
ceiving the notion of a lawful cosmic order the Sumerians had laid also
the rational foundations for the Paradox of Moral Responsibility. Their
proto-scientific notions had made it seem impossible that there could be
any scope for free will in a world in which natural law renders future
events as fixed and unavoidable as past events.
Although this conceptual tension between doctrines of determinism
and of moral responsibility was of some concern to the philosophers of
classical antiquity, it became a crucial theological issue upon the rise of
Christianity. The Christian Fathers wondered how God's certain fore-
knowledge of the future could possibly allow for the kind of freedom that
would provide a rational basis for the notion of moral responsibility in the
first place. How could God act justly in rewarding some people for their
righteous deeds and punish others for their evil deeds if all actions were
foreordained? Didn't God know all along how everybody was going to
behave?
As we noted in Chapter 5, Augustine resolved this dilemma by main-
taining that God's foreknowledge of the autonomous decisions that our
free will is going to make does not entail their necessity. The will God
gave us could not be a will unless it remained within our power to choose
freely. According to Augustine there is no paradox: God's divine power to

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

know in advance how we are going to use the will He gave us does not
preclude its freedom to make autonomous decisions.
Pierre Simon de Laplace. In late eighteenth century, the French
mathematician and astronomer, Pierre Simon de Laplace, provided the
doctrine of determinism with very strong support. Laplace had managed
to account for the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit around the sun, for the
irregularities of the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, and for the mysterious
pattern of terrestrial tides in terms of interplanetary interactions accord-
ing to Isaac Newton's law of gravitation. Thus Laplace explained these
phenomena-previously considered aberrant, irregular natural happen-
ings-in terms of a regular, determinate law of physics. This inspired him
to claim that whatever happened in the world's past was-or whatever is
yet to happen in its future will be-totally determined by the laws of
physics and the world's initial conditions. This all-encompassing Lapla-
cian determinist proposition left little scope for any exercise of an au-
tonomous human free will.
The tension between the doctrines of free will and of determinism is
felt especially acutely by modern people who live in a secular, enlight-
ened, and science-oriented world. They are rationally committed to de-
terminism and reject the possibility that miracles and prayer can influ-
ence future events by transcending natural law. Moreover, in recent years
that tension became especially acute for those politically correct, cosmic
egalitarians, to whom the doctrine of free will appears as the height of
anthropocentric chauvinist conceit. Why should our human will be the
only agency in the world that is not subject to the determinist cause and
effect chains that governs all other phenomena? Yet, at the same time,
how can sane persons deny their direct, subjective experience of freely
willing their own actions and view themselves as mere Zombies, who
form part of the world's predetermined, mindless chain of happenings?

Behaviorists, Immaterialists, Libertarians and Compatibilists. The

Paradox of Moral Responsibility still remains one of the most vexing
problems of moral philosophy. It has persisted from Augustine's days
down to our own postmodern era, except that in the meanwhile Augus-
tine's doctrine of God's omniscience and omnipotence as the antithesis
of free will was replaced by its secular equivalent, namely the scientific
doctrine of determinism. Much philosophical effort has been expended
on trying to resolve that paradox, to rescue the transcendental concept of

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 DETERMINISM

moral responsibility, which provides one of the metaphysical fou

of human social relations. Philosophers who have joined in
tempted rescue mission can be assigned to at least four different
cording to their metaphysical starting positions. They are the B
ists, the Immaterialists, the Libertarians and the Compatibilists. A
see, most of these would-be-rescuers failed because they looked
Paradox from the viewpoint of the monist solution to the m
problem, within the context of which moral responsibility turne
be a rationally incoherent notion.
Behaviorists, such as the American psychologist B. E Skinner (
asserted that free will-even if it did exist-has nothing to do wit
responsibility in any case. They argued that the only reason for
people morally responsible in this determinist world is to create
ical smoke screen behind which the antisocial behavior of social misfits
can be modified psychotherapeutically. According to Behaviorists, the
term 'responsibility' merely denotes the susceptibility of persons to aban-
doning their asocial behavior in response to the psychological pressure
applied to them by the moral judgments of their blameworthiness by
other persons or by the state. And if a verdict of blameworthiness will
not change a person's social behavior in wholesome ways, then there is
no point in making a fuss about her moral responsibility.
Very little needs to be said about the Behaviorist approach to moral
responsibility, except to mention that, being obviously incompatible
with any intuition about morality and justice, behaviorism cannot pro-
vide a philosophically satisfactory resolution of the Paradox of Moral
Responsibility.
Immaterialists, such as Colonial America's best-known moral philoso-
pher, the eighteenth century Puritan theologian, Jonathan Edwards
(1957), derived their appellation from having stood on its head Aristo-
tle's materialist doctrine that the human mind is an attribute of the
human material body substance. For Edwards and his followers were be-
holden to Plato's idealist doctrine that the human body, just as all other
perceptible objects of the world, are attributes of our immaterial mind sub-
stance and that it is these mental ideas that constitute the world's sole
permanent reality.
In accord with his religious proclivity for John Calvin's doctrine of the
predestination of human fate, Edwards was a staunch determinist. He be-
lieved that since the principle of causality, according to which everything

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

that happens is determined by a cause, applies to the human will as it

does to everything else God has created, people have no freedom to will
their actions. God alone is free, in the sense that He can control His vo-
lition, as we cannot control ours. But Edwards rejected Premise 2 of the
Paradox, which states that that no person is responsible for her actions
unless she is free to will them. The reason for his rejection was that he did
not consider the will to be an autonomous, self-determining force.
Rather, Edwards considered the will as a passive relay station that is
moved heteronomously to implement actions determined by external
circumstances. In carrying out this relay function, our will is moved, not
by physical causes, but by our wishes, our passions, and our affects that
are presented to the will, with the strongest of them determining how the
will is going to move. Thus the importance of the will lies not in its mak-
ing free choices but in being the target of the determinist action of our
soul (or ego, as Sigmund Freud would later refer to the ensemble of such
motivational mental states). In other words, according to the Immateri-
alist doctrine, determinism still leaves the actions of persons under their
control and makes them subject to moral responsibility, even in the ab-
sence of any autonomous free will.
Although Immaterialists believe in an all-pervasive determinism just
as much as do Behaviorists, they differ from Behaviorists in accepting the
philosophical centrality of moral responsibility. But Immaterialists dis-
miss the Paradox because they reject the very idea of free will, arguing
that, understood as self-determination in a determinist world, the con-
cept of free will implies an infinite regress of acts of personal self-causa-
tion. According to Edwards, free will can imply no more than a person's
random preference for one action over another. For, according to Premise
1 of the Paradox, all mental events that are not governed by determinism
(as volitions, to be worthy of the predicate 'free,' must not be) occur as a
result of random chance. So even if free will did exist, its random, un-
caused volitions could not account for moral responsibility and the culti-
vation of a virtuous character.
Edwards insisted that the ordinary meaning of being 'free' to do some-
thing is compatible with determinism. He asserted that there is no Para-
dox of Moral Responsibility because moral responsibility devolves from
doing what one wants to do most, and if what one wants to do most is
morally wrong, one is blameworthy. Sinners merit retributive punish-
ment-either in the here-and-now or in the hereafter-because they
chose to do wrong when doing wrong was what pleased their soul most.

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 DETERMINISM

Critics of the Immaterialists' argument had no trouble demonst

the incoherence of Edward's argumentation, by showing that dete
ism is incompatible with statements of the form 'Person P could
willed X rather than Y.' For the normal use of expressions such loc
as 'was free to,' 'could have,' and 'was able to' implies more than a
external constraints on action. Freedom of the will does not mean
dom of action' but 'freedom of the decision to act.' Hence absent u
determinism of any freedom of the will to decide what it would pl
owner's soul most, it could never have been the case that a person
have willed otherwise than she did.
Libertarians, in contrast to Behaviorists and Immaterialists, b
that free will does exist. They accept Premise 2 of the Paradox of
Responsibility, which asserts that persons are morally responsible on
those of their actions that they willed autonomously. And Liberta
accept the first part of Premise 1, which asserts that there are so
tions that are not fully determined by antecedent circumstances. B
ertarians reject the second part of Premise 1, which implies that
extent that human actions are among those that are not fully deter
in advance, they would have to occur by pure chance. Hence Liber
ans do not accept the proposition that the person's will is no more
tonomous control of her actions that were not fully determined i
vance than in actions that were fully determined.
To make room for free will and for the concept of moral responsi
Libertarians distinguish between three types of actions, the first
which confer exemption from responsibility.

(A) Actions that are fully determined by antecedent external cir

stances.

(B) Actions that were caused pure chance, beyond the person's

According to Libertarian thought, however, the third type

does entail responsibility.

(C) Actions that are (at least in part) determined autonom

antecedent internal circumstances. These internal circumstanc
spond to a person's rational states of mind, which determine t
sions of her will and to whose freedom from external, heterono
ences we ascribe her responsibility.

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

Conclusion: Therefore there is no paradox.

O'Connor (1970) criticized this Libertarian resolution of the Paradox,

asserting that "the Libertarian's attempt to make free will dependent on
reason has failed. He has fallen from one kind of determinism into an-
other, exchanging the whips of causal regularity for the scorpions of logi-
cal necessity." But O'Connor's criticism misses the point, since the rea-
son for the failure of the Libertarians' argument is not their replacement
of the whips of causal regularity by invocation of the scorpions of logical
necessity. Rather, the reason for the argument's failure is that it begs the
question, by positing the existence of type C actions, which is explicitly
denied in Premise 1 of the paradox. If there did exist type C actions, the
Libertarian's attempt to make free will dependent on reason would not
have failed, since there is no inconsistency in invoking scorpions of logi-
cal necessity in the determination of free will based on the person's au-
tonomously arisen rational states of mind.
Compatibilists hold that moral responsibility and determinism are mu-
tually compatible rather than mutually exclusive. In the seventeenth
century, Thomas Hobbes (1651), the founder of English moral philoso-
phy, provided an early statement of the Compatibilist position. Contrary
to Edwards, Hobbes argued that to be 'free' means no more than an ab-
sence of external constraints that prevent one from doing what one has
the will (that is, the desire or inclination) to do. He does not mean (an
impossible) freedom of the will from causal necessitation by natural laws.
One is 'free' insofar as one is able to follow one's own desires and inclina-
tions and to implement one's will. The fact that our desires and inclina-
tions are states and events of which each has its own causal history and
explanation, does not make them any less our own, and hence they do
entail our moral responsibility. Thus, the morally relevant antitheses are
not volitionally 'free' as opposed to volitionally 'determined' actions but
'free' as opposed to externally 'coerced' actions.
In the eighteenth century, David Hume (1740) further developed
Hobbes' distinction favored by Compatibilists between coerced action
and volitional determination. Hume argued that to equate coerced ac-
tion and volitional determination is to conflate prescriptive and descriptive
causation. For example, the laws of the land are prescriptive causes of so-
cial behavior because they coerce certain uniform standards of conduct
by imposing penalties for deviations from them. But the laws of celestial

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 DETERMINISM

mechanics do not coerce the planets to move in their orbits; they s

describe the way planetary motion is determined. Nor do the l
chemistry coerce acids to react with alkalis. They merely describe th
the acid-alkali reaction pattern is determined.
While Hume's proposition that there is an important difference
tween prescriptive and descriptive causation is no doubt valid, tha
ference is epistemological rather than conceptual. The difference
temological (that is, related to how we come to know a cause)
than conceptual (that is, related to the concept of causation per se
the following reasons.
As for prescriptive causation, I infer deductively that a red traffi
coerced a driver of an automobile to stop his car until the light tu
green, even though no other cars were in sight. For I know that th
vehicle code prescribes stopping at red lights and provides for fin
case of non-compliance. As for descriptive causation, however, I inf
ductively that a cover of ice on the road caused a driver to slow h
down to a crawl. For I know from past experience that drivers tend
duce their speed because they fear the natural danger presented by
pery road.
There is no basic conceptual difference, however, between prescri
and descriptive causation regarding our notion of causality. In eithe
we posit that there is a link-always overt in the case prescriptive
tion and often covert in the case of descriptive causation-that cau
person to perform an action. Admittedly, philosophers have found i
hard to define or explicate the nature of such a causal link. This do
alter the fact, however, that causation is generally recognized as a
tonic Form, or, as we will consider in some detail in Chapter 10, as
egory of Kantian pure theoretical reason.
In any case, Hume's distinction between prescriptive and descrip
causation does not advance the Compatibilist cause. It seems to hav
tle relevance for the Paradox of Moral Responsibility, inasmuch as
abrogation of our freedom of action by overt coercion (such as th
erted by the laws of the land) is trivially obvious and not the sub
philosophical controversy. What is controversial is how the belief i
will and moral responsibility can be reconciled with the ever-p
covert determination (such as that exerted by the all-pervasive na
laws). After all, one of the main reasons for the well-nigh-universal bel
free will is our subjective experience of choosing freely in many sit

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

This experience does not arise in the presence of prescriptive, and espe-
cially not in the presence of coercive causes, of which we must be con-
sciously aware for them to be effective in the first place.
For instance, the captured partisan guerilla fighter must be aware of
being tortured by the soldiers of the occupying army to be coerced to re-
veal the hiding place of his comrades, and he is unlikely to think that he
is excercising his free will. By contrast, as I am writing these lines, I do
have the experience of acting freely. I am blissfully unaware not only of
the prescriptive rules of English grammar that restrict my freedom of
choice of the next word, but even more importantly, of the multitudinous
physiological events in my brain-past or present-that determine
which symbols I strike on my computer keyboard. It is only under these
seemingly unconstrained conditions that I might wonder whether I am
really choosing freely.
A fundamentally different, and in my view much more satisfactory
Compatibilist resolution of the Paradox of Moral Responsibility was put for-
ward at the turn of the twentieth century by the British philosopher, EH.
Bradley (1927). He too rejected the Paradox's Premise 1 that between
them, determinism and random chance share the governance of all the
world's happenings. Bradley insisted that in considering the implications of
determinism, it is necessary to distinguish, not between determination and
coercion, as did Hume, but between a person's internally self-determined
action and an action that is heteronomously determined by circumstances
external to the person. Why did Bradley insist on making this distinction?
Because, in line with the dualist solution of the mind-body problem
(which we will examine in more detail in Chapter 9), Bradley maintained
that circumstances external to the person exert their determinate effects
directly on the body, which implements the action commanded by the
mind. The internally self-generated mental commands for action, how-
ever, are determined by the mind's free will, which is not wholly subject to
the otherwise all-pervasive determinism. Therefore there is no paradox.
In Chapter 10 we will develop Bradley's Compatibilist resolution of
the Paradox further and take into account that free will is a non-natural
attribute that moral reason obliges us to ascribe to the mind of persons.
Therefore, unlike the determinist causation in terms of which we try to
account for the natural phenomena, whose occurrence we perceive and
describe in both mind and body, free will belongs to the transcendental
world of a priori ideas.

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 DETERMINISM

In anticipatory support of this argument, it ought to be borne

that the concept of 'responsibility' is ascriptive as well, just as is i
ally essential precondition, namely free will. Thus, in speaking of
sponsibility we ascribe to the person some duties and obligation
from moral, legal or ritual imperatives, rather than describing some
ical fact.

Determinism and Predictability. Laplace's determinism had

also a secondary doctrine that was commonly supposed to be ent
it. According to this doctrine determinism should enable us-at l
principle-to predict all of the World's future events on the basi
knowledge of the laws of Nature and of the World's present con
So when at the beginning of the twentieth century some physical
were discovered whose future events turned out not to be predi
was inferred that they are not subject to determinism and design
determinate rather than unpredictable, as they ought to have b
unfortunate conflation of the concepts of determinism and predi
led to the conclusions that determinism is not a universal feature of the
world's events, that there is no Paradox of Moral Responsibility, and that
therefore there would be room for moral responsibility based on free will
after all. Finally, by the middle of the twentieth century these develop-
ments gave currency to the liberating postmodern thought that the world
is not 'Laplacian' after all. (Volkenstein, 1980)
To appreciate that the Paradox of Moral Responsibility cannot be re-
solved all that easily, one needs to disentangle the two conflated con-
cepts. Under the doctrine of determinism, any event is the effect of a
prior series of causal events necessitated by even earlier causal events, so
that the initial and final states of any determinate system are linked via a
causal chain. Determinism implies, therefore, that all future events are as
fixed and unalterable as past events. Predictability, however, is an attri-
bute of only a subset of all determinate systems. For that subset future
events can be forecast by application of natural laws to observations of
past events, while for the remainder of determinate systems future events
are unpredictable. The proof that a system whose events are unpredictable
may nevertheless be determinate is that their retrodiction (that is, provi-
sion of a rational account of the causes of a present event as an effect of
past events) is possible. This insight came upon the study of some physi-
cal phenomena, such as the weather, whose events cannot be precisely

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

foretold, even though they are still linked by rigid causal connections
with their antecedent events. (Stent, 1983)
As we shall now see, it transpired that determinism does not entail pre-
dictability, even though the very idea of a rational predictability of the
world's future events has the doctrine of determinism as its metaphysical
foundation.

Chaos. In the 1960s, the French mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot

(1963) drew attention to the highly irregular nature of the statistical data
gathered by quantitative observations of some natural and social phe-
nomena, such as the weather and the stock market, which he called 'sec-
ond stage indeterminism.' These phenomena differ fundamentally from
what he called 'first stage indeterminism,' of which the outcomes of the
croupier's repeated spinnings of a roulette wheel are an example. To cir-
cumvent the confusion arising from the conflation of 'determinism' and
'predictability' in the context of discussions of the Paradox of Moral Re-
sponsibility, I shall refer to two categories of phenomena identified by
Mandelbrot as manifesting 'first stage' and 'second stage' unpredictability.
First and second stage unpredictability phenomena are alike in that
both are determinate phenomena, whose final state could be predicted in
principle to some degree of accuracy, provided all the relevant parameters
characterizing the initial state are known to a corresponding degree of ac-
curacy. The phenomena are unpredictable in practice because, due to fluc-
tuations in the values of the parameters, such knowledge about their ini-
tial state is almost never available.
For a first stage unpredictability phenomenon, however, it is at least
possible to make an accurate prediction of the average values of the pa-
rameters descriptive of the final state in a series of its repeated occur-
rences. This is the case because the fluctuations tend to offset one an-
other in the long run, an effect known to statisticians as the "ergodic
principle." A roulette wheel in which the fraction of the total number
spinnings of the wheel in which the ball comes to rest on a red number is
predictable exemplifies a first-stage unpredictability phenomenon.
Such predictions are not possible, however, for the average diameter
and wind velocity over the next century of hurricanes on the American
East Coast, which exemplify second stage unpredictability phenomena.
By the 1970s, the realm of second stage unpredictability had come to be

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 DETERMINISM

called 'Chaos' and had developed into a specialized subdiscipline

study of complex natural and social phenomena. The reason fo
chaotic behavior of second-stage unpredictability phenomena turn
to be that their cause-effect relations are governed by complex non
dynamics, in contrast to the linear dynamics that govern 'well-be
predictable, as well as first-stage unpredictable phenomena.
Linear dynamics are described by mathematical functions whose
ables (such as x, y, z, t, and u) appear only to the first power, are
plied only by constants (such as A, B, C, and D), and may be comb
only by addition and/or subtraction, e.g.

x = Ay + Bz - Ct

Non-linear dynamics, by contrast, are described by mathem

functions, some of whose variables appear to powers higher than th
and may be combined not only by addition and subtraction but al
multiplication and/or division.), e.g.

x = Ay2x Bz 3/(Ct 4 + Du 5)

Under linear dynamics, the variation in the magnitude x of an ef

generally proportional to the variation in the magnitude of it
variables. Under non-linear dynamics, however, there may occur e
mous variations in the magnitude x of an effect produced by small
tions in the magnitude of its causal variables, with tiny variations
causal variables sometimes resulting in huge variations in the mag
of the effect.
Thus the roulette wheel is a first stage unpredictability phenomenon
because it is governed by linear dynamics. The final resting position of
the ball depends on the angle and timing of croupier's toss of the ball into
the spinning wheel and on the initial rotational force applied by him to
the wheel. Moreover, the variations in the final resting position are di-
rectly proportional to the variations in the croupier's manipulations.
By contrast, a hurricane, being governed by complex non-linear dy-
namics, is a chaotic phenomenon. Here the variations in the diameter of
the funnel-shaped rotating cloud (which may reach a mile) and in its ve-
locity (which may reach 300 miles per hour) are vastly greater than the

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

corresponding variations of the atmospheric events that set off tornadoes

hundreds of miles removed from their future epicenters. In fact, it came
to be realized eventually that most natural phenomena are fundamen-
tally attributable to chaotic systems, although some phenomena are more
chaotic than are others. As it turned out, the successful theories resulting
from past scientific efforts had addressed mainly the relatively rare quasi-
non-chaotic phenomena, such as the rotation of the planets around the sun.

Prediction vs. Retrodiction in History. Since human affairs belong to

the world's most chaotic phenomena, the second-stage unpredictability
of human history was appreciated long before Mandelbrot drew attention
to its prevalence in the phenomena addressed by the natural and social
sciences. Historians approach their subject from the premise of determin-
ism, just as do physicists. They believe, just as do physicists, that the
events they study do not happen haphazardly but are effects of (or neces-
sitated by) a series of prior events that were themselves necessitated by
even earlier events. And just as do physicists, so do historians try to ex-
plain how an event of interest came about by seeking to uncover the
causal chain linking it and the earlier events that necessitated it. Retro-
diction of present or past events (rather than prediction of future events)
is therefore the main research goal of historians.
Historians differ from physicists, however, in that in their retrodictions
historians cannot call on generally valid laws of history (since there are
none) and in that, partly for this very reason, their power of reliable pre-
diction of future events is much more limited than that of physicists. This
difference is attributable not to the intellectual shortcomings of histori-
ans as compared to physicists, but to the much greater complexity and
highly non-linear dynamics of historical phenomena as compared to
physical phenomena.
For instance, historians would generally agree that some retrodic-
tive account can be provided, at least in principle, of the causal chain
that linked the sequence of events portrayed in Tolstoy's great novel,
War and Peace. For a scholar who believed that there is nothing to ex-
plain retrodictively about these events and that they just happened by
haphazard chance would be a mere chronicler of them rather than an
historian.
But the opinions of historians differ greatly on the extent to which the
state of Russia at the end of the Napoleonic invasion in 1813 was

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 DETERMINISM

predictable on the basis of the state of Russia and France at its b

in 1812. Tolstoy himself was beholden to the historical dete
propounded by the nineteenth century German philosopher
Hegel, who regarded history not only as a determinate but also
sentially linear process. According to Hegel's linear, determinis
history, the magnitude of an event, such as the extent of N
devastation of Russia, is roughly proportional to the magnit
cause, such as the aggressive forces unleashed by the Frenc
tion. It would follow, therefore, that if there had not been any
Napoleon Bonaparte, the French would still have invaded Rus
the direction of some other commander, say General Gaston
who would have been defeated by Tsar Alexander, just
Napoleon. Thus according to Hegel, prediction of the course of
is at least thinkable.
By contrast, the 'Great Man' view of history-no Napoleo
parte, no invasion of Russia in 1812-was championed by th
teenth century Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle. He regar
tory as determinate process as well, but one characterized by n
dynamics. Under Carlyle's view of the course of history, ve
causes, (such as the birth of a baby to the Bonaparte family in
in 1769), can have huge effects (such as changing the enti
of European affairs). From Carlyle's 'Great Man' standpoint
linear historical dynamics, prediction of historical events is
impossible.
Thus the existence of chaotic phenomena in the world studied by the
natural and social sciences does not put in doubt the existence of deter-
minism and is not in conflict with Premise 1 of the Paradox of Moral Re-
sponsibility. Consequently the invocation of chaos (in its modern tech-
nical meaning) is of no help for the resolution of the Paradox.

The True Indeterminism of Quantum Physics. Though determinate

causal relations do govern second stage unpredictable, chaotic phenom-
ena such as tornadoes, there exists another class of phenomena that does
put doubt on the universality of the rule of determinism. These phenom-
ena belong to the realm of nature to which we will refer as the 'micro-
cosm' in Chapter 12. The objects of the microcosm comprise atoms
and subatomic particles, such as electrons (the elementary particles of
electric charge) and photons (the elementary particles of light). It is the

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

subject of quantum physics, which was inaugurated by Max Planck at the

turn of the twentieth century.
As we will note in Chapter 14, the microcosm of atomic and sub-
atomic physics is an Alice-in-Wonderland world. First, this world is not
determinate, and yet many of its phenomena are sufficiently well be-
haved to manifest first-stage (rather than chaotic second stage) unpre-
dictability. Its moving objects do not follow definite trajectories. Instead,
their motion can only be represented by probability functions, which
merely lead to correct predictions for the likelihood of the outcome of ex-
periments that are designed to measure their spatial distribution. Second,
the objects of this world are not conserved; they are created and annihi-
lated, disappearing down a rabbit hole. They disappear singly, in the case
of absorbed photons, or doubly in the case of annihilated negative and
positive electron pairs. Third, the category of identity is abolished in this
world. In a system that contains several objects of the same kind, it is im-
possible in principle to mark them individually for later identification.
These three counterintuitive properties of subatomic objects are essential
parts of the formal structure of atomic physics.
We will return to these bizarre aspects of the microcosm of quantum
physics in Chapter 14. For the time being we merely note that even if the
truly indeterminate phenomena of the atomic and subatomic microcosm
were to play a role in human decision making and people could some-
times have willed differently from how they did will, this possibility
would not provide any support for a compatibilist resolution of the Para-
dox of Moral Responsibility. For according to the Paradox's Argument
presented in Chapter 6, random events that are not fully determined in
advance can be no more under a person's autonomous control than can
fully predetermined events.

Coda. Determinism, the doctrine according to which every event is an

effect of a prior series of events, implies that all future events are as fixed
and as unalterable as past events. One of the doctrine's most vigorous
champions was the eighteenth century French Mathematician, Pierre
Simon de Laplace. Determinism seems incompatible with the concept of
moral responsibility, however, and thus confronts us with the Paradox of
Moral Responsibility. The would-be resolvers of the Paradox have in-
cluded Behaviorists, Immaterialists; Libertarians and Compatibilists, but
none of their proposed resolutions have withstood incisive philosophical

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 DETERMINISM

criticism. Some developments in twentieth-century physics, howe

have aroused doubt regarding the all-pervasiveness of determinism
world and inspired the idea that there is scope for free will after a
these developments also fail to provide a logically coherent resolut
the Paradox.

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 MARTIN LUTHER (1483-1546)
Etching by Lukas Cranach the Elder (1520)

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 Chapter Eight

Freedom

Meaning of Freedom. It is freedom of the will rather than freedom of

action that lies at the root of our attribution of moral responsibility to the
person, and hence also of the troublesome Paradox of Moral Responsibil-
ity. For the action of a person is judged as being praiseworthy or blame-
worthy, not so much for the results that it actually produced as for the will
that led the person to undertake the action in the first place. But we have
yet to clarify the meaning of 'freedom,' as that term applies to willing and
acting, except that it is opposite of 'determinism.'
'Freedom' can take on several basically different meanings, some of
which apply to natural, value-free situations. Physicists, for instance,
speak of 'degrees of freedom,' by which they mean the number of theoret-
ically possible independent modes of change a physical object can take
on, such as a change in the direction of motion of a gas molecule, upward
or downward, backward or forward, and rightward or leftward. This
meaning of 'freedom' is not the opposite of 'determinism,' inasmuch as
which of several theoretically possible modes of change a physical object
actually does undergo is subject to the causal chain of determinism.
Other meanings of 'freedom' do apply to non-natural, value-laden situa-
tions. Thus when philosophers speak of 'freedom of the will,' they mean an
unfettered human choice of volitions and refer to the concept that ascribes
to persons the capacity to choose autonomously among alternative actions.
This ascription of autonomy to the will does not imply, however, that voli-
tion is totally immune to causal influences by the person's physiology, hered-
ity, and past experience, or by other persons, or by the natural world. What
freedom of the will does imply is that, such heteronomous, determinist influ-
ences on a person's will not withstanding, there remains a substantial residue
of independence of them, by virtue of which the rational faculty of persons
remains the final arbiter of what the person actually wills. The outcome of
this autonomous arbitration process is not capricious or random, but causally

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

determined by the person's soul, or, in the parlance of modem psychology,

by the person's self. This meaning of freedom is an opposite of determinism.

Constraints. Although the concept of 'freedom of the will' has to be

distinguished from the concept of 'freedom of action,' the two concepts
are closely related. Thus while freedom of the will refers to the presence
of an autonomous volition to undertake an action, the concept of 'freedom
of action' entails also the person's capacity for actually undertaking it.
What are the necessary conditions for persons to be 'free' to arrive at
some particular volitional state of mind? What is needed for persons to be
able to choose their own goals? What actions are available to implement
them? One obvious necessary condition is the absence of social constraints
imposed on the agent by the will of another person, or of the state, or of
any other authority. In addition to the volitional liberty provided by the
absence of such social constraints there is another kind of necessary con-
dition for freedom, namely the absence of natural constraints that may
also limit a person's freedom to choose among alternatives. For instance,
a San Franciscan is not free to choose between bicycling and flying to
New York if she has to attend a conference on the East Coast on the fol-
lowing day. Yet another, albeit more controversial claim has been made
on behalf of a necessary condition for freedom, namely that one cannot
be said to be truly free to choose some preferred alternative unless one has
the power and means to implement it. For instance, some philosophers
contend that poverty-stricken or poorly educated people are less free
than rich and well-educated people are because fewer alternatives are
open for choice to the former than to the latter.
Does it follow from this argument that the extent of freedom in a society
is directly related to the number of available alternatives, in that the more
alternatives are open for choice to its members, the freer they are? The an-
swer is "yes and no." Yes, because a larger measure of individual freedom is
likely to obtain in a society in which a wider variety of beliefs are expressed
and where there is a considerable diversity of tastes, pursuits, customs and
codes of conduct, as well as ways and styles of living. No, because however
numerous may be the alternatives among which persons may choose, they
will not consider themselves to be free if the one alternative they would pre-
fer most is the one that is forbidden. For instance, in a society that forbids
the preaching of Roman Catholic doctrine and the practice of Roman
Catholic forms of worship, Roman Catholics would not concede that they

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 FREEDOM

enjoy religious freedom just because they are still free to be Angl
Methodists, or Buddhists. Thus a meaningful assessment of the ex
freedom in a particular society has to take into account the interests
individual members and of their ways of living.
Thus far, our considerations about freedom in non-natural,
laden situations have focused on the absence of constraint impo
personal actions by the state or some other authority, which can be
gorized as 'freedom from.' But we need to take into account also th
of freedom on behalf of which freedom is being claimed, or what am
to a claim of 'freedom of.' This latter kind of freedom is actually th
ject of most political and sociological discussions about freedom. Fo
'freedoms of' are almost always concerned with demands for the re
of obstacles to the exercise and satisfaction of specific interests and
of activity that are generally accepted as endowed with special mor
social significance. They include freedom of thought, speech, a
tion, assembly, and religion, as well as the choice of one's employer
cupation, namely the specific spheres of human activity within w
the right for individual choice and initiative really matter.
Another kind of 'freedom from,' which President Franklin D
sevelt often mentioned in speeches advocating his 'New Deal,' is
cally different from the freedoms we have been discussing thus f
refers neither to the absence of constraint nor to any specific inte
behalf of which freedom is claimed, being exemplified by the terms
dom from want' and 'freedom from fear.' These Rooseveltian locuti
were meant to characterize an ideal society whose political and eco
structures shelter its members from hunger and physical threats
kind of freedom must not be confused with the kind of freedom th
always been considered as central and fundamental for the traditi
liberal thought. For the freedoms from want and from fear can b
vided by a well-run, humanitarian prison that drastically restrict
range of personal freedom of its inmates within important spher
human activity.

Principle of Alternate Possibilities. How is one to decide whet

person willed an action freely and thus bears moral responsibility
what happened? According to Van Inwagen (1975), almost all ph
phers agree that for holding a person morally responsible for an
and its results, it is necessary to believe that the person could hav

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

frained from undertaking it. This necessary condition, which is known as

'Could-Have-Done-Otherwise,' seems like an intuitively plausible crite-
rion for freedom of action and attribution of moral responsibility. It is
tantamount to one of the four criteria we considered in Chapter 6 as nec-
essary and sufficient for the attribution of moral responsibility for an ac-
tion, namely

(4) The person willed to undertake the action autonomously, i.e. it

was open to her to choose not to undertake it.

Despite its plausibility and general acceptance perceived by van Inwa-

gen among his colleagues, the criterion of 'Could-Have-Done-Otherwise'
has been the subject of much discussion in the contemporary philosophi-
cal literature. (Dennet, 1984; Fischer 1982; Van Inwagen 1973; 1983)

Martin Luther. One likely reason for so much discussion is that the de-
nial of freedom implicit in that criterion's inverse, namely 'Couldn't Have
Done Otherwise,' may not necessarily grant automatic relief from moral
responsibility for a person's action. Dennett (1984) sought to provide an
example of this ambiguity inherent in the criterion's inverse by examining
Martin Luther's famous statement "Here I stand! I can do no other."
Luther is supposed to have made it at his trial in 1521 before the Imperial
German Diet at Worms, after responding "negative" to the Prince Elec-
tors' question whether he was willing to recant his heretical, rabble-rous-
ing sermons. The source of this statement is an inscription on the pedestal
of Luther's memorial statue in Worms, erected in 1868. According to the
leading historian of the German Reformation, Leopold von Ranke,
Luther did not say anything at his trial about being unable to do other-
wise. He merely asked God to help him. (Buechmann, 1884)
But supposing that Luther had actually said it, Dennett would be al-
most certainly correct in supposing that Luther was not asking the Elec-
tors to absolve him of moral responsibility because he could not have
done otherwise. What Luther would surely have meant is, as Dennett
pointed out, that being the kind of person he is, his soul allows him to
will only one action, namely refusing to recant.
As for the Prince Electors, many of them acknowledged the influences
that gave Luther cause for promulgating his heresies, such as the corrupt
practices of the Roman clergy. The Prince Electors might even have gone
along with Luther in granting that, having his kind of soul, he could have

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 FREEDOM

willed only as he did. But they held him morally responsible for
tions all the same.
One of the most notorious critics of the Could-Have-Done-Otherwise
criterion of moral responsibility, was Harry Frankfurt (1969), [whose per-
sonhood criterion of "second order volitions" we criticized in Chapter 5.]
He called the Could-Have-Done-Otherwise criterion the 'Principle of Al-
ternate Possibilities,' which he formulated as follows:

"A person is morally responsible for what she

has done only if she could have done otherwise."

Frankfurt asserted that, its intuitive plausibility notwithstanding, "the

Principle of Alternate Possibilities is false. A person may well be respon-
sible for what he has done even though he could not have done other-
wise. The Principle's plausibility is an illusion, which can be made to
vanish by bringing the relevant moral phenomena into sharper focus."

Frankfurt's Counterexample. To bring the relevant moral phenom-

ena into sharper focus, Frankfurt devised a counterexample, by means of
which he meant to show that, contrary to the Principle, in some situa-
tions we do hold a person morally responsible even when that person
could not have done otherwise. Frankfurt presented several variants of a
scenario in which a Mr. Jones had decided to kill a Mr. Smith. All the
variants shared the bizarre feature that before actually killing Mr. Smith,
a Mr. Black happened to demand of Mr. Jones to undertake that very ac-
tion. To enforce his demand, Mr. Black threatened Mr. Jones that if he
did not kill Mr. Smith, Mr. Jones would suffer a penalty so harsh that no
reasonable person would have been willing to risk it. Mr. Jones goes
ahead and kills Mr. Smith, as he had intended to do all along. So Frank-
furt asks: "Was Mr. Jones morally responsible for Mr. Smith's death?
Most peoples' moral intuition, evidently including also Frankfurt's
own, would find that in view of Mr. Jones' prior decision to kill Mr.
Smith, Mr. Jones was morally responsible for Mr. Smith's death. But, ac-
cording to Frankfurt, it is also the case that in view of Mr. Black's dire
threat, Mr. Jones could not have done otherwise than killing Mr. Smith.
Hence, it would follow from the Principle of Alternative Possibilities
that, contrary to moral intuition, Mr. Jones was not morally responsible
for Smith's death. So Frankfurt asserted that the Principle of Alternate
Possibilities is false, because he believed that his counterexample shows

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

that an absence of moral responsibility is not entailed by (i.e., does not flow
automatically from) Mr. Jones' inability to do otherwise than killing Mr.
Smith.

Blameworthiness. Frankfurt's argument in support of his proposition

that the Principle of Alternate Possibilities is false is itself defective in at
least two of its crucial aspects. First, Frankfurt's argument conflates the
concept of moral responsibility for actions that relate to the duties and
obligations of a person with the concept of the blameworthiness of the
person's volitions that energized these actions. While it is the case that
there is a close connection between intuitions about moral responsibility
and about blameworthiness, they are distinctly different concepts. Frank-
furt's failure to take this difference into account undermines one of his
main arguments.
As we first noted in Chapter 1, the very notion of moral responsibility
refers to the intuition that persons can be held blameworthy or praise-
worthy for some of their actions. And in Chapter 6 we listed four criteria
that are generally considered necessary and sufficient for holding a per-
son morally responsible for an impermissible action. So, in case the four
criteria are met, the person is held morally responsible.
However, as we noted in Chapter 6 as well, it does not follow neces-
sarily from a finding of moral responsibility of a person for a normally im-
permissible action that the person is therefore blameworthy. For there
may exist two kinds of extenuating circumstances under which an excul-
pation of the morally responsible agent from blameworthiness may be
granted. Under one kind, the granted exculpation is designated 'justifica-
tion,' which renders an action permissible, or even praiseworthy, even
though it would have been impermissible and blameworthy, in the ab-
sence of these circumstances. Under the other kind, the granted exculpa-
tion is designated 'excuse,' which leaves the action still impermissible,
yet not blameworthy, or possibly even praiseworthy, because it was in-
spired by noble motives.
A special class of excusable (albeit impermissible and ordinarily
blameworthy) actions is represented by cases in which an agent was co-
erced by dire threat to undertake them. As we noted in Chapter 3, Aris-
totle had emphasized in his Nichomachean Ethics that an agent may be ex-
cused from blameworthiness for an, on first sight impermissible action,
provided that the agent undertook it only to avoid an even greater evil,

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 FREEDOM

or to achieve some higher purpose. By way of an example, Aristotle

undertaking an evil action in compliance with an order by a tyran
has the agent's parents or children in his power, under the dire t
that in case of refusal, the agent's beloved would be put to death.
As Aristotle pointed out, however, vindicating an excuse from b
worthiness of a person who is faced with such a moral dilemma is n
that clear-cut, since, after all, the agent was offered a choice at th
he acted. Hence to vindicate an excuse from blameworthiness for
permissible action on the grounds that the agent did it for a m
righteous reason it is necessary to take into account the entire cont
the occasion in which the action occurred. Strictly speaking, all h
actions (other than reflexes and movements implemented by the a
nomic nervous system) are voluntary (and designated as such by n
physiologists). An action, therefore, can be regarded as 'coerced' o
supposing that the person would never have chosen to carry it out
absence of the dire threat.
Coercion plays a central role in the argumentation of Frankfurt's
terexample. Frankfurt takes it for granted that the coercion exer
Mr. Black's dire threat to make Mr. Jones kill Mr. Smith is tantam
Mr. Jones being unable to do otherwise. Hence Frankfurt conclude
the Principle of Alternative Possibilities is false, because Mr. Jone
spite being unable to do otherwise, is morally responsible and
Frankfurt does not distinguish between responsibility and blamew
ness) blameworthy as well for Mr. Jones' death. But when Frankfur
that, in view of Mr. Black's threat, Mr. Jones couldn't do otherwise
tually means that Mr. Jones wouldn't do otherwise. Mr. Jones could
done otherwise, had he been willing to suffer the consequences of h
fusal to do what Mr. Black demanded of him (which, as Frankfurt
lates), no reasonable person would have been willing to risk.
Thus Frankfurt's scenario is not a counterexample for the Princ
Alternative Possibilities at all. What the scenario does address is the
problem of exculpating agents from blameworthiness for actions of theirs
that are clearly violations of the imperatives of ethics and for which they
are clearly morally responsible. Under ordinary conditions, the agents
would be held blameworthy for these actions, but under some special
conditions, such as coercion, they may be granted relief from blamewor-
thiness. The actual question posed by Frankfurt's counterexample is
whether, given Mr. Jones' prior decision to kill Mr. Smith and Mr. Black's

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

dire coercive threat, Mr. Jones was or was not blameworthy for killing Mr.
Smith. But, as we saw in Chapter 6, to answer that question the entire
context in which Frankfurt's scenario is set has to be taken into account,
which Frankfurt fails to do. For instance, Frankfurt does not stipulate Mr.
Jones' motives for his original decision to kill Mr. Smith. If, like William
Tell, Mr. Jones had decided to kill Mr. Smith to free his people from a
fiendish foreign governor, or if, like King David, to make Mrs. Smith his
wife, he would be praiseworthy or blameworthy, respectively, regardless
of any threats made by Mr. Black.

Limitations of Counterexamples. There inheres another crucial defect

in Frankfurt's argument in support of his claim that the Principle of Al-
ternate Possibilities is false-quite apart from the bizarre scenario of his
counterexample and his conflation of the concepts of moral responsibil-
ity and exculpation from blameworthiness. This other defect is rooted in
Frankfurt's evident lack of appreciation that the logical force of coun-
terexamples for the disproof of propositions is strong in some disciplines
and weak in others. In philosophical argumentation counterexamples
can serve two distinct functions, both mentioned explicitly, albeit con-
flated by Frankfurt.
One function is to clarify some concept, or to show its inadequacy. For
instance, the concept of democracy can be brought into sharper focus by
considering the counterexample of the totalitarian state. Or, as we found
in Chapter 5, by considering counterexamples from everyday life, the
'identity definition' of personhood is both too inclusive as well as too re-
strictive for capturing the concept of 'person' in morally relevant con-
texts. The clarifying function is applicable in principle to all disciplines,
although perhaps not in practice. For instance, it may not be possible to
provide a useful clarifying counterexample for the complex concept of
the 'soul,' described in Chapter 1 as the seat of consciousness, thought,
volition, emotions, and feelings.
The other function of counterexamples is to disconfirm some proposi-
tion, as exemplified by Frankfurt's claim that his counterexample "discon-
firms the Principle of Alternate Possibilities." Counterexamples do have a
compelling logical force in disconfirming allegations of particular facts,
such as disconfirming the statement "No computer program has ever
beaten a chess master," by pointing to the game in which the IBM pro-
gram 'Deep Blue' beat the world champion chess master Garry Kasparov.

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 FREEDOM

The logical force of counterexamples is compelling also in disconfirm

a general proposition or a 'law,' in 'hard' disciplines, such as mathem
or physics. For example, Fermat's 'last theorem' of number theory, w
states that there are no positive, whole numbers a, b, and c that sat
the equation an + bn = c' when n > 2, remained unproven for more
three centuries, until it was finally proven in 1992. All the while, s
mathematicians had suspected that the theorem hadn't been proven
cause, maybe, it wasn't true in the first place. And so they sought to
confirm the theorem by searching for a counterexample, namely a t
of whole numbers a, b, and c that does satisfy the equation for n >
they had succeeded in finding just one such triplet, then Fermat's l
theorem would have been decisively disconfirmed. They didn't find
because the theorem turned out to be true.
The logical force of counterexamples is much less compelling, howe
in disconfirming general propositions in 'soft' disciplines, such as bio
and social sciences (including moral philosophy). One reason for calli
these disciplines 'soft' in the first place is that they know no (non-tr
exception-less laws, except the one law that affirms the absence of un
sally valid laws. These 'soft' disciplines know only generalizations wh
validity is based on the preponderance of plausible evidence and of w
it can be said that, as in jurisprudence, hard cases make bad law.
For instance, one of the most generally valid biological propositio
Darwin's principle of the role of natural selection in the evolution of
species. This principle is not disconfirmed by the many counterexam
to which students of evolution can point in which evolutionary chan
attributable to processes other than natural selection, such as ran
genetic drift. Similarly, one of the most generally valid sociolo
propositions is the incest taboo, which forbids marriage between cl
relatives, especially between brothers and sisters. The counterexamp
provided by the custom of brother-sister marriages in the royal ho
and noble families of Ancient Egypt do not disconfirm the princip
incest taboo as a generalization of social practices.
Nevertheless, despite the far-fetched character of his counterexam
Frankfurt stoutheartedly asserts that "the [Principle of Alternate Pos
ities] argument's plausibility is an illusion, which can be made to va
by bringing the relevant moral phenomena into sharper focus."
comes as a surprise that after these strong words, Frankfurt implies
conclusion of his essay that the Principle of Alternate Possibilities

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

not be all that mistaken. For, he suggests that it should be replaced by the
following proposition:

"A person is not responsible for what she has done if she
did it only because she could not have done otherwise."

Admittedly, Frankfurt's proposed change in wording of the 'could-

have-done-otherwise' criterion does provide a more easily defensible sup-
port of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities than the original version,
especially in the complex variants of Frankfurt's bizarre scenario. But
Frankfurt's suggested revised wording is no more immune to Frankfurt-
style, far-fetched counterexamples than the original version.
Consider, for instance, an (admittedly unlikely) SS guard in a concen-
tration camp who has some residual feelings of compassion for his prison-
ers. He obeys his commander's order to inflict some particularly horrible
atrocity on them that he would not have done unless his own execution
would have been the penalty for refusing to obey the order. So according
to Frankfurt's revised principle, the SS Guard is not morally responsible
for committing the atrocity because he did it only because he could not
have done otherwise.
At the 1946-47 Allied War Crimes Trials held at the former SS Divi-
sional Headquarters at the Dachau concentration camp (which I at-
tended when I was a member of the U.S. Military Government for Occu-
pied Germany), not a few indicted SS guards did indeed make such a
claim in their own defense. They alleged that they did those horrible
things to their prisoners only because they could not have done other-
wise. But the tribunal held the accused morally responsible all the same.
Taking into account the entire context of the case, the judges found that
the accused could have done otherwise than volunteering for service in
the elite SS in the first place, knowing full well that SS guards were ex-
pected to treat their prisoners brutally.

Coda. The notion of freedom, which is an essential ingredient of the

judgment of personal moral responsibility, is another elusive metaphysi-
cal concept of central importance for moral philosophy. To what criteria
can one resort in everyday life for justifying the ascription of freedom to a
moral agent in holding that person praiseworthy or blameworthy for hav-
ing willed and performed an action? Frankfurt and other critics of the
Principle of Alternate Possibilities notwithstanding, the Principle ap-

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 FREEDOM

pears to be the only serviceable-but by no means infallible-cr

actually used in every-day-life for that purpose. The Principle does
course, apply to cultures whose moral traditions are based on the
Teachings' of Buddha, Confucius, and Lao Tzu, who, as we no
Chapter 3, are strangers to the concepts of free will, choice, and m
sponsibility in the first place.

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 RENE DESCARTES (1596-1650)
Painting by Frans Hals (1649)

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 Chapter Nine

Mind-Body Problem

The enduring, ancient philosophical chestnut known as the 'Mind-

Body Problem' dates back to the emergence of moral philosophy in fourth
century BCE Greece as a secular rather than religion-based subject of in-
tellectual inquiry. The problem had arisen in connection with the effort
to resolve the Paradox of Moral Responsibility and to find a place for
human beings as creatures endowed with an autonomous free will in a
world whose events are governed by determinism.

Physicalist-Mentalist Dualism. To resolve the Paradox of Moral Re-

sponsibility, some Greek philosophers had proposed that there is a basic
difference between mind and body. They conjectured that it is only the
person's body that is subject to the heteronomous forces of determinism,
while the person's mind is free to will autonomously the actions for which
that person is morally responsible. In support of this conjecture, they
noted that the physicalist statements that we make about peoples' bodies
are different in kind from the mentalist statements we make about peoples'
thoughts and feelings. As we noted in Chapter 1, the thesis that mental
phenomena, especially willing, are basically different from bodily func-
tions, in that they are not subject to determinism, came to be known as
dualism. And the antithesis of dualism, namely the counter-thesis that
mental phenomena, including willing, are nothing other than bodily
functions, and hence are subject to determinism, came to be known as
monism.

Substances-Attributes Dualism. Modern believers in monism usually

make light of the alleged difference between physicalist and mentalist
statements, which they simply attribute to our still very incomplete un-
derstanding of the mechanisms by which the brain implements such men-
tal processes as thoughts and feelings. But the Greeks, who took this dif-
ference seriously, accounted for it-and hence for the difference between
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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

dualism and monism-by invoking a conceptual distinction between

substances and attributes. A substance, such as a stone, can exist in the
world on its own, whereas an attribute, such as weight, cannot and must
ultimately refer to something that is a substance. According to that dis-
tinction, the human body is obviously a substance, and its functions, in-
cluding those of its attributes, ought to be subject to determinism. And
what about mind? If, according to monism, mind were an attribute of the
body substance, mentalist functions would be no less subject to deter-
minism than all the other functions of the body. In that case, the only
available resolution of the Paradox would be to declare moral responsi-
bility an incoherent concept, based on mankind's subjective illusion of a
non-existent freedom of the will.
Suppose, however, that in accord with the doctrine of dualism, mind
were an independent substance rather than a mere attribute of the body
substance-an autonomous mental substance, so to speak. In that case
mind might have some special properties that would provide it with free-
dom from the forces of determinism to which ordinary substances, such
as those of which the rest of the human body is composed, are subject.
Then freedom of the will could exist and the Paradox of Moral Responsi-
bility would be resolved.

Platonic Dualism. The ancient Egyptians, who believed that the im-
mortal soul, or ba, survives independently after it leaves the mortal body,
or ka, upon a person's death were steadfast (albeit, unwitting and prema-
ture) dualists. Had they been aware of the distinction between substances
and attributes they would have certainly taken it for granted that the im-
mortal soul is an independent substance rather than an attribute of the
body.
Plato, who was under the sway of Egyptian metaphysical traditions, was
a dualist. He argued on behalf of dualism that persons are to be identified
with their reason and capacity for thought, which reside in the soul rather
than in the body. (Plato tended to refer to the mind as 'soul' because that
term connotes more closely than 'mind' the venue of the transcendental
concept of moral responsibility that dualists actually have in mind.) Since
the soul, with its rational intellect and innate knowledge of Platonic
Forms, belongs to the set of imperceptible, unchanging (that is, perma-
nent) substances, the person's soul is immortal, whereas the person's body,
belonging to the set of perceptible, changing substances, is mortal.

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 MIND-BODY PROBLEM

THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM

Are mental states fundamentally different from body states

NO YES

Aristotle Plato

Skinner Broad Macdonald Descartes Kant Popper/Eccles

RES RES
BEHAV- EXTENSA COGITANS

IORISM * (Body) (Mind)

EPIPHENO-
MENALISM SUBSTANCE
IDENTITY DUALISM
THEORY
MONISM WORLD 1
WORLD 2
WORLD 3

INTERACTIONIST
DUALISM

INTELLIGIBLE WORLD

NATURAL, NON-NATURAL,
AMORAL REALM MORAL REALM

(Noumena: Objects) (Noumena: Subjects)

EPISTEMIC DUALISM

Citing examples of psychological conflict, Plato argued that we d

fact, identify ourselves with the rational thoughts arising in our s
rather than with our non-rational impulses and appetites arising in
bodies. This identification would not be rational if the soul were a m
attribute of the body. According to Plato, acceptance of this dualis

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

of ourselves as possessors of a substantial and immortal soul leads to the

moral conclusion that in living a virtuous life we prepare ourselves for
the eternal afterlife that begins once our immortal soul is finally released
from our mortal body.
Plato favored dualism because he was beholden to the idealist doctrine
that the world's reality consists of the transcendental forms that exist only
in our consciousness and reason. He emphasized that this difference be-
tween physicalist and mentalist statements is especially acute in the con-
text of ethics, where human will looms large in moral judgements. Thus
Platonic dualism might resolve the Paradox of Moral Responsibility.

Aristotelian Monism. Aristotle rejected Plato's dualist concept of

mind being a distinct substance, and accepted the monist concept of the
mind being a mere attribute of the body. He favored monism because he
was beholden to the materialist doctrine that physical matter is the
world's only reality, with all existence and all phenomena being account-
able as manifestations or attributes of matter. He also believed that there
is no essential difference between the physicalist statements we make
about peoples' bodies and the mentalist statements we make about their
thoughts and feelings, since, as he saw them, both kinds of statements
obviously refer to states of physical matter.
Aristotle thought, moreover, that the body organ to whose state men-
talist statements actually refer is the heart, of which he considered mind
to be an attribute. That there is a close connection between heart and
mind-with the mind substance investing the heart under dualism or the
mind being an attribute of the heart substance under monism-is like-
wise an idea that the Greeks had imported from Egypt.
It would be another 500 years until the Alexandrine physician Galen
provided monism with strong empirical support. He showed in mid-sec-
ond century CE (by vivisection of condemned prisoners) that the brain
(albeit not the heart), is the seat of consciousness and sensation. Galen's
demonstration provided the empirical basis for the modern materialist-
monist credo that mentalist statements simply refer to brain states. Yet
the ancient Egyptian soul-is-in-the-heart concept survives in modern
language and ritual. The heart is still referred to as the organ of love;
"will you be my Valentine?" cards exchanged by would-be lovers are still
heart-shaped; and in pledging allegiance to the national flag, the right
hand is still placed over the heart.

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 MIND-BODY PROBLEM

Arguments regarding the mind-body problem have persisted in

ern times, because, Galen notwithstanding, mental phenomen
still be more than, or fundamentally different from, brain states. Mo
there always remained the metaphysical paradoxes entailed by m
for the morally indispensable belief in free will.

Augustinian Dualism. At the dawn of the Middle Ages, in the f

century CE, Platonic dualism was carried over into Christianity
gustine, who adopted it as the solution of the mind-body proble
gustine regarded the soul not, as a monist would, as an attribute
body, but as a substance endowed by God with reason to rule th
Augustine did not consider this mind-body interaction as recipr
thought that while the soul can act on the body, the body canno
the soul. Augustine epitomized his dualist view by characterizing
son as an immortal and immaterial rational soul, which invest
servient mortal body during her secular lifetime and discards th
after death, at the onset of eternal after-life.

Cartesian Substance Dualism. The most notorious dualist solution of

the mind-body problem was put forward in mid-seventeenth century by
Rend Descartes, the French mathematician-philosopher, who is generally
considered the father of modern philosophy and is best-known for formu-
lating the only undoubtedly true existential proposition, namely 'I think;
therefore I exist.' He was born near Tours in the Valley of the Loire in
1596, educated at a Jesuit College, and graduated from the law faculty at
Poitiers. After traveling all over Europe for twelve years-for a while as a
mercenary soldier-he eventually settled in Holland, living quietly and
writing his philosophical works such as Discourse on the Method and Med-
itations on First Philosophy. In 1649, Descartes left Holland for Stockholm
upon Queen Kristina's invitation to tutor her in philosophy. But the
Swedish climate, as well as the rigors of life at Kristina's court, did not
agree with him, and within a few months of his move to the Venice of
the North, he died there of pneumonia.
Discourse on the Method, a condensed exposition of his system of philo-
sophical investigation, is remarkable for its highly personal, autobiograph-
ical tone, as well as for having been written in French (rather than in
Latin, as was then customary among European savants). Two features of
the Cartesian system stand out. ('Cartesian' is the adjective that specifies

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

that something belongs to Descartes). One feature is its intent as an ana-

lytical method, which seeks solutions to complex problems by resolving
them into their simpler constituent elements. Descartes' model for this
method was the resolution of complex mathematical curves by use of an-
alytical geometry, a branch of mathematics that he developed and which
commemorates his contribution by referring to the axes of its graphical
representation as 'Cartesian coordinates.'
The other remarkable feature of the Cartesian method is that it was in-
tended not only for mathematical or scientific studies, but also for any ra-
tional inquiry whatever. Descartes had a vision of the unity of all knowl-
edge-philosophical as well as scientific-which he likened to a tree of
knowledge, whose roots are metaphysics, whose trunk is physics, and
whose branches are the other sciences, including medicine and ethics.
This simile was meant to suggest the continuity of metaphysics and sci-
ence, and much of Descartes' writings imply just this visionary ideal of
philosophy and the natural science, unified in a grand single system of
scholarship.
As did Plato, so did Descartes regard human beings as a composite of
two distinct substances, or res. One of them is the material body, the ex-
tended substance, or res extensa, of which Descartes thought as the kind
of mechanical automaton in human or animal form that enjoyed great
popularity in seventeenth century France. But, so Descartes pointed out,
humans are also moral creatures, who possess spiritual qualities that au-
tomata obviously lack. These spiritual qualities are attributes of the com-
posite's other substance, namely the non-material soul, the thinking sub-
stance, or res cogitans, which, lacking extent in physical space, is not
itself part of the body. Therefore, a human being is more than an au-
tomaton with the body shape of a great ape. According to Descartes, it is
from their non-material res cogitans that persons derive both their free
will and the responsibility for their actions, without which there would
no such thing as morals. Because of its invocation of two substances, res
extensa and res cogitans, Cartesian dualism came to be called 'substance
dualism.'
Unlike Plato's dualist doctrine, however, Cartesian substance dualism
did not assume that the body-automaton owes its very life in the here-
and-now to the soul, and that the direct cause of a person's death is the
departure of her soul from her body. Instead, Descartes'-for its time rev-
olutionary-conception of death was that live bodies differ from dead

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 MIND-BODY PROBLEM

bodies as stopped clocks differ from running clocks. The body d

die because the soul leaves it, but because the automaton suffere
chanical breakdown. And the soul leaves the body only becaus
not inhabit a lifeless body. The exit of the soul from the body is
a consequence rather than a cause of death.
Today, this distinction between the alternative causes of de
seem like trivial metaphysical hairsplitting. Yet, Descartes' concep
human body as an automaton that owes its life to the proper oper
its working parts and its death to a mechanical breakdown of
tomaton stimulated the progress in medicine and the life scienc
would be made in the following three centuries. For this concept
the fruitful notion that to understand the function of the body,
study its components and find out how they make the automato
It was to provide the conceptual basis for the rise of physiology.
of physiology developed the modern disciplines of biochemistry
netics, with their immense practical benefits for human welfare.

Cartesian Physiology. In his treatise, Passions of the Soul, D

provided some details of his ideas about the nature of the body-so
posite. He emphasized that the mind's role in the composite is not
a helmsman, whose only contact with his vessel is via the steerin
ratus. Rather, the mind is connected to all parts of the body, so t
rectly feels the body's pains and other sensations. Descartes conj
that this connection is mediated by the pineal gland, locate
human brain just above the third ventricle. He selected the pine
for this central role because it lies as a single organ on the midp
the brain, and he believed (incorrectly) that the natural distribu
the pineal gland is limited to the human species. In fact, the pine
is present in the brains of all vertebrate animals (and is now kn
subserve the regulation of diurnal physiological rhythms set by t
light-darkness cycle).
According to Descartes, the soul communicates with the pineal
and thus intervenes in, as well as being affected by, the interac
tween sensory input channels and motor output channels. That i
tion Descartes supposed to be mediated by nerves (whose fun
thought was of a hydraulic rather than, as we now know, an elec
ture). Descartes incorporated into this view a pioneering theory
perception that he had previously developed but which was p

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

LXXVIII.
Comment Et de plus, pour entendie icy par occafion, comment,
vne idle
peut eftre
lors que les deux yeux de cette machine, & les organes de
c6pofre de plufieurs autres de fes fens font tournez vers vn mefnme
plufieurs;&
d'oil vient objet,il ne s'en forme pas pour cela plufieurs idees dans
qu'alors ii
ne paroilft fon cerveau, mais vne feule, il faut penfer que c'efit tou-
1qu'vn feul
.objet. jours des mefines points de cette fuperficie de la glande
H que fortent les Efprits, qui tendant vers divers tuyaux
peuvent tourner divers membres vers les mefines objets:
Comme icy que c'eft du feul point b que fortent les Ef-
prits, qui tendant vers les tuyaux 4, 4, & 8, tournent en
mefine temps les deux yeux & le bras droit vers l'objer B.

Descartes' theory of visual perception, published posthumously in his

Traite de l'Homme. The pear-shaped cerebral structure labeled "H" is the
pineal gland, thought by Descartes to be the gateway to the soul, where the
percept is formed. Thus, according to this view, it is to the pineal gland
that information from the sensory input projects, and it is from the pineal
gland that the commands to the effector part issue.
[From the Kofoid collection of the Biology Library of the University of
California, Berkeley. Courtesy of the University of California.]

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 MIND-BODY PROBLEM

only posthumously in his Traite de l'Homme. There he clearly outli

overall process of visual perception. He described how light rays em
from a visual object in space, such as an arrow, pass through the len
form an inverted, complete image of the arrow on the retinas at the ba
both eyes. The retinas transduce the light stimulus into a (hydraulic
sentation of the arrow, which is transmitted to the brain via the
optic nerves across the optic chiasm. Once past the optic chiasm, th
resentations of the bilateral images converge on the pineal gland,
the soul converts them into a unitary, single percept of the arrow.
These insights into the physiology of visual perception represent
umph of the Cartesian method, although the mechanism of visual
ception turned out to be enormously more complex than Descartes
have imagined. Moreover, although the pineal gland does turn
process visual sensory input, it does not participate in transforming
a conscious percept.
Descartes believed that physiological studies leave the final s
forming a conscious percept from the retinal image of the arr
touched. This is why he assigned that final step to the soul, whose
he thought to be inaccessible to scientific analysis.
The concept of visual perception developed by Descartes turned o
be way ahead of its time, ridiculed and not pursued further for th
two centuries. But when it was finally resurrected in the nineteent
tury, it provided the formation for modern vision research.
Great advances have been made in the analysis of the function o
human visual system since Descartes' time. Yet, there is still no bet
planation available for that final step than postulating a tiny inne
son-a homunculus-who watches the projection of the arrow's
onto a little screen in the subject's theater of the soul.
The analysis of the production and reception of human language
pears to be heading for the same conceptual impasse, as does the a
of vision. Thus, Noam Chomsky, the most influential investigator o
guistics of the latter half of the twentieth century, encountered a
difficulty in explaining the final step of forming a conscious per
the spoken word. Chomsky, who views himself as carrying on the
linguistic analysis begun by Descartes, was unable to account for h
speaker produces speech acts and how a listener extracts meaning
them. Great advances have been made in linguistics since Descartes
Yet there is still no better explanation available for the final step

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

coding the spoken words carried to the listener's brain by his auditory sys-
tem than postulating a tiny inner person who looks up their meaning in a
little dictionary in the subject's library of the soul.

Brain Science. Descartes' was aware that there are many functions
that the body, working as a purely mechanical system, performs without
participation of the soul. These mechanical, mindless functions involve
direct interactions between sensory input channels and motor output
channels. Examples of such reflexive reactions are provided by our throw-
ing out our hands on stumbling to save ourselves from falling or by re-
sponding to some distressing news by behavior expressive of emotions,
such as crying. In such cases, our body is functioning as a reactive Carte-
sian automaton, with the sensory stimuli producing bodily change
through the subconscious mechanisms of the brain and nervous system.
It was Descartes view, moreover, that the behavior of all animals is re-
active in this mindless, automatic sense while humans may have at least
some awareness of these automatic processes-for instance in the form of
experienced emotions. This is not the case for animals, which he thought
have no consciousness at all. Actually, he was not wholly consistent in
his denial of the presence of consciousness in animals, but on the whole,
he does seem to have held the strong thesis that has usually been ascribed
to him. His main reason for restricting possession of a conscious mind
solely to human beings and denying it to animals hinged on the argu-
ment that only humans have the ability to reason. He took it as a partic-
ularly cogent support for this argument that only human beings have lan-
guage, which (so Descartes supposed) no automaton or animal could
possess. Nor did he believe that an automaton or animal could have free
will, for which he thought conscious rational deliberation is required.
In the context of contemporary brain research, mind is considered as a
wholly natural thing, whose understanding is a principal objective of the
discipline of neurobiology. The findings of neurobiological studies leave
no doubt that the overall function of the human brain, just as the overall
function of all other organs of the human body, is governed by the prin-
ciples of physics and chemistry. Accordingly, it ought to be feasible to as-
certain whether mental states, including morally relevant volition, can
be accounted for in terms of physicochemical brain states, such as electri-
cal activity patterns in the network of cerebral nerve cells. If they can be,

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 MIND-BODY PROBLEM

mental states would be subject to the natural laws of causal determ

tion, just as are all others of our bodily functions, such as respirati
digestion.
During the recently ended 'Decade of the Brain' proclaimed by the
elder President George Bush in 1990, some important methodological
progress was actually made in the study of mental states that did bring
significant advances in our understanding the biological bases of
thoughts and feelings. Probably the most promising among these novel
methods is 'brain imaging,' which permits the observation of states of the
very parts of the living human brain that are involved in the generation
of mental phenomena. Thus many of the most mysterious functions of
the human brain, such as language, emotions, and cognition that cannot
be studied in experimental animals, recently became accessible to neuro-
biological investigations on human subjects. (Damasio, 1999)
Yet, it seems unlikely that the results of these promising neurobiological
advances will succeed in actually disposing of the free will problem. That
problem has endured for millennia, not because of our hitherto insufficient
neurobiological understanding of the human brain, but because the answer
to the question whether our will is free is a paradoxical 'yes' and 'no.'
Monists usually make light of the alleged difference between physicalist
and mentalist statements, which they ascribe to our still very incomplete
neurobiological understanding of the mechanisms by which the body im-
plements its mind attribute. And as we reached the end of the Decade of
the Brain, many monists believe that the time is near (albeit not quite here
yet) when mental phenomena will be explained in terms of physicalist
statements about brain states and dualism can be buried at last.

Mental Phenomena and Brain States. Probably the deepest of the

mentalist phenomena that remained unsolved at the end of the Decade
of the Brain was consciousness. (Stent, 2001). The absence of a useful
theoretical handle on consciousness is the reason why we still lack any
satisfactory explanation of the final steps that convert the image pro-
jected by an arrow onto the retina into a visual percept. In fact, until re-
cently, the riddle posed by consciousness appeared so deep that it was
widely seen as a philosophical rather than neurobiological problem.
One of the main reasons that is usually advanced for excluding con-
sciousness from the realm of soluble biological problems is the intrinsic
subjectivity of the experiences it provides. This subjectivity of conscious

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

experiences is reflected in their qualitative aspects (or 'qualia'), such as

the redness of the setting sun or the salty taste of seawater, which cannot
exist in the absence of a conscious living observer. Soluble biological
problems, by contrast, are posed by phenomena such as metabolism and
heredity that can exist in the absence of a conscious living observer.
Other arguments that have been advanced by psychologists and
philosophers for the rejection of the possibility of developing physicalist
explanations of mental phenomena include two further claims. One of
them asserts that the intentionality of some mental states makes them
'emergent' properties of brain states, and hence not wholly reducible to
them. [In this context, the term 'intentionality' refers to the directedness
of conscious mental states-especially those that lead to speech acts-
that they are about something]. Another asserts that such mental states as
feelings, beliefs, and desires are imaginary, ad hoc concepts that do not
correspond to anything in the real world, no more than did the mean-
while abandoned, old-time concepts of 'vital force' of naive biology or of
'phlogiston' of naive thermodynamics. These claims by psychologists re-
garding the in-principle impossibility of reducing psychological theories
about mental states to neurobiological theories about brain states have
been effectively refuted. In any case, the fact that some mental states, in-
cluding consciousness, intentionality, as well as feelings, beliefs, and de-
sires, may differ essentially from other bodily functions does not exclude
them from the realm of biological phenomena. They are obviously the
product of processes that occur in our brain, whose understanding is
equally obviously a biological problem, albeit an especially difficult, fas-
cinating and troublesome one.
The view of the biological nature of mental phenomena does not com-
mit one to the belief, however, that their complete explanation in terms of
biological theories is actually possible in practice. The reason for this
caveat is that the brain belongs to a class of phenomena whose high de-
gree of complexity limits the extent to which theories developed to ex-
plain them can be successfully reduced by theories developed to explain
less complex phenomena. That is why the project of a complete biologi-
cal explanation of mental phenomena is probably utopian in practice,
even though it ought to be possible in principle. (Stent, 1975, 1986)

Modern Monism. Although the latter-day developments in brain re-

search have not yet led to a detailed account of the mechanisms of very

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 MIND-BODY PROBLEM

many important mental phenomena (including volition), many neu

ologists confidently expect that all those recent technical breakth
will soon reveal the physical bases of mental states. For they, as w
many contemporary philosophers-such as Gilbert Ryle, (1984
had lampooned dualism as invoking a 'ghost in the machine'-
that all being and phenomena can be explained as manifestations o
sults of matter. As materialists they follow the Aristotelian monis
tion and consider the mind-body enigma as a pseudo problem, wh
egating dualism to the historical garbage heap of abandoned theor
their view, Aristotelian monism is the only game in town. The m
the brain. (Churchland, 1986)
So how is mind instantiated as an attribute of the brain? The foll
two proposals, which were widely discussed by philosophers durin
twentieth century, exemplify the conceptual poverty of the efforts
swer that question.

1) Epiphenomenalism, envisages that there exist both mentalist

as well as conceptually separate physicalist brain states. (Broad,
Thus, on first sight, epiphenomenalism appears to be a kind of exis
dualism. However, epiphenomenalism is actually a kind of fun
monism, in that it regards mental states as causally ineffective and
itous byproducts, or epiphenomena, of physicalist brain states. In
words, Epiphenomenalists deny that mental states have any influe
behavior, which is governed entirely by mindless neurologico-phy
brain processes. Like Skinner's behaviorism, which (as we not
Chapter 7) denies the existence of mental states altogether) epiphe
enalism seems incompatible with any philosophically reasonabl
ition about morals and justice. Moreover, in view of its allegat
causal inefficacy of subjective mental experiences, such as pleasure
pain, it reduces persons to Zombies.
2) The Identity Theory is a modification of epiphenomenalism
epiphenomenalism (but unlike behaviorism), it admits the existenc
mental states as attributes of brain states in living creatures that
conscious mind. It therefore qualifies as a monist theory. But
epiphenomenalism, the Identity Theory does consider mental s
causally effective and hence capable of influencing behavior. It ass
that mental processes are identical with certain physical brain pro
albeit of a special kind that presents different aspects to objective

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

spection from the outside and to subjective introspection from the inside.
The Identity Theory attributes the causal efficacy of mental states to
some kind of 'identity' between certain mental states and certain brain
states. (Macdonald, 1989)

Just as the two popular names 'Evening Star' and 'Morning Star' de-
note different aspects of the same planet Venus, so do 'mental states' and
'brain states' denote different aspects of the same organ of our body. We
just happen to know about the mental state aspects of our brains first
hand from its inside while our theories about physicalist states of the
brain aspect simply describe the same thing from the outside, based on
second hand information provided by neurobiological brain studies.
Thus the identity theory is more obviously a monist theory than is
Epiphenomenalism, since it holds that mental states are brain states, al-
beit of the special kind that presents different aspects from inside and
outside. The identity theory is of no help for the resolution of the Para-
dox of Moral Responsibility, of course, since, if mental processes were
identical with brain processes, they would be subject to the forces of de-
terminism and hence incompatible with free will.
Most contemporary neuroscientists and philosophers of mind are be-
holden to the doctrine of materialism. Since materialists believe that all
being and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of
matter, they simply follow the Aristotelian monist tradition. Seemingly
unaware of the fundamental inability of monism to provide a satisfactory
rational basis for morals, they are convinced that there is no need to
bring any metaphysical considerations to the mind-body problem, and
they declare stoutly that the mind is the brain.

Interactionism. The contemporary obituary notices of dualism seem

premature, since they merely reflect the failure of modern devotees of
monism to fathom the deep moral roots of the mind-body problem. How-
ever incisive and illuminating may have been the neurobiological
progress made in recent years, monism remains the existentially unsatis-
factory solution of the mind-body problem that it has always been. While
monism may be an adequate, or maybe even the only way to deal with
mind as a natural phenomenon, it cannot give a satisfactory account of
mind as a moral phenomenon.

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 MIND-BODY PROBLEM

One of the few noteworthy latter-day proposals for a dualist so

the mind body problem was put forward under name 'interactio
two eminent twentieth-century scholars, the philosopher Karl P
and the neurophysiologist John Eccles. In their 600-page colla
essay, The Self and its Brain, Popper and Eccles (1977) accepted t
tonic concept of the person as a morally responsible, autonomou
with free will. Their aim was to reconcile the notion of the auton
the person with modern neurophysiological insights into brain
Interactionism is a brand of substance dualism, in that it envisa
mental processes exist as distinct entities rather than as mere attr
brain processes.
According to Popper and Eccles' interactionism, we live in
metaphysically distinctive worlds. One of them is World 1, com
the universe of physical objects that are the source of sensory i
sions. Another is World 2, comprising the universe of mental st
include psychological dispositions and conscious as well as unc
states of mind. And yet another is World 3, which comprises th
tents of thought, and, in particular, the intellectual product
human mind. The nub of Popper's and Eccles' theory is that the
processes that represent Worlds 2 and 3 interact with the brain p
that are responsible for handling the sensory input from World
producing the motor output to World 1. This interaction is reci
On the one hand, the mental processes of Worlds 2 and 3 are caus
fective in governing behavior by interacting with the brain proc
sponsible for the physical implementation in World 1 of the dec
made by mental processes. On the other hand, the brain proc
sponsible for sensory input from World 1 are causally effective i
encing the mental processes that represent Worlds 2 and 3. Inte
ism provides for the autonomy essential for the exercise of fre
allowing the possibility of an intervention by the self [or 'soul,' a
to be called] in the interaction between mental processes an
processes. Popper and Eccles tried to clarify this idea with a me
namely that "the self plays on the brain as a pianist plays on a pi
In a review of The Self and its Brain, Donald MacKay (1978) fou
"what makes [Popper and Eccles'] joint effort so remarkable i
seeks to reverse an all-but universal trend in contemporary
about the relation of mind to brain. For a couple of decades at l

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

great majority of brain scientists have proceeded on the working assump-

tion that the central nervous system is a physically determinate system in
the same sense as the heart or lungs or any part of the body. Yet here, in
1977, is a book in which two acknowledged leaders in scientific thought
condemn this whole trend as misguided and obstructive of progress."
According to MacKay, monism and all of its latter-day versions, such
as behaviorism, parallelism [he meant 'identity theorism'], and epiphe-
nomenalism, are fatally deficient because they cannot give "the fullest
recognition of the moral and spiritual dimensions to our human nature."
Dualism, by contrast, "offers the only way to do justice to the data of ex-
perience." Yet, MacKay concluded his review by saying that he does not
believe that Popper and Eccles have established their case for an 'inter-
actionist' version of dualism. In particular, they failed to put forward any
neurophysiologically credible mechanism to account for the supposed in-
teraction between mental and brain processes, or for the intervention in
that interaction by the soul in the service of free will. All the same,
MacKay wishes The Self and Its Brain "whatever the fate of its more ad-
venturous speculations, a long life as a spur to the theorist of cognitive
functions."
MacKay's good wishes did not materialize. Insofar as The Self and Its
Brain is still known at all, it is remembered as a philosophical folie-ai-deux
of a pair of eminences grises.

Persistence of Dualism. Despite its general overt rejection by neuro-

biologists, psychologists and philosophers, dualism remains alive and well
in modern secular societies, albeit surviving mainly underground as a tac-
itly held belief. How has dualism managed to persist through all those
years, as other myths and unscientific misconceptions have fallen by the
wayside in the course of ever-growing, no-nonsense scientific sophistica-
tion? One plausible answer is that dualism is more compatible than
monism with the ancient theory of human nature according to which
mankind is partly animal and partly divine, that mankind lives both in as
well as out of nature. The Israelite version of this theory has been passed
on to us via the Torah and its story about Adam and Eve's ejection from
the Garden of Eden once they stopped being amoral animals and turned
into moral persons who, like God, know evil. As archaeological records
eventually revealed, this theory of the bipartite human nature dates back
at least to predynastic Egypt, long before the Torah was written.

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 MIND-BODY PROBLEM

Coda. On the basis of Plato's perception that statements about

bodies are obviously different in kind from statements abou
thoughts and feelings, he put forward the dualist doctrine of m
body being separate substances. Thus the Paradox of Moral Respo
ity would be resolved if, unlike the body substance, the mind su
and its organ of free will were immune to influence by the heter
forces of determinism. Two thousand years later-in the seve
century CE-Rend Descartes developed Platonic mind-body s
dualism further. By the eighteenth century, however, the success
tonian physics had made Descartes' concept of a non-material su
hard to accept. As we will note in the next chapter, Immanuel K
replaced Cartesian substance dualism with his epistemic dualism,
of which is that we live in the two metaphysically distinct worlds
which are constructs of the human mind.

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 ritir ben

refuc t 3eruuuft

cSmmanuel Raint
Trofeffor in 6nigtserg.

oig4,
Wrtesot SQoann tricbrid) . artflto4
I78.

TITLE PAGE OF KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON

First Edition (1781)

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 Chapter Ten

Critical Idealism

In mid-eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant presented a dualist solu-

tion to the mind-body problem that was significantly different from any
that had been previously put forward. Kant's solution, to which we will
refer as 'epistemic dualism' (Stent, 1998a), was based on his epistemologi-
cal theory of critical idealism, which disentangled the seemingly in-
tractable antinomy of free will and determinism.
Kant is generally considered as one of the most important European
philosophers of modern times, though unfortunately not as one of the
clearest expositors of philosophical ideas. He was born in 1724 in the East
Prussian city of Kbnigsberg, where he spent his entire life and died in
1804. He studied philosophy (which in those days included also the nat-
ural sciences) at the University of K6nigsberg from 1740 to 1746, and
then worked for a time as a private tutor. In 1755, Kant began lecturing at
the University in a wide variety of academic disciplines, including math-
ematics, physics, anthropology, pedagogy, and physical geography, as well
as the more restricted subject to which we refer nowadays to as 'philoso-
phy.' He was appointed Professor of Philosophy in 1770 and published his
masterpiece, Critique of Pure Reason, in 1781.
In addition to the opacity of Kant's writing style there is another obsta-
cle in the way to understanding his works. He uses many terms in special
technical senses that do not match their common, everyday meanings.
For instance, with the phrase 'critique of' in the title of his Critique of
Pure Reason, Kant meant 'careful examination' or 'reasoned clarification,'
rather than cantankerous criticism or faultfinding. Similarly, whereas in
ordinary speech the adjective 'pure' refers to something that is unsullied,
or to someone who is uncorrupted, in the context of Kantian philosophy
the phrase 'pure reason' refers to rational thought based on principles that
are intuitive, or innate, rather than being derived from experience. Thus
for Kant, the 'pure' in 'pure reason' was a quasi-synonym for his equally

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

unconventional use of the word 'transcendental.' Nowadays this latter

term is generally taken to mean 'supernatural' but Kant meant it to desig-
nate innate ideas that we apply to our experience a priori, rather than de-
rive from our experience a posteriori.
Kant's novel approach to the Paradox of Moral Responsibility forms only
one part of his all-encompassing epistemological doctrine of 'critical ideal-
ism.' That doctrine qualifies as a brand of idealism, since it shares with other
brands of idealism, such as Plato's, the rejection of the materialist creed. Ac-
cording to the materialist creed championed by Aristotle, physical matter is
the only essential reality, with all things, processes, and phenomena being
attributable to physical matter. Unlike other brands of idealism, however,
Kant's critical idealism also rejects the traditional idealist creed that the
only things that really exist are minds and their contents. Instead, Kant's
critical idealism invokes a source external to our minds of the phenomena
we perceive, and it provides a coherent, closely reasoned account of how we
come to construct the reality in which we spend our lives.
One of Kant's goals that led him to the development of his critical ide-
alism was to show that there does exist such a thing as pure (or transcen-
dental) knowledge that transcends experience. Prior to Kant, in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, British empiricist philoso-
phers, such as John Locke and David Hume, had denied the existence of
transcendental knowledge and claimed that experience is the only source
of authentic knowledge.

A priori-Synthetic Propositions. Philosophers had long recognized that

there exist two different kinds of propositions (that is, statements that are
capable of being either true or false), namely analytic propositions and syn-
thetic propositions. An analytic proposition is a statement whose truth is en-
tailed a priori by the meaning of the words of which it is composed, such as

'No bachelor is married,'

and whose negation,

'Some bachelors are married,'

is self-contradictory.
A synthetic proposition, by contrast, is a statement whose truth is in-
ferred a posteriori from experience, such as

'No bachelor is happy,'

and whose negation,

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 CRITICAL IDEALISM

'Some bachelors are happy,'

is not self-contradictory.
Yet, so Kant noted, there exists a third kind of propositions
truth appears to be both a priori as well as synthetic, which Kant
nated by the oxymoron 'a priori-synthetic' propositions. An exam
such an a priori-synthetic proposition is

'Every event has a cause.'

This proposition, which provides the rational foundation for our

in determinism, is one of the two mutually contradictory proposi
that generate the Paradox of Moral Responsibility. Its truth is neith
tailed analytically by the meaning of the words of which it is com
nor is it inferable a posteriori from experience. So, Kant wondere
there could there be such things as true a priori-synthetic propositi

Four Antinomies. Kant noted also a second troublesome pro

posed by some propositions that he designated as 'antinomies' and th
paradoxical contradictions between two apparently equally valid pr
sitions. He considered the following four antinomies, or pairs of pr
tions, of which each pair comprises a seemingly true thesis and its
ingly equally true contradiction, or antithesis.

Thesis Antithesis
First The world is finite. It has a The world is infinite. It
Antinomy beginning in time and has no beginning in time
limits in space. and no limits in space.

Second Every composite thing in No composite thing in the

Antinomy the world is made up of world is made up of simple
simple parts. parts.
Third Freedom exists. Not There is no freedom.
Antinomy everything in the world Everything in the wor
takes place solely in takes place solely in
accordance with the accordance with the
causal laws of nature. causal laws of nature.

Fourth One absolutely necessary No absolutely necessary

Antinomy being exists in the world. being exists in the world.

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

A Copernican Revolution in Philosophy. Kant believed that, lest

they be resolved, the conceptual problems posed by a priori-synthetic
propositions and by the four antinomies would lead to a hopeless philo-
sophical skepticism, which he termed 'euthanasia of pure reason.' He
thought that he could resolve both problems by means of the doctrines
of what he himself referred to as his 'Copernican Revolution in Philos-
ophy.' [Copernicus had resolved the formerly intractable physical
quandary of planetary motion by putting forward the revolutionary and
counterintuitive theory that the Earth moves around the Sun.] And so
Kant set out to resolve the intractable metaphysical quandaries by put-
ting forward the revolutionary and counterintuitive theory that for the
world's things to be knowable for us they must conform to our subjec-
tive ways of knowing.
In support of that theory Kant claimed that our perception of space and
time are examples of such subjective ways of knowing, thanks to which our
mind abstracts meaning from the phenomena that we observe. This Kant-
ian critical-idealistic view of our subjective perception of space and time is
radically different from the materialistic view backed half a century earlier
by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Newton considered
space and time as self-subsisting, objective realities, while Leibniz regarded
them as objectively existing relations between self-subsisting objects.
In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant developed the epistemological
dogma that the world's things become known to us by reaching our mind,
not as they may be in themselves but as abstract forms. In other words, ac-
cording to Kant's Copernican Revolution, we can know things only as
they appear to us, but not as they are actually in themselves.

Critical Idealism. The basic idea that underlies Kant's theory of criti-
cal idealism is Plato's insight that our direct contact with the world is
limited to a sensible world of appearances, or phenomena, which we per-
ceive via our senses, such as sight, smell, hearing, and touch. To orient
ourselves in that sensible world of phenomena, that is, to extract mean-
ing from it, we take it for granted that the sources of the phenomena we
perceive are not phantoms but real things-in-themselves, or noumena of
an intelligible world. [The Greek word noumenon means 'that which is
conceived.' It is the opposite of phainomenon, which means 'that which
appears.']

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 CRITICAL IDEALISM

However, according to Kant, it is not given to us to perceive that

telligible world of noumena directly via our senses, so that the nou
we take for granted are not actually knowable as they really are. But
are at least thinkable and thus can serve as the elements of an indi
inferred intelligible (that is, understandable) world of our own mak
To construct that intelligible world and its noumena, we interpret
phenomena we perceive in terms of a priori categories that inhere in
rational faculty, such as time, space, good/evil, and free will. In this
pretive procedure we also resort tacitly to categorical propositions, w
inhere in our rational faculty as well and whose validity we similarl
cept a priori rather than inferring them a posteriori from experien
example of such an a priori categorical proposition is 'some A a
therefore all A are B' (to which philosophers refer as induction). An
example is the proposition 'the occurrence of a set of condition
both necessary and sufficient for the occurrence of B' (to which ph
phers refer as causation by A of B).
Kant considered these categories and categorical propositions t
universally applicable to all phenomena. Their rational use allow
mind to construct an intelligible world from our sensory perceptio
the phenomena of the sensible world. Indeed, it is only in the proc
constructing the intelligible world that sensory perceptions of phe
ena become experience, that is, become meaningful, once the mind
interpreted them in the terms of its innate categorical endowm
Hence the Kantian categories and categorical propositions have tran
dental status, since we resort to them for creating experience rathe
deriving them from experience.
Kant designated that part of our rational faculty whence the
gories spring as pure reason-'pure' because it is not corrupted by our
reliable, incomplete and possibly misleading sensory impressions of
sensible world of appearances, as described in Plato's Parable of the
Kant knew, of course, that many of our reactions to sensory stimul
vided by the sensible world, such as the reflexive withdrawal of the
from a hot stove, do not involve any rational interpretation of
noumenal source in the intelligible world. Since such automatic
tions to sensory stimuli are determined subliminally by the causal f
of natural laws, they are obviously not instances of the exercise of
reason.

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

KANTIAN CRITICAL IDEALISM

PHENOMENA

Sensation

SENSIBLE WORLD

Pure Reason

INTELLIGIBLE WORLD
(Noumena)

Pure Theoretical Pure Practical

Reason Reason

Categories: Categories:
Space, Time, Good /Evil,
Causality. Sacredness, Free Will.

NATURAL, NON-NATURAL/
AMORAL REALM, MORAL REALM
(Noumena: Objects) (Noumena: Subjects)
EPISTEMIC DUALISM

MESOCOSMIC MICROCOSMIC &

DOMAIN MACROCOSMIC DOMAINS
(Visualizable) (Non-visualizable)

Epistemic Dualism. By the latter part of the eighteenth century,

explanatory success of Isaac Newton's physics in the natural world
discredited the Cartesian theory of substance dualism. So, based on
epistemology of critical idealism, Immanuel Kant developed a
brand of dualism, to which we will refer as 'epistemic dualism' (Ste
1998, 2002). Unlike Aristotelian monism or Platonic dualism, Ka
epistemic dualism is not a descriptive theory that is meant to repr

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 CRITICAL IDEALISM

the physical world. It is not concerned with the empirical q

whether mental states are or are not fundamentally different fro
states. Rather, Kant's epistemic dualism, which is philosophically
palatable than Descartes' substance dualism, is a metaphysical
meant to connect two of the fundamental aspects of existence, n
being and knowing.
Epistemic dualism flows readily from Kant's theory of critical id
in that it envisages our existence in two metaphysically distinct r
the intelligible world. Both realms are of our own making, their n
being products of our interpretation by use of our pure reason of t
nomena we perceive in the sensible world.
One realm, the natural/amoral realm, we construct by use of th
of our pure reason that Kant designated as 'pure theoretical reaso
used here by Kant, the adjective 'theoretical' denotes the concern o
reason with the difference between truth and falsehood.) For con
ing the natural/amoral realm, pure theoretical reason resorts to
free, natural categories, such as space, time, causality, and obj
noumena of natural/amoral realm are material objects, such a
stones, and animals. Their existence in the world is governed by th
ural laws of causal determination. They include also human being
far as Homo sapiens are one of the many species in the class of ma
of the vertebrate phylum of the animal kingdom.
The other realm, the non-natural/moral realm, we construct by
that part of pure reason that Kant designated 'pure practical reas
used here by Kant, the adjective 'practical' denotes a concern of pu
son with moral decisions.) Pure practical reason resorts to non-na
categories, such as good and evil, sacredness, free will, and person
The noumena of the non-natural/moral realm are human subj
persons, in so far as we consider them as being governed by the
laws of freedom within them.
In his Critique of Practical Reason Kant (1949) epitomized the p
logical consequences of his epistemic dualism in a famous epigram
things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the mor
and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: Th
heavens above and the moral law within me."

Resolution of the Paradox of Moral Responsibility. Kant's epistemic

dualism thus resolves the Paradox of Moral Responsibility. For it recognizes

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

that our perception of the causes of a person's action are fundamentally

different when we encounter that person in the context of the
natural/amoral realm or in the context of the non-natural/moral realm of
the intelligible world. In the context of the natural/amoral realm-espe-
cially in a biological or psychological setting-we regard the person as an
unfree object whose actions form part of the events heteronomously de-
termined by the laws of nature. But in the context of the non-
natural/moral realm-especially in a jurisprudential setting-we regard
the person as a free subject whose actions are autonomously willed by her
mind.

As Kant argued in his Critique of Pure Reason, the existence of free

will is an a priori synthetic proposition, whose truth cannot be demon-
strated by empirical observations. Moreover, there is an obvious antino-
mial contradiction inherent in our categorical attribution of free will to
the person and our categorical belief that everything that happens in the
world is determined by causal necessity. Kant sought to resolve this an-
tinomy of free will and causal necessity by means of two arguments.
First, Kant insisted that the belief in free will is a precondition of
morals and has its roots in the non-natural/moral categories of pure prac-
tical reason. Hence free will does not need to be established as a fact of
nature. From the practical point of view it suffices that we adhere to the
belief that freedom of the will does exist, since a person who believes in
her freedom is by this fact alone effectively free.
Second, Kant saw no difficulty in believing in free will, inasmuch as
there are no primary sensory data provided by the sensible world that
contradict the categorical belief that people have the power to will their
actions autonomously. Regarding persons as phenomena of the sensible
world, I may use my pure theoretical reason to deem them noumenal ob-
jects in the amoral/natural realm. Using my pure practical reason, how-
ever, I may also deem them noumenal subjects in the non-natural/moral
realm. Thus depending on the context, I can consider the actions of an-
other person either as determined heteronomously by causal necessity or
as willed autonomously by her free will.
Some philosophers have rejected the proposition that attribution of an
autonomous free will to an entity necessarily excludes it from the natu-
ral/amoral realm. Dennett (1984), for instance, argued that animals with
an autonomous free will, such as smart dogs, do belong nevertheless to
the natural/amoral realm. However, as we noted in Chapter 5, the own-

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 CRITICAL IDEALISM

ers of smart dogs tend to confer personhood, and hence memb

the non-natural/moral realm, to their pets, precisely in apprec
the animals' intelligence. Dennett also pointed to some inanim
facts, such as smart machines that possess some of the aspects of
that we attribute to persons, would have to be conferred mem
the non-natural/moral realm. The chess playing 'Deep Blue'
would provide an example of such a smart artifact. It has reliab
tations about what will happen next, can make what appear
tonomous rational choices on the basis of its expectations, and
ects, interests, and values it creates in the course of its own self-def
Dennett's counterexamples highlight the obstacles along th
reaching definitive, logically consistent and universally valid co
regarding the paradoxical aspects of the free will problem. How
tional and autonomous the choices of smart dogs and smart
may appear, few people would infer that any moral responsibil
volves from their actions, except perhaps on the part of the
owners.

Why should this be so? It is so because, as Kant ev

when he developed his non-naturalistic ethics, the par
of morality is one of the innate human qualities. Far fr
table, however, this paradoxical character bids fair refl
adaptation of our cognitive faculties to the human con
two domains constructed by pure theoretical reason an
reason were not inconsistent, we might, indeed, will a
serve our ends better. But in that case we would not will these actions as
a matter of moral duty but for pragmatic (that is, utilitarian) reasons.
And thus mankind would be emotionally poorer, for if pure reason were
not inconsistent, we should lose the opportunity to show good will, the
only thing in the sublunary sphere-or even beyond of it-that can be
taken without qualification as an instance of the Good.

Resolution of the Quandary of A Priori Synthetic Propositions. The

possibility of the existence of true a priori-synthetic knowledge of things
of potential experience provides the very foundation of Kant's critical
idealism. Unlike the truth of an analytic proposition, the truth of the a
priori component of an a priori-synthetic proposition, such as 'every event
has a cause,' is not entailed logically by the meaning of the words of
which it is composed. Accordingly, the negation of an a priori-synthetic

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

proposition, such as the statement 'some events have no cause,' is not

self-contradictory.
Kant contends that the truth of the a priori component of the proposi-
tion 'every event has a cause' devolves from the presumption inherent in
our pure theoretical reason that to become objects of knowledge for us in
the first place, phenomena have to conform to the categorical concept of
causality. And the truth of the synthetic component of that proposition
devolves from our failure to observe any phenomena about which we can
confidently assert that they represent instances of its negation, that is of
instances of events that have no cause. Kant thus resolved the problem of
the truth of a priori-synthetic propositions by attributing their justifica-
tion to the a priori categories of pure reason that provide the metaphysi-
cal basis for his doctrine of critical idealism.

Resolution of the Antinomies. Kant was less successful in disposing of

the paradoxes entailed by the mutually contradictory theses and antithe-
ses of the four antinomies. The antinomies exist because our reason al-
lows us to construct valid proofs for either of the two conflicting, all-en-
compassing propositions, justifying Kant's ultimate sardonic judgment
about the quality of human reason, namely that

Out of timber so crooked as that from which mankind is made,

Nothing wholly straight can be built. (Kant, 1784)

As for the first antinomy regarding the finiteness or infinity of the

world in time and space, Kant argued that all things of which we have
experience are always associated with other things that had previous ex-
istence in time and that exist beyond them in space. So when we put
these experiences provided by the phenomena of the sensible world to-
gether into an intelligible world of noumena, it is no more conceivable
that this intelligible world is finite in both time and space than that it is
infinite.

As for the second Kantian antinomy regarding the quandary whether

composite substances are or are not made up from simple parts, Kant
pointed out that in dealing with this question our pure theoretical reason
tries to grasp the constitution of matter by extending our reasoning from
our experience with composite substances to the ultimate material ele-
ments of which they are composed. We know from our experience that
we can usually break any sample of matter into smaller parts and then

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 CRITICAL IDEALISM

break these smaller parts into yet smaller parts. Eventually, the par
become too small to be directly perceptible to our senses, but our
theoretical reason tells us that they cannot be simple, indivisib
ments. For when we reflect on their nature we find that we canno
conceiving them as occupying space and therefore (in principle) br
able into further parts. Thus such parts are not the simple mater
ments of reality of which we are in search. And if in the process of
ing up things we do reach parts that are no longer breakable into s
parts, they cannot be occupying space and therefore are no longer m
That is to say, the answer to the question what matter consists of
be the paradoxical proposition "matter consists of nothing at all."
Kant resolved the quandary of his first and second antinomies by
cluding that their theses and their antitheses are both false. F
propositions that may seem incompatible at first sight are not tr
tinomial if one or both of them is false. Kant's way of resolving th
and second antinomies did not fare well upon the development of
tieth-century physics, according to which the theses of the first a
ond antinomies both happen to be true. As for the first antinomy
world did have a beginning with the Big Bang about 10-15 billion
ago and can look forward to an (at least conceivable) end upon the
tational collapse of the Big Crunch. The world also turns out to hav
nite size, presently estimated to correspond to a radius of about 10
light years. And as for the second antinomy, the world does contai
unbreakable, simple parts, such as electrons.
Had he been still alive in mid-twentieth century, Kant ought no
have been surprised to learn of this shipwreck of his proposed resolu
the first and second antinomies. For he himself had concluded tha
reason inevitably falls into contradiction with itself whenever it v
beyond our direct experience and tries to think of the world as a w
his reason did in conceiving the first and second antinomies). Kan
in his judgement that both theses and antitheses of the first and
antinomies are false. But he was right in foreseeing the intrinsic
tions on our understanding of the world as a whole that came to lig
after his death and which we will consider in Chapters 12 and 14.
The long and short of the third and fourth antinomies regardin
presence or absence of freedom in the world and the requirement o
pensability of the existence of an absolutely necessary being (a.k.a.
in the world is that there can be no overarching rational resolutio

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

them. We simply have to come to terms as best as we can with our para-
doxical mental endowment provided for us by critical idealism. Thus the-
sis and antithesis of the third antinomy epitomize the contradiction be-
tween freedom of will and determinism. The thesis is a rationally
necessary condition for the concept of moral responsibility of pure prac-
tical reason, while the antithesis is an equally rationally necessary condi-
tion for the concept of natural law of pure theoretical reason. And thesis
and antithesis of the fourth antinomy epitomize the contradiction inher-
ent in the concept of God, which is a category belonging to pure practi-
cal as well as pure theoretical reason. While the existence of God is a ra-
tionally necessary condition for the foundations of morals, He is (or
possibly only may be) also conceptually indispensable for the operation of
natural law.
It had not escaped Kant's notice that whereas his first and second an-
tinomies deal only with the world's natural/amoral realm of pure theoret-
ical reason, his third and fourth antinomies deal also with the world's
non-natural/moral realm of pure practical reason. Thus in the case of the
third antinomy, its thesis that freedom exists pertains to the non-natu-
ral/moral realm, while its antithesis that freedom does not exist pertains
to the natural/amoral realm. And in the case of the fourth antinomy, the
thesis that God (the one absolutely necessary being) exists deals with the
non-natural/moral realm, while its antithesis that God does not exist
deals with the natural/amoral realm.

Existence of God. Three formal arguments were cited by Kant that

were often advanced on behalf of fourth antinomy's thesis, 'God exists.'
The first argument asserted that the very concept of God implies that
God could not not exist. Thus the existence of God would be an analytic
truth. The second asserted that the existence of the world entails that
God exists, because only He could have been the First Cause that
brought it into existence. And the third asserts that the structure and
function of the world is such that it could not have arisen naturally but
must have been designed by Him.
Kant demolished all three arguments on rational grounds, which proves
neither that the thesis is false nor that its antithesis, "No God exists," is
true. All that can be said on behalf of the antithesis is the reply that
Laplace made to Napoleon when Napoleon asked Laplace whether he be-
lieves in the existence of God: "Sire, je n'ai pas besoin de cette hypothbse."

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 CRITICAL IDEALISM

This is not the answer that Kant would have given to Napoleon.
did reject the standard proofs of God's existence by resort to argu
based on pure theoretical reason. But Kant not only believed in th
tence of God but also held that His existence can be justified b
practical reason as a rationally necessary condition for the foundati
morals. Kant's proof of the existence of God was based not on a d
tive proposition about some objective facts in the world but on th
jectively experienced moral situation.
He reasoned that, absent God, people might still applaud and adm
the magnificent precepts of morals. The precepts alone, however,
not serve as sufficiently strong mainsprings for driving moral int
and actions in accord with the categories of pure practical reason th
present a priori in every person.

Immortality of the Soul. The central transcendental problem

nected with a person's death, namely the immortality of the soul,
more, rather than less troublesome over the years. In medieval an
naissance Europe, the immortality of the soul was held to be self-ev
in view of the generally accepted Egypto-Christian belief of a life
death and of a reward or punishment in heaven or hell for one's a
the here-and-now. According to that belief, death is more a begin
than an end of existence; it marks a kind of graduation from a tra
secular probationary period, to the onset of the eternal, transcend
existence during which persons receive their just deserts.
With the decline of religiosity in the eighteenth century, set off
Enlightenment, the belief in life in the hereafter could on lon
taken for granted. Yet, it proved very difficult to dismiss the idea
immortality of the soul as just so much nonsense. Descartes, and a
him Leibniz, continued to believe in the soul's immortality, bu
grounded that belief neither in the revelations of the Christian r
nor in personal mystical experiences. Descartes and Leibniz hel
what Kant would soon designate as 'pure practical reason,' obliges
believe that the soul is immortal.
The rationalist arguments of Descartes and Leibniz did not pe
the monist French philosophers of the Enlightenment, however. T
simply denied the immortality of the soul and developed a mater
outlook on death. According to them, there is no such thing as th
in the first place. All there is, is the mind, which is merely an attr

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

the mortal body. Hence the question of the soul's immortality after death
of the body is moot. It is merely a pseudo-question, since humans are no
more than Cartesian automata after all, whose function simply ceases
upon death. Death, therefore, being the final breakdown of the automa-
ton, obviously entails the total annihilation of the person, as its body dis-
integrates and returns to the dust whence it came.
Where does the idea of the soul and its immortality come from in the
first place? According to the Enlightenment philosophers, the immortal-
ity of the soul is simply a fairy tale made up by the lying priests. Their goal
was to keep the downtrodden poor content with their miserable fate in
the here-and-now and to persuade the rich to endow monasteries where
lazy, good-for-nothing monks would pray for their souls in the hereafter.
This lie must be exposed to provide for a better living of mankind. It is the
amelioration of the human condition in the here-and-now rather than in
after-life that ought to be the paramount goal of our earthly strife. Indeed,
as pointed out by one of the Enlightenment philosophers, the Marquis de
Condorcet, a person's service on behalf of the betterment of mankind in
the here-and-now not only provides a real purpose for life but even offers
an opportunity for achieving for genuine immortality.
Here too it was Kant who fathomed the real depth also of the existen-
tial problem of the immortality of the soul, just as he had in the case of
the epistemological problem of how we come to know what we know. He
conceded that the immortality of the soul is not an empirical proposi-
tion, since, even it were true, its truth would not be demonstrable. But
Kant pointed out that if there were no immortality of the soul, there
would be no counterargument against the claim that it makes no differ-
ence how we conduct ourselves in the-here-and-now, since death annihi-
lates saints and sinners equally. Here Kant did not mean that the belief in
immortality and its attendant eternal reward or punishment is needed as
a (utilitarian) inducement for good conduct. Instead, what he had in
mind was the proposition that unless there were a God and a life in the
hereafter, there would be no Supreme Wisdom according to which the
moral worth of our actions could be judged. And there would be no way
for us to know eventually whether we acted well or badly during our
earthly sojourn. Absent God and an immortal soul, life would of neces-
sity be amoral.
Hence to be a moral creature it is necessary to be committed to the be-
lief in the immortality of the soul, or, in Kant's terms, "in an infinitely

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 CRITICAL IDEALISM

prolonged existence and identity of one and the same rational

Just as are the problems of free will and of God's existence, so is
mortality of the soul one of the central concerns of metaphysics
cannot be disposed of by simply declaring them to be nonsense o
of priestly lies.

Death of God. Kant's moral argument in support of the immorta

the soul and God's existence made relatively little impact in the F
and English-speaking countries, where the materialist view of de
total annihilation still retains many professed adherents to this
this respect, Kant's moral argument in support of God's existenc
an immortal soul suffered a similar fate as his theory of knowledg
also lost out to empiricism as the main philosophical inspiration
teenth-century science. However, Kant's ideas on death were take
elaborated, and modified by a succession of nineteenth century G
philosophers. But none of these post-Kantian thinkers was a
strengthen the argument in favor of an immortal soul sufficiently
off the ever-growing dominance of their materialist opponents.
Finally, towards the end of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Ni
saw the full implications of that development. Whereas, according
zsche, Kant was correct in asserting that without believing in God
cannot lead a moral life, the French philosophers of the Enlighte
such as D'Alembert, Diderot, and Voltaire had nonetheless managed
Him. Thus, according to Nietzsche, everything had become permi
and mankind was about to sink into a moral abyss. To survive ma
must now transcend its animal nature and become truly human, th
become Supermen, so that their actions will be beyond good and ev
Though Nietzsche's Supermen have yet to make their appearanc
did manage to survive into the twenty-first century CE, albeit jus
skin of our teeth, mainly because God, though seemingly moribu
not dead after all. He was still alive and well because the Enlighte
philosophers and their influential disciples, foremost among them
Marx, were atheists in name only. They merely provided a new v
lary for justifying the established moral values of old-time Judeo
tianity without really abandoning the tacit belief in the transcen
source of their authority. Yet, by Nietzsche's time, the eighteenth-
project of seeking a wholly materialistic, scientific basis for mor
duct reached the end of its road.

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

Nietzsche's exposure of the moral bankruptcy of materialism paved the

way for a different view of mankind, which by the middle of the twentieth
century had become a serious rival to the Enlightenment, namely the coun-
terenlightenment. Its focus is on mankind's existence, a concept that was
put forward at about the time of Nietzsche's birth by Soren Kierkegaard.
Here the word 'existence' does not refer so much to persons' presence in the
world as to their interrelations and to their peculiar nature. Kierkegaard ap-
preciated that Descartes' mind-body dualism is more than an academic
philosophical truth. It is the key to the human psyche. Not only philoso-
phers, but also all persons know that they embody the union of irreconcil-
able opposites, of an animal body and of self-conscious soul. While believ-
ing that they possess divine freedom and immortality, persons are
nevertheless aware of the limitations and inevitable death of their animal
body. The illicit coming into that knowledge is, according to Kierkegaard,
the real meaning of the Biblical myth of the Fall and the First Couple's ejec-
tion from the Garden of Eden. Because of that knowledge, which animals
lack, humans are the only creatures that can be said to 'exist.'
One of the most important insights into that existence was provided
by Kant's invocation of the concept of the two realms of the intelligible
world of critical idealism and its epistemic dualism; namely the non-nat-
ural/moral realm with its free subjects and the natural/amoral realm with
its unfree objects. Insofar as I exercise my faculty of pure practical reason,
I belong to the non-natural/moral realm of the intelligible world. All my
actions would be driven by my autonomous free will, and I could have
willed otherwise. Insofar as I exercise my sensuous faculties, however, I
belong to the natural/amoral realm of the intelligible world. All my ac-
tions would be driven by natural necessity, and it would make no sense to
think that I could have willed otherwise.

Reconciliation of Ancient East Asian Philosophy with Critical Ide-

alism. How can it be the case that, in accord with the canon of Kantian
critical idealism, the a priori categories of pure practical and pure theo-
retical reason are shared by all human beings? Do not the seemingly in-
compatible differences between the metaphysical beliefs in which West-
ern and East Asian philosophies are rooted prove otherwise? No; not
necessarily, according to some students of the comparative aspects of
these two philosophical systems. In their opinion, Buddha set off a

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 CRITICAL IDEALISM

Copernican Revolution in East Asian Philosophy long before

made his Copernican Revolution in Western Philosophy, or eve
before Copernicus himself made his eponymous, prototypical revo
in Astronomy.
The stimulus for Kant's development of his revolutionary philos
of critical idealism had been the philosophical impasse created
two rival Greek epistemological systems of materialism and id
which advocated diametrically opposed views about the nature of
ity. And similarly, the stimulus for Buddha's development of his r
tionary philosophy of Madhyamika had been the philosophical im
created by two rival Indian epistemological systems. One of them
Atma-Vada, is the Indian analog of Aristotelian materialism. I
that physical matter is the world's only essential reality, and t
being, processes, and phenomena can be accounted for as manifest
of matter. The other, the Anatma-Vada, is the Indian analog of Pl
idealism. It holds that the world's essential reality is transcendent
isting only as an idea of the human mind-in its consciousness and
son-and that there are no material substances with permanent
identities.
Buddha's Madhyamika and Kant's critical idealism agree in their
ception of the main mission of philosophy, namely to provide a c
of human consciousness and reason, rather than to provide an acc
the nature of reality. Thus, both Buddha's and Kant's systems may
sidered as philosophies of philosophy-as reflective awareness o
working of philosophy. (Murti, T.R.V. 1960)
The Greek philosophers (and many of their modern ideologic
cessors) believed that the origin of the incompatibility of our tw
native concepts of reality-materialism and idealism-is attribut
a conceptual error in one, or both, metaphysical systems. But
showed in his Critique of Pure Reason, it is not a conceptual error
intrinsically paradoxical nature of human reason itself that foresta
development of a wholly consistent intelligible world.
Similarly, Buddha called attention to the paradoxical nature of h
reason, by presenting a set of metaphysical problems, the Avy
which he declared to be insoluble. That set included four unanswe
questions, which bear a striking resemblance to the four antinomie
mulated by Kant more than two millennia later.

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

Buddha's Avyakrta

1. Does the world have both a beginning and an end in time, or only
one or the other, or neither?
2. Is the world finite in space, or is it infinite?
3. Are body and soul one and the same thing, or are they different
things?
4. Is there a Perfect Being who can know things as they really are and
is immortal?

How did Buddha account for our inability to answering such seemingly
reasonable questions about time and space, body and soul, and a Perfect
Being? By attributing it to the incoherence of human reason, as manifest
in its innate adherence to the two antithetical metaphysics of Atma-Vada
and Anatma-Vada (i.e., of idealism and materialism).
But how can one account for the absence from the Far-Eastern Three
Teachings of such key Western moral concepts as 'choice' and 'responsi-
bility'? It does not follow, of course, from the lack of a developed lan-
guage of choice and responsibility in a culture that its people fail to make
morally relevant choices or are not judged praiseworthy or blameworthy
for their actions. Surely, it did not escape Confucius' notice that in An-
cient China some people behaved more righteously than did others. It
also seems indubitable that-the concept of the Tao notwithstanding-
Chinese people made morally relevant choices and were certainly pun-
ished for their blameworthy acts. The Confucian justification of punish-
ment, however, is the utilitarian-behaviorist deterrence of future
malfeasance, in contrast to the classical Greco-Judeo-Christian justifica-
tion of punishment as the removal of a moral unbalance in the world due
to the lack of retribution of past blameworthy actions. Most likely, the
absence of such moral concepts as 'guilt,' 'repentance,' or 'retributive
punishment' from the Three Teachings can be explained by the relative
lack of cultivation in the Ancient Far East of the category of the morally
autonomous person. (Fingarette, 1972)

Coda. Kant's basic idea that set off his Copernican Revolution in Phi-
losophy was that our direct contact with the world is limited to a sensible
world of phenomena that we perceive via our senses. To make sense of
that phenomenal world we take it for granted that the sources of the phe-
nomena we perceive are the real things-in-themselves, or noumena, of an

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 CRITICAL IDEALISM

intelligible world. To construct that intelligible world and its nou

interpret the phenomenal world in terms of two sets of a priori
that inhere in our rational faculty. We use one set, which K
pure theoretical reason, to construct a natural/amoral realm of the i
ble world, whose noumena are natural objects governed by phy
of determination. We use the other set, which Kant called pure
reason, to construct a non-natural/moral realm, whose noumena
sons governed by moral laws of freedom. The two sets of a pri
gories provide the basis for a theory of epistemic dualism, whic
solve the mind-body problem and the Paradox of Moral Respon

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 ERASMUS OF ROTTERDAM (1466-1536)
Charcoal drawing by Albrecht Diirer (1520)

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 Chapter Eleven

Etiquette*

Manners. In Chapter 1, we adopted as the meaning of 'ethics' the sys-

tem of rules, or laws, devised for regulating human social behavior in con-
formance with the principles of right and wrong. We identified these
principles with the set of categories of Kantian pure practical reason, des-
ignated collectively as 'morals,' which includes duty, compassion, sacred-
ness of the person, and free will.
There exists also another system of rules, known as 'etiquette,' devised
for regulating human social behavior, conformance with another set of
categories of Kantian pure practical reason. That other set is referred to as
'manners,' which includes such categories as harmony, cultural coherence,
beauty, and dignity of the person. (Martin and Stent, 1990; 1992) Being
concerned with neither moral responsibility nor free will, manners are
not troubled by the Paradox of Moral Responsibility. Yet, hyperparadoxi-
cally, for that very reason etiquette plays only second fiddle to ethics, at
least in the societies of the Western world.
Manners form part of the basic beliefs, wants, and interests that bring
order to our social relations, just as do morals. In view of the considerable
overlap between the aspects of the human condition to which morals and
manners pertain, they do not represent two entirely different, conceptu-
ally clearly separable components of the ensemble of our fundamental be-
liefs, wants, and interests inherent in Kantian pure practical reason.
Nonetheless, manners do differ from morals in at least two basic aspects:

1. Their domains of concern. Whereas morals tend to be concerned

with social situations that involve matters of potentially grave con-
sequences for life, limb, and property, manners tend to be concerned
with situations of potentially less grave offenses against personal
dignity, ritual, and the aesthetic sense.
*A substantial part of this chapter is based on the paper I Think; Therefore I
Thank, by J. Martin and G. S. Stent (1990).

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

2. The psychological consequences of their violations. Whereas

awareness of a violation of morals tends to engender feelings of guilt
in the sinner, awareness of a violation of manners tends to arouse
feelings of shame in the boor.

Origins of Etiquette. Archeological and historical records do not pro-

vide very clear indications as to just when etiquette first arose as a system
of explicit but not legally binding rules intended to implement the innate
categories of manners inherent in pure practical reason. It seems most
likely, however, that the articulation of explicit rules of etiquette, just as
the articulation of explicit rules of ethics, dates back some ten thousand
years to the dawn of civilization. As we noted in Chapter 2, there would
have been no need for the articulation of explicit rules of social inter-
course before the agricultural-urban revolution of the late Stone Age be-
fore sedentary civilizations with their large settlements first arose in
southwestern Asia. No doubt, prior to this change in the human condi-
tion there had already existed some rules that guided mannerly social re-
lations, just as there had already existed some laws in conformance with
the categories of morals. But as long as the horizon of human social life
did not extend beyond the narrowly circumscribed group of the hunter-
gatherer clan, these rules of proto-etiquette would have been tacitly
known to and understood by all members of the clan.
Once people began to live in large urban settlements, however, and
began dealing with strangers from a variety of clannish backgrounds, they
would have encountered a diversity of systems of rules of social behavior.
Though in isolation each system might have served the innate categories
of manners, the resulting farrago of rules from different systems would
most likely have been dysfunctional. So the need arose for an explicit
codification of a single, consistent system of etiquette rules (as well as
moral laws) regulating the social interactions of all the members of an
urban community.

Noble Savage. Kant's eighteenth-century contemporary, the Geneva

philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, interpreted the connection between
the development of codified rules of social behavior and the rise of civiliza-
tion in a way very different from that presented in the preceding paragraphs.
As Rousseau saw it, the change in the human condition brought about

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 ETIQUETTE

by the agricultural-urban revolution had disastrous social consequences.

According to him, human nature is intrinsically virtuous and mankind
conducted itself admirably from the standpoint of morals and manners in
its pre-civilization, 'natural' hunter-gatherer condition, when people
were still 'noble savages.' To rephrase Rousseau's argument in the lan-
guage of Kantian critical idealism, Rousseau asserted that mankind's nat-
urally noble categories of pure practical reason became corrupted by the
non-natural conditions of civilization. Hence Rousseau advocated that
human virtue be restored to its original, pre-lapsarian state by abandon-
ing civilization and returning to mankind's natural condition of the
noble savage. The appeal of Rousseau's call for restoring human virtue by
returning to a state of nature was limited to the European and American
Romantic movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it
had little influence on the mainstream of Western moral philosophy.
Yet Rousseau was not totally mistaken in claiming that the advent of
civilization did bring on dramatic changes in the human condition. But
the way in which these changes were accommodated was not by going
back to the status of the noble savage, but by formulating the system of
explicit rules of social conduct represented by ethics and etiquette. For
there can be no such thing as civilized living in their absence. Even those
people who have a well-developed intuitive feeling for morals and man-
ners cannot navigate through a complex civilized society by untutored
social instinct alone, that is, by reliance on their 'human nature.'

History of Etiquette. In predynastic Egypt and archaic Greece, eti-

quette was certainly in place by the fortieth century BCE. Yet, even
though rules of mannerly conduct are of high antiquity, their designation
as 'etiquette'-whose etymological origin is the Old French verb
estiqu(i)er (to stick)-dates back only to the seventeenth century court
of Louis XIV at Versailles. There the Sun King frequently changed the
rules of courtly behavior, to shame those nobles who did not trouble to
come to Versailles often enough to keep up with the comme-il-faut com-
portement du jour, by figuratively sticking an etiquet (sticker) on them that
labeled them as unmannerly country bumpkins.
The essential differences in the social roles of these two parallel sys-
tems-ethics and etiquette-were not explicitly emphasized by the an-
cient Mediterranean and East Asian sages at the dawn of moral philoso-

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

phy, whom we considered in Chapter 3. Insofar as Socrates, Plato, or

Aristotle paid any attention to this distinction, they regarded etiquette of
much lesser importance for the guidance of social behavior than ethics.
The ancient Greeks managed to bequeath their lack of interest in eti-
quette to our postmodern, be-yourself-and do-your-own-thing Western
societies.

The distinction between ethics and etiquette seemed to be of equally

little interest to the Athenians' coeval Chinese philosopher, Confucius.
However, in contrast to the Greeks, Confucius' interest was focussed
more on etiquette than on ethics, since he considered morals of lesser
importance than manners in the regulation of social behavior. For unlike
the way personhood is perceived from the Greco-Judeo-Christian view-
point, Confucianism does not regard the person as sacred by virtue of her
possession, within herself and independently of other persons, of a piece
of the divine, namely an immortal soul. Instead, the central concern of
Confucianism is the blossoming of humanity in its ceremonial acts. Con-
fucius managed to pass on his relative lack of interest in ethics to present-
day East Asian societies. (Fingarette, 1972) We will consider Confucius'
views on etiquette in more detail after we have clarified our present un-
derstanding of the philosophical standing of manners.

Changing Rules of Etiquette. It seems odd that in view of Socrates'

evergreen question 'How should one live?' Western philosophers have
shown so little interest in etiquette. [The 150-page index of the 8-vol-
ume, 4,000-page Encyclopedia of Philosophy edited by Paul Edwards and
published in 1967 contains no entry under either rubric of 'etiquette' or
'manners.'] As heirs of the Greek founders of moral philosophy, one
might have expected Western philosophers to remain concerned with
the quest for the virtuous life, where 'virtuous' refers to good social be-
havior in general and not merely righteous moral conduct.
This lack of attention to etiquette by Western philosophers is regret-
table. Being a complex system requiring contextually dependent judg-
ments rather than a set of simple, rule-ordained routines, etiquette is a
subtle discipline. Moreover, the work of an etiquette expert is never
done, because the rules of etiquette keep on changing. Usually, those
changes occur slowly, since etiquette is essentially conservative, as are
the law, religion and language-all of which must take into account the

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 ETIQUETTE

inertia of the beliefs of their constituencies due to emotional ties to tra-

dition. But sometimes changes in the rules of etiquette are very abrupt,
especially when radically novel social philosophies are installed.
Such abrupt changes did occur at the times of the American and
French Revolutions, when the etiquette of the Court of St. James and of
the Ancien Regime at Versailles intended for aristocratic courtiers was ob-
viously unsuitable for their republican successors. Thus, the Founding Fa-
thers of the United States faced some (still unresolved) problems about
the design of etiquette suitable for a democratic society. These problems
arise from the tensions inherent in such antithetical desiderata of man-
ners as dignity and obeisance, ceremony and efficiency, or comfort and
good taste. The questions that the Founding Fathers had to address in-
cluded the following:

1. Is obeisance to distinction by personal achievement any less offen-

sive than obeisance to distinction by birth?
2. How can rules of conduct in the workplace acknowledge the pro-
fessional hierarchy, from apprentice to master, without implying
subservience?
3. Must the lowest, crudest styles of conduct necessarily serve as the
norm, or can one aim at a higher, more refined general standard of
deportment?

Etiquette as a Regulative System. How do etiquette and law differ as

systems for the regulation of social behavior? Both systems prescribe con-
duct in the interest of community harmony. But while the law addresses vi-
olations of ethics, the first purpose of etiquette is to reduce personal antago-
nisms and thus to avert conflict, just as the first purpose of diplomacy is to
avert war. Thus the law handles conflicts threatening life or property that
etiquette has failed to avert. In accord with this division of labor, the law
dispenses fierce sanctions for violations of its rules, such as fines, corporal
punishment, imprisonment and loss of life. Meanwhile, etiquette handles
all those conflicts that can be controlled by restraints for which voluntary
compliance is usually obtainable without the threat of fierce sanctions.
That is why etiquette restricts freedom of expression more than does the
law. Much of what people would say if they expressed their thoughts and
feelings indiscriminately would be highly provocative to others and the

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

cause of social disharmony. It is within my legal right to tell you that you
are ugly, or that your baby is, but such locution is likely to lead to ugly-
which is to say, dangerous-behavior. Etiquette rejects the latter-day en-
counter group, rap-session theory of social harmony, which seeks to clear
the air by frankly expressing one's every thought and feeling. Instead, by
proscribing the voicing of offensive, albeit sincerely held opinions, eti-
quette reduces the need for lawsuits charging slander and libel.
The only sanction available to etiquette for non-compliance with its
rules is shame. In that regard, etiquette resembles international law, which,
like etiquette, depends on voluntary compliance (by sovereign states rather
than individuals) and, in case of non-compliance, can only resort to shame
as its sanction, short of retaliation by acts of war. Even shame is merely a
voluntary sanction, since it requires the collusion of righteous shamers and
self-effacing shamees. In fact, etiquette may even demand not invoking the
only sanction available to it, as set forth in the Golden Maxim of Manners
promulgated in the sixteenth century by the Dutch humanist, Erasmus of
Rotterdam, in his De Civilitate (one of the few etiquette books ever written
by a philosopher). According to Erasmus, "It is part of the highest civility if,
while never erring yourself, you ignore the errors of others."
The breadth of the general subscription to manners is demonstrated by
the fact that even people most devoted to lawlessness-those with the least
developed sense of law and order-still believe that others should treat them
courteously. For instance, it is not unusual on Los Angeles freeways for mo-
torists to shoot at strangers in other cars. To justify their mayhem, the gun-
slingers cite violations of traffic etiquette by their targets as sufficient provo-
cation (not responding promptly to a signal requesting permission to pass, or
not ceding the right of way, or forcing the assailant to slow down by pulling
in front of his car). Thus they plead that they were merely upholding the
standards of highway etiquette by punishing its violators.

Social Regulation of Smoking. Changes in the social regulation of

smoking exemplify the historical give-and-take between etiquette and the
law. The task of separating smokers from non-smokers used to be accom-
plished quite satisfactorily by the rules of etiquette. In addition to such de-
vices as smoking rooms and smoking jackets to protect non-smokers from
exposure to smoke there was a smoking ban during dinner. After dinner, the
non-smokers (a.k.a. ladies) repaired to the drawing room, while smokers
(a.k.a. gentlemen) enjoyed their cigars. But when smoking became com-

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 ETIQUETTE

GUIDANCE OF HUMAN SOCIAL BEHAVIOR

PRACTICAL REASON

MORALS MANNERS
CATEGORIES

sacredness of person dignity of person

good/evil RULES harmony
free will cultural coherence
duty beauty

ETHICS ETIQUETTE

laws regulative ritual

symbolic
SANCTIONS

GUILT SHAME

punishments ostracism

mon to both sexes, etiquette turned uncharacterist

will of the smoking majority abrogate the rights of t
ity. Not only did the rules change to permit smoking
also they even required that the formal table settin
urns and ashtrays for the diners' ad libitum use.
Only recently have non-smokers managed to ch
that it has again come to be considered rude to sm
without first seeking their wholehearted agreeme
recognition of the need to obey etiquette when it goe
wishes made enforcement of these rules difficult.
comply voluntarily with the new rules incensed no
cause of the involuntary continued exposure of non
also because of the galling refusal of smokers to ob
The offended non-smokers began to treat the off
rudely in turn, abandoning other rules of etiquette th

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

ers, criticizing their personal habits, and announcing that they are about to
die. It was at this impasse that the law took over from etiquette, because
medical findings that smoke inhaled indirectly by non-smokers may be in-
jurious to their health made the conflict sufficiently serious to merit the
law's attention. More and more laws restricting the freedom of smokers were
passed, regulating (or forbidding altogether) smoking in virtually all public
places, such as aircraft, restaurants, and offices. Smoking in the private
realm remains an unregulated grand melee, however.

Etiquette and the Administration of Law. The example of smoking

shows that the law can be said to exist to compensate for the failure of
etiquette. If we had perfect obeisance to etiquette, we would not need the
law. So one might suppose that once the law takes over, etiquette should
retreat gracefully from the scene.
Wrong! The law cannot be administered justly without etiquette.
The etiquette of jurisprudence, governing proper behavior in the court-
room, is extremely strict, just as it is in other professions that must deal
with strongly felt conflicts-parliament, the military, the Church, ath-
letics. In all of them, strict adherence is required to rules that specify
how one dresses, when and where one sits or stands, how one moves,
and how one acknowledges superiors. Such rigor is necessary because
the more orderly the form of a social structure, the more conflict it can
support. Etiquette requires participants in adversary proceedings to
present their opposing views in a restrained manner, to provide a disci-
plined and respectful ambience in which to settle conflicts peacefully.
Everybody knows what is meant by the statement "My distinguished
colleague seems to be unfortunately misinformed," but this polite cir-
cumlocution permits the proceedings to continue, rather than to have
them interrupted by a fistfight set off by direct locution ("You're lying,
you bastard!").
The dependence on etiquette of the just administration of law was
demonstrated dramatically in the 1960s, at the trials of the Chicago
Seven and the Black Panthers. Here the defendants deliberately defied
the rules of courtroom etiquette-addressing the judge by his first
name, wearing judicial robes, putting their feet on tables and chairs,
speaking out of turn, shouting, swearing, and not behaving very nicely
in general. The judges sought to establish order in the courtroom, using
the weapon of contempt of court, ordering the defendants manacled

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 ETIQUETTE

and gagged, and having them removed from the courtroom altogether.
But these judicial remedies, in turn, violated the judges' explicit Con-
stitutional commitment to conducting a fair trial, at which the defen-
dant has the right to be present and in a condition that is not prejudi-
cial to the jury's findings.
Which is more important, we may ask, the defendants' constitutional
right to attend their own trial or mere courtroom etiquette? On appeal,
the United States Supreme Court found in favor of etiquette: A misbe-
having defendant may be removed from the courtroom. From this ruling
it does not follow, of course, that etiquette is more important than the
Constitution. But adherence to etiquette is a prerequisite for any aspect
of civilized life, including jurisprudence.

Etiquette as a Symbolic System. Along with its regulative functions,

etiquette serves as a system of symbols, whose meanings provide pre-
dictability in social relations, especially among strangers. Examples of the
symbolic function include the rules governing greeting, eating, dressing,
and restraining bodily functions. Some detractors of etiquette ground
their disdain for it in the commonsense notion that a rule of etiquette is
silly if it cannot be directly, obviously, logically, and functionally justi-
fied. (An example of such an allegedly silly rule is that which requires an
RSVP to be composed in the third person if the invitation addressed the
invitee in the third person). But inasmuch as the essence of a symbolic
system is that its symbols refer to something other than themselves and
that the relation between a symbol and the thing that it stands for is
more often than not arbitrary, many rules of etiquette cannot be given a
direct functional justification). Hence the rules of etiquette are not sim-
ply a matter of common sense. They have to be learned rather than de-
duced from first principles.
Once learned and correctly interpreted, the symbols of etiquette allow
one person to recognize such essential attributes of other persons as their
intentions, status, friendliness, or hostility, and thus to deal appropriately
with a wide range of social situations and relationships. It is essential,
therefore, that children be taught the meaning of the symbols of etiquette
(rather than telling children simply to 'act naturally'), so that they will
know what to expect of others and how their own behavior is going to be
interpreted. The child who grows up taking literally a statement such as
'Please make yourself at home,' or using the same language and attitude

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

towards teachers as towards playmates, is going to have a rough life.

Another reason for the demand of strict etiquette in the law courts, in
the military, and in the Church and athletics is that compliance with the
rules of conduct is taken to symbolize adherence to the particular values
that these professions require, such as fairness, respect, obedience, valor,
or piety. Such symbolic expressions of adherence to shared values may be
insincere, of course, since it is possible to lie just as well by means of non-
linguistic symbols as by means of words. There is no incentive like the
desire to get a job or a verdict of 'not guilty' for making people recognize
the wisdom of following the conventions of dress and behavior rather
than their personal choices or 'natural' inclinations. The well-dressed,
soft-spoken grandmother is a more effective anti-war agitator than the
unkempt, obscenity-spouting youth.
People benefit their society by a mannerly symbolic affirmation of their
adherence to shared social values. This should be contrasted with the dam-
age done by those social misfits who take it onto themselves to violate a
rule of etiquette because they have their own good reasons for ignoring
what they consider a piece of nonsense or deny that they have reason to do
'what's done.' Such violations of the rules of etiquette give offense, because
they are necessarily interpreted as overt defiance of, or an indifference to,
or an antagonism toward, the interests of the community. The person who
disregards her hosts' expectations about what time or in what kind of attire
she will arrive for a party is signifying disdain for their standards as much as
the person who refuses to stand up when the national anthem is sung.
There is ideologically motivated civil disobedience of etiquette just as
there is of law. But people who mean to change the values of the com-
munity for its own supposed benefit by such actions must be prepared to
accept the punitive consequences of their defiance. They would be well
advised to violate only the rule that offends them, carefully adhering to
other conventions, if they do not wish to have their protest interpreted
as a general disdain for other people.

Etiquette as a Ritual System. There can be few people left nowadays,

even among hard-core materialists, who would deny that mankind can-
not live by bread alone. Not many people would question the legitimacy
of the sacred and its aesthetic as a means to satisfy those spiritual needs
that make us distinctly human and transcend the physical needs that we
share with the animals. Nevertheless, it is not widely appreciated that in

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 ETIQUETTE

our own enlightened industrialized societies ritual still plays a central

role in the satisfaction of those spiritual needs. Many people have noth-
ing but scorn for their own, familiar rituals, which they reject as silly. At
the same time, they wax enthusiastic about preserving the integrity of
the strange customs and folklore of the jungle dwellers of the Upper
Amazon, which they find full of wonderful significance. Or, while they
may adore the rain dance of the Hopi Indians, they may refuse to partic-
ipate in their parents' holiday dinner traditions. It is in its role as a system
for the codification of ritual in the service of the sacred that etiquette has
yet a third function, in addition to its regulative and symbolic functions.
By way of two examples of etiquette's codification of ritual, we may
consider funerals and weddings. Rather than leaving it to individuals as a
do-it-yourself project to work out how to come to terms with their
chaotic feeling on such momentously emotional social occasions, the rit-
ual codified in etiquette facilitates this process and, additionally, provides
for a sense of social cohesiveness and sharing of our humanity.
In the lives of most people, even of those who do not usually trouble
themselves with good manners, a wedding is one occasion at which they
acknowledge a desire to do 'what's done.' This leads them to buy eti-
quette books, hire wedding consultants, and accept etiquette advice from
such wedding-industry tradespeople as caterers and photographers.
Sometimes conflicting customs cause difficulties in fitting the circum-
stances of the families of bride and groom into the general pattern of the
marriage ritual. Yet there derive obvious emotional benefits from the use
of a traditional wedding ceremony to ease accommodation to the strange
idea that two people and their families who have been strangers hitherto
suddenly become relatives.
The problem posed by death-how can someone whom one knew
only yesterday as a living person is today no more than a hunk of decay-
ing organic tissue?-remains as deep an existential puzzle as ever. Yet fu-
neral rites, in contrast to the extravagantly elaborate wedding rites, are
now often improvised. As a reaction against nineteenth-century conven-
tions of mourning, which restricted the clothing and behavior of a large
circle of mourners long after the demise of the deceased and regardless of
the depth of their emotional bereavement, mourning etiquette has been
largely abandoned. With no outward signs (such as black garments, black
wreaths on doors, or black-bordered writing paper) to warn others of the
mourner's vulnerability and no customs of seclusion from society, the be-

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

reaved are unprotected against the demand of normal social life, which
they may be unable to handle. Indeed, the bereaved are often encouraged
to plunge into social situations where joviality is expected-and yet, just
as often, are deemed heartless when they succeed in behaving as if noth-
ing had happened. Etiquette's codifying behavior under bereavement al-
lows a period of readjustment safe from prying judgments of others, as
well as from normal social expectations.

Natural and Positive Etiquette. Two different kinds of etiquette rules

can be distinguished. One kind are 'natural' rules and the other kind are
'positive' rules-just as the philosophy of law distinguishes between a
'natural law' and a 'positive law.' The rules of natural etiquette and natu-
ral law could not be otherwise, while the rules of positive etiquette and
positive law are conventional, or arbitrary, and could be otherwise. For in-
stance, a rule of natural (traffic) law is: 'Vehicles moving in opposite di-
rections travel on opposite sides of the road.' This rule is 'natural' because
its contrary ('Vehicles moving in opposite directions travel on the same
side of the road') would lead to traffic chaos. Another version of this rule
('All automobiles travel on their driver's right hand side of the road') is a
'positive' rule because its contrary ('All vehicles travel on their driver's
left hand side of the road') works perfectly well in England, except for vis-
itors from the Continent.
[It should be noted that in this section the term 'natural' is used in a
sense different from that in which it is used in all other parts of this essay,
where it denotes 'being in accordance with the laws or ordinary course of
nature.' This confusing divergent semantic use of the same word is re-
grettable but unavoidable since the terms 'positive law' and 'natural law'
are standard locutions in the philosophy of law.]
A natural rule of ritual etiquette is 'Behave respectfully in a sacred
place of worship.' This rule is natural because its contrary (that is, 'Feel
free to behave disrespectfully in a sacred place of worship') would be in-
compatible with having any sacred places of worship, and hence irra-
tional. Two mutually incompatible (and hence obviously conventional)
positive transforms of this natural rule are 'Uncover your head when in a
place of worship' (man in church) and 'Cover your head when in a place
of worship' (man in synagogue).
By way of another example, let us consider the 'ladies-first' rule of sym-
bolic etiquette. It is often assumed that this rule, which contemporary

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 ETIQUETTE

feminists find offensive and seek to relegate to the trashcan of outdated

customs, has always existed as a non-negotiable tenet of European (as op-
posed to Asian) etiquette. But it is only one of the rules of positive eti-
quette, not of natural etiquette, and therefore subject to gradual change.
In fact, the 'ladies-first' rule did not always exist and, from the women's
point of view, was a great improvement over its fifth-century Greek pred-
ecessor, 'ladies-never.' Moreover, the rule applies only to the private
world, where the differences between ladies and gentlemen may be
highly relevant for their activities, and not to the workaday world, where
rational business practice demands not making gender distinctions.
Precedence in the workaday world is by professional standing, not gen-
der. The new rule is 'CEOs-first,' rather than 'ladies first.' We are now
slowly headed toward a new system of positive rules of precedence in the
private world, according to which age, rather than gender, is likely to be
the determinative factor. This would resolve the conflict between the
regulative and the symbolic functions of the 'ladies-first' rule in favor of
the former.

Is Etiquette a Social Evil? Some people believe that etiquette is frivo-

lous, or snobbish, or repressive-unworthy of serious attention except
perhaps as a social evil. One reason for that belief appears to be the de-
mand of etiquette for hypocritical concealment of one's true feelings to-
wards others. That is to say, by asking people to pretend to have higher
moral qualities than they actually have, etiquette is perceived as a sub-
versive force that subverts the Kantian categorical imperative of truth
telling. But, as we already noted, despite their dignity and plausibility,
the categorical imperative does not generate rules that can be universally
applied to all situations without conflict. Here is another self-referential
paradox:

There is only one rule that never has to yield precedence to any
other rule to reach a valid moral judgment, namely the rule that
there is no such rule.

For instance, there is no a priori reason why, to reach the greater Good
in some social situations, the imperative of truth telling should not yield
to etiquette's imperative of hypocritical conduct, if the promotion of jus-
tice and of harmonious personal relations is at stake. There are many
people who feel morally justified by the imperative of truth telling to

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

make remarks that etiquette has always categorized as insults ('You're too
fat'; 'You ought to get married'). But few of the targets of such remarks
would agree that these insults represent the correct choice between the
conflicting virtues of truth telling and mannerly behavior.
Another reason for the belief in etiquette as a social evil is the idea
that it is used mainly as an instrument of oppression-a tool of elitism.
This view should not come naturally to many philosophers, among
whom, ever since Plato, the ideal of an intellectual elite has ever been
popular. Thus Erasmus pointed out in his De Civilitate that it is exactly
the people risen to leadership, thanks to their own intellectual merit,
who ought to set the highest standards of social conduct.
General rudeness, or the lack of obeisance to etiquette, is much more
of a burden to the poor than to the rich, who can usually pay for special
treatment and buy their way out of any trouble caused by their own rude
behavior. The Duc de L6vis' 200-year-old injunction

noblesse oblige!

expresses etiquette's demand that the rich not only avoid taking advan-
tage of the poor, but that the rich actually treat the poor more consider-
ately than their own peers. One of the most heinous crimes known to eti-
quette is being rude to a subservient person, such as an employee, who is
not in a position to respond in kind. Etiquette considers such behavior
far more reprehensible than rudeness toward a peer or superior.

Ethics and Etiquette as a Continuum. The sets of imperatives de-

rived from morals and manners for the sake of bringing order into our ex-
istence are not the totally separate systems for the regulation of social re-
lations that some philosophers make them out to be. In fact, there seems
to be little point in trying to draw the line of demarcation between them.
Ethics and regulative etiquette form a continuum of imperatives whose
metric is the gravity of the consequences of their willful violations.
Ethics lies towards that end of the continuum where the consequences of
violations, such as murder, are most grave. Many imperatives of ethics are
embodied in laws established by authority of a sovereign legislator, with
severe, usually formally stipulated penalties as sanctions and retributions
provided for violations. A highly structured judicial system exists for ad-
ministering the law and resolving cases where the legal system leads to
conflicting imperatives.

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 ETIQUETTE

Symbolic etiquette lies towards the other end of the continuum, where
the consequences of violations, such as disgusting others by one's way of
eating, are least grave. Many imperatives of etiquette are part of an oral
tradition and usually owe their definitive formulation to writers of eti-
quette books. There are no formally stipulated penalties for violation,
with shame and social ostracism as the only sanctions. There is no formal
system for administering etiquette, and the resolution of conflicts arising
from its rules is in the hands of self-appointed arbitrators who also decree
new rules of etiquette. Nevertheless, it is as true for etiquette as it is for
ethics (and the law) that in the long run, its rules can prevail only with
the consent of the governed-that is, the rules must be rationally con-
nectable with the a priori categories of morals and manners. Between
these extremes of the continuum, in its middle range, where the conse-
quences of violations, such as offending the dignity of a person, are of an
intermediate gravity, there is a broad region where ethics and etiquette
overlap.

Confucianism and Etiquette. As noted in Chapter 3, Confucianism

is a secular prescriptive system of rules for the establishment of harmo-
nious social relations. Confucius was concerned not merely with com-
munal order but also with human dignity, as well as with a culture that
was founded in a sense of the beautiful, the noble, and the sacred as dis-
tinctive dimensions of the human existence. The guiding principle that
leads to the attainment of these harmonious relations is a Sacred Way
of Life, the Tao of Humanism. It is concerned with the political order
and the practical life of the person and deals with the problems inher-
ent in human social relationships, by demanding adherence to man-
made (rather than divinely ordained) social norms and moral precepts.
[It should be remembered that, according to a parallel Chinese tradi-
tion, there is also another Sacred Way of Life, namely, the Tao of Nature
of Lao Tzu's Taoism, whose main function is guidance of the peoples'
inner lives rather than of their social relations. Since its precepts are
based on the fundamental premise that mankind is part of nature and
that, therefore, its life must follow the way of natural phenomena, it has
little relevance for any discussion of etiquette, except by way of serving as
a counterexample.]

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

The Confucian Tao of Humanism may be regarded as a combination of

the two kinds of categories of pure practical reason-morals and man-
ners-whence the rules of both ethics and etiquette are derived. This
analogy is strengthened by the constant recurrence in the Confucian
Analects of two themes related to the Tao of Humanism. One theme is li,
often rendered in English as a combination of 'etiquette' and 'ritual,'
since it specifies the manners, social graces, and show of sympathy that
promotes harmony in interpersonal relations. Thus the Analects' exposi-
tion of ii anticipated by six centuries the Christian Gospels' Golden Rule
(Matthew 7:12) in quoting Confucius as having said
"What you do not want done onto yourself, do not do unto others."
According to the Analects, formally correct conduct is honorable only
if it is the result of a sense of virtue inculcated by observing suitable mod-
els of deportment, such as those provided in theatrical performances,
rather than having been compelled. Thus, ii appears to be a rough equiv-
alent of the category of manners.
The other theme frequently mentioned in the Analects is jen, which is
usually rendered as 'virtue' and would appear to be the equivalent of the
category of morals. The identification of jen with morals is further sup-
ported by the Analects' subdivision of jen into two further components,
namely chung, which is usually rendered in English as 'conscientiousness,'
and shu, which denotes obligations entailed by familial-social relation-
ships.
This then is the essence of Confucius' perspective of ii:

I see you on the street; I smile, walk toward you, and put out my-
hand to shake yours. And behold-without any command, strata-
gem, force, special tricks or tools, without any effort on my part to
make you do so, you spontaneously turn toward me, return my smile,
raise your hand toward mine. We shake hands spontaneously.

Coda. Ethics and etiquette form a single, albeit highly complex-

and by no means contradiction-free-system of rules of regulation of
social conduct. Despite the prevalence of rule conflicts in actual situa-
tions, the imperatives of ethics and etiquette all take the unconditional
form characteristic of the Kantian categorical imperative, namely, 'you
ought to do Y.' This is the case because the reason-giving force of the
oughts of etiquette, no less than that of the oughts of ethics, devolves

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 ETIQUETTE

rationally from fundamental normative wants and interests to which

we subscribe simply because we are human beings. In view of its source,
the ethics-etiquette system is essential for the practical and spiritual as-
pects of civilized life. Were morals and manners to fall by the wayside,
civilization would disappear.

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KONRAD LORENZ (1903-1989) JEAN PIAGET (1896-1980)

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 Chapter Twelve

Evolutionary and
Genetic Epistemology*
Pure Reason and Nietzsche's Will to Power. Kant's critical idealism
presents us with a puzzle. How can it be that the intelligible world with its
noumena of our own construction seems to provide us with such a fabu-
lously workable understanding of the phenomena of the sensible world, if
the categories of pure reason existed in our mind a priori? After all, there
are so many dysfunctional notions that our pure reason might have
brought to the sensible world a priori. Space might have been one-dimen-
sional; time might have been multidimensional; and things might change
without cause. So it seems like a miracle that everything has been work-
ing out so well for us. Admittedly, if we follow Kant all the way and ac-
cept his argument on behalf of the existence of God, we might be satisfied
with a simple, non-natural answer. It was He who had arranged for that
concordance of our pure reason with the world that He made when He
created us in His image.
But just in case we are not satisfied with such deistic handwaving, we
could consider an alternative natural explanation that Friedrich Niet-
zsche offered in the latter part of the nineteenth century. (Nietzsche,
1883). He proposed that pure reason is simply a product of our mode of
existence, and that our mind's origin can be accounted for in terms of
what he believed to be a fundamental principle driving the evolution of
the species. According to that principle, the salient traits of any species
arose as stratagems for facilitating that species' dealings with the world.
And how, in the course of evolution, did we acquire our salient trait of
pure reason and its a priori categories? According to Nietzsche, it was by
inheriting a will to power from our ancestors, which drives us to acquire
knowledge about the world. And how did our ancestors acquire their will
to power in the first place ? They acquired it a posteriori from their interac-
tions with the phenomenal world. Did they acquire it by the natural se-

*A substantial part of this chapter is based on Chapter 9 of Max Delbrack's Mind

from Matter? Stent, G.S., et al., editors (1986).

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

lection mechanism that Darwin proposed in 1859 in his Origin of Species

twenty-five years before Nietzsche developed his theory of the will to
power? No, not according to Nietzsche, who was of the opinion that Dar-
win greatly exaggerated the role of natural selection in evolution. What
Darwin did not realize-so Nietzsche claimed-was that the essential
thing in life processes is precisely the 'creative force' (that is, the will to
power), working from within us, which utilizes and exploits (rather being
determined by) external circumstances. Thus, according to Nietzsche's ar-
gument, the a priori categories that our pure reason brings to the sensible
world arose a posteriori as a direct and heritable cognitive acquisition by in-
teraction with the phenomena of the sensible world. Nietzsche's view of
the origin of hereditary variation in evolution was therefore Lamarckian
(that is, based on the erroneous thesis of Kant's French contemporary
and original founder of the theory of evolution, Jean Baptiste Lamarck,
that evolution was driven by the inheritance of acquired traits).

Evolutionary Epistemology. It took another sixty years after Niet-

zsche's proposal until a truly Darwinian explanation was provided for the
baffling origin of our Kantian a priori categories of pure reason. By what
seems like an uncanny coincidence, this explanation was presented in
1944 as the subject of the inaugural dissertation of a successor of Kant to
the Chair of Philosophy in the University of K6nigsberg (of which Kant
had been the first incumbent). That successor was Konrad Lorenz, one of
the founders of the evolutionarily based study of animal behavior. The
bottom line of Lorenz's explanation was "what is a priori for the individ-
ual is a posteriori for his species" (Lorenz, 1944), reminiscent of Niet-
zsche's much earlier Lamarckian solution but grounded in more modern
evolutionary and genetic principles.
Lorenz proposed that the worldly success of our a priori categories of
pure reason is simply another product of the Darwinian natural selection
process that guided our entire evolutionary history. According to Lorenz,
any early hominids whose hereditarily determined cerebral neuronal net-
work happened to generate a priori such categorical ideas as before coming
later than after, or near being more remote than far, or changes having no
causes, left no descendants to whom to pass on such dysfunctional no-
tions. Lorenz's Darwinian explanation of the origins of the Kantian cate-
gories gave rise to a discipline at the interface between biology and phi-
losophy styled evolutionary epistemology. (Campbell, 1974; Vollmer, 1975)

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 EVOLUTIONARY AND GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY

Brain Evolution. Let us grant then, that, as supporters of Aristote

monism would have it (and as supporters of Kantian epistemic dualis
would have no reason to deny), mental states are brain states. Th
would follow that, in line with the dogma of evolutionary epistemol
the human brain is hereditarily endowed with the set of innate men
states representing pure reason. One subset of the innate mental state
pure reason would include the categories of pure theoretical reason t
were selected by evolution for providing the construction of t
noumena of the natural/amoral realm of material objects of the intel
ble world. Another subset of the innate mental states of pure re
would include the categories of pure practical reason that were selec
by evolution for providing the construction of the noumena of the n
natural/moral realm of human subjects of the intelligible world.
Accounting for the evolutionary origins of the human brain poses
greater conceptual difficulties than accounting for the evolutionary
gins of any other organ of the human body, say of its liver. The hu
brain is obviously an elaboration of the brain of some ancestral specie
fish that lived a hundred or so million years ago. That fish's brain, in t
was an elaboration of the nervous system of an ancestral jellyfish w
lived about five hundred million years ago. That ancestral jelly-f
nervous system was already capable of performing such basic brain fu
tions of interpreting signals taken in by sensory receptors from the e
ronment and commanding movements that are appropriate response
environmental changes.
The brain of vertebrate animals became more and more elaborate in
the course of its evolutionary history. It came to be composed of more
and more nerve cells and the network linking these cells became more
and more complex. As a result, the brain of vertebrates gained the capac-
ity to perform more and more sophisticated functions, culminating in
mankind's well-known fabulous intelligence. In line with Darwinian
principles, this evolutionary development towards an ever-more complex
brain would have been driven by natural selection, which allowed
ever-cleverer animals to be fruitful and multiply in previously vacant
ecological niches.

Macrocosm, Mesocosm, and Microcosm. The sensible realm of the

world of phenomena, to which our mental states became adapted in the
course of human evolution, represents but a tiny sliver of the whole

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

world. It merely comprises those phenomena in the ecological niche of

Homo sapiens whose dimensions in time and space make them accessible to
our direct sensory perception and, moreover, are commensurate with phe-
nomena manifested by our own bodies. This domain of the phenomenal
world is referred to as the mesocosm. Its scales of time and length range
roughly from the 1-second human heartbeat period to the 100,000 second
day/night cycle and from the 0.1 mm thickness of a human hair to the
10,000,000 mm distance to the horizon of a human observer standing at
the seashore. Beyond the mesocosm lie the macrocosm, extending outward
to the stars and their galaxies, and the microcosm, extending inward to the
atoms and their subatomic particles. (Vollmer, 1984). Mankind became
aware of the macrocosmic and microcosmic domains of the phenomenal
world only upon the rise of modem science. And that rise took place
merely during the last 0.1 percent of the approximately 100,000 years that
lapsed since the first appearance of Homo sapiens on the terrestrial scene.
The terms 'macrocosm' and 'microcosm' actually date back to Pre-So-
cratic Greek philosophers of the sixth century BCE, who used them with
a meaning rather different from that adopted by the evolutionary episte-
mologists of the twentieth century CE. By 'macrocosm' the Pre-Socratics
meant the world as a whole and by 'microcosm' the ensemble of elements
(including living creatures) of which the macrocosm is composed. Ac-
cording to the Pre-Socratics, the structure of the elements of the micro-
cosm reflects, or mirrors, the structure of the macrocosm. The Pre-So-
cratics did not use the term 'mesocosm,' which, from our present
perspective, encompasses what they called 'macrocosm' and 'microcosm.'
When, in the waning years of the nineteenth century, astronomers and
physicists began to study phenomena that lie outside the mesocosmic do-
main, an incredible fact came to light. It turned out that some of the cat-
egories of Kantian pure theoretical reason fail us when we address phe-
nomena in the microcosmic and macrocosmic domains. On second
thought, however, this failure of our categorical intuition outside the
mesocosmic domain is accounted for by evolutionary epistemology just as
well as is its success within it.
Thus, according to the doctrine of evolutionary epistemology, it is the
phenomena of the mesocosm with which our sensory organs and our rea-
son cope and to the verbal description of which our language, as well as
our Kantian pure theoretical reason, is adapted. So it should not come as
a total surprise that we have to discard, or at least modify drastically our

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 EVOLUTIONARY AND GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY

categorical intuitions of pure theoretical reason when our scientif

ies move beyond the mesocosm to the microcosmic or macrocosm
mains. This is the case, of course, when we seek to fathom the s
of the tiny atom and its function or of the vast universe and its histo
other words, our innate Kantian categories of pure theoretical re
not serve us all that well, or may even be fundamentally inad
when we apply them to the microcosmic and macrocosmic domai

Classical Physics. From the beginnings of science in classical

uity until the turn of the twentieth century it was assumed taci
asserted explicitly by Descartes in his Principles of Philosophy-th
natural world has the same structure throughout the Universe. In
ular, it was taken for granted that the invisible microcosm of the
(postulated by Democritus in the fifth century BCE) and the
macrocosm of the stars are governed by the same natural law
mesocosm. Although this assumption seemed eminently reasonab
the turn of the twentieth century it had been shown to be wron
turned out, the structures of the macrocosm and microcosm hav
properties that make them qualitatively (and not merely quantita
different from structures in the mesocosm.
Kant was (excusably) unaware that it is only for the phenomena
mesocosmic domain of the sensible world that the a priori catego
pure theoretical reason provide such a remarkably serviceable exp
tory account. That is why he had (mistakenly) declared that the
teenth-century physics of Isaac Newton (whose strict validity is
to the mesocosm) is a universal truth and that the geometry of
(which is only one of several possible geometries) reflects the true
ture of space. The physics that were developed to account for th
nomena of the mesocosm came to be known as 'classical physics,' o
Galileo's and Newton's theories are the paradigmatic examples.

Relativity Theory. One of the first contraventions of classical

was Albert Einstein's development in 1905 of his relativity theory
tampered with the categories of time and space of Kantian pure th
cal reason. The point of departure of Einstein's relativity theory
then recent, to physicists very surprising, discovery by Albert M
and Edward Morley. They had found that the speed of propag
light is the same [namely 3x108 m/sec] for all observers, regardless of

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

own motion relative to the light flow. Einstein attributed the inconsis-
tency of this fact with our intuitive concept of relative motion to our ev-
idently false intuition that the flow of time is absolute, i.e. independent
of how it is observed. So he developed a theory of relative motion-later
designated as the 'special theory of relativity'-which does not invoke the
concept of an absolute flow of time. Instead, Einstein's theory posits that
the time of occurrence of an event depends on the frame of reference of
the event's observer, so that there does not exist just one universal, or
pancosmic time, but many times, to each observer his own. Einstein thus
dissolved the intuitive conceptual independence of space and time.
In 1916, Einstein presented another counterintuitive theory, which he
called the general theory of relativity and whose purpose was to fathom the
nature of gravity. Here Einstein actually replaced a counterintuitive idea
of classical physics; namely that gravitational attraction is a force that
acts instantaneously at a distance in three-dimensional space, by an-
other, even more counterintuitive idea. According to Einstein's general
theory of relativity, a massive material body produces a curvature in a
four-dimensional space (for which time provides the fourth dimension).
That curvature is the equivalent of a gravitational field, in that the path
taken by a moving object is determined by the field's curvature.
When Einstein announced his general theory of relativity, the physics
community generally rejected it, because it seemed impossible to fathom
the counterintuitive concepts on which the general theory depended,
such as space characterized by four dimensions and by non-Euclidean
geometric relations. (A geometry is designated as 'non-Euclidean' if it
omits or modifies one or more of the axioms of Euclidean geometry, such
as the axiom that disallows the intersection of parallel lines or the axiom
that disallows the existence of triangles whose angles sum to more than
1800.) In Chapter 14 we will encounter some other examples of counter-
intuitive theories in the microcosmic domain of atomic physics, such as
the existence of energy as discrete (rather than infinitely divisible) pack-
ets, or quanta, and the wave-particle duality of the electron.

Visualizability. The counterintuitive nature of some propositions and

theories about the structures and phenomena of the macrocosmic or mi-
crocosmic domains of the phenomenal world impairs our ability to visualize
(that is, to form a mental picture of) some of the noumena of the intelligi-
ble world of our own construction. Fortunately, some of the structures and

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 EVOLUTIONARY AND GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY

phenomena in macrocosmic or microcosmic domains are visualiz

instance, the general features of our solar system, which extend
yond the mesocosmic spatial domain, can be visualized by scaling
spatial dimensions a hundred-millionfold, resulting in a virtual m
object, such as a planetarium with a diameter of about one meter. Sim
the spatial configuration of chemical molecules can be visualized b
them up a hundred-millionfold, resulting in a virtual mesocosmi
such as a wooden ball with a diameter of about one meter. Even the me-
chanical model of the atom devised at the turn of the twentieth century by
the British physicist, Ernest Rutherford, can be visualized, since its mini-
planetary-system-like properties are mesocosmically representable.
Yet many, if not most structures outside the mesocosmic domain cannot
be visualized by simply scaling them up or down to the mesocosmic dimen-
sional scale. This includes the neutron stars and black holes of the macro-
cosm and the protons and electrons of the microcosm, since they have
properties that are utterly different from any mesocosmic structure of our
direct experience. The classical physics of Galileo and of Isaac Newton are
visualizable because they are based on our innate categories of space and
time of Kantian pure theoretical reason. As pure theoretical reason has it,
both space and time are absolute and independent realities that can be
measured separately by use of yardsticks and clocks. But this basic tenet re-
garding space and time had to be abandoned at the turn of the twentieth
century upon the emergence of Einstein's relativity theories.
There are four general principles regarding the role of visualizability in
the evaluation of scientific theories.
First, the impossibility of visualizing a theory, whether it is derived
from mathematics, or from physics, or from any discipline whatsoever,
does not necessarily imply that the theory is not correct. On the contrary,
any theory dealing with microcosmic, subatomic particles that can be
readily visualized by a dimensional transformation to the mesocosmic
scale is likely to be wrong.
Second, if visualizability is neither a necessary nor a sufficient criterion
of truth, and if visualizability is not even a guide to truth, then we have to
depend on non-visualizable, or abstract arguments for demonstrating
truths. This explains the prominent role of mathematics in the progress of
modem science. This role derives not only from the provision by mathe-
matics of precise, quantitative formulations of linguistically vague and
non-quantifiable ideas, but also from its ability to remodel the structure of

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

the intelligible world in terms of counterintuitive concepts that are not

amenable to visualization. Though mathematics itself does not yield any
direct knowledge about the world, it puts at our disposal various abstract
structures that can be helpful for probing the truth of non-visualizable
propositions in the description of nature, such as the four- (or more) di-
mensional and non-Euclidean geometrical aspects of space.
Third, the impossibility of visualizing some abstract objects does not
imply that they cannot be understood. We may claim that we understand
a theory if we know, at least qualitatively, what the theory does and does
not say. This shows that the reach of reason is farther than that of intu-
ition of thought farther than that of visualization, of concepts is farther
than that of sensation, and of calculations is farther than that of images.
Modern physics is non-intuitive and could not be otherwise if it is to ex-
tend beyond the mesocosm. Yet, it is not incomprehensible.
Fourth, the two worlds of Kantian critical idealism-the sensible
world of phenomena and the intelligible world of noumena-are not co-
extensive. Whereas our direct sensory experience of phenomena is lim-
ited to the sensible world of the mesocosm, the intelligible world of
noumena transcends the mesocosm and reaches out into the micro- and
macrocosm, of whose strange properties Kant did not have and could not
have had any inkling.

Antinomies Revisited. The four general principles regarding the role

of visualizability in the theoretical evaluation of scientific propositions
account for Kant's (forgivable) error in concluding that theses as well as
antitheses of his first and second antinomies are false. [Thesis and an-
tithesis of the first antinomy assert that the world is finite (respectively
infinite) and that it has a beginning (respectively no beginning) in time
and limits (respectively no limits) in space. Thesis and antithesis of the
second antinomy assert that every (respectively no) composite thing in
the world is made up of simple parts.] For when in his argumentation
Kant referred to 'things of which we have experience' he obviously
meant the visualizable things of the mesocosm of which we do have direct
experience. However, the first antinomy, being concerned with the
macrocosmic spatial and temporal limits of the Universe, and the second
antinomy, being concerned with the microcosmic (atomic) composi-
tional elements of matter, far transcend the dimensional limits of the
mesocosm of our direct experience, and hence cannot be visualized.

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 EVOLUTIONARY AND GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY

Kant erred in his judgment that both theses and antitheses of h

two antinomies are false. But he was remarkably prescient with h
arching epistemological conjecture that reason inevitably falls in
tradiction with itself whenever it ventures beyond experience an
to think about the intelligible world as a whole.

Genetic Epistemology. Characterization of the categories of Kan

pure reason as a priori for the individual does not necessarily me
they are present already full-blown at the time of the person's birt
latter-day Wisenheimers with our wisdom of hindsight, it seems
that this obvious epistemological platitude was not recognized by
himself or by any of the advocates or opponents of his critical ide
plausible explanation for this odd historical fact is that philos
not excepting even Kant-discussed epistemology only as the c
for knowing possessed by the adult human mind. They did not t
account that the origins of adult cognitive faculties lie in the mind
infant.

Kant's contemporary, the Genevese philosopher Jean-Jacques

Rousseau, provided the exception that proves the rule of the general pre-
twentieth-century philosophical neglect of the development of the cog-
nitive capacities of the infantile mind. Rousseau did declare that "nature
wants children to be children before being men.... Childhood has its
own seeing, thinking, and feeling." In his philosophical novel, Emile,
Rousseau (1762) put forward the idea, taken up by almost all later theo-
reticians of cognitive and moral development, that young people pass
through an age-related sequence of stages in reaching maturity. Rousseau
listed five stages: infantile (birth to three years), sensory (four to twelve),
ideational (thirteen to puberty), sentimental (puberty to age twenty), and
nuptial-socially-responsible (onwards from twenty-one).
It was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that psycholo-
gists, especially the American, James Mark Baldwin, began to make a sys-
tematic assessment of the cognitive capacities of the infantile mind and
of the process by which it matures to its adult condition. In the middle
years of the twentieth century, the psychologist, Jean Piaget (1932; 1954;
1964),-a Genevese like Rousseau-extended Baldwin's pioneering
studies.
Piaget's work showed that the Kantian categories, though they are im-
manent in the mind, arise postnatally during childhood, as a result of an

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

interaction between the developing infantile mind and the sensible

world. This interaction proceeds gradually by a process that Piaget
named genetic epistemology. (In the context of Piagetian studies, the ad-
jective 'genetic' means 'ontogenetic' or 'developmental,' rather than
'hereditary.') Yet, even after Piaget had taken up this line of investiga-
tion, another quarter century had to pass before his findings would have
any significant impact on philosophy. Finally, it was appreciated that the
study of the cognitive development of children is a virtual gold mine for
epistemological explorations. It still seems puzzling, though, why philoso-
phers overlooked this gold mine for millennia, when all the while chil-
dren were readily available as observational subjects.
Piaget began his studies while designing IQ tests to be given to French
school children. He had noticed that children are consistent in the sort
of incorrect answers they give to certain questions. Their answers are not
randomly wrong but show a systematic, age-related error profile. Piaget
inferred from this unexpected finding that the observed consistency of
errors must be attributable to a stereotyped, progressive evolution of the
mental structures present during the infantile cognitive development. To
account for that development, he rejected the idea that the mind is a pas-
sive device that processes sensory input according to some fixed mental
program of analysis. Instead, Piaget postulated that the infantile mind ac-
tively explores the pattern of sensory input from the sensible world by
subjecting it to a series of tentative exploratory transformations. In per-
forming this exploratory process, the immature mind passes through suc-
cession of distinct cognitive developmental stages on its way to the mature
adult mind. As did Kant, so did Piaget regard the function of human rea-
son as the active construction of an intelligible world by processing the
sensory input to the mind from the phenomena of the sensible world.

Invariance, Assimilation and Accommodation. One of the most

striking of Piaget's findings was that although the age at which individual
children reach one or another of these distinct cognitive developmental
stages can vary greatly, the sequence of stages is invariant. Piaget inter-
preted this to mean that the beginning of one stage presupposes the com-
pletion of the developmental goals characteristic of all preceding stages.
Moreover, he inferred that each stage is integrated within itself, accord-
ing to an equilibrium that comprises the child's cognition. Here Piaget did
not use the word 'equilibrium' in its usual mechanical or chemical sense.

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 EVOLUTIONARY AND GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY

Instead, he intended the word to convey the idea of a dynam

state between the two major antithetical aspects of cognitive pe
ance, namely accommodation and assimilation.
Accommodation to novel situations means changing an existing
tal or behavioral technique to adapt it to the specific characteris
novel objects and novel relationships, thus taking into account n
pects of reality. Thus accommodation is a way of being realistic
life as it comes. Assimilation, the counterforce to accommodatio
equilibrium, means fitting novel aspects of reality into old behav
cognitive schemes rather than changing them. It is a way of bein
tic, or of shaping reality according to one's own preconceived n
For instance, according to a very simple example of this equili
infants have a method of grasping objects. If given a novel
grasp, they perform assimilation, by including the object in the
class of things that are graspable, as well as accommodation, by
ing their grasping technique to suit the novel object. It is the p
state of the equilibrium between the two antithetical cogniti
that characterizes each stage of cognitive development. The equi
becomes upset in play, dreams, and make-believe, where autistic a
tion occurs without accommodation to reality. In the upset of t
librium during these activities, objects may be commanded to d
things, which leads to symbolization: one bends the object playf
represent something that it is not. The equilibrium also becomes
during imitation, but in the opposite direction: imitating a
nothing other than accommodation of the mind to the realit
world. This also applies to imagery, since a mental image is an in
ized representation of reality.
Piaget did not concern himself very much with the extent to
the postnatal development of cognitive structures proc
tonomously (that is, driven by hereditary determinants
eronomously (that is, driven by experience or parental training
case, for our present discussion of the development of the infant
it is unimportant whether our adult notions about the world an
determined by our genes or implanted in our minds by experienc
fices to recognize that our Kantian cognitive categories constitute
mental adaptations to the phenomenal world. That phenomenal w
the mesocosm of middle dimensions, constituted of things that a
or-less directly accessible to our sensory perception.

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

Development of Pure Theoretical Reason. According to Piaget, the

maturation of the infantile mind begins with the development of Kant-
ian categories of pure theoretical reason, with particular categories aris-
ing in the immature mind during the sequence of distinct developmental
stages.
The first stage is the sensorimotor stage (from birth to age 2 years), during
which the infant's mind acquires the categories of object, space, and time
and develops hand-eye coordination. The infant can move its arms willfully,
but it does not yet appreciate that the hand it sees is its own. The grasping
reflex is already present, i.e. the infant's reaching out for an object triggered
by the appearance of that object in its visual field. The infant's hand will not
usually aim directly at the object, though it may eventually get there by lo-
cating the object by trial and error. By the end of the first stage, tactile, vi-
sual, acoustic, and kinesthetic spaces have been coordinated, and the infant
can perform target-directed movements.
The initial object concept of infants is clearly not what adults think of
as an object. At the outset of the sensorimotor stage, infants consider an
object to be a thing that has a permanent place. A particular object be-
comes a different object when it is moved from one place to another, and
it ceases to exist as soon as it disappears from view. Accordingly, for the
early infant objects do not persist. The next step in the development of
the object concept is the beginning of the infants' capacity for remem-
bering objects while they are out of sight, and by the end of the first year
infants come to believe in their continued existence.
By this sequence of steps infants gradually acquire the notion of a per-
manent object with continued existence and identity under various
transformations. Finally, by the end of the sensorimotor stage, the con-
cept of the permanent object has been formed. This sequence constitutes
a mutual assimilation of tactile and visual spaces. It is succeeded by the
coordination of sight and sound and by the ability to follow a moving ob-
ject. Once infants have acquired the belief in the persistence of objects,
they are able to search for objects that are not in view. They can form
mental images of objects and fathom their complex, even invisible, spa-
tial displacements.
The second stage is the preoperational stage (age 2 to 5 years), during
which the child's thought processes begin to use symbols. These symbols
take either the form of mental images, whose source is imitation, which
become more and more internalized, or the form of words, as symbolic

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 EVOLUTIONARY AND GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY

representations of objects and events. Children also begin to reas

memory and analogy during this stage. But they are not yet ab
derstand the notion of the equivalence of sets. For instance, they
yet able to order sticks of varying lengths according to length,
upon being asked to do so, they may produce some kind of
(though clearly not random) ordering.
The third stage is the concrete operational stage (age 5 to 10 years)
which children gain the ability to carry out mental operations o
such as counting them and classifying and arranging them as or
sembles. It should be noted that the development of the numbe
has nothing to do with learning to recite strings of numbers in their
order. Rather, acquisition of the number concept consists of get
of the idea of the equivalence of sets. Once that equivalence idea
grasped children are able to pair two sets containing the same nu
elements, such as sets of pennies and candies, or of vases and f
without being distracted by the disparate features of their eleme

Numbers. Early in the concrete operational stage children

the concept of relative sizes of sets. For instance, if a child is gi
yellow flowers and three flowers of colors other than yellow a
which set is greater-the set of flowers or the set of yellow flo
child will reply "they are the same size," even though the whole
tains six items and its subset only three. For the child cannot as
tify class-inclusion relations, that is, appreciate that the whole i
of its parts. Later in the concrete operational period, howev
comes a moment at which the child realizes that a set contains more
items than its subset.
By this time the child understands the numerical equivalence of sets,
such as the equivalence of sets containing five elements as distinct from
sets containing seven elements. This understanding allows the child to
master the concept of cardinal number. Cardinal numbers denote particu-
lar classes of numerically equivalent sets, without, however, implying a
serial relation between them, such as that 'seven' comes after 'five.' The
task of serially ordering sets is served by the concept of ordinal number,
which can arise only after the concept of cardinal number has been
grasped, since ordinal numbers are not entailed logically by cardinal
numbers. Thus children pass through a stage at which they have no no-
tion that when one goes from one cardinal number to another, one must

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

pass all intervening cardinal numbers. For instance, that in going from
'five' to 'seven' one must pass through 'six.'
At this point the child has gained the ability to handle hierarchical struc-
tures, that is, sets comprised of subsets, such as the set of 'flowers,' which in-
cludes various kinds of flowers. Upon gaining the ability to conceive hierar-
chical structures, children also have access to the notion of ordinal number.
They are now equipped with the two most powerful conceptual tools for
dealing with the quantitative aspects of the phenomenal world.
The fourth and last stage is that of formal operations (age 10 to 14
years) during which intelligible world is conceived as a subset of possible
worlds. Propositional thinking, with assertions and statements that can
be true or false, has become intellectually possible.

Time and Space. The categories of time and space do not arise auto-
matically in the infantile mind. The notion that the whole world is em-
bedded in one all-pervading universal flow of time is reached only at a
comparatively late stage of development. This is the case also for the no-
tions that an all-pervading space provides unique places for the world's
objects and that motion consists of an object's change from one place to
another in the universal flow of time. The inability of children to grasp
these notions is illustrated by the following experiment. Suppose a child
still in the preoperational stage is confronted with two objects that start
and stop moving at the same time and at the same speed and is asked: (1)
Have the objects started at the same time? (2) Have they moved at the
same speed? (3) Have they moved the same distance? (4) Have they
stopped at the same time?
The child will generally respond correctly to all these questions. But if
the test is repeated with one of the objects moving faster than the other,
the child will still respond correctly to questions 1, 2, and 3 but will reply
incorrectly to question 4. It will say that the faster moving object stopped
later, despite answering correctly questions 2 and 3 that the faster mov-
ing object moved at a greater speed and for a longer distance. Piaget con-
cluded from this finding that, at the preoperational stage, speed is an in-
tuitive primary kinetic category based on the ordinal succession of points
traversed in space and time, without separate consideration of the actual
distances moved or time intervals taken. At this early stage, intuition
about time, especially about the notion of simultaneity, is derived from,
rather than underlying, the assessment of speed. Thus at the preopera-

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 EVOLUTIONARY AND GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY

tional stage children are unable to conceive that two objects mi

at the same time and stop at the same time, while one of them
versed more space. They can focus on the different displaceme
two objects, but they cannot embed those displacements in a
time frame.

How does the child develop the concept of space? The br

mathematics concerned with spatial relations is geometry; and
tive of most geometric analyses is to demonstrate the equiv
shapes. Mathematicians first grasped the metric aspects of spac
fourth century BCE, upon the development of Euclidean geome
ric geometry depends mainly on the concepts of length of
width of an angle. Here the equivalence of figures is based on an
of their contours with regard to these parameters. For example,
cles of equal diameter are metrically equivalent (that is, congru
The projective aspects of space were grasped next, in the nine
century. Projective geometry depends mainly on the concep
straight line as the basis of spatial relationships. Here the equiv
figures is based on the notion of perspective, or on the poss
transforming one figure into another by projecting its contour
contour of another via a set of straight lines. For example, any t
are projectively equivalent.
The topological aspects of space were grasped last, in the twent
tury. Topological geometry depends mainly on the identification
tative features inhering in shapes, such as continuity as oppose
ration and openness as opposed to closure, as well as on coun
number of such features present. Here the equivalence of figure
on the notion of homeomorphy, that is, the possibility of transform
figure into another by a simple continuous deformation of its
without any tear or overlap. For example, a circle and a square
logically equivalent.
The results of his studies led Piaget to conclude that the o
which children acquire spatial concepts during their cognitive d
ment is exactly the reverse of the order in which mathemat
quired them historically: Children grasp topological aspects of sp
projective aspects second, and metric aspects last.

Causality. Piaget also studied the genetic epistemology of anot

cial category of Kantian pure theoretical reason, namely c

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

Causality had been the subject of vigorous philosophical debate since an-
tiquity. And onwards from Newton, the epistemological foundation of
causality became a topic of concern also to physicists, because Newton's
postulation of forces acting at a distance, such as gravitational attraction,
seemed to run counter to the intuitive notion that a cause and its effect
ought to be contiguous. The role of the causality concept in physical the-
ory became more controversial still with the advent of modern physics,
particularly, as we shall soon see, upon the appearance of the relativity
and quantum theories early in the twentieth century. By causality we
mean that there is a necessary, although often hidden, connection be-
tween an earlier event and a later event, between cause and effect. This
idea is closely tied to the notion that the entire universe is embedded in
a common space and time. Whence does this idea come? Early in the
eighteenth century, David Hume declared that the idea of such a neces-
sary connection between cause and effect arises from our feelings rather
than from our reason, because logical induction, i.e. the extrapolation from
past experience to the future, cannot be rationally justified. For instance,
just because every morning the Sun rose in the East and every evening
set in the West, it does not follow logically that the Sun will do so again
tomorrow.

Hume's epistemological criticism of the rational basis of the ca

concept was addressed by Kant, who argued that causality, though
demonstrable logical validity, is another of the a priori categori
time, space, and object, that are a precondition of all experience
since the causality category is used for creating experience (that i
forming phenomena into noumena), the concept cannot be acqui
or inferred from, experience. We simply take the validity of indu
granted because, according to Kant, the human mind simply cann
ceive a world in which the future is not determined by the p
Kantian view of causality was inspired by Newtonian physics an
plication to celestial mechanics, whose success made it seem obvi
the world is governed by determinate laws: given the initial con
and Newton's laws of motion, the trajectories of the celestial ob
uniquely determined.
This viewpoint was to be dealt a blow by Einstein's development
special theory of relativity, because in situations to which that th
plies, notions of what is past and what is future must be modified. He
finding by one observer that event A preceded event B is ambiguo

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 EVOLUTIONARY AND GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY

a second observer moving relative to the first might find that event B pr
ceded event A. Accordingly, the first observer might infer from his m
ured order of these events that A is the cause of B, whereas the second
server might infer from his data that B is the cause of A. However, in
case both observers would be wrong, since, according to the special rel
ity theory, an inversion of the order of two events can be registered only
they are not causally connected. This follows from the (seemingly inc
trovertible) proposition that if the earlier event A is the cause of the
event B, some signal must be exchanged between A and B. Because the
nal-whatever be its nature-cannot propagate faster than light, the m
imum measurable time interval between A and B is zero, which wou
registered by an observer himself traveling at the speed of light from A t
All other observers would find that the cause preceded its effect.
What can Piaget tell us about the genesis of the idea of causality in
infantile mind? He argues that the notion of cause and effect arises d
ing the first, or sensorimotor stage and has two roots. The first root Piag
identified as dynamism, or efficacy, which means that children are vag
aware that their own intentions and volition are somehow respon
for what happens. They discover that in order to make a rattle ratt
they must move themselves in some way, such as wriggling, althoug
they are not aware of just how they cause the effect. All that they
aware of is that there exists some connection between their wish for
noise of the rattle and its occurrence.
The second root of the idea of causality Piaget identified is a consis
linkage between events of which one always follows the other, such
the mother's unfastening of her dress and the availability of milk.
awareness of the connection between events that are contiguous in t
(but not necessarily in space) is reached much earlier than the devel
ment of the space concept. The child's notion of causality is peculiar
different from that of an adult, and continues to be weird from the adult
point of view well into its concrete operational stage. Children t
that anything can cause anything, whether the requirements of the a
notion of causality, such as continuity of cause and effect in time a
space, are met or not. Thus, the notion of a complete (eighteenth-ce
tury Laplacian) determinism in the external world, is not yet presen
the child's mind at the third or concrete operational stage.
The connection in the infantile mind between will and event, whe
the will can be mine or thine or that of gods or demons, is often car

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

over into adulthood. Under that view of causality there is no need for a
physical connection between will and event, as there is not in the case of
the cause-effect relation commonly designated as 'magic.'
By way of an example of the development of causal explanations of
physical phenomena in the infantile mind, we may consider the uniform,
straight-line motion of an object. According to the principles of Aris-
totelian physics, such motion requires a continuously acting motive
force. If the force ceases to act, the object stops moving. According to the
principles of Galilean physics, however, only a change in velocity of the
object requires the action of a force, since the object's momentum (a con-
cept of which Aristotelian physics is innocent) perpetuates its motion in
the absence of any force. Both explanations envisage a determinate
world (that is, that there is one and only one straight-line motion in a
given context), but Aristotelian and Galilean theories make different as-
signments for the cause that is necessary to produce the same phenome-
non.

The decision regarding which is the more reason

Aristotelian or the Galilean-has to be based on evide
the particular context of the phenomenon. A motile
certainly believe in the Aristotelian theory, since i
where viscous forces dominate inertial forces by an
That is to say, the drag exerted on the bacterium by th
water through which it moves vastly exceeds any mom
bacterium may have while moving. Admittedly, a bact
high speed in relation to its body size, covering 30 time
in 1 second (which, on the scale of an automobile, wou
speed of about 300 miles/hour). Yet its forward motion
tance that is a fraction of its body length (say within a
automobile scale), as soon as its flagella stop beating. Th
evidence would lead the bacterium to conclude that con
requires a continuously acting force.
To probe their capacity to provide a causal explanation
ear motion, Piaget asked children between the ages
makes clouds move. He reported that, on the basis of t
ceived, he was able to distinguish definite stages in the
causal thought. In the first stage children think that as
clouds move with them; in other words, the motion of
the clouds to move in some magical manner. In the seco

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 EVOLUTIONARY AND GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY

by the age of 5 or 7, children think that clouds are moved by the

moon, that is, by command rather than physical force. Finally,
olds usually think that the wind moves the clouds, and the wi
turn created by the clouds.

Development of Pure Practical Reason. Just as Piaget had be

first to investigate methodically the development of Kantian pur
retical reason in children, so was he also the pioneer of the em
study of the childhood development of Kantian pure practical reas
sofar as there had been any interest prior to Piaget in the problem
morally naive children grow up into morally cognizant adults, the
was generally attributed to passive learning under the tutelage of
and other adults. The morally most pernicious of the theories invo
early twentieth century to account for such learning was the doct
connectionism, which tried to explain all learning in terms of con
reflexes, as manifested by Ivan Pavlov's dogs.
Piaget, however, considered the childhood development of pure
tical reason as essentially similar to that of the development of pu
oretical reason: Both processes occur by way of a reciprocal inter
between the gene-directed maturation of the infantile nervous s
and the phenomenal world. So, to fathom the way children develo
practical reason for making morally responsible judgments, Piage
cussed stories and played games with them. His findings led P
conclude that, following an initial premoral stage (lasting for th
three to four years of life), at which the child has little awarenes
derstanding of ethical rules, the genetic epistemology of pure pr
reason passes through two further distinct developmental stages.
During the first of these two post-premoral stages-designated
heteronomous stage and lasting from 4 to 8 years of age-morals
straint obtain. At the onset of the heteronomous stage the child f
comes aware that controls are being imposed on its behavior b
The source of these rules is adults, whose authority the child cons
sacred and whose rules it regards as unchangeable and applicable,
ever the circumstances. To do right means acting in conformanc
the adult-imposed rules, and to do 'wrong' means defying them. M
sponsibility for actions devolves from conformance with mor
rather than from the intentions of the agent. Though the child is
ally able to identify what the rules require or prohibit, it does n
fathom their underlying justification.

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

During the second of the two post-premoral stages-designated as the

autonomous stage and lasting from 8 to 10 years of age-the child's con-
cept of morals becomes reorganized. The onset of the autonomous stage
marks the emergence in the child's mind of the concepts of reciprocity
and equality. Once the child has reached the autonomous stage, it no
longer regards rules as immutable or sacred. Instead, it now views the
rules as products of mutual agreement (and thus as changeable) and as
beneficial guides for reciprocal cooperation rather than as autocratic
edicts ordained by the sacred authority of adults. Moral responsibility for
actions has been transferred from simple conformity of actions with rules
ordained by powerful adults to the freely willed intentions of autonomous
child-persons.
Between the 1960s and 1970s the Harvard psychologist, Lawrence
Kohlberg (1969, 1976) modified and extended Piaget's studies of moral
development in children by interviewing them regarding their reactions
to made-up stories Kohlberg told them involving moral dilemmas. Like
Piaget, Kohlberg interpreted moral development as a progression through
stages characterized by different ways of understanding moral rightness
and wrongness. He extended Piaget's three-stage system to constitute a
more finely divided six-stage system. The major modifications made by
Kohlberg in his staging system were that at the earliest post-premoral
stages, the child's moral judgments are based, not as envisaged by Piaget
on respect for authority and rules, but on a fear of punishment. Later the
child's judgments become oriented towards the maintenance of the rules
and laws of the social system. And at their most advanced developmental
stages moral judgments are autonomous and based on principles of justice.
Just as Piaget claimed for the stages he identified, so did Kohlberg
claim for his that their sequence is invariant and universal. Children
progress through his system without skipping any stages or ever regressing
from a higher to lower stage. The sequence applies to all individuals in all
cultures, although different individuals may go through the stages at
varying speeds and some may stop at a particular stage and not progress
further. Each stage involves a unified way of thinking, a distinct 'moral
logic,' rather than a set of separate attitudes toward specific situations.
Thus particular judgments that occur at a given stage share a general
framework for organizing and interpreting moral concerns.
Kohlberg's student, Eliott Turiel, agreed with Piaget's and Kohlberg's
general conceptions of moral development as a process that passes

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 EVOLUTIONARY AND GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY

through a sequence of distinct, culturally invariant, and universal

Turiel criticized his elders, however, for exaggerating the role o
convention and fear of punishment in infantile moral developme
line with Kantian critical idealism, Turiel asserted that young ch
can make autonomous moral judgments on the basis of a priori cat
of their pure practical reason without resorting to adult idles re
the basis of his own, non-interventive observations of children pl
a Kindergarten, he wrote, "in the moral domain the existence of
regulation is not necessary for a child to view an event as a transg
If, for example, one child hits another and thereby causes physica
a third child's perception of that event as a moral transgression
stem from features intrinsic to the event (e.g. from a perception
consequences for the victim)." (Turiel, 1980)

Coda. The philosophical importance of the development of evolu

ary and genetic epistemology in mid-twentieth century still awaits
appreciation at the start of the twenty-first. Admittedly thus far,
velopment has contributed little to the resolution of the deep pa
generated by pure theoretical and pure practical reason that trou
human mind. But it has led to an explanation for why, as Kant h
serted, man is made out of timber so crooked that from it nothi
tirely straight can be built.
Actually, Kant's choice of the metaphor of crooked timber was
together felicitous. The timber from which man is made is not a
crooked. It is insufficiently plastic, however, to be able to ad
timely manner to the secular changes in the phenomenal world th
largely because of mankind's own activities. Thus, while by now,
philosophers are aware of the gist of evolutionary epistemology, f
them appreciate that natural selection has adapted pure reason to
day's rather than today's world.

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 FRANCIS BACON (1561-1626)
(Engraved by Frances Holl, after an old print by Simon Tuss)

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 Chapter Thirteen

Scientism

Francis Bacon and the Rise of Scientism. In his books, The Advance-
ment of Learning and Novum Organon, the seventeenth century English
statesman and philosopher of science, Francis Bacon, praised the virtue
and dignity of scientific research. Bacon considered science not merely
an academic or intellectual exercise intended to increase our knowledge
of nature. He thought that its more important goal was to give mankind
mastery over nature, since the practical applications of the results of sci-
entific research were bound to improve the quality of the human condi-
tion. In fact, Bacon gave his life for the advancement of useful scientific
knowledge. One cold winter's day he went out to stuff a dead chicken
with snow, to see how long the freezing temperature would preserve the
raw meat. While performing this experiment, Bacon caught a cold and
died from bronchitis a few days later.
Bacon, who saw no conflict between religion and science, died just a
few years before the Roman Catholic Inquisition forced Galileo in 1633
to renounce his belief in the heretical, heliocentric Copernican planetary
system that has the Earth moving around the Sun. As it turned out, in
not worrying about the Church's hostility to science, Bacon was not all
that far off the mark. In the long run, conflicts between science and reli-
gion were always resolved in favor of science, as was also true in Galileo's
case. By the middle of the eighteenth century this ever-repeating pattern
of initial religious criticism of some scientific advance, followed by its
eventual vindication and religious acceptance, had inspired a new creed
that came to be called 'scientism.' (The adjectival form of 'scientism' is
scientistic,' but-inconveniently for our discussion-there is no noun
in English, or, as far as I know, in any other language, denoting its True
Believers.)
According to the creed of scientism, the positive methods and insights
of science are valid not only for the entire sphere of human interests, but

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

they are the only authentic source of true knowledge. These interests in-
clude morals and the management of social affairs, of which scientific ig-
noramuses, such as priests and politicians, have always made such a mess
in the past. Yet, despite the widespread tacit acceptance of scientism in
modern society, the term 'scientistic' has become an invective that, like
'reductionist,' people apply only to the views of others but never to their
own. [In his book, Scientism, Tom Sorell (1991) provided an excellent
overview of the subject.]
In considering the scientistic approach to morals and to the manage-
ment of social affairs, it is useful to distinguish between two different
grades of scientism. One is hard-core scientism, whose adherents hold that
moral norms and values must be justifiable on scientific grounds. The
other grade is soft-core scientism, whose adherents allow that valid moral
values may be justified on nonscientific grounds, but they still insist on
the primacy of science as a guide to the optimal implementation of moral
values. (Stent, 1976a)

The Evolutionary Origins of Morals. To clarify the nature of the sci-

entistic approach to morals, we may consider an application of scientific
principles and methodology to moral problems that on first sight does
not seem to be scientistic. This example concerns the evolutionary ori-
gins of morals. It qualifies for the predicate 'scientific' rather than 'scien-
tistic' because its intent is the presentation of a descriptive theory of how
morals arose in human history rather than of the development of a pre-
scriptive set of rules for how people ought to live.
In our earlier discussion of evolutionary epistemology in Chapter 12
we accounted for the origins of the natural/amoral categories of Kantian
pure theoretical reason (such as space, time, and causality) in terms of
their Darwinian fitness in the course of mankind's biological evolution.
So it requires no great leap of the imagination to fathom the evolutionary
origins of also the non-natural/moral categories of Kantian pure practical
reason (such as virtue, vice, sacredness, and free will) as products of the
natural selection process that drove the evolutionary history of Homo
sapiens. That is to say, any early hominids whose hereditarily determined
cerebral neuronal network happened to generate categorical ideas ac-
cording to which vice is preferable to virtue, free will is wholly subject to
determinism, and human life is not sacred, left no descendants in the
long run to whom to pass on such socially dysfunctional notions.

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 SCIENTISM

As seen from the biological perspective, Homo sapiens is just on

many social species belonging to the class of mammals in the ve
phylum. So it seemed plausible that a comparative study of the
havior of our relatives in the animal kingdom should reveal sign
clues about the evolutionary origins of our own social behavior.
as evolutionary biologists can ask how there arose the intricate
perbly adapted facet eye of the honey bee by Darwinian natural
so can they ask how it was possible for natural selection to give
the intricate and superbly adapted society of the beehive or to th
chical social structure in bands of social mammals such as canines and
primates.
Despite Darwin's full awareness of the importance of social behavior
for his theory of descent by heritable variation, it was only in the 1930s
that the evolutionarily oriented study of the social behavior of animals
really got under way. One of its Founding Fathers was none other than
Konrad Lorenz, the main originator of evolutionary epistemology and
holder of the Chair of Philosophy in K6nigsberg of which Kant had been
the first incumbent. By the 1950s, Lorenz's line of study had become an
established academic discipline under the name of ethology. There can be
little doubt that the ethological approach to social behavior has greatly
enhanced our understanding of the animal world. For that contribution
Lorenz was awarded the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
However, Lorenz's ethological approach to the origins of morals did
turn out to be scientistic after all, because it soon transpired that his goal
was not merely a descriptive account of the natural origins of morals.
What he really had in mind was the provision of a hard-core scientistic pre-
scriptive account of the moral values that govern, or ought to govern, the
social behavior of our species. So Lorenz assigned moral virtue to those
righteous features of human behavior, such as altruism, mother-love, and
marital fidelity, for which analogs can be found in the animal world and
for whose functional role in nature, credible ethological explanations can
be put forward. Contrariwise, Lorenz assigned moral vice to those de-
praved features of human behavior that animals seem to avoid in the wild
and exhibit only under the socio-pathological conditions of captivity.
Lorenz's ethological studies came to be used for the scientistic rational-
ization of moral values traditionally justified on religious grounds. An -
undoubtedly unintended-caricature of this approach was provided
by Wolfgang Wickler (1971) in his Biology of the Ten Commandments.

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

However, in a not quite so trivial reversal of Lorenz's scientistic rational-

izations, the ethological vindication of conventional morals was stood on
its head by Desmond Morris (1967). Morris bestowed the predicate 'vir-
tuous' on some features of human behavior normally regarded as wicked,
such as aggression and marital infidelity, on the grounds that animals ex-
hibit them in nature, for evolutionarily accountable reasons.

Hard-core Bioscientistic Definition of Moral Virtue. In mid-twenti-

eth century, concurrently with Lorenz's development of ethology, two
prominent British biologists, Julian Huxley (1943) and C. H. Wadding-
ton (1960), provided another example of hard-core scientistic argumen-
tation. They asserted that evolutionary theory provides a secure basis for
an objective assessment of moral values. According to them, moral virtue
can be attributed to those features of social behavior, such as mother-
love, marital fidelity and economic cooperation, for which it can be rea-
sonably argued that they promote the Darwinian fitness of H. sapiens in
the evolutionary epic of natural selection. Conversely, moral vice can be
attributed to other features of human behavior, such as cannibalism,
murder, and incest, for which it can be reasonably argued that they im-
pair the Darwinian fitness of our species.
Waddington, whose political sentiments were distinctly left wing, had
to deal with one, for him, very troublesome predecessor in the scientistic
grounding of moral values in Darwinian evolutionary concepts. That
predecessor was Herbert Spencer (1892), the late-nineteenth century,
politically right wing English apostle of the hard-core scientistic doctrine
of Social Darwinism. Spencer asserted that the concept of virtue could be
identified with human progress, which is driven by the forces of natural
selection in social evolution, just as it is in biological evolution. Accord-
ing to Spencer, laissez-faire capitalism is morally virtuous because, like
nature (which, according to Alfred Tennyson, "is red in tooth and
claw"), it is the optimal context for assuring social progress. Socialism, by
contrast, is morally vicious because it stifles progress by interfering with
the natural selection of the economically fittest people and pampering
the ne'er-do-wells.
In line with the politically correct rejection of Social Darwinism by
mid-twentieth century, Waddington wrote that Spencer's ethical "theo-
ries have been so completely discredited at this time that little further
needs to be said about them." So Waddington did say nothing further

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 SCIENTISM

about them. He merely presented his own variant of Spencer's har

scientistic ethics, claiming that although the notion of moral
cannot be simply identified with 'progress,' a particular set of mor
ues can be judged to be virtuous if it promotes anagenesis, or evol
ary improvement. The general metaphysical idea underlying Wadd
ton's anagenesis argument is evidently that, from a moral viewpoin
condition of our planet has been improving all the time, as mo
more complex forms of life, and finally wonderful, wonderful H. s
made the scene. But Waddington did not spell out to what kind of
lutionary improvement, or anagenesis, he was looking forward. In
case, his natural idea of moral virtue was even more remote from
normal, intuitive understanding of that concept provided by Kan
pure practical reason than was Spencer's. Moreover, Wadd
seemed to have been unaware of an essential feature of the 'fitness' con-
cept of Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory. According to that feature,
natural selection can favor only those variant genotypes in a population
that give rise to a higher differential reproductive rate in the here-and-
now, but not if they merely promote anagenesis, that is, provide benefits
at some future time.

Naturalistic Fallacy. On first sight, these efforts to develop a hard-

core scientistic foundation for morals would seem to fail on logical
grounds. For the authority of science and the claims for authenticity of its
knowledge are based on the belief that scientific propositions are objec-
tive and value-free. In view of that belief, it would be clearly invalid to
derive value-laden moral conclusions from the value-free propositions of
biology. This logically invalid procedure, to which David Hume first
drew attention in the early eighteenth-century, came to be epitomized by
the mantra "an 'ought' cannot be inferred from an 'is.' " At the turn of
the twentieth century, the Cambridge philosopher G. E. Moore desig-
nated the inference of a moral-value-laden 'ought' from a value-free 'is' as
the 'naturalistic fallacy,' the name under which this invalid procedure is
generally known nowadays.
Thus the scientistic project of establishing objective criteria for moral
virtue would fail because no moral values can possibly be inferred from
objective and value-free ethological findings regarding the behavior of
animals in their natural setting. For that same reason, the derivation of
virtue from the evolutionary 'fitness' concept would fail because the

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

primary value judgment on which the evolutionary ethic depends,

namely that evolution is progressive, cannot itself be inferred from any
set of objective and value-free statements about the paleontological
record.
It follows, therefore, that hard-core scientistic morality cannot, in fact,
be based wholly on the objective propositions of biology and must base
its authority on unstated premises with hidden values. In the case of
ethology-derived ethics, the source of those unstated, value-laden prem-
ises is not hard to identify. It is the Bible, to which the evolutionary ethi-
cists resort even more fundamentally than do their stout adversaries, the
Protestant Christian Fundamentalists. Rather than taking their ethics di-
rectly from God's ten explicit commandments of Exodus 21:23, as do the
Fundamentalists, ethological ethicists go back to the basics of Genesis 1,
2, and 3 and its account of His creation of the world and the First Cou-
ple's expulsion from the Garden of Eden. It is evidently from this account
that biologists derive the idea that the natural behavior of animals pro-
vides a moral baseline, because before the Fall, Adam and Eve, still
naked and nameless, lived beyond good and evil, like all the other ani-
mals. The idea that the course of evolution has been progressive, culmi-
nating in the appearance of mankind, is evidently derived as well from
Genesis 1:27, which has God making us in His own image as the crown-
ing act of the sixth day.
On second sight, however, the derivation of moral value from biologi-
cal propositions may not be invalid after all, and the dismissal of the 'nat-
uralistic fallacy' on logical grounds may itself be a fallacy, albeit for rea-
sons that can give little comfort to the adepts of hard-core scientism.
According to some latter-day philosophers, such as Thomas Kuhn and
Paul K. Feyerabend, the kind of objective science on behalf of which au-
thority is claimed for scientism is only a myth and does not, in fact, exist
in the first place. Since the practitioners of science are human beings
rather than disembodied spirits, since they necessarily interact with the
phenomena they observe, and since they use ordinary language to com-
municate their results, they are really part of the problem rather than
part of the solution. That is to say, scientists lack the status of au-
tonomous observers external to the world of phenomena, a status they
would have to have if their scientific propositions could justly claim to be
truly objective.

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 SCIENTISM

This lack of conceptual autonomy of scientists vis-a-vis their w

materials is particularly evident in the case of biologists. As the
tionist Ernst Mayr has pointed out, in speaking about their findin
ogists cannot avoid terms that imply functions, roles, and values.
ample, ethological investigators of insect societies resort to such
'queen,' 'worker,' 'soldier,' 'slave,' and 'caste' to describe the o
their studies. It would be unreasonable to demand of them for th
objectivity to replace these value-laden metaphors by an os
value-free vocabulary, such as referring not to 'queen' but to 'type
not to 'caste' but to 'social subset MNO.' After all, it is precisely
perception of a functional typology that any study of social beha
its starting point. The typology both defines the phenomenon t
be explained and already comprises within it part of the eventua
nation.

Another example of such linguistic contamination with value of a pre-

sumably value-free scientific term is provided by 'fitness,' the central
concept of Darwinian selection theory. In ordinary English discourse, 'fit-
ness' connotes value, and it was that value-laden quality of the term that
gave meaning to the slogan 'survival of the fittest' in the context of
Spencer's Social Darwinism. In their politically correct rejection of So-
cial Darwinism, contemporary biologists charge Spencer with having
misunderstood the technical meaning of 'fitness,' which is meant to rep-
resent a value-free algebraic parameter that indicates the contribution
made by a particular hereditary determinant to the differential reproduc-
tion rate of a creature. Thus Darwinian 'fitness' itself implies nothing
about 'progress.'
However, the semantic problem posed by 'fitness' is more complicated
than this rough-and-ready dismissal of Spencer would imply. Geologists
seek an understanding of the physical evolution of the Earth, and, just as
do evolutionary biologists, they try to account for the history of our
planet in terms of the laws of nature. But there is an important difference
between these two callings. Although in the course of the Earth's history
geological forms have come and gone-just as have biological forms-
geological theories put forward to explain this succession of forms do not
resort to any concept equivalent to 'fitness.' There is no need for such a
concept because geologists do not think of geological evolution as pro-
gressive. Since the presently existing continents are not perceived as an

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

'improvement' over Pangea, (the single continental mass from which

they evolved by plate tectonics), no explanation positing progress is
called for. But for biologists it would require an act of intellectual self-de-
nial to view biological evolution in any light other than that of progress.
Not only does the truth of the Biblical idea of mankind as the crowning
achievement of creation seem self-evident, but also it is even difficult to
deny that the swift, sharp-eyed hawk represents an improvement over
lumbering, deservedly extinct Archaeopteryx. Thus, if the Darwinian
concept of fitness were really purged of all value content, it would lose its
explanatory power for the deep question in want of a credible answer.
That question is not "how did evolution happen?" but "what has made
evolutionary progress possible?"
If it were really the case that the propositions of science, and especially
those of biology, are not value-free, then there would be no inherent log-
ical error-no naturalistic fallacy-in deriving moral value from them.
Accordingly, ethological and evolutionary ethics would not have to fail
on logical grounds. But the idol of the uniquely authentic, wholly objec-
tive scientific knowledge that inspires the hard-core scientistic project of
universalizing the scientific perspective in the first place would turn out
to stand on feet of clay.

Sociobiology. In the 1960s William Hamilton (1964) brought a novel

approach to ethology that was more quantitative and more sharply for-
mulated than Lorenz's original, rather qualitative evolutionary reasoning.
Hamilton's most important contribution was the development of his kin
selection theory, according to which the Darwinian fitness of a particular
social behavior pattern does not derive solely from the extent to which it
promotes the reproductive success of an individual animal who displays it.
Kin selection takes into account, as well the extent to which that behav-
ior pattern augments, also reproductive potential of an individual ani-
mal's close relatives, a parameter that Hamilton named inclusive fitness.
The conceptual advance represented by inclusive fitness led to the de-
velopment of an ethological subdiscipline styled 'sociobiology,' dedicated
specifically to the evolution of the social behavior of animals. Of that
subdiscipline a treatise by E. O.Wilson (1975) entitled Sociobiology pro-
vided the first comprehensive account. Admittedly, there exist differ-
ences in opinion among biologists regarding the achievements of sociobi-
ology, but regardless of whether sociobiology has or has not any

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 SCIENTISM

substantial achievements to its credit, it would be downright cranky

any biologist to deny that the professed general scientific goal of so
ology is not intrinsically worthwhile. Yet, the publication of Wi
scholarly treatise caused a tremendous ruckus in the late 1970s. Wi
became the subject of both laudatory feature stories in the news me
well as the target of invective, and even physical assault, from poli
activists. For he argued in his final chapter that the methodology a
findings of sociobiology are applicable not only to insects and other
orders but also to the social behavior of our own species, H. sapiens.
son claimed that sociobiology can provide for the human social scie
such as anthropology and sociology, the objective scientific basis
they lacked hitherto.
Much of the virulent criticism directed against Wilson was not, h
ever, based on the grounds that the naturalistic view of morals em
ied in his sociobiology is philosophically mistaken. Most of Wil
ideological (mainly Marxist) critics actually shared his fundam
(Aristotelian) viewpoint that moral behavior is to be viewed as a str
egy for optimizing human welfare. No, their criticism was based
fervid rejection of the scientific premise fundamental to sociobiolo
namely that human behavior is genetically determined. Contra
Wilson, his adversaries believed (inspired mainly by one-but no
only possible-interpretation of dialectical materialism) that hu
social behavior is determined by the environment and not by h
genes.
It may seem that the question whether human social behavior is deter-
mined by genes or by the environment ought to be susceptible to an ob-
jective, empirical resolution, just as it was shown that human eye color
-blue eyes or brown eyes-is genetically rather than environmentally
determined. But there lies a fundamental difficulty in the way of an em-
pirical resolution of the problem of the genetic determination of human
social behavior. For the very notion of the genetic determination of com-
plex features of living creatures, and not just of social behavior, is an elu-
sive concept. As we noted in our earlier discussions of evolutionary and
genetic epistemology, the most reasonable explanation of the Darwinian
origins of the Kantian a priori categories of pure reason is that these com-
plex mental structures develop in the course of our postnatal develop-
ment. This development is mediated by a dialectical-materialist interac-
tion between our genes and our infantile environment.

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

Selfish Gene. Thus, if there is to be effective criticism of the claims of

sociobiology with regard to the biological basis of morals, it has to be
made on philosophical rather than scientific grounds. In fact, it is not dif-
ficult to show that Wilson and his fellow sociobiologists are misusing the
locutions and categories of moral discourse. To illustrate this semantic
deficit of sociobiological theories dealing with morals, we may examine
the concepts of 'altruism' and 'selfishness,' which were the central focus
of Richard Dawkins' (1976) popular and widely discussed book, The Self-
ish Gene. Dawkins epitomized the sociobiological viewpoint of mankind
by saying that we are machines created by our genes. These genes have
managed to survive in a highly competitive world only by virtue of their
ruthless selfishness.
This argument has little philosophical merit because it resorts to the
rhetorical slight-of-hand known as 'metaphorical slippage.' Dawkins ap-
plies the terms 'selfishness' and 'altruism' metaphorically as indirect (or
target) meanings to objects (that is, genes), while their direct (that is,
source) meanings refer to the moral praiseworthiness and blameworthi-
ness of human subjects. (In ordinary, morally relevant discourse, the di-
rect meaning of selfishness denotes disregard by one person for the inter-
ests of another, whereas the direct meaning of altruism denotes regard for
the interests of others.) The use of metaphors is not objectionable in it-
self in scientific discourse. On the contrary, it enriches the language. For
instance, if Dawkins had identified a gene which he believed to be in-
volved in the development of morally selfish behavior in people, it would
have been semantically legitimate (but maybe not advisable) for him to
refer to it as a 'selfishness gene.' But this is not the indirect meaning that
Dawkins intended to imply. What he did intend to imply (and needs to
imply for his sociobiological account of the evolutionary origin of moral
behavior in accord with the inclusive fitness theory) is that the gene acts
selfishly on its own behalf.
Thus Dawkins slipped his metaphors by attributing the moral quality
'selfish' of the metaphor's direct meaning, (which refers to a moral sub-
ject), to an amoral object (the gene). Evidently not wholly unaware of
the questionable legitimacy of his procedure-how can genes, not being
persons, have regard or disregard for the interests of persons?-Dawkins
put forward his own idiosyncratic and wholly unconventional, value-free
definitions of the moral categories of selfishness and altruism. According
to him, an 'entity' is altruistic if it behaves in such a way as to increase

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 SCIENTISM

another entity's welfare at the expense of its own, with 'welfare' be

fined as 'chances of survival.' Selfish behavior has exactly the opp
effect. Thus Dawkins' idiosyncratic definitions of altruism and self
are beyond good and evil, since they concern consequences for sur
rather than regard for the interest of others, and they pertain to 'e
rather than persons.
By contrast, the conventional, morally relevant meanings of alt
and selfishness apply only in the context of interpersonal relations
as we previously noted, according to Pierre Abelard and Kant,
rather than consequences is the necessary and sufficient criterion fo
morally relevant meanings. For instance, if little Jack takes away c
late from little Jill because he wants to eat the chocolate himself, J
morally selfish. However, since Jack has thereby lowered for Jill
raised for himself the chances of dental caries, Jack's morally selfis
at the same time sociobiologically altruistic. (Stent, 1977)
Dawkins argues that an apparently altruistic behavior, such
alarm call of birds, is really selfish after all. For according to the pr
of kin selection, the selfish genes of the alarmist bird have actual
creased the welfare of their own informational replicas in the othe
of the flock. It ought to have been obvious that such sociobiological
ing with the words 'altruism' and 'selfishness' is unlikely to contr
very much to our understanding of morals, especially not to conn
the non-natural categories of Kantian pure practical reason with th
ural noumena of the intelligible world. Yet, some sociobiologist
claimed that, thanks to their alleged insights into the evolutionar
gins of moral principles, we would finally be able to rid ourselves o
antiquated metaphysical baggage. This argument is reminiscent of
mund Freud's claim that neurotics will be able to rid themselves o
abling mental obsessions once psychoanalysis has uncovered their
chogenetic origins. Thus even if, in accord with evolutio
epistemology, Kantian pure practical reason did provide Darwinian
ness to our caveperson ancestors, we have no longer any need for
these days it just causes us no end of trouble.

Star Wars. Since soft-core scientism does not claim to justify m

norms or values on scientific grounds, it escapes the logical dilem
hard-core scientism. It is this version of scientism that is often encoun-
tered among philosophically more sophisticated scientists. They recog-

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

nize the epistemological shortcomings of hard-core scientism, but never-

theless cannot help but believe that the scientific method praised by
Francis Bacon, which proved of such tremendous help in allowing us to
gain mastery over nature, ought to be of equal help in the successful
management of human social affairs.
One of the many literary examples informed by soft-core scientism was
provided by the science fiction tale The Voice of the Dolphin, written by
the Hungaro-American physicist (and sometime molecular biologist)
Leo Szilard (1961). Szilard himself was no stranger to the management of
human affairs. In 1939, he had counseled Einstein to write the letter to
President Roosevelt that induced the U.S. government to embark on the
project for developing the atomic bomb, and in the immediate post-War
years, Szilard played a leading role in the efforts to bring atomic energy
under civilian control. In The Voice of the Dolphin, which he wrote in
1969 during the coldest days of the Cold War, Szilard envisaged the
founding in Vienna of an International Biological Research Institute.
Contrary to their chartered scientific duties, the fabulously brilliant
young molecular biologists staffing the Vienna Institute intervened in
world-wide economic, political, and military affairs and thus saved the
world from the then seemingly imminent U.S.-Soviet nuclear holocaust.
Szilard wrote his story to show that the same kind of clear thinking that
cracked the genetic code will get us out of the messes that the woolly-
headed politicians are always getting us into.
Now, with the wisdom of several decades of hindsight, it would appear
that scientists did play a critical-albeit inadvertent-role in bringing
about the end of the Cold War and averting a nuclear holocaust. For by
persuading President Reagan to adopt the extremely expensive and prob-
ably ineffective 'Star Wars' Strategic Defense Initiative, his scientific ad-
visors bankrupted the Soviet Evil Empire, whose equally woolly-headed
leaders felt obliged to follow suit.
The more restricted claim of soft-core scientism for the primacy of sci-
ence as a guide to management of human affairs also fails, however, if not
on logical then on empirical or practical grounds. For it seems to be im-
possible to consider moral issues touching on science while minding the
underlying moral values that have an other-than-scientific basis. By way
of an example of this fundamental difficulty, we considered in Chapter 5
the conference held in Paris in 1975, at which an international panel of

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 SCIENTISM

biologists and biomedical scientists had been convened to defi

stage in human fetal development at which life can be said to beg
prior to that stage there could be no moral objection to abortio
surprisingly, this scientistic discussion turned out to be entirely fu
cause the actual question at issue was "when does the fetus gain the
of a person and thus fall under protection of the moral law that
the killing of persons?" Evidently, that question can be dealt with
the non-natural context of the moral metaphysics of personhood a
in the natural context of human biology.

Utility of Objectively False Beliefs. One of the, on first sight re

able, tenets of soft-core scientism is that the implementation of
aims is necessarily impeded by acts that are motivated by objective
beliefs. Indeed, a more extreme version of this proposition claims
society is doomed if it bases its organization on scientific falsehood
claim is itself a false belief because one can point to many societie
operated in a successful and stable manner while making value
ments based on witchcraft, astrology, prophecy, and other pr
which we now know to be scientifically unsound. The reason why
tively false beliefs can promote the realization of worthy moral a
that social relations are complex, multicausal phenomena and th
social aim can only be regarded as an optimization rather than a m
mization of a set of values.
This fact has been well known to the Chinese since the days of C
cius in the sixth century BCE. And in the West it has been general
ognized by cultural anthropologists ever since Bronislaw Malin
pointed out early in the twentieth century that the function of my
rites is to strengthen the traditions that help to maintain a social w
life. For instance, the false belief of the Hopi Indians that they can
about rain by dancing may have been harmful for their agricultu
the rain dance fostered a communal cohesion whose benefits may
outweighed the potential gains in crop yield which abandonment
false belief might have produced.

Heredity and Intelligence. The unwillingness to admit the possib

of deriving social benefits from holding objectively false beliefs is
root of the ongoing, mainly demagogic, dispute in the United Sta

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

Britain about research on the hereditary basis of intelligence. The battles

regarding this controversy have been fought at two different levels. At
the first level, the question to be addressed is whether the statement that
intelligence has a hereditary basis is a genuine proposition in the first
place, i.e. whether it is capable of being true or false. Those who deny
propositional status to the assertion of a hereditary basis of intelligence
usually claim that, absent an objective, context-free definition of the
concept of intelligence, the assertion can be neither true nor false. This
argument has little force, however, since it is possible to design tests that
do provide a meaningful and stable measure of intelligence, at least inso-
far as that concept applies to the capacity to succeed in the society in
whose contextual setting the tests are given. Moreover, it is an empirical
fact that there exist significant, stable differences in test scores between
different individuals, as well as between homogeneous social and racial
subgroups. (Bodmer and Cavalli-Sforza, 1970)
At the second level, the question to be addressed is whether the
proposition of a hereditary basis of intelligence is actually true or false.
And it is at this level that the problem is extremely difficult to resolve
empirically, especially when the differences in intelligence between so-
cial and racial subgroups are at issue. The reason for this is that intelli-
gence, however defined in any practically significant way, is obviously a
multicausal phenomenon, in whose postnatal development both genes
and environment play determinant roles. Moreover, the relative contri-
butions of genes and childhood environment in this developmental
process, from infancy to adulthood, of normal individuals who are not
mentally defective is bound to be subject to such large individual varia-
tions that the data are unlikely to lead to many practically useful conclu-
sions.

Yet, both opposing sides in this dispute appear to accept the validity of
the soft-core scientistic proposition that if there were a significant varia-
tion in the genetic contribution to intelligence between individuals, or
between racial groups, then this factor ought to be taken into account in
the organization of society. Since, to the opponents of such research, the
mere consideration of the notion of hereditary determinants of intelli-
gence, let alone taking it into account in social action, is a morally inad-
missible underpinning of racist ideology, they deny outright the possibil-
ity of any connection between heredity and intelligence.

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 SCIENTISM

The proponents of research on the hereditary determination of in

gence, on the other hand, are convinced that the failure to gi
recognition to the existence of hereditary differences in intelligen
pernicious social consequences. Hence they insist that no effort sh
be spared to try to identify the genetic basis of intelligence in a sci
cally valid manner. This conclusion is not, however, rationally self
dent. Suppose that there really were a hereditary contribution to in
gence. Now consider Society A, which falsely believes that ther
such hereditary contribution and utilizes its educational resources l
ficiently than Society B, which 'tracks' its pupils according to a sci
cally valid familial or ethnic prognosis (that is, if such a prognosi
really possible). Cultural anthropologists might easily conclude
these circumstances that Society A is better off than Society B. For
could very well argue that whatever pedagogic losses are sustained b
ciety A due to its scientifically falsely based educational system are
than offset by the greater communal cohesion fostered by the (fal
lief in an innate equality of human intelligence.
It ought to be noted in this connection that the implementation o
cial practices based on an objectively false belief can foster greate
munal cohesion only if that false belief is actually shared generally
the members of the community. This was presumably the case for t
lief in the meteorological efficacy of rain dancing among the Hop
would not likely to be the case for the belief in an innate equa
human intelligence among politically incorrect modern Europea
Americans.

Limits of Scientism. The most serious deficiency of scientism, how-

ever, derives from its habitual overestimation of the power of science to
provide an authoritative understanding of just those phenomena that are
most relevant for the social sphere. That is to say, scientism fails to ap-
preciate the difference in explanatory power between theories of the
physical sciences and of the social sciences. The physical sciences, whose
explanatory propositions are the most solidly validated, have the least
bearing on the realization of moral aims. By contrast, the propositions in
the social sciences, which have the most bearing on the realization of
moral aims, are conspicuously deficient in objective validation. Biology
occupies an intermediate position between these two extremes with re-

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

spect to both the validity and the moral relevance of its propositions. Al-
though this difference between the laws of physics and sociology is, of
course, generally recognized, the deeper epistemological reasons why the
physical sciences are 'hard' and the human sciences 'soft' are less widely
appreciated.
In fact, there not only still arise so many troublesome conflicts be-
tween science and morals that the credibility of the Baconian creed of
salvation through science is itself losing ground in its Western heartland.
Some of this loss of faith in mankind's salvation through science was set
off by the misuses of science in war and peace. The misuses commonly
mentioned include the killing and maiming of defenseless civilians by
nuclear weapons, the control and exploitation of subject peoples by their
electronic surveillance, and the despoilment and pollution of the Earth
by the technological fruits of modern research. Scientists deplore these
misuses as much as do the critics of science. But scientists tend to point
out that it is wrong to blame science only for mankind's problems while
ignoring its contributions to mankind's welfare. According to them, the
way to avert these misuses is not to stop doing science but to remedy the
misuses politically and scientifically. Anyhow, how will we ever be able
to feed the hungry of the world and to cure cancer if we turn away from
science now?

Machiavelli. These discussions rarely consider a class of deeper causes

of the latter-day decline of the Baconian creed, which is philosophically
more troublesome than the misuses of science, inasmuch as it has no
remedy, even in principle. That category comprises some projects, which,
even though they are far from being intended to kill or enslave people or
to destroy nature, are sincerely meant to augment human welfare. Yet,
these projects are perceived as having sinister implications. It is to this
troublesome, paradoxical category of causes responsible for the decline of
the Baconian creed that some of the present and proposed applications of
human biology belong, such as cloning and other manipulations of
human genes, as well as mood-control by psychoactive drugs. Despite
their overtly benevolent intent, these applications seem monstrous and
evoke the specter of Doctors Frankenstein and Strangelove.
The surprising overarching conclusion that can be drawn from the
moral dilemma posed by benevolent science (in contrast to its malevo-
lent applications) is not merely that science sometimes conflicts with

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 SCIENTISM

ethics. It is also that the growth of scientific knowledge and the

that sprung from it has made it evident that the ensemble of We
metaphysics and morals that spawned science in the first place is
ently paradoxical.
As we noted briefly in Chapter 1, this troublesome character of
Western moral tradition was discovered, or at least was first
stated, by the sixteenth century Italian statesman and political th
Niccolo Machiavelli, a century before Galileo even opened the d
modern science. According to the British philosopher Isaiah
(1971), it is one of the great enigmas of Western letters why scho
have argued for centuries about just what it was that Machiavelli
to convey in his two famous books, The Prince and The Disco
Berlin's proposed resolution of the great enigma was that Machiav
who (unlike Immanuel Kant) was a highly lucid writer-presen
most disturbing insight, which no Utopian visionary of the fu
mankind can accept. For Machiavelli showed that the ensemble
social aspirations is paradoxical. Hence the belief that the correct,
tively valid solution to the question of how men should live can in
ciple be discovered is itself, in principle, not true.
By publishing his insight Machiavelli managed to incur an ecum
and everlasting hatred of people representing the entire spect
Western religious, philosophical, and political thought. Catholi
Protestants, autocrats and democrats, reactionaries and revolution
all despised him. Different visionaries may disagree about the feli
their respective visions, but they all share the same fervent belie
such a thing as an ideal society can exist. No wonder that Machiav
subversive message that no such thing is possible has made him app
the Devil incarnate, a.k.a. (as Machiavelli's namesake) 'Old Nick
Thus Machiavelli drew attention to the two incompatible system
ethics that form part of the Western cultural heritage. One of the
tems, which Berlin termed 'Christian,' regards morals as being ba
ultimate values sought for their own sakes-values recognition of w
alone enable us to speak of crimes or morally to justify and condem
thing. The other system, which Berlin terms 'pagan' derives it au
from mankind's being social creatures that live in communiti
pagan system knows no ultimate values, only communal purposes, a
moral judgments are relative rather than absolute. Or, more s
stated, the two mutually incompatible aims and values projected i

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

Utopian society are freedom and justice for the individual, on the one
hand, and law and order for the body politic, on the other.
What is the source of the 'Christian' belief in ultimate values in the
first place? Berlin identifies it as the doctrine that in one version or an-
other has dominated Western thought since Plato "that there exists some
single principle that not only regulates the course of the sun and the
stars, but prescribes their proper behavior to all animate creatures." Cen-
tral to this doctrine (brought to Christianity, as we noted earlier, by St.
Augustine in the fourth century) is the notion of God, or His atheistic
equivalent, Eternal Reason. Its power "has endowed all things and crea-
tures, each with a specific function; these functions are elements in a sin-
gle harmonious whole and are intelligible in terms of it alone. This uni-
fying pattern is the very heart of traditional rationalism, religious and
atheistic, metaphysical or scientific, transcendental or naturalistic,
which has been characteristic of Western Civilization. It is this rock
upon which Western beliefs and lives have been founded, that Machi-
avelli seems, in effect, to have split open."
To illustrate the moral contradictions to which he called attention,
Machiavelli provided some concrete examples from politics, statecraft,
and warfare of classical antiquity and Renaissance Italy. Other examples
are provided in our own modern times, which illuminate the troublesome
and equivocal ethical role of science-one of the crown jewels of West-
ern Civilization. As Machiavelli noted, no Utopia can be achieved on
Earth, not because of the frailties and imperfections of mankind, but be-
cause every conceivable ideal society is meant to satisfy mutually incom-
patible, that is, paradoxical, goals.

Evolutionism vs. Creationism in the Schools. It had long seemed that

the controversy regarding the teaching of Darwinian evolution in Amer-
ican public schools had been settled judicially in favor of modern science
at the Scopes Monkey Trial held in Tennessee in the 1920s. But, as it
turned out, the controversy still festered in the 1970s. At that time, the
Curriculum Commission of the California State Board of Education re-
considered whether the Biblical account of Creation ought not to be pre-
sented in the officially approved high school biology textbooks on an
equal footing with Darwinian evolutionary theory. At hearings held in
response to demands by some Christian Fundamentalist groups, much of

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 SCIENTISM

the argument was devoted to the question whether the Darwinian t

is merely an unproved speculation, as alleged by the Fundamental
a solidly documented scientific proposition, as claimed by the biol
The deeper matter at issue, however, was not scientific truth but r
freedom. For the Fundamentalists claimed that a Christian child att
ing a tax-supported school has as much of a right to be protected fr
dogmas of atheism as an atheist child has to be protected from pr
Hence, it would follow that the classroom teaching of Darwinism
only explanation of biocosmogeny is an infringement of the r
freedom of Christian parents to raise their children in the faith of
choice.
In the light of the citizen's rights guaranteed by the US Constitution,
the Fundamentalist's argument seemed sound. And the Fundamentalists
rightly rejected as irrelevant the pro-Darwinist testimony by liberal apol-
ogist clergymen that one can be a devout Christian without taking the
biblical account of Genesis all that literally. After all, the Fundamental-
ist faith is to take the Bible literally. But the practical inference that flows
from admitting the justice of the Fundamentalist claim is not that sec-
ondary-school biology texts should give the Genesis story equal time
with the Darwinian theory. Rather, what follows is that no public school
system can operate effectively in a heterogeneous social setting without
having its curriculum prejudice the minds of its students against the cher-
ished beliefs of some of their parents. In other words, to be practicably
workable, the Constitution (just as the Bible, in fact) cannot be inter-
preted in a wholly literal way. Rather, the Constitution's judicial inter-
pretation must (and usually does) take into account the complex contex-
tual situation in which its articles are to be applied and seek an optimal,
albeit imperfect solution. As for the textbook case, it has been recognized
in most (but by no means in all) American jurisdictions that the ultimate
Judeo-Christian (Western) moral aim of freedom and individual rights
has to give way to the pagan (Confucian) aim of mounting a pedagogi-
cally effective society.
A concrete example of the metaphysical gulf that still separates West-
ern and East Asian approaches to nature and her laws was provided by
the Reverend Hogen Fujimoto (1972) at the biology-textbook revision
hearings of California Curriculum Commission. Fujimoto spoke as a rep-
resentative of the Buddhist Churches of America, and just as the Dar-

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

winist biology teachers, he too voiced his opposition to the inclusion of

the Genesis story in the biology textbooks. But his opposition was based
on ideological grounds that were entirely different from those repre-
sented by the scientist witnesses. Reverend Fujimoto objected to the in-
clusion of the Biblical account because it is contrary to Buddhist episte-
mology, which holds, according to his testimony, that "in the
complexities of causes and subcauses one cause cannot be isolated, and is
hidden within the myriad of subcauses and conditions. For this reason, a
one-cause concept such a Divine Creation cannot be accepted by the
Buddhists."
Although Reverend Fujimoto did not seem to object to the retention
of the Darwinian account of evolution in the textbooks, he ought to
have done so. For the same, and from the East Asian perspective, nadve
ideas informed both the Torah and the Origin of Species, namely that sin-
gle causes can be isolated and that from their isolation devolves an expla-
nation of the universe. Whether one believes that the cause of present
life forms was God's will or natural selection is, as the East Asian remove
from Western doctrines, a comparatively inconsequential detail. Hence
Buddhist children in California schools ought to be spared exposure to
the simplistic notion that it is given to mankind to explain the phenom-
ena of the world by rational thought, be it of the Biblical or the Darwin-
ian variety. Reverend Fujimoto concluded his testimony with the obser-
vation that the "the question of the beginning is beyond human intellect
to grasp and, therefore, should not be incorporated into the school cur-
riculum."

Coda. The deeper cause for the latter-day decline of the Baconian
creed is philosophically more troublesome than the misuses of science,
inasmuch as it has no remedy, even in principle. That cause stems from
the moral difficulties that arise from some applications of science which,
far from being meant to kill or enslave people or to destroy nature, are in-
tended to augment human welfare and which nevertheless have sinister
implications. It is to this troublesome paradoxical category that some of
the present and proposed applications of human biology belong. As
stated, despite their overtly benevolent intent, these applications seem
monstrous and evoke the specter of Doctors Frankenstein and
Strangelove. The surprising, overarching conclusion that can be drawn

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 SCIENTISM

from the moral dilemma posed by benevolent science (in contrast

malevolent applications) is not merely that science sometimes con
with morals. The growth of scientific knowledge and the manipu
power it provided for mankind has made it evident also that the
ble of Western metaphysics and morals that spawned science in th
place is inherently paradoxical.

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 Sg:':::::

Niels Bohr (1885-1962)

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 Chapter Fourteen

Complementarity*
Paradoxes of Quantum Physics. In our discussions of Kantian epis-
temic dualism we considered the paradoxical relation between pure theo-
retical reason (with its value-free, natural categories, such as space, time,
causality, and object) and pure practical reason (with its value-laden,
non-natural categories, such as good and evil, sacredness, free will, and
personhood). These discussions led us to the insight that our interpreta-
tion of persons' actions can be very different when we encounter them in
a natural/amoral context or in a non-natural/moral context. In a natu-
ral/amoral context-especially in a scientific or medical setting-we re-
gard persons as objects, whose actions are determined heteronomously by
the laws of nature and for which they bear no moral responsibility. But in
a non-natural/moral context-especially in a social setting-we regard
persons as subjects, whose actions are determined autonomously by their
free will and for which we do hold them morally responsible.
We had noted briefly, moreover, that epistemological paradoxes arise not
only between the two realms of the intelligible world-the natural realm
and the non-natural realm created by pure theoretical reason and by pure
practical reason, respectively-but also within the natural realm. We thus
saw that we encounter paradoxes within pure theoretical reason when we
address phenomena in the microcosmic domain of the phenomenal world.
For the tiny dimensions of that microcosmic domain situate its phenomena
outside the mesocosmic domain of our direct experience to which our in-
nate categories of pure theoretical reason are evolutionarily adapted.
To conclude our discussion of the limits of human rationality, we now
turn to one particular set of-as yet not fully resolved-paradoxical phe-
nomena of nature that physicists encountered in the first half of the twen-
tieth century. These paradoxical phenomena arise from the existence of en-
ergy as discrete (rather than infinitely divisible) packets, or quanta, and
from the wave-particle duality of some basic (microcosmic) constituents of

*A substantial part of this chapter is based on Chapter 17 of Max Delbriick's Mind

from Matter? Stent, G.S., et al., editors (1986).

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

matter. They confront us with the kind of 'deep truth' of which Niels Bohr
had said that its opposite also contains deep truth.

Exchange of Energy between Light and Matter. The scientific study

of light began in the Renaissance and, by the seventeenth century, Isaac
Newton and Christian Huygens had put forward antithetical theories
about its nature. According to Newton, light consists of fast-moving par-
ticles flying through space. According to Huygens, however, light con-
sists of transverse waves propagated as oscillatory disturbances of a hypo-
thetical 'ether' supposed to permeate all space, just as ocean waves are
propagated as oscillatory disturbances of seawater. By the beginning of
the eighteenth century, Newton's particle theory had fallen into disfavor,
after it was found that light manifests the phenomena of interference and
diffraction characteristic of waves but not of particles. [Interference di-
minishes the amplitude of two waves of equal wave length upon their en-
counter if they oscillate out-of-phase and augments it if they oscillate in-
phase. Diffraction changes the direction of propagation of a wave when it
encounters an obstruction, such as an edge or a small hole.]
By the 1870s James Clerk Maxwell had succeeded in unifying electricity,
magnetism, and light, by demonstrating that all three phenomena consist of
waves propagated as oscillatory disturbances of an electromagnetic field.
Maxwell's conception of light as an electromagnetic wave encouraged
physicists to try to account for the exchange of energy between light and
matter. That problem had arisen as a result of efforts to explain the com-
monplace observation that as a body, such as a bar of iron, is heated to
higher and higher temperatures, it emits light waves of higher and higher
intensities and frequencies (that is, oscillations per second). At low temper-
atures, light is emitted in the low frequency range of the (for us invisible) in-
frared and at low intensity. Then, as the bar becomes hotter and hotter, the
light it emits turns red, then yellow, then blue (a.k.a., 'white heat'), and fi-
nally the (for us again invisible) ultraviolet, all the while becoming more
and more intense. This process can be represented by a series of graphs, on
which the intensity of light p (v) [that is, the flux of radiant energy per unit
volume] emitted at the frequency v is plotted against v-with each graph
representing the intensity-distribution curve at a given temperature, T.
As seen in the graph of an intensity-distribution curve such as that
presented here, the light intensity, p(v), rises with increasing values of v,
until it reaches a maximum at Vmax. After that point, p(v) declines again

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 COMPLEMENTARITY

and falls to zero at very high values of v. The value of Vmax correspond
the frequency of the perceived color of the light emitted at the te
ture T. Additional graphs of intensity-distribution curves measur
series of temperatures T would have shown that with increasing va
T, the position of the curve's Vmax shifts to the left (i.e. to higher valu

v), in a manner such that the ratio T/vmax remains constant. This
was discovered by Wilhelm Wien and is known as 'Wien's law.' The
tional graphs would have shown also that the total intensity of light em
over the entire range of frequencies [that is, the area under the p(v)
bution curve] at any given T increases proportionally with the fou
power of T. This relation is known as the 'Stefan-Boltzmann law.'

Rayleigh's Distribution Formula. By 1900, the British physicist,

Rayleigh, had developed a theory intended to account for the p (v
tensity distribution curve of light emitted by hot bodies. His theor
based on three ideas, in addition to Maxwell's conception of light a
electromagnetic wave. One idea was to formulate the problem in ter
a hollow box filled with light waves, whose interior temperature is
whose black interior walls absorb from the box and reemit into its i
rior all light waves that strike them. A second idea was to regard
light wave in the box as the equivalent of a gas molecule. And Ray
third idea was to apply to the (conceptually molecularized) light w
the thermodynamic law known as the 'equipartition principle.' Acco
to that principle, the total, evenly shared heat energy available to a
semble of n molecules is nkT (where k denotes Boltzmann's con
having the value of 1.3805 x 10-16 erg/degree/molecule, and T den
the absolute temperature in degrees Kelvin).
On the basis of these three ideas, Rayleigh derived a formula th
lates the light intensity p(v) emitted at a light frequency v (of dim
sec-1) to the temperature T.

p(v) = (8 rV 2/C3)kT

In this formula the letter c denotes the velocity of light (3x108 m

ond) and the factor 8 V I/c3 represents n, the number of ligh
"molecules" of frequency v per unit volume, according to Maxwell
ory of electromagnetic radiation.
As is evident from the plot shown here, the light intensity p(v)
given temperature T predicted by Rayleigh's formula increases rap

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

with increases in the light frequency, v. For low values of v, such as that
characteristic of lukewarm iron bars glowing in the infrared, Rayleigh's
formula is in reasonable agreement with both Wien's law and the Stefan-
Boltzmann law. In fact, Rayleigh's formula gives a satisfactory account of
the experimentally observed intensity distribution p(v) as long as the
values of v are below v max

\Rayleigh

C,

a,
C

r-

Planck

Vm<x Frequency (v)

Distribution of the intensity, p(v), of light of frequency v emitted at a given
temperature T. The Rayleigh distribution formula correctly describes the inten-
sities emitted at low frequencies but diverges drastically from those actually emit-
ted at high frequencies. The Planck distribution formula correctly describes the
intensities emitted over the entire frequency range.

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 COMPLEMENTARITY

However, Rayleigh's distribution formula fails to account for the

vation that the intensity distribution p(v) reaches a maximum va
the frequency Vmax, and it predicts counterfactually that p(v) keep
creasing ever more rapidly with increases in v. Hence Rayleigh's f
is in accord neither with Wien's law nor with the Stefan-Boltzmann
The counterfactual prediction of Rayleigh's formula of ever-incre
values of the light intensity p(v) at higher and higher light frequ
came to be known as the 'ultraviolet catastrophe.'

Planck's Distribution Formula and the Discovery of the Quan

In the same year of 1900 when Rayleigh had presented his ina
formula, the German physicist, Max Planck, put forward a radicall
and, at the time, counterintuitive idea that would evade the coun
tual predictions inherent in Rayleigh's distribution formula. Plan
posed that the amount of energy contained by individual light w
restricted to discrete values, rather than being capable of taking
value whatever, as physicists had previously believed. Accord
Planck, the discrete amount of energy carried by an individua
wave is given by the product h x v, where v is the wave's frequen
dimension sec-1) and h is a universal constant of nature, soon to b
known as Planck's constant, having the value 6.624 x 10-27 erg sec
the product hv represents the unit packet, or quantum, of energy
carried by each wave of frequency v, and that it can exchange on
toto with matter.
Contrary to Rayleigh's assumption of energy equipartition amo
the light wave "molecules" sharing the same black-walled box,
assumed that each wave in the box retains its energy quantu
which it contributes to the overall light-intensity distributio
Thus the quantized distribution of radiant energy among an en
of light waves would differ fundamentally from the equipart
kinetic energies among an ensemble of gas molecules. Planck r
on statistical grounds that at a temperature T the relative abu
of waves in the ensemble with energy hv is 1/(ehv/kT -1
the global light intensity of the whole ensemble at the frequ
would be

p(v) = 82t hv3/c3(ehv"IkT-1)

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

At low values of the frequency v, Planck's formula reduces to

Rayleigh's formula p(v) = (8nt v 2/c3 )kT. At high values of the frequency,
v, however, Planck's formula reduces to

p(v) = 8hthv3/c3ehV I kT

Planck's formula thus evades the ultraviolet catastrophe, since its denomi-
nator, c3ehv /kT increases more rapidly with the frequency v than does its nu-
merator 8irhv3. Hence unlike Rayleigh's, Planck's formula correctly ac-
counts for the whole range of observed distribution of light intensities p(v)
and is in agreement with the laws of Wien and of Stefan-Boltzmann.
(Planck, 1901)

Einstein's Wave-Particle Antinomy. Although quantum theory came

into being in 1900, it took a quarter of a century before its full ontologi-
cal implications were appreciated. Planck's postulation of the quantum
was gloriously successful, but it soon led to a conceptual calamity for
physicists when young Albert Einstein began his study of the photoelectric
effect. (This is the name given to the phenomenon of emission of elec-
trons from metal surfaces induced by their absorption of light.) Building
on Planck's counterintuitive notion that a light beam composed of waves
oscillating with frequency v is an ensemble of quantized energy packets,
each carrying an energy hv. Einstein showed in 1909 that light is not ab-
sorbed by the metal as waves, but as discrete lumps of energy, or 'photons.'
According to Einstein, photons are massless particles (that is, objects
without mass, which is yet another counterintuitive notion for us
denizens of the mesocosm), with the radiant energy of each photon being
hv, where h is Planck's constant and v the frequency attributable to the
wave-like aspect of the light. Thus Einstein resuscitated Newton's long-
abandoned theory of the particulate nature of light and discovered that
light has a dual nature, or to express it in terms of a Kantian antinomy.

Thesis: Antithesis:
Light is a wave Light is a particle
(Huygens, Maxwell) (Newton)
When Einstein first made this proposal of the antinomial relati
tween the wave-like and the particle-like properties of light, it me
general rejection by the community of physicists. Even Planck wou
accept it at first, so radical was its nature. But by 1921 the quantize
ton had become a mainstream idea, and Einstein was awarded the

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 COMPLEMENTARITY

Prize in Physics for his work on the photoelectric effect (rather t

devising his relativity theories, which would make him the most f
scientist of the twentieth century).

Quantized Bohr Atom. The next stage in the development of

tum theory produced even more acute conceptual paradoxes. In th
years of the twentieth century, Ernest Rutherford had postulate
atoms consist of a nucleus, which comprises almost all of their m
carries a positive electrical charge. Around the nucleus orbits a cl
much lighter particles,-the electrons-, which carry a negative ele
charge. By 1913, however, Niels Bohr had realized that Ruthe
model of electrons orbiting the nucleus could not account for the
chemical properties of atoms. So Bohr modified Rutherford's
model by postulating that the electrons move in a discrete, quantiz
set of the continuously varying range of orbits that would be theor
possible according to classical Newtonian mechanics. Bohr pro
furthermore, that the orbiting electrons jump from one quantized
another by absorbing or emitting quanta of light. The idea of qu
electron orbits was very offensive to many physicists, especially t
whose data Bohr took the liberty of reinterpreting in terms of his
Bohr's atomic model may have offended some people, but it was tr
dously successful and led to a much deeper understanding of
chemists' periodic table of the elements.

Uncertainty Principle. Efforts during the period 1913-1925 t

Bohr's quantized atomic model a quantitative formulation culmina
two independent theoretical breakthroughs: the wave equation of
Schr6dinger and the matrix mechanics of Werner Heisenberg. Schr6
wave equation was based on Louis de Broglie's recent conjecture that
photons, electrons also have wave-like properties. De Broglie's con
that electrons, authentic particles possessing a measurable mass, have al
properties of waves, [and hence Schr6dinger's wave equation based
conjecture], was even less palatable for the physics community tha
stein's earlier inference of the wave-particle duality of the massless ph
As for Heisenberg's matrix mechanics, it seemed an even greater
on rationality than de Broglie's attribution of wavelike propertie
electron. For when Heisenberg's formulation was restated by Paul
terms of an algebra whose variables represent the positional coor
(p) and momenta (q) of electrons, supposedly real quantities meas

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

with rods and clocks, it transpired that these variables do not obey the
law of 'multiplicative commutability.' [According to that law, it is true for
all ordinary quantities a and b encountered in everyday life that a x b is
equal to b x a. But it is not true for the positional coordinates and mo-
menta of electrons that p x q is equal to q x p.]
Heisenberg's 'uncertainty principle' brought further disorder into this
conceptual chaos. This principle asserts that the variables p and q repre-
sent quantities that cannot in principle be measured jointly to any arbi-
trary degree of accuracy in a single experiment or have their exact mag-
nitudes inferred from successive experiments. For it inheres in the nature
of these experiments that when an experimental arrangement is set up
that is designed to measure the magnitude of one of these variables, in-
formation is necessarily lost concerning the magnitude of the other. The
product of the uncertainties, Ap and Aq, in the measure of both p and q is
never smaller than h/21r (where h is Planck's constant) as seen in
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

Apx Aq > h/2nt

Complementarity. It had not escaped Bohr's notice that the parade of

counterintuitive findings that turned up in the development of the quan-
tum theory confronted physicists with deeply troubling epistemological
problems. The problems had begun to turn up upon Planck's discovery of
the quantum and continued with Einstein's discovery of the wave-particle
duality of the photon and Bohr's own discovery of the discrete character of
the electron orbits around the atomic nucleus. And they culminated in de
Broglie's conjecture of the wave-particle duality of the electron [soon to be
vindicated by the demonstration that, like photons, electrons too, are sub-
ject to diffraction] and in Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. By 1927, Bohr
had realized that all these strange phenomena could be traced to a common
epistemological root, which he called 'complementarity.'(Bohr, 1928)
In his use of the term complementarity Bohr did not refer to its ordi-
nary, everyday meaning, namely the aspects of two different parts of an
entity that make it a whole, as the two 'complementary' polynucletoide
chains make the DNA double helix a whole. Rather, Bohr gave 'comple-
mentarity' a special, esoteric meaning, namely the relation between two
rationally irreconcilable (or in Kantian terminology, antinomial) descrip-
tions of the world whose factual irreconcilability no experiment can ever
demonstrate. Bohr's prime example of complementarity was the descrip-
tion of electrons in terms of both waves and particles. The irreconcilabil-

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 COMPLEMENTARITY

ity of these two antinomial descriptions is not experimentally de

ble, because a critical test of either the wave or of the particle
the electron demands mutually exclusive observational arrangem
Bohr pointed out that the mutually exclusive experimental ar
ments needed for the study of complementary aspects turn out
sponsible for a fundamental limitation of our analysis of natural
ena. For in a physical measurement it is never possible to take int
the interaction between object and measuring instruments. Or, as
it, "the instruments cannot be included in the investigation while
also serving as means observation." But the admission of such a fu
tal limitation of empirical knowledge inhering in Bohr's complem
puts in doubt our intuitive idea-usually referred to as 'realism'-t
nomena exist independently of the means by which they are obse
That this is bad news for those scientists (namely, the maj
them), for whom realism is the unquestioned metaphysical found
their vocation in the first place, was clearly exposed by Donald
(1957, 1974). After all, if phenomena do not exist independently
means by which we observe them, then as far as reality is conc
there would be no "there" there, as Gertrude Stein once sai
hometown, Oakland, California.

Conspiracy of Nature. The furthest-reaching epistemologic

quence of Bohr's complementary concept, however, was that fa
having both properties of wave and particle, an electron takes o
the other property only as we are observing it under one or the
mutually exclusive observational setups. To illustrate this point,
veloped a thought experiment whose apparatus consists of a
shoots a beam of electrons at a wall. The wall has two small holes
through which some of the electrons impinging on the wall may pass and
then hit a backstop at some distance behind the wall. Either hole can be
opened or closed. [The following four panels are taken from R. Feynman,
R. B. Leighton, and M. Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume
III. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA. 1965.]
In panel A, we see a gun shooting bullets at random at the wall. There
are two holes, 1 and 2, in the wall, spaced at equal distances from the in-
tersection with the wall of a perpendicular line projected to the wall from
the point at which the gun is positioned. Either hole may be opened or
closed. Behind the wall is a backstop with a moveable bullet detector.

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

The detector measures P, the frequency with which (and hence the prob-
ability that) bullets that pass through one of the holes in the wall and
strike the backstop at a distance x from the projection to the backstop of
the midpoint between the two holes. When only hole 1 or only hole 2 is
open, the detector registers the bullet frequency distributions designated
respectively as P1 and P2. When both holes are open the distribution P12
registered is the sum of the distributions P1 and P2 that are observed with
either hole open alone. That is to say, in this setup, P12 = P1 + P2'

MOVABLE
DETECTOR P1 P12

GUN

S/P2

WALL BACKSTOP P12 = P + P2

Panel A

In panel B, the setup is immersed in water. The gun has been replaced
by a source of water waves (such as stones dropping into the water). The
backstop has been replaced by an absorber (that is, by a non-reflector) of
the waves and a wave detector that measures the intensity I of the waves
reaching the absorber at the distance x from the midpoint has been sub-
stituted for the movable bullet detector. Here the 'intensity' is defined as
the square of the absolute value of the mean amplitude I h I of the waves
absorbed at x, averaged over the whole duration of the experiment.
When only hole 1 or only hole 2 is open, the wave detector registers the

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 COMPLEMENTARITY

intensity distributions designated as I1 and 12 respectively, wh

I h 1 2 and 12 = I h2 12. When both holes are open, the distribution 1

istered is not the sum of the distributions I1 and 12 observed with either
hole open alone. Instead we see a distribution with crests and troughs, or
'fringes,' due to the following relation.

112 = I h + h2 12

The difference between the results shown in panel A and panel B is at-
tributable to interference at the absorber of parts of the same wave that
passed through both open holes in the experiment of panel B. In the ex-
periment of panel A, the bullets do not show interference at the backstop,
since any given bullet can pass through only one of the two open holes.

DETECTOR / I I12

WAVE
SOURCE

WALL ABSORBER I1 = h112 112 = Ih + h212

12 = h111212

Panel B

In panel C, the setup is in a vacuum chamber. The gun is an electron

gun, which emits an electron beam in random directions. The electron de-
tector at the backstop is an electronic device connected to a loudspeaker.
Each electron that strikes the detector is heard as a distinct click, thus

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

demonstrating that the electrons strike the backstop as particles, just as do

the bullets in panel A. When only hole 1 or only hole 2 is open, the detec-
tor registers the electron frequency distributions P1 and P2 respectively. But
when both holes are open, the observed frequency distribution P12 is not the
sum of P1 and P2. Rather, just as in the case of the water waves, P12 manifests
the results of interference at the backstop. Loudspeaker clicks notwith-
standing, each electron behaves as if it had reached the backstop by travel-
ing through both holes, that is, like a water wave rather than a bullet. Thus
at x there are two mean amplitudes, ~1 and 02, associated with parts of the

electron waves having traveled through either hole, so that P1 = I 1, 1 2 P2

I 2 12, and Pl2 = 1 1+ 02 12. This uncanny result is obtained, even if the
electron gun is firing so slowly that each electron has reached the backstop
before the next electron has been released, thereby eliminating the possibil-
ity that the interference pattern represented by P12 is the result of interac-
tions between several electrons.

DETECTOR P1 P12

ELECTRON U
GUN 2

P2

WALL BACKSTOP P1 = 10112 P1 = I + 0212

P2 = 1212
Panel C

The setup shown in panel D is similar to that of panel C, except that it

includes an additional feature that can tell us whether an individual elec-

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 COMPLEMENTARITY

tron that produced a distinct click in the loudspeaker had actuall

through hole 1 or hole 2. This feature consists of a strong light sourc
behind the wall between the two holes, as well as a device that reg
direction in which light was scattered by passage of an electron.
possible to know on which side of the light source proximal to ho
hole 2, each electron has traveled. Here it is found that, as wou
pected of a particle, when both holes are open, each click is associ
transit of an electron through one or the other of the two holes,
through both. But in this case the distribution P12 is characteristic o
rather than waves, namely that P12 = P1+ P2: That is to say, the inte
phenomenon observed in the setup of panel C has disappeared: T
sion of the additional feature in the experimental setup that dem
the particulate character of the electron has eliminated its wave-l
acter. This result leads to the even more uncanny inference tha
electron goes through both holes only when we are not watching
which hole it actually went. It is uncanny, but not inconsistent, a
have been had the device had shown that any given electron goes
only one of the two open holes and yet that the electron distribution
backstop is still that characteristic of an electron wave.

P'1 P'12

LIGHT

SOURCE /

GUN /A
2

P'2
/2

WALL BACKSTOP P'12 = P' + P,2

Panel D

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

Maybe the result obtained with the setup of panel D is not all that
strange, because, after all, the quanta emitted by the light source of the
additional feature do disturb the electrons. Thus we can at least console
ourselves with the thought that in setup D something is being done to
the electrons that is not being done in setup C. To remove any residual
complacency, let us therefore consider a fifth setup (which is not shown
here). That setup is again similar to that of panel C, except that the wall
with the holes is now mounted on wheels riding on a track running par-
allel to the backstop. The wall is thus free to move back and forth, due to
the recoil imparted to the wall by the momentum of individual electrons
that are colliding with the edges of the holes. Thus it should be possible
to infer from the direction in which the wall moves whether an electron
passed though hole 1 or hole 2. In this setup nothing extra is done to the
electrons, since they cannot help but collide with the edges of the holes.
Should not their wave-like character, and hence the interference phe-
nomenon, be preserved under these conditions? The answer is that we
cannot tell, because we are unable to observe the interference pattern,
even if the wave-like pattern were preserved.
There is a good reason for this frustration of our earnest efforts to infer
from the direction of the movement of the wall which hole an electron
has passed through. This reason arises from the necessity of measuring
with very high accuracy both the momentum imparted to the wall and
the positions of the two holes before and after passage of the electron.
But the experimental arrangement needed for measuring the momentum
of the wall with high accuracy introduces an uncertainty, or wiggle, in
the positions of the two holes. This procedure generates an error in the
measurement of the distance Ax from the midpoint at which an electron
released by the electron gun in a given direction actually strikes the (sta-
tionary) backstop. This error causes a corresponding error AP in the elec-
tron distribution P measured by the detector, which, in accord with
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, is sufficiently large to smear out the
crests and troughs of the interference pattern P12 = I01 + 02 2, if any in-
terference did occur.
We thus reach another stage in the torturous development of quantum
theory. The eerie fact is that the uncertainty principle and the comple-
mentarity of mutually exclusive measurements protect the conceptually
paradoxical elements of quantum theory from being shown up by any ex-
periment. Every observational act of ours entails an element of subjectivity,

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 COMPLEMENTARITY

since we must make an arbitrary choice of where and how to m

conceptual cut between the instruments of observation to be us
the objects to be observed. The observational setup has to be des
the terms of classical (i.e. non-quantum, or mesocosmic) physics
the observers can report to others (as well as making clear to the
in unambiguous terms the exact experimental setup and the res
tained.
In Bohr's thought-experiment, for example, we can choose a wa
in position relative to the electron gun and the backstop. This se
mits a determination of the wavelengths of the electrons on th
their interference patterns, but not of the identity of the hole
which any given electron went. Or we can choose a wall that is
exchange momentum, but with an uncertain position, by moun
wall on wheels. This setup permits a determination of the mome
change between wall and electrons, and hence an identificati
hole through which each electron went. However, any informat
garding the wavelength of the electrons is lost. These two s
clearly mutually exclusive, since the wall cannot be both fixed
free to exchange momentum. If the wall is fixed, it is part of the
tional apparatus with which we seek to define the wave charact
observed object (the electron). If the wall is free to move, and i
mentum is measured before and after the collision with the part
the wall is itself an object of observation rather than part of the
tional apparatus.
Bohr's thought-experiment shows that complementarity amou
fiendish conspiracy of nature (or of God) to keep us from attaini
jective description of reality. She (or He) ties observer and o
gether so that, in the microcosmic realm of applicability of quan
chanics, no sharp line that can be drawn in any experiment
would demarcate where the 'observer' ends and the 'object' begin
according to Bohr, in the drama of existence, we play the dual
actor and observer. It seems ironical, indeed bizarre, that a con
subversive for the metaphysics of materialism should have been
us by twentieth-century physics.

Criticisms of Complementarity. The proposition that the com

tarity concept is universally applicable to physical reality and is
of quantum phenomena was hotly debated for the twenty years

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

Bohr's first presentation of the concept. The most prominent among

Bohr's critics was Einstein, who was unwilling to admit any such conspir-
acy of nature and would not accept quantum mechanics as a complete
description of physical reality. He felt that quantum mechanics is incom-
plete, in the sense that it fails to account for some quantities that are
'physically real.' He believed that it should be possible to develop a more
adequate theory, which would provide a fully determinate, or complete ac-
count of all real phenomena.
Many attempts were made to find loopholes in Bohr's complementar-
ity argument, especially by designing clever thought-experiments that
would circumvent the uncertainty principle. But all of these attempts
failed, probably because the dictum of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein, "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" ap-
plies to Einstein's hoped-for complete and fully determinate description
of all real phenomena in the microcosmic domain.

Lao-Tzu and Bohr. In a lecture that Bohr presented in Bologna in

1937, he likened complementarity to the philosophy of Lao-Tzu, the
founder of Taoism. As we noted in Chapter 3, Taoism provided the
philosophical fountainhead for the development of Chinese science,
even though Taoism distrusts the powers of reason and regards the
workings of nature inscrutable for the theoretical intellect. Taoism
turned out to be wrong, of course. But it turned out to be wrong only in
the short run: The workings of nature are not all that inscrutable. Pro-
vided that the questions one asks of nature are not too deep and the
phenomena under study not too remote from our direct experience, ra-
tionally coherent answers can usually be found. But Taoism turned out
to be right in the long run. Once physicists began to address natural
phenomena in the microcosmic-atomic or subatomic-domain, they
encountered bizarre and totally surprising contradictions (contraria)
that violate the a priori categories of pure theoretical reason that serve
us so well in the management of our everyday affairs in the mesocosmic
domain.
When shortly after World War II, King Christian X made Bohr a
Knight of the Royal Danish Order of the Elephant, Bohr emblazoned his
knightly coat of arms with the Taoist Ying/Yang device, under the motto
"CONTRARIA SUNT COMPLEMENTA." Bohr had played a little
joke on his sovereign, but like all good jokes, Bohr's joke embodied wis-

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 COMPLEMENTARITY

dom: Propositions and their antinomies (contraria) can both be tr

complementa), as are Ying and Yang.

Kant and Bohr. As we noted,-first briefly in Chapter 1 and la

more detail in Chapter 10-in his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant
ticipated Bohr by applying an analog of the complementarity c
quantum physics to the mind-body problem. For in developing
temological theory to which we refer as "epistemic dualism," Kan
voked two sets of categories-pure theoretical reason and pure p
reason-and identified the source of two unavoidable, albeit r
irreconcilable, or antinomial, descriptions of persons. In a natura
context, to which we apply the set of transcendental categories
theoretical reason, such as space, time, and causality, we describe
as material objects. But in a non-natural/moral context, to w
apply the set of transcendental categories of pure practical reaso
good/evil, sacredness, and free will, we describe persons as mora
According to Kant, to be human means to live as a dualist in both
of the intelligible world and struggle with the paradoxes that ar
their incompatibility. (Kant, 1949)
Thus we are confronted not only with a conspiracy of nat
keeps us from attaining an objective (i.e., observer-independent
tion of reality but also with a conspiracy of existence, foisted on
joint dependence on the antithetical categories of theoretical re
practical reason. Because of this conspiracy of existence, our de
of persons are bound to be conceptually irreconcilable (or comp
tary in Bohr's sense) when we observe persons either in a natura
context or in a non-natural/moral context. Nevertheless, despit
being conceptually irreconcilable, both natural/amoral and n
ral/moral descriptions are needed for a complete account of the
Bohr made no reference in his philosophical writings to Kanti
temic dualism of pure theoretical reason and pure practical r
which his ideas about complementarity as a dualistic epistemolo
ory are obviously analogous. (Stent, 1988). It seems surprising t
failed to recognize this analogy, especially in view of his assert
1933 Light and Life lecture that free will-a crucial category of
pure practical reason-must be considered as a trait peculiar to conscio
Another indication of the affinity of Bohr's epistemology to
critical idealism is implicit in his following statement. "In our de

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

of nature the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of the phenomena
but only to track down, so far as is possible, relations between the mani-
fold aspects of our experience." (Bohr, 1934). Thus the electron, to
which Bohr sometimes referred as a 'phenomenon,' is, qua phenomenon,
part of the Kantian sensible world.
As Bohr knew only too well, to account for the electron's relations
with the manifold aspects of our experience, that is, to bring the electron
from the sensible world of phenomena to the intelligible world of noumena,
the French physicist Louis de Broglie had applied to the electron the an-
tinomial categories of 'wave' and 'particle.' And just as joint application
to the same moral context (responsibility) of two antinomial categories-
one (determinism) provided by pure theoretical reason and the other
(freedom) provided by pure practical reason-leads to moral paradoxes,
so does joint application to the same physical context (electron) of two
antinomial categories provided by theoretical reason alone (wave and
particle) lead to physical paradoxes. Thus, Bohr's dualism of complemen-
tarity is no more meant to represent the world as it really is than is Kant's
epistemic dualism. What the paradoxes embodied in both Kant's and
Bohr's dualist theories testify to is our inability to construct a wholly co-
herent intelligible world of noumena on the basis of the phenomena we
perceive in the sensible world.
Bohr's not mentioning Kant in this connection can hardly be attribut-
able to his not having heard of the Kant's Copernican Revolution in Phi-
losophy and its principal manifesto, the Critique of Pure Reason. For Den-
mark's leading Kant expert, the philosopher Harald Hoffding
(1843-1931), was a close personal friend of Bohr's father, the physiolo-
gist Christian Bohr, as well as young Niels' philosophy professor in his
first student years at Copenhagen University. In line with Bohr's failure
to mention the analogous relation between his complementarity concept
and Kant's epistemic dualism, Kant's name does not appear in such defin-
itive Bohr biographies as those by Ulrich R6seberg (1985) and Abraham
Pais (1991), nor in any of the 40 articles contributed to the Niels Bohr
Centenary Volume edited by A.P. French and P.J. Kennedy (1985).
So it was not until the final years of the twentieth century that there
began to appear writings that drew attention to the affinity of Bohr's
ideas to Kantian philosophy. Several examples of such writings were pre-
sented in the collection of essays Niels Bohr and Contemporary Philosophy
edited by Jan Faye and Henry J. Folse (1994). The topics covered by the

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 COMPLEMENTARITY

sixteen authors of these essays included comparisons of Bohr and

views on the use of language and symbolism and on the antinomial
physics of materialism and idealism, as well as the classification of
metaphysical views under the rubric of 'Pragmatic Kantian Realis
None of the essayists, however, pointed to the most striking pa
between Kant and Bohr's philosophies, namely their epistemic dua
In Kant's case, his epistemic dualism consists of the two mutually
herent domains of the intelligible world-the amoral/natural d
and the moral/non-natural domain-the former created by pure t
ical reason and the latter by pure practical reason. And in Bohr's c
'CONTRARIA SUNT COMPLEMENTA' dualism comprises the m
ally incoherent descriptions of phenomena in the quantum world
the amoral/natural domain of pure theoretical reason.
There is a plausible explanation for the failure of Faye and Fols
teen essayists to mention the obvious epistemological parallel b
Bohr's concept of complementarity and Kant's epistemic dualism:
of the essayists seemed to be familiar with (or interested in) moral
ophy and Kant's contribution to the clarification of its foundation
Moreover, none of the essayists seemed to know-no more th
Kant or Bohr, of course-about the development of evolutionary e
mology in mid-twentieth century (let alone its anticipation by N
in the latter part of the 19th century). Thus they were unaware of
ological roots of the paradoxical aspects, or complementarity, of ou
scendental categories when they are pursued au bout de la nuit
noted in Chapter 12, the mesocosmic domain of the sensible w
phenomena, for the verbal description of which our language, as
our Kantian pure theoretical reason, became adapted in the course
brain evolution, represents but a tiny sliver of the phenomenal w
That domain comprises merely those phenomena in the ecological
of Homo sapiens whose dimensions in time and space make them
ble to our direct sensory perception. Beyond it lie the macrocosm
tending outward to the stars and their galaxies, and the microcos
tending inward to the atoms and their subatomic particles.
Had the essayists been familiar with evolutionary epistemology, i
not have come as a surprise to them that our categorical intuition h
discarded, or at least drastically modified, when our scientific
moved beyond the mesocosm to the microcosmic and macrocosmi
mains of very small and very brief, or of very large and very long

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

phenomena. Such a movement beyond the mesocosmic domain of mid-

dle dimensions occurs whenever we consider the structure of the tiny
atom and its function, or of the vast universe and its evolution.

Biology and Complementarity. Bohr believed that complementarity is

not restricted to the phenomena of atomic physics and would be applica-
ble also to many other disciplines dedicated to the search for understand-
ing the world. He thought, for instance, that one of these disciplines is
biology, which he considered in his Opening Address of the Interna-
tional Congress of Light Therapy held in Copenhagen (Bohr, 1933). The
title of Bohr's address was 'Light and Life,' and its purpose was to draw at-
tention to the epistemological implications for the life science of the fun-
damental changes that the quantum theory has brought to the concep-
tion of natural law.
Bohr thought that these changes, which extend to the very idea of the
nature of scientific explanation, were important not only for a full appre-
ciation of the new situation brought to physics by the quantum theory.
According to Bohr, these developments had created also an entirely new
background for viewing the problems of biology, in the light of which se-
rious consideration ought to be given to the possibility that the processes
of life might not be reducible to atomic physics. He suggested that there
might be a complementary relation between the physiological and physi-
cal aspects of life analogous to that obtaining for the wave and particle
aspects of the electron. In that case there would exist a kind of Uncer-
tainty Principle of Biology. This proposal was expressed in the following
passage he presented at his lecture.
"We should doubtless kill an animal if we tried to carry on then inves-
tigation of its organs so far that we could describe the role played by sin-
gle atoms in vital functions. In every experiment involving organisms
there must remain an uncertainty with regard to the conditions to which
they are subjected. The idea suggests itself that the minimum freedom
that we must allow organisms in this respect is just large enough to per-
mit it, so to say, to hide its ultimate secrets from us." Bohr thus suggested
another conspiracy of nature. Bohr's suggestion made many biologists, es-
pecially biochemists, as uneasy as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle of
quantum mechanics had made uneasy many physicists.
What novel insights into biology did Bohr think could be gained by
taking into the account the concept of complementarity? First of all,

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 COMPLEMENTARITY

Bohr made clear what it was that he did not mean to imply: He d
wish to suggest that at the microcosmic quantum level we enc
phenomena that show a closer resemblance to the properties of li
do ordinary mesocosmic physical phenomena. On the contrary, at
sight the essentially indeterminate, statistical character of quantum
nomena is very difficult to reconcile with the highly structured or
tion of mesocosmic living creatures like ourselves, who have all the
acteristics of their species implanted in tiny genes. It goes without
that quantum theory applies to the chemical behavior of all ato
they part of living or non-living matter. But, so Bohr declared, re
life as a chemical phenomenon will not explain it any better th
the ancient comparisons of life with fire, or the more recent com
of living organisms with mechanical engines, such as clockworks. R
so Bohr said, "an understanding of the essential characteristics of h
beings must be sought in their peculiar organization, in which pro
that may be analyzed by the usual mechanics are interwoven with
cally atomistic traits in a manner having no counterpart in in
matter." To illustrate this point, Bohr provided a brief and insight
cussion of the human eye and pointed out that the absorption of a
light quantum by the retina suffices to cause a determinate, macro
effect, namely a visual experience by the subject.
So the question at issue was not whether physics can explain som
tures of the function of living organisms, which it clearly ca
whether some fundamental traits are still missing in the analysis o
ral phenomena, before we reach an understanding of life on the b
physical experience." Bohr hastened to point out that among thos
ing traits he does not include the mysterious 'vital force,' which so
mantic biologists called on for the governance of organic life. He t
that "we all agree with Newton that the real basis of science is th
ture under the same conditions will always exhibit the same regu
Therefore, if we are able to push the analysis of the mechanism of
organisms as far as that of atomic phenomena, we should scarcely
to find any properties differing from the properties of inorganic matt
What kind of missing fundamental traits did Bohr then have in
He was thinking of traits that are still unknown, because the con
holding for biological and physical research are not directly comp
since the necessity of keeping the object of biological investigation
imposes a restriction on biological research that finds no counter

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

physical research. Because its ultimate secrets will remain hidden from
us, Bohr suggested that "the existence of life must be considered as an el-
ementary fact that cannot be explained. It has to be accepted as a start-
ing point of biology, just as the existence of elementary [subatomic] parti-
cles and of [Planck's] quantum of action have to be accepted as starting
points of atomic physics. The impossibility of a physical or chemical ex-
planation of the physiological functions peculiar to life would in this
sense be analogous to the insufficiency of a mechanical analysis for the
understanding of atoms." But if the existence of life itself is to remain an
unexplained elementary fact of biology, how are we going to find the
missing fundamental traits that will allow us to come to terms with life
on the basis of physical experience? Not, said Bohr, by embracing the
doctrine of vitalism, which asserts that the processes of life are not expli-
cable by the laws of physics and chemistry because they are driven by an
occult 'vital principle,' distinct from physico-chemical forces. Instead,
Bohr proposed that the missing fundamental traits of life are likely to de-
volve from the complexity of the physico-chemical systems that govern
the behavior of the living matter we encounter in biology. Compared to
the traits of life, the properties of matter in non-living-forms that are the
primary focus of interest in atomic physics, are relatively simple.
Bohr extended his considerations from the physiological aspects of life,
which make living organisms appear merely as material objects, albeit
highly complex ones, to its psychological aspects, which make human
beings appear as more than material objects, namely also as mental sub-
jects. He pointed out that the recognition of the epistemological limita-
tion presented by mutually exclusive observational arrangements for the
study of atomic phenomena is suited also for reconciling the apparently
contrasting points of view that separate physiology from psychology. "In-
deed, the necessity of considering the interaction between the measuring
instruments and the object under investigation in atomic physics corre-
sponds closely to the peculiar difficulties met within psychological analy-
ses, which arise from the fact that mental content is invariably altered
when attention is concentrated on any single feature of it." However, just
as Bohr had warned that the extension of the complementarity concept
from atomic phenomena to living organisms should not be regarded as
supporting vitalism in the physiology of living organisms, so did he warn
also that complementarity should not be regarded as supporting spiritual-
ism in psychology. Bohr said that from this point of view, "the free will

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 COMPLEMENTARITY

must be considered as a trait peculiar to conscious life. . ... Withou

tering into metaphysical speculations, I may perhaps add that any a
sis of the very concept of an explanation would, naturally, begin an
with a renunciation of an explanation of our own conscious activit

Niels Bohr's Last Lecture. Thirty years after his seminal Ligh
Life lecture in Copenhagen and a few months before his death
vember 1962, Bohr (1963) spoke at the dedication ceremony o
newly founded Institute of Genetics at the University of Cologne
entitled his address, which was to be his last public lecture, 'Light
Life Revisited.' Aware of the explosive progress in molecular biolog
had begun to take place in the meanwhile, he had reconsidered his
time conjecture about the impossibility of reducing physiology to p
Bohr now said:

It appeared for a long time that the regulatory function in living or-
ganisms, disclosed especially by studies of cell physiology and embry-
ology, exhibited a fineness so unfamiliar to ordinary physical and
chemical experience as to point to the existence of fundamental bio-
logical laws without counterpart in the properties of inanimate matter
studied under simple reproducible experimental conditions. Stressing
the difficulties of keeping the organisms alive under conditions which
aim at a full atomic account I therefore suggested that the very exis-
tence of life might be taken as a basic fact in biology in the same sense
as the quantum of action is to be regarded in atomic physics as a fun-
damental element irreducible to classical physical concepts.

From the point of view of physics, the mysteries of life were indeed
stark. Physiologists had discovered innumerable ways in which cells re-
spond intelligently to changed environmental conditions. Embryologists
had demonstrated the possibilities of such amazing feats as growing two
whole animals from one embryo split into halves. The transgenerational
stability of the gene and the algebra of Mendelian genetics suggested to
Bohr that the processes underlying the phenomena were akin to quan-
tum mechanics. The resistance of biologists to such ideas did not surprise
Bohr. He had met resistance to the complementarity argument before
among his fellow physicists.
But this time Bohr was wrong, because James Watson's and Francis
Crick's discovery of the DNA double helix in 1953 did for biology what

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

many physicists had hoped, in vain, could be done for atomic physics. It
solved all the mysteries in terms of visualizable theories, without having
to abandon our intuitive notions about truth and reality embedded in our
natural Kantian a priori categories of theoretical reason.

Max Planck's Last Lecture. In the spring of 1947, when I worked for
the U.S. Military Government in Occupied Germany, I went to hear a
lecture given by the 89-year-old Max Planck on "Religion and Science"
at the Bayer pharmaceutical plant in the Westfalian city of Elberfeld. I
was super-excited by the prospect of listening to Planck. It would provide
me not only with the historically unique opportunity to see the Founding
Father of Quantum Physics, but I would also learn first hand the great
man's views on a theologico-philosophical problem that I had endlessly
discussed with my fellow graduate students at the University of Illinois.
We were all agreed that the sole connection between religion and sci-
ence consists of science having proven that religion is bunk, a proposi-
tion that seemed self-evident, hardly worth making a fuss about. I sus-
pected that in his dotage, Planck might have forsaken scientific
rationality and gone back to the irrationalities of religion, something
that my colleagues and I had promised each other we would never do.
Planck, looking ancient and frail, walked very slowly down the center
aisle of the auditorium, supported by his second wife, Marga. She helped
him mount the speaker's podium, where he sat down on a chair facing
the audience. Remaining seated, he read his lecture from a prepared
manuscript in a barely audible voice. He began with the admonition that
the belief in miracles, which he identified as one of the main pillars of
support of religious teachings, is incompatible with science. It is not even
admissible to hold the view that while miracles are impossible today, of
course, Moses or Jesus might have worked some a long time ago. Planck
then declared that, the impossibility of miracles notwithstanding, we do
need a religion, but one that is devoid of all myths about "externalities."
The beliefs of that religion must be confined to "essences," namely to the
faith in the existence of an Almighty Rational Entity, who reigns over
Nature. According to Planck, this faith is backed by the findings of sci-
ence, which show that general laws govern all natural phenomena.
These laws are valid over the whole realm of Nature, in which we hu-
mans on our tiny planet play only a negligible role. The laws are inde-
pendent of the existence of mankind, and yet, insofar as they can be

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 COMPLEMENTARITY

fathomed by our senses, we can formulate them in terms of purpose

tions. Thus far from having done away with religion, science provid
most secure rational support.
After having spoken for about 45 minutes, Planck suddenly slump
his chair and fell silent. Greatly alarmed, several people rushed to h
and carried him out of the hall. This lecture turned out to be Planc
public appearance. He died nine months later.
I felt lucky to have seen and listened to the great Max Planck, a
liked his insistence that the belief in miracles is incompatible with
ence. Yet, I suspected that in making his seemingly preposterous c
that the findings of science support, rather than disprove religious
he was merely trying to sneak discredited pious baloney back in thr
the rear door. But later that day I began to think that maybe ther
something to Planck's thesis. Perhaps all those one-hundred percen
tionally thinking, self-styled atheists (such as I was at the time) wh
it for granted that all phenomena are governed by generally appli
natural laws, actually have to believe-as did the Sumerians,-in t
istence of a Divine Legislator who made up all those laws.

Coda. Bearing in mind Bohr's insight that a fiendish conspiracy of

ture lies at the root of physical complementarity, it becomes eviden
Kant had the insight that a no less fiendish conspiracy of existence
the root of the free will paradox. For just as Bohr saw that mutuall
clusive observational arrangements are required for the study of the
plementary attributes of the electron, so did Kant see that resort t
tually exclusive realms of pure reason is required for dealing with
will. According to Kant, in any given social situation, free will
viewed from the standpoint either of the categories of pure theor
reason or of the categories of pure practical reason, but never from
standpoints simultaneously. Thus beastly and divine, natural an
natural, pure theoretical reason and pure practical reason, all appe
be complementary, that is paradoxical, apects of human nature.

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 Glossary

ANALYTICAL METHOD The procedures Descartes devised for solving com-

plex problems by resolving them into their sim-
pler constituent elements.
ANALYTIC PROPOSITION A proposition whose truth is evident from the
words it contains, such as 'no bachelor is married,'
and whose negation, e.g., 'some bachelors are
married,' is self-contradictory.
ANIMAL Unless stated explicitly otherwise, in this essay
the meaning of the term "animal" does not in-
clude the species Homo sapiens, which from a bio-
logical point of view is, of course, a member of the
animal kingdom.
ANTINOMY A pair of apparently equally valid principles or
propositions that contradict each other.

A PRIORI-SYNTHETIC A proposition whose truth is evident a priori and

PROPOSITION yet not derivable from an analysis of the words it
contains, e.g. 'every event has a cause.'
ATTRIBUTE A property, like weight, that has no existence on
its own and owes its existence to a SUBSTANCE.

AUTONOMOUS Independent and self-directing; the opposite of

HETERONOMOUS.

BCE A date before the Common Era, formerly called

'BC' (Before Christ).
CARTESIAN Belonging or pertaining to Rene Descartes.
CATEGORICAL A moral obligation or command that is uncondi-
IMPERATIVE tionally and universally binding.

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

CATEGORY (KANTIAN) One of the fundamental principles, or a priori

concepts, of human reason, such as causation,
that we bring to the SENSIBLE WORLD for construc-
tion of the INTELLIGIBLE WORLD.

CE A date in the Common Era, formerly called 'AD'

(Anno Domini, or After Christ).
COMPLEMENTARITY The concept introduced by Niels Bohr, according
to which some physical phenomena give rise to
rationally irreconcilable alternative interpreta-
tions whose inconsistency can never be demon-
strated empirically.
CRITICAL IDEALISM The Kantian theory according to which human
knowledge is limited to PHENOMENA, whereas
NOUMENA are thinkable but not actually knowable.
DETERMINISM The doctrine according to which event is an ef-
fect of a prior series of events necessitated them-
selves by even earlier events. Determinism im-
plies that all future events are as fixed and as
unalterable as past events.
DUALISM The doctrine that mind and body are each a sepa-
rate SUBSTANCE. The opposite of MONISM.
ENTAIL Thing A entails thing B if A causes B or requires
B as its necessary accompaniment.
EPISTEMOLOGY The branch of metaphysics that deals with the
nature of our Knowledge about the world.
ETHICS The system of rules, or laws, devised for regulat-
ing human social behavior in accord with the
CATEGORIES of MORALS.

ETHOLOGY The evolutionarily oriented study of animal be-

havior.

ETIQUETTE The system of rules devised for regulating human

social behavior in accord with the CATEGORIES of
MANNERS.

EVOLUTIONARY The discipline at the interface of biology and phi-

EPISTEMOLOGY losophy that seeks evolutionary explanations of the
origins of the CATEGORIES of Kant's EPISTEMOLOGY.

EXEMPLAR An ideal model or example.

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 GLOSSARY

EXPLICATION A description of the meaning of a word, as distin

guished from its normative definition.
EXPLICATUM The meaning of the word to be explicated.
HETERONOMOUS Subject to external influence or determination;
the opposite of AUTONOMOUS.
HEURISTIC Helpful for learning, discovery, or problem-solving.
IDEALISM The theory about the world according to which
its essential reality is TRANSCENDENTAL and exists
only in our consciousness and reason. The oppo-
site of MATERIALISM.

INTELLIGIBLE WORLD The world of NOUMENA.

JUDGMENT A proposition stating an authoritative opinion

(or the opinion so stated).
LIBERTARIANISM The doctrine according to which we are free to
act in one way or another and make the future
different from what it would have been otherwise,
regardless of what happened in the past and given
the present state of affairs.
MANNERS A subset of tacitly held human intuitions, or cate-
gories, of PURE PRACTICAL REASON, including so-
cial harmony, cultural coherence, beauty, and dig-
nity of the person, as distinct from MORALS.
MATERIALISM The doctrine about the nature of the world ac-
cording to which physical matter is its only essen-
tial reality and that all being and processes and
phenomena can be explained as manifestations or
results of matter; the opposite of IDEALISM.

MENTALIST Pertaining to the mind.

MESOCOSM The world of middle dimensions to which the
human cognitive structures are evolutionarily
adapted.
METAPHYSICS The branch of philosophy which deals with the
first principles of things, including such concepts
as being, substance, essence, time, space, cause,
and identity.
MONISM The doctrine according to which mind is not a
separate SUBSTANCE but an ATTRIBUTE of the
body; the opposite of DUALISM.

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

MORALS A subset of tacitly held human intuitions, or

categories, of PURE PRACTICAL REASON, including
good and evil, free will, duty, compassion, and
sacredness of the person, as distinct from
MANNERS.

NON-NATURAL Transcending the laws or the ordinary course of

nature.

NOUMENA Things-in-themselves, which are thinkable by our

reason but not directly knowable by our senses.
[From the Greek nooumenon, that which is con-
ceived], as opposed to PHENOMENA.
PARADOX A proposition which seems reasonable on first
sight but turns out to be self-contradictory. Or
two paired propositions, either of which, when con-
sidered alone, is supported by apparently sound ar-
guments, but which, when they are considered to-
gether, turn out to be mutually contradictory.
PHENOMENA Things as they appear to our senses and are famil-
iar to us in everyday experience. [From the Greek
phainein, to show], as opposed to NOUMENA.
PHYSICALIST Pertaining to the body.
PROPOSITION A statement capable of being true or false.
PURE PRACTICAL REASON The part of PURE REASON applied to the SENSIBLE
WORLD that resorts to such NON-NATURAL cate-
gories as values, ends, and responsibility. Practi-
cal reason constructs an INTELLIGIBLE WORLD
whose NOUMENA are human subjects governed by
laws of freedom, as distinguished from PURE THEO-
RETICAL REASON.

PURE REASON Reasoning applied to the SENSIBLE WORLD that is

based on a priori CATEGORIES and provides a unify-
ing ground for its perception.
PURE THEORETICAL REASON The part of PURE REASON applied to the SENSIBL
WORLD that resorts to such natural categories as
space, time, and causality. Pure theoretical rea-
son constructs an INTELLIGIBLE WORLD whose
NOUMENA are natural objects governed by the
physical laws of causal determination, as distin-
guished from PURE PRACTICAL REASON.

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 GLOSSARY

RES COGITANS Descartes' term for mental SUBSTANCE (that is,

the soul or mind).
RES EXTENSA Descartes' term for material SUBSTANCE (that is,
the body).
RETRODICTION A rational account of the causes of a present
event as an effect of past events; the opposite of
'prediction,' which is a rational forecast of a fu-
ture event as an effect of present events.
SENSIBLE WORLD The world of PHENOMENA.

SOCIOBIOLOGY A subdiscipline of ETHOLOGY dedicated to the

study of the evolution of the social behavior of
animals.

SUBSTANCE Something that can exist in the world on its own,

independently of anything else, as distinct from
ATTRIBUTE.

SYNTHETIC PROPOSITION A proposition whose truth is evident from obser-

vation, such as 'no bachelor is happy,' and whose
negation, e.g. 'some bachelors are happy,' is not
self-contradictory.
TAO The Way of virtuous conduct, according to Con-
fucian moral philosophy.
TAOISM Chinese mystical philosophy whose basic tenet is
the conformance of human society with the nat-
ural order and the rejection of the restrictive in-
fluence of social norms, moral precepts, and
worldly goals.
THEODICY The paradox that arises from the belief that God
is good, even though He permits evil in the world
that He created.

TORAH The Hebrew term designating (strictly speaking)

the Five Boooks of Moses, or (more loosely
speaking), all of those parts of the Bible that
Christians refer to as Old Testament.

TRANSCENDENTAL Referring to ideas or notions that we apply to

rather than derive from our experience, of which
God, love, and good and evil are examples.
UTILITARIANISM The moral doctrine according to which pleasure
and the satisfaction of desires is the sole human
good.

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 Sources of Illustrations

Cover: The Copernican Revolution. Woodcut made in 1888, in imitation of the

style of the early Renaissance. Copyright: Archiv fuir Kunst und Geschichte,
Berlin.

Immanuel Kant. D6bler (1791). From J.H.W. Stuckenberg, The Life of Immanuel
Kant. Macmillan and Co., London, 1882.

Seren Kierkegaard. Drawn by Niels Christian Kierkegaard (1840). From Joakim

Garff. SAK - En Biografi. Gads Forlag, K0benhavn, 2000.

Moses showing the Tables of the Law to the people. Rembrandt (1659). From
H. Focillon and L. Goldscheider, Rembrandt. Phaidon Press, London, 1960.

Plato's Symposion. Anselm Feuerbach (1866). From H. Bodmer, Feuerbach.

Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, Leipzig 1942.

St. Augustine. Sandro Botticelli (1480). From G.C. Argan, Boticelli. Editions
d'Art Albert Skira, 1937.

Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer. Rembrandt (1663). From H. Focil-

Ion and L. Goldscheider, Rembrandt. Phaidon Press, London, 1960.

David Hume. Allan Ramsay, (1766). From D. E Norton, ed. The Cambridge
Companion to Hume. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1993.

Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace. Commemorative stamp issued by the French

Postal Service in 1955.

Martin Luther. Lukas Cranach, the Elder (1520). From Martin Brecht, Martin
Luther; Sein Weg zur Reformation. Calwer Verlag, Stuttgart, 1981.

275

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

Rene Descartes. Frans Hals (1649). From W.R. Valentiner, Rembrandt and Spin-
oza. Phaidon Press, London. 1957.

Title page of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. First edition, 1781. From Norbert
Weis, Kdinigsberg: Immanuel Kant und seine Stadt. Georg Westermann Verlag,
Braunschweig. 1993, p. 131.

Erasmus of Rotterdam. Albrecht Dtirer, (1520). From Martin Brecht, Martin

Luther; Sein Weg zur Reformation. Calwer Verlag, Stuttgart, 1981.

Konrad Lorenz. From Wissenschaftliche Mitglieder der Max Planck Gesellschaft.

Part II. Drucker & Humblot, Berlin. 1998.

Jean Piaget. From Milton Schwebel and Jane Raph, eds. Piaget in the Classroom.
Basic Books, New York. 1973.

Francis Bacon. From The Works of Francis Bacon, J. Spedding, R.L. Ellis and
D.D. Heath, eds. Vol. I. London: Longman's & Co., 1872.

Niels Bohr. From Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 9, 37

(1963).

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 Index

Ab (heart), 24 A priori categories, 159, 223

Abelard, Peter, 71, 97, 225 A priori synthetic propositions, 156, 163
Abortion, 82 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 71, 72, 73, 74
Abraham, 33, 36 Archaeopteryx, 222
Academy, 43, 44 Aristarchus (of Samos), 7
Achilles and the Tortoise, 7 Aristotle, 3, 5-7, 12, 43-48, 55, 57, 72,
Adam and Eve, 39, 152, 170, 220 80, 85, 101, 106, 130, 131, 156
Advancement of Learning, 215 Ariya atthangita, 49
Aesthetics, 41 Atma-Vada, 171-172
Agricultural-urban revolution, 21, 176, Atomic nucleus, 243
177 Atonism, 26, 27, 35, 36
Ahura Mazda, 60 Attributes, 138
Alarm call of birds, 225 Augustine, St., 63, 67-73, 75, 109, 110,
Albertus Magnus, 72 232
Alexander (the Great), 22, 27, 44 Augustine's City of God, 67
Allied War Crimes Trials, 134 Augustine's Confessions, 63, 65, 67
'Alternate possibilities,' principle of, 129, Augustine's Free Choice of the Will, 67
131-134 Authoritarian state, 101
Altruism, 224, 225 Autological words, 9
Amama, 27 Automatons, 142, 146
Ambrose, 64 Autonomy, 1, 48, 125
Amenhotep IV (alias Ikhnaton), 22, 26,
36 Ba (soul), 24, 138
Amoral/natural realm, 162 Babylon, 32, 109
Amyntas, 44 Bacon, E, 215, 226
Anagenesis, 219 Baconian creed, decline of, 230
Analects, 50-52, 105-106, 189-190 Baldwin, J.M., 201
Analytic geometry, 142 Barber of Seville paradox, 9
Analytic propositions, 156 Behaviorists, 110-112, 122
Anatma-Vada, 171-172 Bellamy, E., 9
Andronikos, 3 Bentham, J. 47, 55
Angra Mainyu, 60 Berlin, I., 9, 231, 232
Animal experimentation, 89-91 Big Bang and Big Crunch, 165
Animal rights, 88 Biology and complementarity, 256-259
Animals, personhood of, 87-88 Biology of the Ten Commandments, 87
Antinomies (Kantian), 157, 164-166, 200 Black Holes, 199
Antiquities of the Jews, 62 Blameworthiness, 2, 99, 100, 130, 131

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

Bodmer, W., and L. Cavalli-Sforza, 228 Chou dynasty, 50

Bohr, Christian, 254 Christian fundamentalists, 220, 232-233
Bohr, Niels, 1, 3, 7, 10, 11, 16, 236, 238, Christian philosophy, 59
243, 244, 245, 251-259, 261 Christian X, King of Denmark, 252
Bohr's last lecture, 259-260 Christianity, 8, 35, 109
Boltzmann's Constant, 239 Chung (conscientiousness), 51
Bradley, EH., 116 Churchland, P.S., 13, 149
Brain evolution, 195 City of God (St. Augustine), 67
Brain imaging, 147 Civilization, rise of, 21, 65, 177
Brain science, 12, 146 Clayes, G., 9
Brain states, 147, 195 Cloning, 85-86
Brainwashing, 101 Coercion, 47, 48, 101, 130, 131
Breasted, J.H., 25, 34 Compatibilists, 99, 111, 114-116, 122
Broad, C.D., 149 Complementarity, 16, 237, 244, 251
Buddha, [Siddharta Gautama] 5, 49, 50, Condorcet, Marquis de, 168
57, 135, 170, 171 Confucianism, 48-52, 172, 189-190
Buddhism, 48, 91 Confucius, 5, 50-52, 57, 104-106, 227
Buddhist doctrines of Four Noble Truths Consciousness, 22, 147
(dharma) and Five Precepts, 49 Conspiracy of existence, 253
Buechmann, G., 128 Conspiracy of nature, 245, 251, 253
Bush, President George, 147 Constantine the Great, 63
Constraints, 126
California State Board of Education: Copernican Revolution in Philosophy,
Hearings before its Curriculum 158, 171, 172, 178, 254
Commission, 232 'Could-Have-Done-Otherwise,' 127-128
Calvin, J., 111 'Couldn't Have Done Otherwise,'
Campbell, D., 15 128-129
Canaan, 33 Counterenlightenment, 170
Candide, 76 Counterexamples, limitations of, 132-134
Carlyle, T., 121 Critical (Kantian) Idealism, 14, 15,
Carter, President Jimmy, 97 155-156, 158-160, 163, 170, 171,
'Cartesian,' 141 177, 200, 253
Cartesian coordinates, 142 Critique of Pure Reason, 155, 158, 162,
Cartesian physiology, 143-145 253, 254
Categorical imperatives, 55-57 Critique of Practical Reason, 161, 162
Categorical propositions, 159 'Crooked timber of humanity,' 164, 213
Categories of reason, 14 Cuneiform script, 28
Causality, Aristotle, 210
Causation, prescriptive vs. descriptive, D'Alembert, 169
114-115 Damasio, A.H., 147
Chaos, 118-121 Darwin, C., 133, 193, 194, 217
Character traits (Humean), 100 Dawkins, R., 224, 225
Chicago Seven, 182 Dawn of Conscience, 25
China, 5, 48, 52 Dead Sea Scrolls, 62
Chinese science, 54 Decade of the brain, 147
'Choice' and 'responsibility'; Absence De Civilitate, 180, 188
from Analects, 104 Deep Blue Chess Program, 163
Chomsky, N., 145 Deep truths, 1, 3

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 INDEX

Democritus, 197 Epistemology, 41

Dennet, D., 128, 162, 163 Equipartition principle (of thermody-
Deontological morality, 55 namics), 239
Depersonalization, 85 Erasmus, 180
Descartes, R., 14, 83, 87, 141, 153, 167,Ergodic principle, 118
170, 197 Essenes, 62, 63
Desires, first order, 81 Eternal reason, 231
Determinism, 2, 12, 62, 97-99, 107, 109, Ethics, 4, 175, 177
110, 117, 137 Ethology, 15, 88, 217
Determinists, 48 Etiquette, 175-191
Dialectical materialism, 223 Administration of the law, 182
Diderot, 169 Changing rules, 178
Dirac, P., 243 Confucianism, 189-190
Disconfirmation, 132-133 Continuum with ethics, 186-187
Discourse on the Method and Meditations on Guidance of Human Social Behavior,
First Philosophy, 141 181
Dualism, 12, 13, 116, 137 Highway, 180
Augustinian, 141 History of, 177-179
Cartesian substance, 141, 142, 153, Natural and positive rules, 186-187
160, 161, 170 Regulative system, 179
Epistemic, 14, 16, 17, 153, 155, Ritual system, 181, 184-186
160-161, 170, 173 Social evil, 187
Persistence of, 152 Symbolic system, 183-184
Physicalist-mentalist, 137 Eubulides (of Miletus), 7
Platonic, 138 Eudaemonia, 7, 55
Substances vs. attributes, 137 Euphrates, 28
Evodius, 68, 69, 70
Eccles, J., 151 Evolutionary epistemology, 15, 194, 201,
Eden, Garden of, 39, 170 223, 255
Edwards, J., 111-113 Evolutionism and Creationism in the
Egypt, Ancient, 5, 22-28 schools, 232-234
Chronology, 22 Exchange of energy between light and
First Interregnum, 25 matter, 238
Hieroglyphic writing, 23 Exculpations, 99, 102, 103, 130, 131
Hyksos 26, 34 Excuses, 99, 100, 130
Middle Kingdom, 25 Exodus, 2, 33, 34, 37
New Kingdom, 26
Old Kingdom, 23, 25 Fall of Man, 39, 61, 66, 170, 220
Religion, 23-24, 37 Ferm, V., 19
Second Interregnum, 26 Fermat's Last Theorem, 133
Einstein, A., 197-198, 242 Fertile Crescent, 28-29
Electrons, 121, 199 Feyerabend, P.K., 220
Eliade, M., 19 Feynman, R., R.B. Leighton, and M.
Emile, 201 Sands, 245
Enlightenment, 39, 47, 55, 76, 168, Fingarette, H., 172
169-170 Fischer, J., 128
Epiphenomenalism, 149 Fitness (Darwinian), 221
Epistemic dualism, 253, 255 Flavius, Josephus, 62

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

Flood (Myth), 30 History and its Dynamics, 120-121

Folse, H.J., 254 Alexander, Tsar, 121
Foreknowlege of the future, 8 Carlyle, T., 121
Form (of the Good), 6, 7, 8, 44 "Great Man" theory, 121
Forms (Platonic), 6, 7, 14, 19, 79, 97, 138 Hegel, G.FH., 121
Frankfurt, H., 81, 82, 91, 129-134 Linear and non-linear dynamics, 120
Frankfurt's counterexample, 129 Mandelbrot, B., 120
Free will, 1, 3, 12, 13, 62, 67, 69, 96, 110, Napoleon (Bonaparte), 120-121
112, 113, 116, 138, 141, 150, 155, Prediction of future events and retro-
159, 162, 170, 175, 259 diction of past events, 120
Freedom of action, constraints on, Tolstoy, L.N., 120-21
125-127 War and Peace, 120
French, A.P., 254 Hitler, A., 4
Freud, S., 2, 34, 36, 112, 225 Hobbes, T., 114
Fujimoto, Reverend Hogan, 233-234 Hoffding, H., 234
Homo sapiens, 5, 15, 79, 84, 87, 216, 217,
218, 253
Galen, 12, 140
Hook, S., 3
Galileo, 54, 199, 210, 215
Hopi Indians, 185, 227
Gates, J.A., 10
Horus, 23
Genesis, 29, 61, 90
Genetic determination of human
Hugo, V., 100
Human social behavior, genetic
behavior, 223
determination of, 223
Genetic drift, 133
Hume, D., 56, 100, 114-116, 208
Genetic epistemology, 15, 201-213, 221,
Hunter-gatherers, 21
223
Huygens, C., 238
Geological evolution, 221
Hypothetical imperative, 55-57
Ghost in the machine, 149
Huxley, J., 218
God, 5, 8, 9, 30, 35, 37, 38, 59, 62,
67-71, 76, 90, 109, 112, 152,
Idealism, 6, 14, 111, 156, 171
165-169, 193, 220, 251
Identity definition (of personhood),
G6del, K., 10 79-80, 84, 85, 87, 149
Gospels, 66
Immaterialists, 111-113
Graves (Burials), 20
Incest taboo, 133
Greece, 2, 5
Inclusive fitness, 222
Grelling, K., 9
Incompatibilists, 99
Indeterminism (in quantum physics), 121
Hamilton, W., 222 Indeterminism (or unpredictability), first
Hammurabi, 32 and second stage, 118
Hart, H.L.A., 95 Induction (logical), 208
Hegel, G.EH., 121 Insanity, 84, 102-104
Heiberg, P.A., 1 Intelligible world, 14
Heisenberg, W., 243 Interactionism, 150-152
Heloise, 71 Isis, 23, 28
Heredity and Intelligence, 227, 229 Israel (nation), 33-39
Heterological words, 9 Israelites, 27, 37
Hilbert, D., 10
Hippo, 71 Jacob (alias 'Israel'), 33

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 INDEX

Jen (virtue), 51, 105, 190 Malinowski, B., 227

Jesus (Christ), 64, 66, 67, 74 Mandelbrot, B., 118, 120
Josephus Flavius, 62 Mani, 60, 61
Juno, 28 Manicheanism, 60, 64
Jupiter, 28 Mankind in God's image, 38
Justifications, 99 Manners, 175
Marduk, 30, 32, 109
Ka, 23 Mars, 28
Kant and Bohr, 253-256 Materialism, 6
Kant, I., 1, 2, 4, 7, 11, 14, 15, 16, 55, 57, 71, Mcdonald, C., 150
79, 153-173, 196, 197, 200, 208, 225 McNeil, W., 5, 33
Kasparov, Gary, 132 Mayr, E., 221
Kennedy, P.J., 254 Maxwell, J.C., 238-239
Khaybet (shadow), 24 Mental illness, 104
Khu (intelligence), 24 Mentalist statements, 12
Khur, V., 1 Mercer, S.A.B., 23
Kierkegaard, S., 1, 10, 11 Mesocosm, 196
Kin selection theory, 222, 225 Mesopotamia, 28
King David, 132 Messianism, 25
Kleptomania, 102,103 Metaphorical slippage, 224
Kristina, Queen of Sweden, 141 Metaphysics, 3
Kuhn, T., 220 Microcosm, 121, 196
Kuhr, V., 1 Miletus, 41
Mind-body problem, 12, 13, 39, 137-143,
Laissez-faire capitalism, 218 148-153,253
Lao-Tzu, 5, 52-54, 57, 135, 252 Monica, Santa, 63, 64
Laplace, Pierre Simon de, 110, 122 Monism, Aristotelian, 140, 149, 150
Leibniz, G.W., 60, 76, 158 Monism, modern, 13, 148
Lejeune, J., 83, 84 Monotheism, 8, 26, 34
Les Miserables, 100 Moore, G.E., 219
Li (ritual), 51, 106, 190 Moral/nonnatural realm, 162
Liar's Paradox, 7, 9 Moral responsibility (paradox of), 8, 12,
Libertarians, 48, 113 13, 30, 75, 82, 98-100, 104, 107,
Life after death, 20, 24 109-112, 121, 137-138, 153
Light and matter, exchange of energy Moral responsibility (rejection of the
between them, 238-242 concept), 3
Logic, 41 Moral vice, 217
Lomasky, L.E., 79, 92 Moral virtue, 217-219
Lorenz, K., 15, 194, 217, 222 Morals, 4, 5, 175, 216
Luther, M., 124, 128 More, Thomas, 9
Lyceum, 44 Morris, D., 218
Moses, 8, 34, 36
M'Naghten rule, 103 Moses and Monotheism, 34
Maat, 23 'Multiplicative commutability,' 244
Machiavelli, N., 9, 230-231 Murti, T.R.V., 171
MacKay, D., 151-152, 245
Macrocosm, 195 Napoleon (Bonaparte), 120-121, 166
Maimonides, Moses, 73 Natural constraints, 126

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

Natural law, 109 Equilibrium, 202

Natural/amoral realm, 14 Formal operational stage, 206
Naturalistic fallacy, 219, 220 operational stage, 204
Natural selection, 15, 173, 218, 219 Sensorimotor stage, 204
Needham, J., 54 Time and space, 206
Neurophilosophy, 13 Planck's constant, 241
Newton, I., 14, 110, 158, 208, 238 Planck's distribution formula, 241
Nicomachean Ethics, 45, 47, 130-131 Planck, Marga, 260
Nietzsche, E, 76, 255 Planck, Max, 241-242, 260-261
Nile, Valley, 22, 28 Plato, 5, 12, 43, 44, 57, 79, 111, 232
Nirvana, 49 Plutarch, 88
Noble eightfold path, 49 Polis, 46
Non-natural/moral realm, 15 Popper, K.G., 151
Noumena, 14, 158, 159 Praiseworthiness, 2
Novum Organon, 215 Predestination, 111
Predictability, 117
O'Connor, D., 11, 114 Prehistoric mankind, 19
Ontology, 41 Prince Electors (at Worms), 128
Original position, 57 Protestant Christian Fundamentalists,
Osiris, 23, 28, 35 220
Ptolemies, 27
Pais, A., 254 Pure practical reason, 4, 15, 160, 161,
Palestine, 33 162, 166, 167, 173, 175, 176, 181,
Pangea, 222 211, 213, 216, 237, 253, 254, 261
Parable of the Cave, 43 Pure reason, 159, 161, 164, 194, 223
Paradoxes, 7, 10 Pure theoretical reason, 15, 161, 162,
Paradoxes of Quantum Physics, 237-238 165, 166, 173, 196, 197, 199, 211,
Paul, St., 62 213, 216, 237, 253, 254, 255, 260,
Peel, Sir Robert, 103 261
Persons Pyramid texts, 23
Actual and potential, 91-92 Pythagoras, 88
Identity definition, 79-80
Psychological definition, 80 Quantized Bohr atom, 243
Second-order volitions definition, 81 Quantum physics, 121, 237-242
Slaves, natural, 85
Uniqueness of, 85-86 Radner, D. and M. Radner, 88
Pharaoh, 23 Rank, 0., 2, 34
Pharisees, 62 Ranke, L. von, 128
Phenomena, 14, 158 Rawls, J., 57
Photoelectric effect, discovery of the Rayleigh's distribution formula, 239
photon, 242 Re (Egyptian god), 23
Physicalist statements, 12 Reagan, President Ronald, 226
Piaget, J., genetic epistemology, 15, Red in tooth and claw, 218
201-212 Relativity theory, 197-198
Accommodation, 203 Religion and Science, 260-261
Assimilation, 202 Ren, 24
Cardinal numbers, 205 Res cogitans, 142
Concrete operational stage, 205 Res extensa, 142

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 INDEX

Responsibility, moral, 2, 95-97 Tao, 52, 104-105

Retrodiction, 11, 117 Taoism, 48-54
Rock paintings, 20 Tao-te-ching, 52-53
Roman Catholic Church, 73 Ten commandments, 106
Roosevelt, ED., 127 Tennyson, A., 218
R6seberg, U., 254 Theodicy, 8, 30, 49, 59-60, 64-65, 73, 77
Rousseau, J.J., 201 Theory of forms, 45
Russell, Bertrand, 9 Three teachings, 5, 48, 49, 135
Rutherford, E., 243 Tigris, 28
Ryle, Gilbert, 149 Tolstoy, L.N., 120-121
Torah, 2, 29, 32, 33, 37, 38, 59, 61, 67,
Sacred Way of Life [Tao], 50-52 106, 152
Sacred, theoretical Way (of Torsting, E., 1
Confucianism), 53 Tree of knowledge, 39
Sadduccees, 62 True indeterminism in quantum physics,
Sahara, 22 121
Sakhem, 24 Tu, W., 49
Satan, 64
Schr6dinger, E., 243 Ultraviolet catastrophe, 241, 242
Scientism, hard core and soft core, 216
Uncertainty Principle, 243, 244, 250
Scientism, limits, 229, 230
Unpredictability, 118
Scientism, rise of, 215
'Upright' Kung, 105-106
Scopes Monkey trial, 232 Ur, 33
Self and its Brain, 152 Utilitarian morality, 47, 55, 89
Selfish genes, 224
Utility of objectively false beliefs, 227
Selfishness, 224
Utopia, 9, 232
Self-referential paradoxes, 9
Shu (obligations), 51, 190
Sinai, 34, 37 Valjean, Jean, 100
Skinner, B.E, 111 Van Inwagen, P., 127, 128
Social Darwinism, 218, 221 Vegetarianism, 88
Sociobiology, 222 Veil of ignorance, 57
Socrates, 5, 41, 42, 57 Visual perception, 143
Socratic dialogue, 42 Visualizability, 198-200
Sorrel T., 216 Vital force, 257

Soul, 2, 5, 38 Vitalism, 258

Spencer, H., 218, 221 Voice of the Dolphin, 226
Volitions, second order, 81
Stalin, J., 4
Volkenstein, M., 117
Star Wars Strategic Defense Initiative, 226
Statuettes, 20 Voltaire, 76
Stefan-Boltzmann law, 239-240
Sumer, 28-32, 109 Waddington, C.H., 218, 219
Summa theologica (Aquinas), 74, 75 Wantons, 81
Susa, 32 War and Peace, 120
Sweden, 91 Watson, J. and EH.C. Crick, 259
Synthetic propositions, 156 Wave-particle antinomy of the nature of
Szasz, T., 104 light, 242
Szilard, L., 226 Way without crossroads, 140

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 PARADOXES OF FREE WILL

Wickler, W., 217 Yahweh, 34, 36

Wien's law, 239, 240 Yin and Yang, 252
Williams, B., 4
Wilson, E.O., 222-224 Zarathustra (Zoroaster), 60
Wittgenstein, L., 252 Zeno (of Elea), 7
Wootton, Barbara, 104 Zombies, 11

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