what is the relationship between freedom and responsibility essay

What is the Relationship between Freedom and Responsibility?

There is an intimate relationship between freedom and responsibility, because responsibility assumes that the individual can have freedom of action and decision. Therefore, freedom necessarily leads to responsibility.

Freedom is the power of choice that individuals have in society, while responsibility is the attitude of the person to respond for the actions he chooses freely.

They are two parallel concepts that, at the same time, go hand in hand, because one leads to the other. This means that freedom can become a subject of responsibility. People are responsible for their actions in principle, because they decide on them and are their cause.

To analyze how the two concepts are related, it is convenient to be clear about their meaning.

What is freedom?

The dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy (DRAE) offers the following definition of the term freedom:

It is the"natural faculty that man has to act in one way or another, and not to act, so he is responsible for his actions."

But this freedom is not absolute, because generally the person is conditioned by other elements that regulate their performance, such as coercion, fear, violence, ignorance, culture, social norms and conventions, psychic disorders, among others.

The human being enjoys several types of freedom:

Internal freedom or free will

It is the choice that the individual makes when deciding with self-determination between good and bad.

Freedom of action or external action

It is the freedom of action, without impediments or physical, social, cultural, economic or legal constraints.

What is the responsibility?

The DRAE also defines responsibility in two senses. In response to an unlawful conduct, which would be"debt, obligation to repair and satisfy, by itself or by another person, as a result of a crime, fault or other legal cause."

In a second sense, it defines it as a response to a given action; that is, the"existing capacity in every active subject of law to recognize and accept the consequences of a freely realized fact."

Every person is immersed in a circle of responsibility to which he must respond for his actions. This circle is composed of the person himself, his family, the social group or work and society.

Freedom and responsibility

As we can see, the concepts of freedom and responsibility are closely related. For a person to be responsible for his actions, it is indispensable that he can have freedom of action, with no limitations other than his own conscience and moral values.

Therefore, it is considered that the mentally ill, children, and animals are not responsible for their actions, because they do not have full consciousness or lack the use of reason.

The Irish writer George Bernard Shaw summed up the relationship of both concepts of life in one sentence:"Freedom means responsibility. That is why most men fear him."

For his part, the Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater points out that:"We are not free to choose what happens to us", or what we are or have as people (ugly, beautiful, poor, rich, sick), but" to what happens to us in such and such a way,"either by obeying or through resignation.

In summary, it can be affirmed that in the absence of individual freedom there is no responsibility, nor is it possible to preserve freedom without responsibility, derived from individual moral regulations and from the Law itself.

• Stahl, Bernd Carsten. Responsible Management of Information Systems. The Montfort University, UK. Idea Group Publishing, 2004. Retrieved from books.google.co.
• Russel, Paul. Freedom & Moral Sentiment. Oxford University Press, 1995. GoogleBooks
• Lee, Dwight R. Liberty and Individual Responsibility. Fundation for economic education. Consulted from fee.org
• Responsibility and Freedom. Digital Public School. University of the Punta. Retrieved on October 3, 2007 from contentsdigitales.ulp.edu.ar
• Freedom. Consulted from dle.rae.es
• A Republic, If You Can Keep It. Consulted by governingprinciples.wordpress.com
• Freedom and Responsibility. Consulted from ucsc.cl

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Hume on Free Will

But to proceed in this reconciling project with regard to the question of liberty and necessity; the most contentious question of metaphysics, the most contentious science… —David Hume (EU 8.23/95)

It is widely accepted that David Hume’s contribution to the free will debate is one of the most influential statements of the “compatibilist” position, where this is understood as the view that human freedom and moral responsibility can be reconciled with (causal) determinism. Hume’s arguments on this subject are found primarily in the sections titled “Of liberty and necessity”, as first presented in A Treatise of Human Nature (2.3.1–2) and, later, in a slightly amended form, in the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (sec. 8). Although both contributions share the same title, there are, nevertheless, some significant differences between them. This includes, for example, some substantial additions in the Enquiry discussion as it relates to problems of religion, such as predestination and divine foreknowledge. These differences should not, however, be exaggerated. Hume’s basic strategy and compatibilist commitments remain much the same in both works.

This article will be arranged around a basic contrast between two alternative interpretations of Hume’s compatibilist strategy: the “classical” and “naturalistic” interpretations. According to the classical account, Hume’s effort to articulate the conditions of moral responsibility, and the way they relate to the free will problem, should be understood primarily in terms of his views about the logic of the concepts of “liberty” and “necessity”. In contrast with this, the naturalistic approach maintains that what is essential to Hume’s account of the nature and conditions of responsible conduct is his description of the role that moral sentiment plays in this sphere. How we interpret Hume’s core arguments relating to the free will debate must be understood, on this view, with reference to these psychological claims and concerns (which also accounts for the use of the label “naturalism” in this context). On either account, the contrast between these two interpretations will be of importance, not only for our general understanding of Hume’s philosophical system, but also for any adequate assessment of the contemporary value and relevance of Hume’s views on this subject.

The first two sections of this article present and contrast the classical and naturalistic interpretations. Hume’s views on causation and necessity are highly relevant to both these interpretations. The following three sections sections consider the contemporary significance of Hume’s contribution, particularly as interpreted by the naturalistic account. The sixth and final section examines the relevance of Hume’s views on free will for matters of religion.

• 1. Liberty and Necessity – The Classical Reading

2. Free Will and Moral Sentiment – The Naturalistic Reading

3. hume’s naturalism and strawson’s “reconciling project”, 4. virtue, luck and “the morality system”, 5. moral sense and moral capacity, 6. free will and the problem of religion, references to hume’s works, secondary literature, a brief guide to further reading, other internet resources, related entries, 1. “liberty and necessity” – the classical reading.

For many years the established view of Hume has been that he is a principal and founding figure of classical compatibilism, as located in the empiricist philosophical tradition that stretches from Hobbes, through Hume, on to Mill, Russell, Schlick and Ayer. Classical compatibilists believe, with libertarians, that we need some adequate theory of what free action is, where this is understood as providing the relevant conditions of moral agency and responsibility. Compatibilists, however, reject the view that free action requires the falsity of determinism or that an action cannot be both free and causally necessitated by antecedent conditions. According to the classical compatibilist strategy, not only is freedom compatible with causal determinism, the absence of causation and necessity would make free and responsible action impossible. A free action is an action caused by the agent, whereas an unfree action is caused by some other, external cause. Whether an action is free or not depends on the type of cause, not on the absence of causation and necessity. An uncaused action would be entirely capricious and random and could not be attributed to any agent, much less interpreted as a free and responsible act. Understood this way, the classical compatibilist strategy involves an attempt to explain and describe the logic of our concepts relating to issues of freedom and determinism. It is primarily concerned with conceptual issues rather than with any empirical investigations into our human moral psychology. On the classical interpretation this is how Hume’s core arguments should be understood.

As Hume’s title “Of liberty and necessity” makes plain there are two key ideas in play are “liberty” (freedom) and “necessity” (causation and determinism). In his Abstract of the Treatise Hume emphasizes that his “reasoning puts the whole [free-will] controversy in a new light, by giving a new definition of necessity” (T Abs. 34/ 661). Despite this, the classical interpretation places heavy weight on the significance of his views on the nature of liberty as the relevant basis for explaining Hume’s position on this subject. The strategy that Hume follows, according to this reading, is much the same as that which was pursued by Hobbes. It is the distinction between two kinds of liberty that is, on this account, especially important. Hume’s views on liberty in the Treatise are not, however, entirely consistent with his later views as presented in the Enquiry .

In the Treatise Hume distinguishes between two kinds of liberty.

Few are capable of distinguishing betwixt the liberty of spontaneity , as it is call’d in the schools, and the liberty of indifference ; betwixt that which is oppos’d to violence, and that which means a negation of necessity and causes. The first is even the most common sense of the word; and as ’tis only that species of liberty, which it concerns us to preserve, our thoughts have been principally turn’d towards it, and have almost universally confounded it with the other. (T 2.3.2.1/407–8)

Liberty of spontaneity involves an agent being able to act according to her own willings and desires, unhindered by external obstacles which might constrain or restrict her conduct (e.g., the walls or bars of a prison [T 2.3.1.17/406]). This kind of liberty does not imply an absence of causation and necessity, unless we incorrectly assume that what is caused is somehow compelled or forced to occur. In the Enquiry Hume drops the distinction between two kinds of liberty and instead provides an account of what he calls “hypothetical liberty” (EU 8.23/95). A liberty of this kind involves “a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will ; that is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may; if we choose to move, we also may.” According to Hume this sort of hypothetical liberty is “universally allowed to belong to every one, who is not a prisoner and in chains” (ibid.). Although Hume is committed to the existence of both liberty of spontaneity and hypothetical liberty, they are not the same. A person may enjoy liberty of spontaneity and act according to the determinations of her own will, and still lack hypothetical liberty. If she chose otherwise her action might still be obstructed (e.g., as with a person who chooses to remain in a room but could not leave if she chose to because the door is locked).

In the Treatise Hume tends to identify liberty with indifference rather than spontaneity and even suggests “that liberty and chance are synonimous” (T 2.3.2.8/412; cf. T 2.3.1.18/407; but see also EU 8.25/96). For this reason he presents his arguments as aiming to show that liberty, so understood ( qua indifference), is, if not contradictory, “directly contrary to experience” (T 2.3.1.18/407). In placing emphasis on this negative task of refuting “the doctrine of liberty or chance ” (T 2.3.2.7/412), Hume is happy to present himself as coming down firmly on the side of “the doctrine of necessity” (T 2.3.2.3/409), which he is careful to define in a way that avoids any confusion between causation and compulsion or force (as is explained in more detail below). The account that Hume offers in the Enquiry strikes a more balanced note. In this work Hume presents his position as not so much a refutation of “the doctrine of liberty” or “free-will” (T 2.3.1.18/407; cf. T 2.1.10.5/312), but rather as a “reconciling project with regard to the question of liberty and necessity” (EU 8.23/95; although even in the Enquiry his references to liberty are not uniformly to spontaneity). Although these differences should be noted, it is important not to exaggerate them. In the Treatise Hume makes clear that liberty of spontaneity is “the most common sense of the word” and the “only… species of liberty, which it concerns us to preserve” (T 2.3.2.1/407–8). It is evident, therefore, that there is also a “reconciling project” implicit in the Treatise and that his arguments against “the doctrine of liberty” remain tightly focused on liberty of indifference.

In both the Treatise and the Enquiry Hume claims that the most original or interesting part of his contribution to free will rests with his definition or understanding of what we mean by necessity (T 2.3.1.18, 2.3.2.4/407, 409–10; see also EU 8.1–3, 8.21–25/80–81, 92–96). It is this issue, Hume claims, that has been the primary obstacle to resolving this controversy. According to Hume there are “two particulars, which we are to consider as essential to necessity, viz. the constant union and the inference of the mind; and wherever we discover these we must acknowledge a necessity” (T 2.3.1.4/400). In order to explain this, Hume begins with a description of causation and necessity as we observe it in “the operations of external bodies” (T 2.3.1.3/399) or in “the actions of matter” (T Abs. 34/ 661). Here we find “not the least traces of indifference or liberty” and we can see that “[e]very object is determin’d by an absolute fate” (T 2.3.1.3/400). What this means, Hume explains, is that we discover that there exist constant conjunctions of objects, whereby resembling objects of one kind are uniformly followed by resembling objects of another kind (e.g., Xs are uniformly followed by Ys). (See, in particular, T 1.3; T Abs. 8–9, 24–26/649–50, 655–57; and also EU 4 and 7). When we experience regularities of this sort we are able to draw relevant inferences, and we deem objects of the first kind causes and those of the second kind their effects.

The crucial point, on Hume’s account, is that we can discover no further “ ultimate connexion ” (T 1.3.6.11/91) between cause and effect beyond our experience of their regular union. There is no perceived or known power or energy in a cause such that we could draw any inference to its effect or by which the cause compels or forces its effect to occur (T 1.3.12.20, 1.3.14.4–7/139, 157–59). Nevertheless, on the basis of our experience of regularities or constant conjunctions of objects, the mind, on the appearance of the first object, naturally draws an inference to that of the other (T 1.3.14.20–22, 31/164–66, 169–70; cf. EU 7.28–29/75–77). In other words, our experience of regularities serves as the basis upon which we can draw inferences to the existence of an object on the appearance of another. All that we find of causation and necessity in bodies or matter, Hume argues, is this conjunction of like objects along with the inference of the mind from one to the other. The relevant question, therefore, is do we find similar features in the operations of human action?

Our experience, Hume maintains, proves that “our actions have a constant union with our motives, tempers, and circumstances” and that we draw relevant inferences from one to the other on this basis (T 2.3.1.4/401). Although there are some apparent irregularities in both the natural and the moral realms, this is entirely due to the influence of contrary or concealed causes of which we are ignorant (T 2.3.1.11–12/403–4; cf. EU 8.15/88).

[T]he union betwixt motives and actions has the same constancy, as that in any natural operations, so its influence on the understanding is also the same, in determining us to infer the existence of one from that of another. If this shall appear, there is no known circumstance, that enters into the connexion and production of the actions of matter, that is not to be found in all the operations of the mind; and consequently we cannot, without a manifest absurdity, attribute necessity to the one, and refuse it to the other. (T 2.3.1.14/404)

In support of this claim Hume cites various regularities that we observe in human society, where class, sex, occupation, age, and other such factors are seen to be reliably correlated with different motives and conduct (T 2.3.1.5–10/401–3). Regularities of this kind make it possible for us to draw the sorts of inferences that are needed for human social life, such as in all our reasoning concerning business, politics, war, and so on (T 2.3.1.15/405; EU 8.17–18/89–90). In the absence of necessity, so understood, we could not survive or live together.

Hume goes on to argue that not only is necessity of this kind essential to human society, it is also “essential to religion and morality” (T 2.3.2.5 410), because of its relevance to the foundations of responsibility and punishment. If the motives of rewards and punishments had no uniform and reliable influence on conduct then law and society would be impossible (ibid.; cp. EU 8.28/ 97–98; see also T 3.3.4.4/609). Beyond this, whether we consider human or divine rewards and punishments, the justice of such practices depends on the fact that the agent has produced or brought about these actions through her own will. The “doctrine of liberty or chance,” however, would remove this connection between agent and action and so no one could be properly held accountable for their conduct (T 2.3.2.6/411). It is, therefore, “only upon the principles of necessity, that a person acquires any merit or demerit from his actions, however the common opinion may incline to the contrary” (ibid.; EU 8.31/99). Read this way, Hume is mostly restating a claim found in many other compatibilist accounts, that necessity (determinism) is needed to support a generally forward-looking, utilitarian theory of moral responsibility and punishment.

Why, then is there so much resistance to “the doctrine of necessity”? The principal explanation for this resistance to “the doctrine of necessity” is found, according to Hume, in confusion about the nature of necessity as we discover it in matter . Although in ordinary life we all rely upon and reason upon the principles of necessity there may well be some reluctance to call this union and inference necessity.

But as long as the meaning is understood, I hope the word can do no harm.… I may be mistaken in asserting, that we have no idea of any other connexion in the actions of body.… But sure I am, I ascribe nothing to the actions of the mind, but what must readily be allow’d of.… I do not ascribe to the will that unintelligible necessity, which is suppos’d to lie in matter. But I ascribe to matter, that intelligible quality, call it necessity or not, which the most rigorous orthodoxy does or must allow to belong to the will. I change, therefore, nothing in the receiv’d systems, with regard to the will, but only with regard to material objects. (T 2.3.2.4/410; cp. EU 8.22/93–94)

The supposition that there is some further power or energy in matter, whereby causes somehow compel or force their effects to occur, is the fundamental source of confusion on this issue. It is this that encourages us to reject the suggestion that our actions are subject to necessity on the ground that this would imply some kind of violence or constraint – something that would be incompatible with liberty of spontaneity. When confusions of this sort are removed, all that remains is the verbal quibble about using the term “necessity” – which is not itself a substantial point of disagreement.

Hume’s suggestion that our ideas of causation and necessity should be understood in terms of constant conjunction of objects and the inference of the mind became a central thread of the classical compatibilist position. A key element of this is his diagnosis of the source of incompatibilism as rooted in a confusion between causation and compulsion. What are we to make of this aspect of the compatibilist strategy? The first thing we need to consider is how this argument stands in relation to the other compatibilist arguments already described? We may begin by noting that Hume’s strategy, as built around his “new definition of necessity” (TA, 34/661), appears to concede that a stronger metaphysical “tie” or “bond” between cause and effect would indeed “imply something of force, violence, and constraint”. From the perspective of the (core) compatibilist argument, as developed around the notion of “liberty of spontaneity” and “hypothetical liberty”, this is a basic mistake. The distinction that is crucial to the original argument is that between actions that have causes that are internal to the agent (i.e., motives and desires of some relevant kind) and those that have external causes. It is the latter that are compelled or constrained actions (such as we find in the case of the prisoner who is in chains: EU 8.23/95). This crucial distinction between actions that are brought about through the agent’s motives and desires and those that are not is not compromised by “metaphysical” (non-regularity) accounts of causation. What is relevant to whether an action was compelled or not is the nature of the cause (i.e., the object), not the nature of the causal relation . Hume’s argument relating to the advantages of his “new definition of necessity” directly challenges this – so one or other of these two claims must be abandoned.

Another crucial claim of the original strategy was that if an agent is to be (justly) held responsible for her actions then she must be causally connected to them in the right way. Hume’s “new definition of necessity” presents some awkward problems for this requirement. More specifically, it may be argued that if we remove “metaphysical” necessity of any kind from our conception of the causal relation, and all objects are “entirely loose and separate... conjoined but never connected ” (EU 7.26/73–4 – Hume’s emphasis), Hume’s own form of compatibilism is vulnerable to the same objection that he raised against the suggestion that free actions are uncaused . That is to say, a mere regular conjunction between events cannot serve to adequately connect the agent with her action. Hume’s theory of causation, therefore, threatens to saw off the compatibilist branch that he is sitting on.

Apart from these “internal” difficulties among Hume’s core arguments, it may also be questioned whether Hume’s alternative account of causation serves to allay or diffuse other (and deeper) worries that libertarians and incompatibilists may have about his proposed “reconciliation”. What libertarians seek – particularly but not exclusively in the 18th c. context – is an account of moral agency that rests with agents who possess active powers of some kind such that they have genuine open alternatives in the same (causal) conditions. Related to this, libertarians also insist on making a distinction between agents who can intervene in the natural causal order and, on the other side, beings who are simply part of the natural causal order and fully integrated within it. Real agency requires the causal series to begin with the agent, not to run through the agent. Hume’s revisionary “new definitions” of causation and necessity satisfies none of these fundamental concerns or requirements. Although Hume suggests that “a few intelligible definitions” should immediately put an end to this controversy (EU 8.2/81), he must have been well aware that he was far from providing the sort of metaphysical resources that libertarians are seeking or satisfying the demands that they place on free, responsible moral agency.

Hume also advances two other explanations for resistance to “the doctrine of necessity”. One of these concerns religion, which we discuss further below. The other concerns, what we might describe as the phenomenology of agency and the way in which it seems to discredit Hume’s necessitarian claims. Hume concedes that when we consider our actions from the agent’s perspective (i.e., the first person perspective) we have “ a false sensation or experience even of the liberty of indifference” (T 2.3.2.2/408 – Hume’s emphasis; cf. EU 8.22n18/94n). The basis of this is that when we are acting we may not experience any “determination of thought” whereby we infer the action to be performed. However, from the spectator’s (third person) perspective the situation is quite different. The spectator will “seldom feel such a looseness and indifference” and will reliably infer actions from an agent’s motives and character. For this reason, although when we act we may find it hard to accept that “we were govern’d by necessity, and that ’twas utterly impossible for us to have acted otherwise” (T 2.3.2.1/407), the spectator’s perspective shows that this is simply a “false sensation”. Put another way, the agent perspective may encourage the view that the future is “open” with respect to how we will act but this supposition is contradicted by the opposing spectator perspective, which is generally reliable. It is worth adding that this claim is consistent with Hume’s account in the Enquiry of “hypothetical liberty”. There is no contradiction between a spectator being able to reliably infer how an agent will act and the fact that how that agent will act depends on how he wills in these circumstances.

The above interpretation suggests that Hume’s primary aim in his discussion “Of liberty and necessity” is to defend an account of moral freedom understood in terms of “liberty of spontaneity”. Our tendency to confuse this form of liberty with indifference is a result of a mistaken understanding of the nature of causation and necessity. The significance of Hume’s contribution, on this interpretation, rests largely with his application of his “new definition of necessity” to this issue. All this is, in turn, generally consistent with arguments by leading representatives of classical compatibilism who came after Hume (viz. Mill, Russell, Schlick, Ayer, et al). If this is an accurate and complete account of Hume’s approach then it is liable to all the objections that have been levelled against the classical compatibilist view.

The first and most obvious of these objections is that “liberty of spontaneity” is a wholly inadequate conception of moral freedom. Kant, famously, describes this account of moral freedom as a “wretched subterfuge” and suggests that a freedom of this kind belongs to a clock that moves its hands by means of internal causes. If our will is itself determined by antecedent natural causes, then we are no more accountable for our actions than any other mechanical object whose movements are internally conditioned. Individuals who enjoy nothing more than a liberty of this nature are, the incompatibilist claims, little more than “robots” or “puppets” subject to the play of fate. This general line of criticism, targeted against any understanding of moral freedom in terms of “spontaneity”, leads directly to two further important criticisms.

The incompatibilist maintains that if our willings and choices are themselves determined by antecedent causes then we could never choose otherwise than we do. Given the antecedent causal conditions, we must always act as we do. We cannot, therefore, be held responsible for our conduct since, on this account, we have no “genuine alternatives” or “open possibilities” available to us. Incompatibilists, as already noted, do not accept that Hume’s notion of “hypothetical liberty”, as presented in the Enquiry , can deal with this objection. It is true, of course, that hypothetical liberty leaves room for the truth of conditionals that suggest that we could have acted otherwise if we had chosen to do so. However, it still remains the case, the incompatibilist argues, that the agent could not have chosen otherwise given the actual circumstances. Responsibility, they claim, requires categorical freedom to choose otherwise in the same circumstances. Hypothetical freedom alone will not suffice. One way of expressing this point in more general terms is that the incompatibilist holds that for responsibility we need more than freedom of action, we also need freedom of will – understood as a power to choose between open alternatives. Failing this, the agent has no ultimate control over her conduct.

Hume’s effort to draw a distinction between free and unfree (i.e., compelled) action itself rests on a distinction between internal and external causes. Critics of compatibilism argue that this – attractively simple – distinction is impossible to maintain. It seems obvious, for example, that there are cases in which an agent acts according to the determinations of his own will but is nevertheless clearly unfree. There are, in particular, circumstances in which an agent may be subject to, and act on, desires and wants that are themselves compulsive in nature (e.g., as with a drug addict or kleptomaniac). Desires and wants of this kind, it is claimed, limit and undermine an agent’s freedom no less than external force and violence. Although it may be true that in these circumstances the agent is acting according to his own desires or willings, it is equally clear that such an agent is neither free nor responsible for his behavior. It would appear, therefore, that we are required to acknowledge that some causes “internal” to the agent may also be regarded as compelling or constraining. This concession, however, generates serious difficulties for the classical compatibilist strategy. It is no longer evident, given this concession, which “internal” causes should be regarded as “constraining” or “compelling” and which should not. Lying behind this objection is the more fundamental concern that the spontaneity argument presupposes a wholly inadequate understanding of the nature of excusing and mitigating considerations.

Finally, on this reading, Hume is understood as defending an essentially forward-looking and utilitarian account of moral responsibility. Following thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, Hume points out that rewards and punishments serve to cause people to act in some ways and not in others, which is clearly a matter of considerable social utility (T 2.3.2.5/410; EU 8.2897–98). This sort of forward-looking, utilitarian account of responsibility has been further developed by a number of other compatibilists with whom Hume is often closely identified (e.g., Moritz Schlick and J.J.C. Smart). Forward-looking, utilitarian accounts of responsibility of this kind have been subject to telling criticism. The basic problem with any account of this kind, incompatibilists have argued, is that they are entirely blind to matters of desert and so lack the required (backward-looking) retributive element that is required in this sphere. Moreover, any theory of responsibility of this kind, critics say, is both too wide and too narrow. It is too wide because it would appear to make children and animals responsible; and it is too narrow because it implies that those who are dead and beyond the reach of the relevant forms of “treatment” are actually responsible for their actions. For all these reasons, critics argue, we should reject compatibilist theories constructed along the lines of these distinctions.

What we need to ask now is to what extent the classical interpretation serves to capture the essentials of Hume’s position on this subject? From the perspective of the alternative naturalistic reading there are two fundamental flaws in the classical reading:

First, and foremost, the classical reading fails to provide any proper account of the role of moral sentiment in Hume’s understanding of (the nature and conditions) of moral responsibility. Part of the explanation for this is that the classical interpretation treats Hume’s views on free will in isolation from other parts of his philosophical system. In particular, it fails to adequately integrate his discussion of free will with his theory of the passions (T 2.1 and 2.2). We are more vulnerable to this mistake if we rely too heavily on Hume’s discussion “Of liberty and necessity” as presented in the Enquiry .

Second, and related to the first issue, the classical reading suggests an overly simple, if not crude, account of the relationship between freedom and moral responsibility. Whereas the classical account suggests that responsibility may be analyzed directly in terms of free (or voluntary) action, the naturalistic interpretation suggests a very different picture of this relationship. It would not be correct, for example, to interpret Hume as endorsing what J.L. Mackie has called “the straight rule of responsibility”: which is that “an agent is responsible for all and only his intentional actions” (Mackie, 1977): 208; and also 221–2). This is, nevertheless, a view that the classical interpretation encourages.

In order to see where the classical interpretation goes wrong we need to begin with an examination of Hume’s arguments in support of the claim that necessity is essential to morality and that “indifference” would make morality impossible (T 2.3.2.5–7/410–2).

In order to understand the relevance of necessity for the conditions of holding a person responsible we we need to understand the workings of “the regular mechanism” of the indirect passions (DP 6.19). In his discussion of love and hatred Hume says:

One of these suppositions, viz. that the cause of love and hatred must be related to a person or thinking being, in order to produce these passions, is not only probable, but too evident to be contested. Virtue and vice, when consider’d in the abstract… excite no degree of love and hatred, esteem or contempt towards those, who have no relation to them. (T 2.2.1.7/331)

Our virtues and vices are not the only causes of love and hatred. Wealth and property, family and social relations, bodily qualities and attributes may also generate love or hate (T 2.1.2.5; 2.1.7.1–5/279, 294f; DP 2.14–33). It is, nevertheless, our virtues and vices, understood as pleasurable or painful qualities of mind, that are “the most obvious causes of these passions” (T 2.1.7.2/295; cp. 3.1.2.5/473; and also 3.3.1.3/574–5). In this way, by means of the general mechanism of the indirect passions, virtue and vice give rise to that “faint and imperceptible” form of love and hatred which constitutes the moral sentiments. This is essential to all our ascriptions of moral responsibility.

Hume makes clear that it is not actions, as such, that give rise to our moral sentiments but rather our more enduring or persisting character traits (T 2.2.3.4/348–9; and also 3.3.1.4–5/575). The crucial passage in his discussion “Of liberty and necessity” is the following:

Actions are by their very nature temporary and perishing; and where they proceed not from some cause in the characters and disposition of the person, who perform’d them, they infix not themselves upon him, and can neither redound to his honour, if good, nor infamy, if evil. The action itself may be blameable… But the person is not responsible for it; and as it proceeded from nothing in him, that is durable or constant, and leaves nothing of that nature behind it, ‘tis impossible he can, upon its account, become the object of punishment or vengeance. (T 2.3.2.6/411; cp. EU 8.29/98; see also T 3.3.3.4/575: “If any action…”)

Further below, in Book II, Hume expands on these remarks:

‘Tis evident, that when we praise any actions, we regard only the motives that produc’d them, and consider the actions as signs or indications of certain principles in the mind and temper. The external performance has no merit. We must look within to find the moral quality. This we cannot do directly; and therefore fix our attention on actions, as on external signs. But these actions are still consider’d as signs; and the ultimate object of our praise and approbation is the motive, that produc’d them. (T 3.2.1.2/477; cp. 3.2.1.8/479; EU 8.31/99)

In these two passages Hume is making two distinct but related points. First, he maintains that “action”, considered as an “external performance” without any reference to the motive or intention that produced it, is not itself of moral concern. It is, rather, the “internal” cause of the action that arouses our moral sentiments. It is these aspects of action that inform us about the mind and moral character of the agent. Second, the moral qualities of an agent that arouse our moral sentiments must be “durable or constant” – they cannot be “temporary and perishing” in nature in the way actions are. This second condition on the generation of moral sentiment is itself a particular instance of the more general observation that Hume has made earlier on in Book II that the relationship between the quality or feature that gives rise to the indirect passions (i.e., its cause) and the person who is the object of the passion must not be “casual or inconstant” (T 2.1.6.7/293). It is, nevertheless, the first point that is especially important for our present purpose of understanding why necessity is essential to morality.

In order to know anyone’s motives and character we require inference, from their actions to their motives and character (T 2.1.11.3; 3.3.1.7/317, 576). Without knowledge of anyone’s character no sentiment of approbation or blame would be aroused in us. Without inferences moving in this direction – from action to character (as opposed to from character to actions) – no one would be an object of praise or blame and, hence, no one would be regarded as morally responsible. In these circumstances, praising and blaming would be psychologically impossible. Along the same lines, external violence, like liberty of indifference, also makes it impossible to regard someone as an object of praise or blame. When an action is produced by causes external to the agent we are led away from the agent’s character. Clearly, then, actions that are either uncaused or caused by external factors cannot render an agent responsible, not because it would be unreasonable to hold the person responsible, but rather because it would be psychologically impossible to hold the person responsible, where this stance is understood in terms of the operation of the moral sentiments. It is in this way that Hume brings his observations concerning the operation of the indirect passions to bear on his claim that necessity is essential to morality and, in particular, to our attitudes and practices associated with responsibility and punishment.

In light of this alternative account, we may conclude that the nature of Hume’s compatibilist strategy is significantly misrepresented by the classical interpretation. Hume’s arguments purporting to show that necessity is essential to morality are intimately connected with his discussion of the indirect passions and the specific mechanism that generates the moral sentiments. Whereas the classical interpretation construes his arguments as conceptual or logical in nature, the naturalistic interpretation presents Hume as concerned to describe the circumstances under which people are felt to be responsible. Interpreted this way, Hume’s arguments constitute a contribution to descriptive moral psychology and, as such, they are an important part of his wider program to “introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects” (which is the subtitle of the Treatise ).

The next question to consider is whether or not the issues that divide the classical and naturalistic interpretations are of any contemporary significance or interest? The first thing to be said about this is that from a contemporary perspective, classical compatibilism seems too crude an account of both freedom and moral responsibility and very few philosophers would still press the claim that incompatibilist prejudices can be explained simply in terms of confusion about necessity arising from a conflation between causation and compulsion. In contrast with this, Hume’s concern with the role and relevance of moral sentiment for our understanding of the free will problem anticipates several key features of P.F. Strawson’s highly influential contribution to the contemporary debate. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” [hereafter FR] is arguably the most important and influential paper concerning the free will problem published in the second half of the twentieth century. The most striking affinity between the approaches taken by Hume and Strawson is their shared appeal to the role of moral sentiments or reactive attitudes, which both use as a way of discrediting any supposed sceptical threat arising from the thesis of determinism.

On Strawson’s account, both classical compatibilists (whom he refers to as “optimists”) and libertarians (whom he refers to as “pessimists”, because they suppose determinism threatens moral responsibility) make a similar mistake of “over-intellectualizing the facts” by seeking to provide some sort of “external ‘rational’ justification” for moral responsibility (FR, 81). The classical compatibilist does this on the basis of a “one-eyed utilitarianism”, whereas the libertarian, seeing that something vital is missing from the classical compatibilist account, tries to plug the gap with “contra-causal freedom” – which Strawson describes as “a pitiful intellectualist trinket” (FR, 81). Against views of these kinds, Strawson argues that we should focus our attention on the importance of reactive attitudes or moral sentiments in this context. By this means he hopes to find some middle ground whereby he can “reconcile” the two opposing camps. Our reactive attitudes or moral sentiments, Strawson argues, should be understood in terms of our natural human emotional responses to the attitudes and intentions that human beings manifest towards each other. We expect and demand some degree of good will and due regard and we feel resentment or gratitude depending on whether or not this is shown to us (FR, 66–7). Granted that these emotions are part of our essential human make-up, and are naturally triggered or aroused in relevant circumstances, it is still important to recognize that these responses are in some measure under rational control and we can “modify or mollify” them in light of relevant considerations (FR, 68).

There are two kinds of consideration that Strawson distinguishes that may require us to amend or withdraw our reactive attitudes. First, there are considerations that we may describe as exemptions, where we judge that an individual is not an appropriate or suitable target of any reactive attitudes. These are cases where a person may be viewed as “psychologically abnormal” or “morally underdeveloped” (FR, 68; and also 71–2). On the other hand, even where exemptions of this sort do not apply, ordinary excusing considerations may nevertheless require us to alter or change our particular reactive attitudes as directed toward some individual (FR, 68). Considerations of this kind include cases where an agent acts accidentally, or in ignorance, or was subject to physical force of some kind. Where these considerations apply we may come to recognize that the conduct in question, properly interpreted, does not lack the degree of good will or due regard that we may demand. Even if some injury has occurred, no malice or lack of regard has been shown to us. However, the crucial point for Strawson is that while our reactive attitudes may well be modified or withdrawn in these circumstances, there is no question of us altogether abandoning or suspending our reactive attitudes (FR, 71–3). In particular, there is nothing about the thesis of determinism that implies that either exemptions or excuses, as Strawson has described them, apply or hold universally (FR, 70–1). Moreover, and more controversially, Strawson also maintains that even if determinism did provide some “theoretical” basis for drawing this sceptical conclusion, any such policy is “for us as we are, practically inconceivable” (FR, 71). In other words, according to Strawson our natural commitment to the fabric of moral sentiment insulates us from any possible global sceptical threat to the whole fabric of moral responsibility based on theoretical worries about the implications of determinism.

If we read Hume along the lines of the classical interpretation, then his position on these issues looks as if it accords very closely with the typical “optimist” strategy associated with such thinkers as Schlick. The classical interpretation, however, entirely overlooks the role of moral sentiment in Hume’s reconciling strategy. It emphasizes the relevance of the (supposed) confusion between causation and compulsion in order to explain the more fundamental confusion about the nature of liberty (i.e., why philosophers tend to confuse liberty of spontaneity with liberty of indifference). With these features of Hume’s position established, the classical interpretation points to Hume’s remarks concerning the social utility of rewards and punishments and the way in which they depend on the principles of necessity. From this perspective, Hume’s discussion of freedom and necessity clearly constitutes a paradigmatic and influential statement of the “optimist’s” position. So interpreted, Hume must be read as a thinker, like Schlick, who has “over-intellectualized the facts” on the basis of a “one-eyed-utilitarianism”; one who has ignored “that complicated web of attitudes and feelings” which Strawson seeks to draw our attention to. In this way, we are encouraged to view Hume as a prime target of Strawson’s attack on the “optimist” position.

The naturalistic interpretation, by contrast, makes it plain that any such view of Hume’s approach and general strategy is deeply mistaken. Hume, no less than Strawson, is especially concerned to draw our attention to the facts about human nature that are relevant to a proper understanding of the nature and conditions of moral responsibility. More specifically, Hume argues that we cannot properly account for moral responsibility unless we acknowledge and describe the role that moral sentiment plays in this sphere. Indeed, unlike Strawson, Hume is much more concerned with the detailed mechanism whereby our moral sentiments are aroused, and thus he is particularly concerned to explain the relevance of spontaneity, indifference, and necessity to the functioning of moral sentiment. To this extent, therefore, Hume’s naturalistic approach is more tightly woven into his account of the nature of necessity and moral freedom. In sum, when we compare Hume’s arguments with Strawson’s important and influential discussion, it becomes immediately apparent that there is considerable contemporary significance to the contrast between the classical and naturalistic interpretations of Hume’s reconciling strategy.

The overall resemblance between Hume’s and Strawson’s strategy in dealing with issues of freedom and responsibility is striking. The fundamental point that they agree about is that we cannot understand the nature and conditions of moral responsibility without reference to the crucial role that moral sentiment plays in this sphere. This naturalistic approach places Hume and Strawson in similar positions when considered in relation to the views of the pessimist and the optimist. The naturalistic approach shows that, in different ways, both sides of the traditional debate fail to properly acknowledge the facts about moral sentiment. Where Hume most noticeably differs from Strawson, however, is on the question of the “general causes” of moral sentiment. Strawson largely bypasses this problem. For Hume, this is a crucial issue that must be settled to understand why necessity is essential to responsibility and why indifference is entirely incompatible with the effective operation of the mechanism that responsibility depends on.

We have noted that the classical and naturalistic interpretations differ in how they account for the relationship between freedom and responsibility. According to the classical interpretation responsibility may be analysed directly in terms of free action, where this is understood simply in terms of an agent acting according to her own will or desires. While classical compatibilists reject the incompatibilist suggestion that free and responsible action requires indeterminism or any special form of “moral causation” they are, nevertheless, both agreed that a person can be held responsible if and only if she acts freely. On the naturalistic interpretation, however, Hume rejects this general doctrine, which we may call “voluntarism”.

Hume maintains that it is a matter of “the utmost importance” for moral philosophy that action must be indicative of durable qualities of mind if a person is to be held accountable for it (T 3.3.1.4/575). This claim is part of Hume’s more general claim that our indirect passions (including our moral sentiments) are aroused and sustained only when the pleasurable or painful qualities concerned (e.g. the virtues and vices) stand in a durable or constant relation with the person who is their object (T 2.1.6.7/292–3; DP 2.11). In the case of actions, which are “temporary and perishing”, no such lasting relation is involved unless action is suitably tied to character traits of some kind. Two important issues arise out of this that need to be carefully distinguished.

(1) Does Hume hold that all aspects of virtue for which a person is subject to moral evaluation (i.e., approval and disapproval) must be voluntarily expressed? That is to say, are virtues and vices to be assessed entirely on the basis of an agent’s deliberate choices and intentional actions? (2) Granted that virtues and vices are to be understood in terms of a person’s pleasant or painful qualities of mind, to what extent are these traits of character voluntarily acquired (i.e., acquired through the agent’s own will and choices)?

Hume’s answer to both questions is clear. He denies that voluntary or intentional action is the sole basis on which we may assess a person’s virtues and vices. Furthermore he also maintains that moral character is, for the most part, involuntarily acquired. The second claim does not, of course, commit him to the first. Nor does the first commit him to the second, since a person could voluntarily acquire traits that, once acquired, may be involuntarily expressed or manifest. Plainly the combination of claims that Hume embraces on this issue commits him to a position that radically deflates the significance and importance of voluntariness in relation to virtue – certainly in comparison with some familiar alternative accounts (e.g. as in Aristotle).

Let us consider, first, the relevance of voluntariness to the expression of character. As we have already noted, Hume does take the view that actions serve as the principal way in which we learn about a person’s character (T 3.3.1.5/575). Action is produced by the causal influence of our desires and willings. The interpretation and evaluation of action must, therefore, take note of the particular intention with which an action was undertaken. Failing this, we are liable to attribute character traits to the agent that he does not possess (and consequently unjustly praise or blame him). Although intention and action do have a significant and important role to play in the assessment of moral character, Hume also maintains that there are other channels through which character may be expressed. More specifically, a virtuous or vicious character can be distinguished by reference to a person’s “wishes and sentiments,” as well as by the nature of the person’s will (T 3.3.1.5/575). Feelings, desires and sentiments manifest themselves in a wide variety of ways – not just through willing and acting. A person’s “countenance and conversation” (T 2.1.11.3/317), deportment or “carriage” (EU 8.15/88), gestures (EU 8.9/85), or simply her look and expression, may all serve as signs of character and qualities of mind that may be found to be pleasant or painful. Although we may enjoy some limited degree of control over our desires and passions, as well as how they are expressed, for the most part our emotional states and attitudes arise in us involuntarily and may even be manifest or expressed against our will.

We may now turn to the further question concerning Hume’s understanding of the way in which virtues and vices are acquired and, in particular, to what extent they are shaped and conditioned by our own choices. It is Hume’s view that, by and large, our character is conditioned and determined by factors independent of our will. In the sections “Of liberty and necessity” (T 2.3.1–2; EU 8) he argues that not only do we observe how certain characters will act in specific circumstances, we also observe how circumstances condition character. Among the factors that determine character, he claims, are bodily condition, age, sex, occupation and social station, climate, religion, government, and education (T 2.3.1.5–10/401–03; EU 8.7–15/83–8; see esp. EU 8.11/85–6: “Are the manners ...”). These various causal influences account for “the diversity of characters, prejudices, and opinions” (EU 8.10/85). Any accurate moral philosophy, it is argued, must acknowledge and take note of the forces that “mould the human mind from its infancy” and which account for “the gradual change in our sentiments and inclinations” through time (EU 8.11/86). The general force of these observations is to establish that “the fabric and constitution of our mind no more depends on our choice, than that of our body” (ESY 168; see also T 3.3.4.3/608; ESY 140, 160, 579).

Critics of Hume’s position on this subject will argue that if a person has little or no control over the factors that shape her character then virtue and vice really would be, in these circumstances, matters of mere good or bad fortune and no more a basis for moral concern than bodily beauty or ugliness. (See Reid 1969: 261: “What was, by an ancient author, said of Cato…”.) If people are responsible for the character that their actions and feelings express, then they must have acquired that character voluntarily. Hume’s reply to this line of criticism is that we can perfectly well distinguish virtue and vice without making any reference to the way that character is acquired. Our moral sentiments are reactions or responses to the moral qualities and character traits that people manifest in their behavior and conduct, and thus need not be withdrawn simply because people do not choose or voluntarily acquire these moral characteristics. Hume does recognize, of course, that we do have some limited ability to amend and alter our character. In particular, Hume acknowledges that we can cultivate and improve our moral character, in some measure, through self-criticism and self-understanding. Nevertheless, the points he emphasizes are that all such efforts are limited in their scope and effect (ESY 169) and that, beyond this, “a man must be, before-hand, tolerably virtuous” for such efforts of “reformation” to be undertaken in the first place.

Hume’s views about the relationship between virtue and voluntariness do much to explain one of the most controversial aspects of his theory of virtue: his view that the natural abilities should be incorporated into the virtues and vices (T 3.3.4; EM App 4). With respect to this issue he makes two key points. The first is that natural abilities (i.e., intelligence, imagination, memory, wit, etc.) and moral virtues more narrowly understood are “equally mental qualities” (T 3.3.4.1/606). Second, both of them “equally produce pleasure” and thus have “an equal tendency to produce the love and esteem of mankind” (T 3.3.4.1/606–07). In common life, people “naturally praise or blame whatever pleases or displeases them and thus regard penetration as much a virtue as justice” (T 3.3.4.4/609). (See, e.g., Hume’s sardonic observation at EM App. 4.5/315: “It is hard to tell...”) Beyond all this, as already noted, any distinction between the natural abilities and moral virtues cannot be based on the consideration that the natural abilities are for the most part involuntarily acquired, since this also holds true for the moral virtues more narrowly conceived. It is, nevertheless, Hume’s view that the voluntary/involuntary distinction helps to explain “why moralists have invented” the distinction between natural abilities and moral virtues. Unlike moral qualities, natural abilities “are almost invariable by any art or industry” (T 3.3.4.4/609). In contrast with this, moral qualities, “or at least, the actions that proceed from them, may be chang’d by the motives of rewards and punishments, praise and blame” (T 3.3.4.4/609). In this way, according to Hume, the significance of the voluntary/involuntary distinction is largely limited to our concern with the regulation of conduct in society. To confine our understanding of virtue and vice to these frontiers is, however, to distort and misrepresent its very nature and foundation in human life and experience. (For more on Hume’s views on virtue in relation to his position on free will see Russell, 2013.)

These observations regarding Hume and the doctrine of voluntarism are of considerable relevance to the contemporary ethical debate as it concerns what Bernard Williams has described as “the morality system” (Williams, 1985: Chp. 10). Although Williams’ (hostile) account of the morality system is multifaceted and defies easy summary, its core features are clear enough. The concept that Williams identifies as fundamental to the morality system is its special notion of obligation. Flowing from this special concept of obligation are the related concepts of right and wrong, blame and voluntariness. When agents voluntarily violate their obligations they do wrong and are liable to blame and some measure of retribution. To this extent the morality system, so conceived, involves what Williams calls “the blame system”, which focuses on particular acts (Williams, 1985: 194). According to Williams there is pressure within the blame system “to require a voluntariness that will be total and will cut through character and psychological or social determinism, and allocate blame and responsibility on the ultimately fair basis of the agent’s own contribution, no more and no less” (Williams, 1985: 194).

One reason why the morality system places great weight on the importance of voluntariness is that it aspires to show that morality – and moral responsibility in particular – somehow “transcends luck” (Williams, 1985: 195). This is required to ensure that blame is allocated in a way that is “ultimately fair”. Despite the obvious challenges this requirement poses, compatibilists have typically tried to satisfy these aspiration of the morality system by way of offering a variety of argument to show that compatibilist commitments do not render us vulnerable to the play of fate or luck in our moral lives (e.g. Dennett, 1984). Hume, however, makes little effort to satisfy these aspirations. (A point that Williams notes in Williams, 1995: 20n12.) In the final analysis, Hume claims, just as every body or material object “is determin’d by an absolute fate to a certain degree and direction of its motion, and can no more depart from that precise line, in which it moves, than it can convert itself into an angel, or spirit, or any superior substance” (T 2.3.1.3/400), so too our conduct and character is similarly subject to an “absolute fate” as understood in terms of the inescapable “bonds of necessity” (T 2.3.2.2/408). In these fundamental respects, therefore, Hume takes the view, along with Williams, that morality does not elude either fate or luck. In this Hume, perhaps, shares more with the ancient Greeks than he does with those moderns who embrace the aspirations of the morality system (see, e.g., Williams, 1993).

From a critical perspective, it may be argued that there remains a significant gap in Hume’s scheme as we have so far described it. Even if we discard the aspirations of the morality system, any credible naturalistic theory of moral responsibility needs to be able to provide some account of the sorts of moral capacity involved in exempting conditions, whereby we deem some individuals and not others as appropriate targets of moral sentiments or “reactive attitudes”. As it stands, what Hume has to say on this subject is plainly inadequate. According to Hume, it is an ultimate inexplicable fact about our moral sentiments (qua calm forms of the indirect passions of love and hate) that they are always directed at people, either ourselves or others. This account leaves us unable say why some people are not appropriate objects of moral sentiments (e.g. children, the insane, and so on). There are, however, several available proposals for dealing with this gap. Perhaps the most influential proposal is to adopt some general theory of reason-responsiveness or rational self-control. According to accounts of this kind, responsible agents need to have control over their actions, where this involves performing “those actions intentionally, while possessing the relevant sorts of normative competence: the general ability to grasp moral requirements and to govern one’s conduct by light of them” (Wallace, 1994: 86). While proposals of this general kind help to plug a large gap in Hume’s theory, they also suggest a particular understanding of moral responsibility that is not entirely in keeping with Hume’s own account.

There are two points of divergence that are especially significant with respect to to issue. First, rational self-control may be explained, as it is on Wallace’s account, in terms of specifically Kantian conceptions of practical reason and moral agency (Wallace, 1994: 12–17). Even if commitments of this kind are avoided, theories of this kind are still too narrowly based on moral capacity as it relates solely to actions and intentions. On Hume’s account, moral capacity must be related to wider patterns and dispositions of feeling, desire and character. The scope of moral evaluation should not be reduced or limited to concern with (fleeting and momentary) acts of will modelled after legal paradigms. Moral capacity must be exercised and manifest in a larger and more diverse set of propensities and abilities that make up moral character, including the operation of moral sentiment itself.

Second, and related to the previous point, although Hume does not provide any substantial or robust theory of moral capacity, it is possible to find, within what he provides, material that suggests a less “rationalistic” understanding of moral capacity. It may be argued, for example, that in Hume’s system there is an intimate and important relationship between moral sense and virtue. Our moral sense should be understood in terms of our general capacity to feel and direct moral sentiments at both ourselves and at others. Hume points out that children acquire the artificial virtues, involving the conventions of justice, by way not only of learning their advantages but also learning to feel the relevant moral sentiments when these conventions are violated (T 3.2.3.26/500–01). The mechanism of the moral sentiments both cultivates and maintains the artificial virtues. Hume has less to say about the role of moral sentiment in relation to the natural virtues but similar observations would seem to apply. As children grow up and mature they become increasingly aware that their qualities of character affect both others and themselves and that these will inevitably give rise to moral sentiments in the people they will deal with. This entire process of becoming aware of the moral sentiments of others, and “surveying ourselves as we appear to others” (T 3.3.1.8, 3.3.1.26, 3.3.1.30, 3.3.6.6/576–7, 589, 591, 620; EM 9.10, App. 4.3/276, 314) surely serves to develop the natural as well as the artificial virtues. Along these lines, Hume maintains that this disposition to “survey ourselves” and seek our own “peace and satisfaction” is the surest guardian of every virtue (EM 9.10/276). Any person who entirely lacks this disposition will be shameless and will inevitably lack all the virtues that depend on moral reflection for their development and stability.

If this conjecture regarding the intimate or internal relationship between virtue and moral sense is correct, then it does much to explain and account for the range of exemptions that are required in this area. Hume’s understanding of the operation of moral sentiment is not simply a matter of enjoying pleasant and painful feelings of a peculiar kind (T 3.1.2.4/472). On the contrary, the moral evaluation of character involves the activity of both reason and sentiment. The sort of intellectual activities required include not only learning from experience the specific pleasant and painful tendencies of certain kinds of character and conduct, as well as the ability to distinguish accurately among them, but also the ability to evaluate character and conduct from “some steady and general point of view” (T 3.3..15/581–2; EM 5.41–2/227–8). Clearly, then, insofar as the cultivation and stability of virtue depends on moral sense, it also requires the intellectual qualities and capacities involved in the exercise of moral sense. (One way of understanding this is to say that moral sense and moral reflection serve as the counterparts to practical wisdom or phronesis in Aristotle’s moral theory. See Russell, 2006.) Given this, an animal, an infant, or an insane person will lack the ability to perform the intellectual tasks involved in the production of moral sentiment. We cannot, therefore, expect virtues that are dependent on these abilities and intellectual activities to be manifest in individuals who lack them, or when they are damaged or underdeveloped.

Interpreting Hume in these terms not only serves to fill what looks like a large gap in his naturalistic program, it also avoids distorting his own wider ethical commitments by imposing a narrower, rationalistic conception of moral capacity into his naturalistic framework. Beyond this, interpreting moral capacity in these more sentimentalist terms is both philosophically and psychologically more satisfying and plausible. On an account of this kind, there exists a close and essential relationship between being responsible, where this is understood in terms of being an appropriate target of moral sentiments or reactive attitudes, and being able to hold oneself and others responsible, where this is understood as the ability to experience and entertain moral sentiments. It is a merit of Hume’s system, so interpreted, that it avoids “over-intellectualizing” not only what is involved in holding a person responsible, but also what is involved in being a responsible agent.

In the Treatise , as was noted earlier, Hume argues that one of the reasons “why the doctrine of liberty [of indifference] has generally been better receiv’d in the world, than its antagonist [the doctrine of necessity], proceeds from religion, which has been very unnecessarily interested in this question” (T 2.3.2.3/409). He goes on to argue “that the doctrine of necessity, according to my explication of it, is not only innocent, but even advantageous to religion and morality”. When Hume came to present his views afresh in the Enquiry (Sec. 8), he was less circumspect about his hostile intentions with regard to “religion”. In the parallel passage (EU 8.26/96–97), he again objects to any effort to refute a hypothesis “by a pretence to its dangerous consequences to religion and morality”. He goes on to say that his account of the doctrines of liberty and necessity “are not only consistent with morality, but are absolutely essential to its support” (EU 8.26/97). By this means, he makes it clear that he is not claiming that his position is “consistent” with religion. In the final passages of the Enquiry discussion of liberty and necessity (EU 8.32–6/99–103) – passages which do not appear in the original Treatise discussion – Hume makes it plain exactly how his necessitarian principles have “dangerous consequences for religion”.

Hume considers the following objection:

It may be said, for instance, that, if voluntary actions be subjected to the same laws of necessity with the operations of matter, there is a continued chain of necessary causes, pre-ordained and pre-determined, reaching from the original cause of all to every single volition of every human creature… . The ultimate Author of all our volitions is the Creator of the world, who first bestowed motion on this immense machine, and placed all beings in that particular position, whence every subsequent event, by an inevitable necessity, must result. Human action, therefore, either can have no moral turpitude at all, as proceeding from so good a cause; or if they have any turpitude, they must involve our Creator in the same guilt, while he is acknowledged to be their ultimate cause and author. (EU 8.32/99–100)

In other words, the doctrine of necessity produces an awkward dilemma for the theological position: Either the distinction between (moral) good and evil collapses, because everything is produced by a perfect being who intends “nothing but what is altogether good and laudable” (EU 8.33/101), or we must “retract the attribute of perfection, which we ascribe to the Deity” on the ground that he is the ultimate author of moral evil in the world.

Hume treats the first horn of this dilemma at greatest length. He draws on his naturalistic principles to show that the conclusion reached (i.e., that no human actions are evil or criminal in nature) is absurd. There are, he claims, both physical and moral evils in this world that the human mind finds naturally painful, and this affects our sentiments accordingly. Whether we are the victim of gout or of robbery, we naturally feel the pain of such evils (EU 8.34/101–2). No “remote speculations” or “philosophical theories” concerning the good or perfection of the whole universe will alter these natural reactions and responses to the particular ills and evils we encounter. Hence, even if we were to grant that this is indeed the best of all possible worlds – and Hume clearly takes the view that we have no reason to suppose that it is (D 113–4; EU 11.15–22/137–42) – this would do nothing to undermine the reality of the distinction we draw between good and evil (i.e., as experienced on the basis of “the natural sentiments of the human mind”: EU 8.35/103).

What, then, of the alternative view, that God is “the ultimate author of guilt and moral turpitude in all his creatures”? Hume offers two rather different accounts of this alternative – although he does not distinguish them properly. He begins by noting that if some human actions “have any turpitude, they must involve our Creator in the same guilt, while he is acknowledged to be their ultimate cause and author” (EU 8.32/100). This passage suggests that God is also blameworthy for criminal actions in this world, since he is their “ultimate author”. At this point, however, there is no suggestion that the particular human agents who commit these crimes (as preordained by God) are not accountable for them. In the passage that follows this is the position taken.

For as a man, who fired a mine, is answerable for all the consequences whether the train he employed be long or short; so wherever a continued chain of necessary causes is fixed, that Being, either finite or infinite, who produces the first, is likewise the author of all the rest, and must both bear the blame and acquire the praise which belong to them. (EU 8.32/100)

Hume goes on to argue that this rule of morality has even “greater force” when applied to God, since he is neither ignorant nor impotent and must, therefore, have knowingly produced those criminal actions which are manifest in the world. Granted that such actions are indeed criminal, it follows, says Hume, “that the Deity, not man, is accountable for them” (EU 8.32/100; cf. EU 8.33/101).

It is evident that Hume is arguing two points. First, if God is the creator of the world and preordained and predetermined everything that happens in it, then the (obvious) existence of moral evil is attributable to him, and thus “we must retract the attribute of perfection” which we ascribe to him. Second, if God is indeed the ultimate author of moral evil, then no individual human being is accountable for the criminal actions he performs. The second claim does not follow from the first. Moreover, it is clearly inconsistent with Hume’s general position on this subject. As has been noted, in this same context, Hume has also argued that no speculative philosophical theory can alter the natural workings of our moral sentiments. The supposition that God is the “ultimate author” of all that takes place in the world will not, on this view of things, change our natural disposition to praise or blame our fellow human beings. Whatever the ultimate causes of a person’s character and conduct, it will (inevitably) arouse a sentiment of praise or blame in other humans who contemplate it. This remains the case even if we suppose that God also deserves blame for the “moral turpitude” we find in the world. In general, then, Hume’s first formulation of the second alternative (i.e., that God must share the blame for those crimes that occur in the world) is more consistent with his naturalistic principles.

What is crucial to Hume’s polemical purpose in these passages is not the thesis that if God is the author of crimes then his human creations are not accountable for them. Rather, the point Hume is concerned to make (since he does not, in fact, doubt the inescapability of our moral accountability to our fellow human beings) is that the religious hypothesis leads to the “absurd consequence” that God is the ultimate author of sin in this world and that he is, accordingly, liable to some appropriate measure of blame. Hume, in other words, takes the (deeply impious) step of showing that if God exists, and is the creator of the universe, then he is no more free of sin than human beings are. According to Hume, we must judge God as we judge human beings, on the basis of his effects in the world, and we must then adjust our sentiments accordingly. Indeed, there is no other natural or reasonable basis on which to found our sentiments toward God. In certain respects, therefore, we can make better sense of how we (humans) can hold God accountable than we can make sense of how God is supposed to hold humans accountable (i.e., since we have no knowledge of his sentiments , or even if he has any; cf. D 58,114,128–9; ESY 594; but see also LET I/51). It is, of course, Hume’s considered view that it is an egregious error of speculative theology and philosophy to suppose that the universe has been created by a being that bears some (close) resemblance to humankind. The question of the origin of the universe is one that Hume plainly regards as beyond the scope of human reason (see, e.g., EU 1.11–2;11.15–23;11.26–7;12.2634/11–13, 137–42, 144–47, 165; D 36–8,88–9,107). Nevertheless, Hume’s point is plain: On the basis of the (limited) evidence that is available to us, we must suppose that if there is a God, who is creator of this world and who orders all that takes place in it, then this being is indeed accountable for all the (unnecessary and avoidable; D 107) evil that we discover in it.

Although it is evident that Hume’s discussion of free will in the first Enquiry is part of his wider critique of the Christian religion, it is nevertheless widely held that Hume’s earlier discussion “Of liberty and necessity” in the Treatise carries none of this irreligious content or significance. This view is itself encouraged by a more general understanding of the relationship between the Treatise and the first Enquiry which maintains that the Treatise lacks any significant irreligious content (because Hume “castrated” his work and removed most passages of this kind, perhaps including the passages at EU 8.32–6). On this view of things, the elements of Hume’s discussion that are common to both Treatise 2.3.1–2 and Enquiry 8 are themselves without any particular religious or irreligious significance. To show why this view is seriously mistaken would, however, take us wide of our present concerns. (For a more detailed account of Hume’s fundamental irreligious intentions throughout the Treatise see Russell, 2008 and also Russell, 2016.)

Suffice it to note, for our present purposes, that throughout his writings, Hume’s philosophical interests and concerns were very largely dominated and directed by his fundamental irreligious aims and objectives. A basic theme in Hume’s philosophy, so considered, is his effort to demystify moral and social life and release it from the metaphysical trappings of “superstition”. The core thesis of Hume’s Treatise – indeed, of his overall (irreligious or “atheistic”) philosophical outlook – is that moral and social life neither rests upon nor requires the dogmas of Christian metaphysics. Hume’s naturalistic framework for understanding moral and social life excludes not only the metaphysics of libertarianism (e.g., modes of “moral” causation by immaterial agents) but also all further theologically inspired metaphysics that generally accompanies it (i.e., God, the immortal soul, a future state, and so on). The metaphysics of religion, Hume suggests, serves only to confuse and obscure our understanding of these matters and to hide their true foundation in human nature. Hume’s views on the subject of free will and moral responsibility, as presented in the sections “Of liberty and necessity” and elsewhere in his writings, are the very pivot on which this fundamental thesis turns.

In the entry above, we follow the convention given in the Nortons’ Treatise and Beauchamp’s Enquiries : we cite Book. Part. Section. Paragraph; followed by references to the Selby-Bigge/Nidditch editions. Thus T 1.2.3.4/34: will indicate Treatise Bk.1, Pt.2, Sec.3, Para.4/ Selby-Bigge pg.34. References to Abstract [TA] are to the two editions of the Treatise mentioned above (paragraph/page). In the case of the Enquiries we cite Section and Paragraph; followed by page reference to the Selby-Bigge edition. Thus EU 12.1/149 refers to Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding , Sect.12, Para. 1 / Selby-Bigge pg. 149.

• Árdal, Pall, 1966. Passion and Value in Hume’s Treatise , Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, Chapter 4: Liberty.
• Ayer, A.J., 1954. “Freedom and Necessity”, Philosophical Essays , London: Macmillan; reprinted in G. Watson (ed.), Free Will , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982 [pp. 15–23].
• Beebee, Helen, and Alfred Mele, 2002. “Humean Compatibilism”, Mind , 111(442): 201–223.
• Berofsky, Bernard (ed.), 1966. Free Will and Determinism , New York & London: Harper & Row.
• Berofsky, Bernard, 2012. Nature’s Challenge to Free Will , New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Botterill, George, 2002. “Hume on Liberty and Necessity”, in P. Millican (ed.), Reading Hume on Human Understanding , Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 277–300.
• Bricke, John, 1988. “Hume on Freedom to Act and Personal Evaluation”, History of Philosophy Quarterly , 5: 141–56.
• –––, 2011. “Hume on Liberty and Necessity”, in E.S. Radcliffe (ed.), A Companion to Hume , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Buckle, Stephen, 2001. Hume’s Enlightenment Tract: The Unity and Purpose of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding , Oxford: Clarendon; Section 8 [Of Liberty and Necessity].
• Campbell, C.A., 1951. “Is ‘Freewill’ a Pseudo-Problem?”, Mind , 60: 446–65; reprinted in Berofsky (ed.) 1966, pp. 112–35.
• Clarke, Samuel, 1704. A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God And Other Writings , E. Vailati (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• Collins, Anthony, 1717. A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty ; reprinted in J. O’Higgins (ed.), Determinism and Freewill , The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976.
• Davidson, Donald, 1963. “Actions, Reasons, and Causes”, reprinted in Davidson 1980, pp. 3–19.
• –––, 1973. “Freedom to Act”, reprinted in Davidson 1980, pp. 63–81.
• –––, 1980. Actions and Events , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Dennett, Daniel, 1984. Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Fields, Lloyd, 1988. “Hume on Responsibility”, Hume Studies , 14: 161–75.
• Flew, Antony, 1961. Hume’s Philosophy of Belief , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• –––, 1984. “Paul Russell on Hume’s ‘Reconciling Project’”, Mind , 93: 587–88.
• –––, 1986. David Hume: Philosopher of Moral Science , Oxford: Blackwell, Chapter 8 [Necessity, Liberty and the Possibility of Moral Science].
• Frankfurt, Harry, 1971. “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person”, reprinted in G. Watson (ed.), Free Will , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982, pp. 81–95.
• Garrett, Don, 1997. Cognition and Commitment in Hume’s Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press, Chapter 6 [Liberty and Necessity].
• Harris, James, 2005. Of Liberty and Necessity: The Free Will Debate in Eighteenth-Century British Philosophy , Oxford: Clarendon.
• –––, 2012. “Free Will”, in A. Bailey & D. O’Brien (eds.), The Continuum Companion to Hume , London & New York: Continuum.
• Hobbes, Thomas, 1650. The Elements of Law , F. Tonnies (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928.
• –––, 1651. Leviathan , R. Tuck (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
• –––, 1654. Of Liberty and Necessity , selections reprinted in D.D. Raphael (ed.), British Moralists: 1650–1800 (Volume 1), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969, pp. 61–70.
• Kane, Robert, 2005. A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will , Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
• Kemp Smith, Norman, 1941. The Philosophy of David Hume , London: MacMillan, Chapter 20.
• Locke, John, 1689 [1700]. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding , 4th edition, P. Nidditch (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.
• Mackie, J.L., 1977. Ethics: Inventing right and Wrong , Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin.
• McKenna, Michael, 2004. “Compatibilism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2004 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2004/entries/compatibilism/ >.
• Millican, Peter, 2010. “Hume’s Determinism”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy. 40.4: 611–642.
• Penelhum, Terence, 1975. Hume , London: Macmillan, Chapter 6: The Will.
• –––, 1993. “Hume’s Moral Psychology”, in The Cambridge Companion to Hume , D.F. Norton (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; reprinted in Penelhum 2000.
• –––, 1998. “Critical Notice of Paul Russell, Freedom and Moral Sentiment ”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 28: 81–94.
• –––, 2000a. “Hume and Freedom of the Will”, in T. Penelhum 2000b.
• –––, 2000b. Themes in Hume: The Self, the Will, Religion , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Perry, John, 2010. “Wretched Subterfuge: A Defense of the Compatibilism of Freedom and Natural Causation”, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association , 84(2): 93–113.
• Pitson, A.E., 2002. Hume’s Philosophy of the Self , London: Routledge [Chapter 7: Hume and Agency].
• –––, 2006. “Liberty, Necessity, and the Will”, in The Blackwell Companion to Hume’s Treatise, S. Traiger (ed.), Oxford: Blackwell.
• –––, 2016. “Hume, Free Will and Moral Responsibility”, in P. Russell (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Hume , New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press: 380–400.
• Reid, Thomas, 1788. Active Powers of the Human Mind , B. Brody (ed.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969.
• Russell, Paul, 1983. “The Naturalism of Hume’s ‘Reconciling Project’”, Mind , 92: 593–600.
• –––, 1985. “Hume’s ‘Reconciling Project’: A Reply to Flew”, Mind , 94: 587–90.
• –––, 1988. “Causation, Compulsion and Compatibilism”, American Philosophical Quarterly , 25: 313–21; reprinted in Russell 2017.
• –––, 1990. “Hume on Responsibility and Punishment”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 20: 539–64; reprinted in Russell (ed.) forthcoming.
• –––, 1995. Freedom and Moral Sentiment: Hume’s Way of Naturalizing Responsibility , Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2006. “Moral Sense and Virtue in Hume’s Ethics”, in T. Chappell (eds.), Values and Virtues: Aristotelianism in Contemporary Ethics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2008. The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism. and Irreligion , Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, Chapter 16 [Freedom Within Necessity: Hume’s Clockwork Man].
• –––, 2013. “Hume’s Anatomy of Virtue”, in D. Russell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 230–251; reprinted in Russell (ed.) forthcoming.
• –––, 2015. “Hume’s ‘Lengthy Digression’: Free Will in the Treatise ”, in A. Butler & D. Ainslie (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Hume’s Treatise, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 230–251; reprinted in Russell (ed.) forthcoming.
• –––, 2016. “Hume’s Philosophy of Irreligion and the Myth of British Empiricism”, in P. Russell (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Hume , New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press; reprinted in Russell (ed.) forthcoming.
• –––, 2017. The Limits of Free Will: Selected Essays , New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• ––– , 2021. Recasting Hume and Early Modern Philosophy: Selected Essays , New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Russell, Paul, and Anders Kraal, 2005 [2017]. “Hume on Religion”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/hume-religion/#RelMor/ >.
• Schlick, Moritz, 1939. ‘When is a Man Responsible?,’ David Rynin (trans.), in Problems of Ethics , New York: Prentice Hall, pp. 143–158; reprinted in Berofsky (ed.) 1966, pp. 54–63.
• Smart, J.C.C., 1961. “Free Will, Praise and Blame”, Mind , 70: 291–306.
• Smith, Adam, 1759. The Theory of Moral Sentiments , D.D. Raphael (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon, 1976.
• Strawson, P.F., 1962. “Freedom and Resentment”, Proceedings of the British Academy , 48: 187–211; reprinted in P. Russell & O. Deery (eds.), The Philosophy of Free Will , New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp 63–83; page reference is to the reprint.
• –––, 1985. Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties , London: Metheun.
• Stroud, Barry, 1977. Hume , London: Routledge, Chapter 7: Action, Reason and Passion.
• Wallace, R. Jay, 1994. Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Williams, Bernard, 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy , London: Fontana.
• –––, 1993. Shame and Necessity , Berkeley: University of California Press.
• –––, 1995. Making Sense of Humanity and Other Philosophical Papers , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The above citations may be used as the basis for further reading on this subject in the following way. Influential statements of the classical interpretation of Hume’s intentions can be found in Flew (1962), Penelhum (1975) and Stroud (1977). Prominent statements of 20 th century classical compatibilism that are generally taken to follow in Hume’s tracks include Schlick (1939), Ayer (1954) and Smart (1961). Davidson (1963) provides an important statement of the causal theory of action based on broadly Humean principles. A complete statement of the naturalistic interpretation is provided in Russell (1995), esp. Part I. For a critical response to this study see Penelhum (1998; 2000a), and also the earlier exchange between Russell (1983, 1985) and Flew (1984). The contributions by Botterill (2002) and Pitson (2016) follow up on some of the issues that are at stake here. For an account of Hume’s views on punishment – a topic that is closely connected with the problem of free will – see Russell (1990) and Russell (1995 – Chp. 10). For a general account of the 18 th century debate that Hume was involved in see Harris (2005) and Russell (2008), Chap. 16. See also O’Higgins introduction [in Collins (1717)] for further background. The works by Hobbes, Locke, Clarke and Collins, as cited above, are essential reading for an understanding of the general free will debate that Hume was involved in. Smith (1759) is a valuable point of contrast in relation to Hume’s views, insofar as Smith develops a naturalistic theory of responsibility based on moral sentiment (which Strawson follows up on). However, Smith does not discuss the free will issue directly (which is itself a point of some significance). In contrast with this, Reid (1788) is perhaps Hume’s most effective and distinguished contemporary critic on this subject and his contribution remains of considerable interest and value. With respect to Hume’s views on free will as they relate to his more general irreligious intentions see Russell (2008 – esp. Chp. 16). Similar material is covered in Russell (2016). Garrett (1997) provides a lucid overview and careful analysis of Hume’s views on liberty and necessity, which includes discussion of the theological side of Hume’s arguments and concerns. Helpful introductions discussing recent developments in compatibilist thinking, which are of obvious relevance for an assessment of the contemporary value of Hume’s views on this subject, can be found in McKenna (2004) and Kane (2005). Among the various points of contrast not discussed in this article, Frankfurt (1971) is an influential and important paper that aims to advance the classical compatibilist strategy beyond the bounds of accounts of freedom of action. However, as noted in the main text of this article, the work of P.F. Strawson (1962, 1985) is of particular importance in respect of the contemporary significance and relevance of Hume’s naturalistic strategy. Finally, for discussions of Hume’s compatibilism as it relates to his theory of causation see, for example, Russell (1988), Russell (1995), esp. Chaps.1–3, Beebee & Mele (2002), Harris (2005), Chap. 3, Millican (2010), and Berofsky (2012).

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

• Hume Texts Online [Peter Millican]. .
• The Hume Society .
• David Hume , entry by James Fieser, in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
• Compatibilism: Can free will and determinism co-exist? , John Perry, in the Stanford News Service .

Clarke, Samuel | compatibilism | determinism: causal | free will | Hume, David | Hume, David: moral philosophy | Hume, David: on religion | incompatibilism: (nondeterministic) theories of free will | incompatibilism: arguments for | luck: moral | moral responsibility | punishment, legal | Reid, Thomas

Acknowledgments

The editors would like to thank Sally Ferguson for noticing and reporting a number of typographical errors in this entry.

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Philosophy Notes Ethics Essays

Freedom, Voluntariness, And Responsibility Notes

Updated freedom, voluntariness, and responsibility notes.

Ethics Essays

A collection of Cambridge Undergraduate essays, on Ethics, addressing the following topics;

1. Emotive Theories of Ethics.

2. Freedom, Voluntariness, and Responsibility

3. Killing and Letting Die (incl. a discussion of the Doctrine of Double Effect)

4. Relativism

5. Theories of Rights

6. Universalisability

7. Utilitarianism

8. This package also contains a collection of detailed notes, summarising the debate over the philosophical concept of 'Well-being'. It contains contri...

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Freedom, Voluntariness, And Responsibility

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William H. Miller III Department of Philosophy

Freedom and responsibility.

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

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

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

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

Freedom Philosophy Essay Examples & Topics

What is freedom in philosophy? Is freedom real? The phenomena of freedom and free will have been discussed in philosophy for centuries. These concepts are not easily defined.

Freedom can mean the capacity to do something or be someone without restraints or limitations. It can also refer to independence from the influence of others. There are several types of human freedom: physical, political, natural, social, and many more.

Free will is defined as the ability to make an independent choice.

The problem of freedom has a long-standing history with multitudes of differing viewpoints. If you are writing a freedom philosophy essay, you have a long road ahead of you. Our experts have described some thinkers so that you know where to start your research. See their conflicting takes on freedom and responsibility explored on the page. Also, we have come up with exciting topics for what is freedom philosophy essay or research paper.

Besides, you will find essay samples written by other students. Reading them can get you inspired or help you develop your own paper.

What Is Freedom in Philosophy? The Most Prominent Thinkers

Throughout humankind’s history, many had something to say about the concept of freedom. Philosophers have debated and continue to argue with one another over this complicated subject. Over here, we have looked at some of the points of view held by the most prominent thinkers. They will help you begin thinking about “what is freedom in philosophy” essays.

• René Descartes

In his philosophical theories, René Descartes insisted that freedom comes from the human mind. He divided the world into the material and the ideal world of thoughts. Descartes believed that our ideas were completely free and could influence the material world.

• Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant argued that a person could not be genuinely free while their wants and wishes govern them. He came up with the concept of autonomy, believing that the ideal way to live is through self-control. Once a human person stops being a slave to their desire, only then will they achieve true freedom.

• Arthur Schopenhauer

Drawing inspiration from Plato, Arthur Schopenhauer wrote essays on the questions of ethics and human freedom. He claimed that there was absolutely no such thing as free will and that people could not possess it. Schopenhauer insisted that a person could only react in response to external stimuli.

• Rudolf Steiner

Rudolph Steiner discussed what human freedom means in his work titled The Philosophy of Freedom . He argued that freedom lies in the relationship between a person’s ideals and the limitations of external reality. Understanding the gap between the two allows one’s actions to be inspired by moral imagination.

• Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre is famous for coming up with some of the most influential theories on existentialism. He didn’t believe that freedom and responsibility are separable. According to him, we give meaning to our lives through our decisions. Sartre debated that there was no God to provide us with a purpose. Therefore, freedom was a burden on humanity.

• Isaiah Berlin

Most famous for his concepts of positive and negative freedom, Isaiah Berlin talked about opposing philosophies of liberty. Positive liberty referred to the idea of self-government, similar to Kant’s autonomy. In contrast, negative liberty explores the notion of freedom as being unhindered by other forces.

Freedom Philosophy Essay Topics

You can write an incredible number of works about freedom in philosophy. So how does one choose the best idea? First of all, you can try using our title generator , which will automatically create it for you. Second, you can peruse our list of topics, specially prepared for freedom in philosophy essays.

• Examining Berlin’s two concepts of freedom in relation to political liberty.
• What is the concept of freedom according to Christian theology?
• Dissecting Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum regarding freedom of thought and free will.
• Is Kant’s idea of self-freedom tangibly achievable?
• The differences and similarities between Hegel’s and Steiner’s philosophies of freedom.
• Does the existence of charities undermine the social and economic freedom of individuals?
• Social media filtering and the constraints to social freedom imposed by censorship.
• The relationships between the concepts of freedom and responsibility.
• Can the concept of free will and faith co-exist?
• Examining the right to free speech from the point of view of the freedom philosophy.
• Is there any true importance of freedom for human beings, according to Sartre?
• The main differences in points of contention between 19 th and 20 th -century freedom philosophers.
• Analyzing the fundamental principles of utilitarian ethics concerning freedom.
• Exploring Theodore Adorno’s moral philosophy and the un-freedom of the individual.
• A reflection on Schopenhauer’s philosophy and the moral responsibility for one’s actions.
• How does the idea of determinism contradict the concept of free will?

In this article, we have only touched upon the topic of freedom. There are still hundreds of philosophers and hundreds of ideas left. To continue exploring these ideas, consider reading through our human freedom philosophy essay samples. We’re sure they will help you deepen your understanding of this topic!

Thank you for reading!

53 Freedom in Philosophy Essay Examples

Philosophy and relationship between freedom and responsibility essay.

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Perspectives on Free Will: A Comparison of Hobbes and Berkeley

Freedom and determinism.

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Rousseau and Kant on their respective accounts of freedom and right

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Are We Free or Determined?

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Jean-Paul Sartre’s Views on Freedom

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Free Will: Towards Hume’s Compatibilist Approach

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Susan Wolf’s Philosophy

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Free Will and Argument Against Its Existence

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Freedom and the Role of Civilization

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Is the Good Life Found in Freedom? Example of Malala Yousafzai

Albert camus’s “the guest”: obedience to authority.

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Determinism Argument and Objection to It

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Satre human freedom

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Saint Augustine and the Question of Free Will

The concept of free will by susan wolf, the meaning of freedom today.

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Predetermination and Freedom of Choice

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• Words: 1687

Free Will and Its Possible Extent

Against free will: determinism and prediction, freedom: malcolm x’s vs. anna quindlen’s views, autonomy or independence by e. durkheim and t. adorno.

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Freedom Definition Revision: Components of Freedom

Free will and willpower: is consciousness necessary.

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Boredom and Freedom: Different Views and Links

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Master Zhuang’s Philosophical Theory of Freedom

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The Existence of Freedom

Van inwagen’s philosophical argument on free will, mill’s power over body vs. foucault’s freedom, rousseau’s vs. confucius’ freedom concept, hegel and marx on civil society and human freedom.

• Words: 2235

Human Free Will in Philosophical Theories

Nielsen’s free will and determinism: an analysis and critique.

• Words: 1166

Rivalry and Central Planning by Don Lavoie: Study Analysis

• Words: 1349

Human Freedom as Contextual Deliberation

• Words: 1999

Inconsistency of the Compatibilist

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Do Humans Have Free Will?

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Concepts of Determinism, Compatibilism, and Libertarianism

• Words: 1664

Free Will of a Heroin Addict

What is the difference between compatibilsm and incompatibilist in relation to free will, “the behavior of atoms is governed entirely by physical law.” “humans have free will.” “are these statements incompatible”, freedom of the will, the issue of the free will.

Responsibility and Freedom

• Political Culture
• Rights and Liberties

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RESPONSIBILITY AND FREEDOM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS

The Individual and Social Rights and Obligations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Responsibility, Freedom, Empowerment, and Mental Health

How to empower yourself by decluttering your mind..

Posted November 21, 2021 | Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

• Freedom and responsibility are essential to mental health.
• Freedom comes from becoming self-aware and taking responsibility. Taking responsibility involves decluttering your mind.
• The more responsibility you take, the greater the peace of mind, freedom, and self-empowerment you’ll experience.

From an existential perspective, freedom and responsibility are inseparable. They constitute the foundation for understanding our experience, developing our sense of identity , and leading a purposeful and meaningful life.

Psychological or personal freedom, as opposed to political freedom or liberty – although it impacts our ability to make political choices – relates to our capacity to make choices in taking action, which in turn determine the possibilities and opportunities we create for our future. Your life is (and will be) the sum of all the actions and non-actions you take (and don’t take).

Personal freedom represents the highest value in existentialism. This kind of freedom is internal freedom and requires self-awareness. Lack of self-awareness means living a life dominated by the illusion of freedom and without existential choices.

The illusion of freedom

Real freedom is internal, as it relates to becoming aware (and later free) of the psychological and social conditioning that was placed upon us since the day we were born and has been progressively reinforced to us ever since.

Given our fragility and vulnerability, as the child that we once were, it was useful for us to learn to be obedient and compliant by fulfilling the wishes and expectations of our caregivers. At that time, we had no choice but to be dependent in order to be taken care of. This was the genesis of our inauthentic or false-self (e.g. being a perfectionist or a people pleaser).

As we grow up, however, this dependency is no longer useful. To become a free adult, we need to learn to let go of this dependency. This includes the constant pressure to conform with and to please others.

Failure to do so means living in a permanent child-like state trapped inside the body of an adult. It means to keep making unconscious life choices out of compulsion or conditioning. Over time, this will very likely compromise our mental health (e.g. experiencing depression , anxiety , and even despair). These are the psychological indicators telling us the time to reclaim our authentic or true-self (our freedom) has come.

This reclaiming of our true self entails becoming self-differentiated by decluttering our minds and unburdening ourselves from external expectations, belief structures, roles, duties, and obligations that were imposed on us. This process of self-liberation doesn’t mean we don’t need to fulfill any external expectations, or don’t have beliefs, roles or duties. It means that we choose them freely by making conscious life choices.

Freedom, then, means becoming aware of what we can do to reach our full human potential. Only when we have choices, can we exercise our freedom. This requires self-awareness.

Freedom and self-awareness

There cannot be freedom without self-awareness. To be free means to have choices to choose from. The only way to have choices is to become self-aware, so self-awareness gives us life’s choices. Self-awareness is having clarity about who we are. This includes knowing our personality , strengths, weaknesses, thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, and emotions. Self-awareness also allows us to understand others and how they perceive us, and our responses to them. It is the first step in creating what you want, where you focus your attention and reactions to determine where you go in life. The benefits of gaining self-awareness include greater clarity and peace of mind.

Most importantly, self-awareness is transformational, as it derives self-transformation – it transforms how you view yourself and are viewed by others. Once we become self-aware, we are then in a position to know what to take responsibility for. Personal freedom comes by taking responsibility for making choices to live authentically.

Taking responsibility is empowering and leads to freedom

Taking responsibility empowers us by making us accountable for our own behavior, to think critically, perform well under pressure, and handle challenges with ease.

Owning our decisions provides us with a powerful focus on what we want. Responsibility begins with knowing what we want and creating a plan to get there – not because of a sense of duty, but from our own desire.

When we take responsibility, we take ownership of behavior and its consequences. We accept our choices and their outcomes – without blaming others or life’s circumstances. This makes us strong and resilient .

The degree of freedom we experience in life is a direct proportion of the amount of responsibility we take.

Seven benefits of taking responsibility

By taking responsibility we:

• Live more meaningful and purposeful lives
• Experience personal (inner) power and authority
• Create individuation
• Attain differentiation
• Embody our truth
• Create freedom for ourselves
• Feel empowered, capable, and proud of ourselves

In what area of your life could you take only 10% more responsibility today?

What your life would be like if you were going to do this today?

Overend, P. (2021). Working with power in existential therapy. Existential Analysis: Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis, 32 (2), 309-321.

Salicru, S. (2021). A practical and contemporary model of depression for our times—A timeless existential clinician’s perspective. Open Journal of Depression, 10 (2), 54-89. https://doi.org/10.4236/ojd.2021.102005

Spinelli, E. (2007). Practising existential psychotherapy: The relational world . Sage.

Sebastian Salicru is a registered psychologist, psychotherapist, and board-approved supervisor, with over 25 years of professional experience in both clinical and corporate settings. He is the author of Leadership Results.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Responsibility without freedom folk judgements about deliberate actions.

• 1 Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Corporate Member of Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
• 2 School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
• 3 Department of Philosophy, Kenan Institute for Ethics, Duke University, Durham, NC, United States
• 4 Berlin Center for Advanced Neuroimaging & Department of Psychology & Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

A long-standing position in philosophy, law, and theology is that a person can be held morally responsible for an action only if they had the freedom to choose and to act otherwise. Thus, many philosophers consider freedom to be a necessary condition for moral responsibility. However, empirical findings suggest that this assumption might not be in line with common sense thinking. For example, in a recent study we used surveys to show that – counter to positions held by many philosophers – lay people consider actions to be free when they are spontaneous rather than being based on reasons. In contrast, responsibility is often considered to require that someone has thought about the alternative options. In this study we used an online survey to directly test the degree to which lay judgements of freedom and responsibility match. Specifically, we tested whether manipulations of deliberation affect freedom and responsibility judgements in the same way. Furthermore, we also tested the dependency of these judgements on a person’s belief that their decision had consequences for their personal life. We found that deliberation had an opposite effect on freedom and responsibility judgements. People were considered more free when they acted spontaneously, whereas they were considered more responsible when they deliberated about their actions. These results seem to suggest that deliberating about reasons is crucially important for the lay concept of responsibility, while for the lay notion of freedom it is perceived to be detrimental. One way of interpreting our findings for the interdisciplinary debate on free will and responsibility could be to suggest that lay beliefs match the philosophical position of semi-compatibilism. Semi-compatibilists insist that the metaphysical debate on the nature of free will can be separated from the debate on conditions of responsible agency. According to our findings the beliefs of lay people are in line with views held by semi-compatibilists, even though we did not test whether they endorse that position explicitly.

Introduction

Philosophers have been analyzing the relation of free will and responsibility since antiquity. Most of them have proposed that freedom is a necessary condition for responsibility ( Van Inwagen, 1983 ; Kant, 1998 ; Aristotle, 2000 ; Augustine, 2006 ; Vihvelin, 2008 ). Many philosophers furthermore claim that people act freely or autonomously only if they act for reasons ( Locke, 1975 ; Kant, 1998 ), or only if they are provided with options with different values ( Van Inwagen, 1989 ; Kane, 2005 ; Schlosser, 2014 ; Mecacci and Haselager, 2015 ), or only if the action has significant consequences for their personal life ( Roskies, 2011 ; Schlosser, 2014 ; Mecacci and Haselager, 2015 ).

Recent empirical research has shown that lay people’s beliefs do not agree with these conceptual positions. In one study ( Deutschländer et al., 2017 ) we found that the deliberation of reasons, the availability of different choice options, or the existence of real life consequences were all not necessary for an action to be considered free. On the contrary, lay people judged actions to be most free if (a) they were chosen without deliberation, (b) they involved different (as opposed to equal) options, and (c) they were believed to have different real-life consequences. Thus, paradoxically, deliberation was even considered to reduce freedom, counter to the notion that reasons play a key role in assigning freedom to actions.

Please note that this research pertained to subjective ratings of freedom rather than responsibility. For lay concepts of responsibility, in contrast, deliberation might non-etheless be important, but this hasn’t been empirically tested so far. Previous studies have already jointly measured the effects of experimental conditions on free will and moral responsibility judgements ( Nahmias et al., 2005 , 2007 ), however, regarding somewhat different experimental manipulations than here (see section “Discussion”).

Thus, here, we directly compare how freedom judgements and responsibility judgements of laypeople are affected by the factors deliberation, choice, and consequence. We compare how the following factors affect judgements of freedom versus responsibility: (1) Whether an action was spontaneous or based on deliberation; (2) whether the decision involved qualitatively different options (choosing) or identical options (picking) [for the distinction between picking and choosing see Ullmann-Margalit and Morgenbesser (1977) ]; (3) whether the subsequent actions led to consequences for a person’s life or not. As Nahmias et al. (2005) note, it is very difficult to ask subjects about abstract theories like determinism and compatibilism that are quite far removed from everyday life without biasing their answer in crafting the vignettes. Instead, we have opted to test action types that are both clearly relevant for the free will discussion, but also easily understandable in an everyday context.

Materials and Methods

Participants.

We deployed an online-questionnaire via university email distribution-lists. We received responses of 133 participants (62.6% female, 31.3% male, 3.8% missing values). The age of the respondents ranged from 18 to 53 years ( M age = 25.03 years, SD age = 7.76 years). Almost all respondents (97.7%) had a high-school or university degree. 66.7% of the respondents had not previously thought about the question of free will, while the remaining third had (“Have you ever thought about free action or free will?”). The research was approved by the psychological ethics committee of the Humboldt University in accordance with the declaration of Helsinki. Informed consent was obtained at the beginning of the online-questionnaire.

Material and Procedure

We asked participants to respond to questions in an online questionnaire containing short written scenarios. We implemented those scenarios in the software Unipark (Questback GmbH, Köln, Germany). Each questionnaire contained eight scenarios. Those scenarios followed from a combination of three within-subject factors: deliberation, choice, and consequence. The factor deliberation used two levels: A person either deliberated about their choice or acted spontaneously. The factor choice included two levels: “choosing” among different options or “picking” among identical options. The factor consequence had two levels: Participants knew that the action either had significant consequences for a person’s life (signing a job contract) or it involved an insignificant action with no consequences (taking a note) (see Table 1 for all scenarios used in this study based on all possible combinations of the three factors). Before starting the questionnaire participants were randomly assigned to one of two possible groups: One group was asked to provide only freedom ratings, the other group was required to provide only responsibility ratings. This between-subjects approach in our mixed design was adopted in order to avoid priming the participants to the purpose of the study.

Table 1. The three within-subject factors and the corresponding scenarios.

At the beginning, subjects were presented with instructions for completing the questionnaire. We asked the respondents to assess how free/responsible they considered each of eight displayed actions according to their individual beliefs. For each respondent, the order of the scenarios was randomized. The respondent saw only one scenario at a time. Subjects answered using a rating scale with a range from 0 to 100, where 0 indicates “not free/not responsible” and 100 “free/responsible” (depending on the group, they had been assigned to). Please note that in the philosophical literature, freedom and responsibility are frequently considered dichotomous rather than continuous. Here we opt for the continuous scale because it entails the dichotomous case as one possibility for participants to respond. Below the freedom/responsibility rating an additional question was presented that asked, “How confident are you about the rating?” (confidence rating, CR) and was to be answered on a scale from 0 “not certain” to 100 “certain.” This was done to monitor whether subjects had clear beliefs about the different scenarios. There were no time constraints for responding to the questions.

Ratings of Freedom and Responsibility

Figure 1 shows the mean judgements of freedom and responsibility plotted separately for the three main experimental factors (for full results see Table 2 ). We performed a four-factorial mixed ANOVA with three within-subject experimental factors (Deliberation × Choice × Consequences) and one between-subject factor (Rating Type).

(1) Overall, participants rated the responsibility for actions higher than their freedom, as indicated by a significant main effect of the between-subject factor Rating Type [ Figure 1 ; F (1,131) = 15.37, p < 0.001, Cohen’s d = 0.40].

(2) There was a significant interaction effect between the factors Deliberation and Rating Type [ Figure 1A ; F (1,131) = 35.66, p < 0.001, Cohen’s d = 1.12]. This strong effect indicates that the factor Deliberation had different effects on ratings of freedom. Deliberating about an action (as opposed to acting spontaneously) led subjects to judge that action as more responsible but less free. The difference between freedom ratings of deliberate versus spontaneous actions was significant t (266) = -2.92, p = 0.004, Cohen’s d = 0.26. The difference between responsibility ratings of deliberate versus spontaneous actions was also significant t (288) = 9.07, p < 0.001, Cohen’s d = 0.56.

(3) There was no significant interaction effect of Rating Type and Choice [ Figure 1B ; F (1,131) = 0.257, p = 0.663], indicating that the judgment of freedom versus responsibility was not differentially affected by whether a choice involved different or equal options.

(4) There was a significant interaction between Rating Type and Consequences [ Figure 1C ; F (1,131) = 5.55, p = 0.020, Cohen’s d = 0.21]. While an action with consequences for a person’s life (compared to an action without consequence) was judged to make a person more responsible t (288) = 3.52, p > 0.001, Cohen’s d = 0.23 it had no effect on the degree to which the action was rated as free t (266) = -0.21, p = 0.83.

Figure 1. Interaction between rating type separately for each the three within-Subject factors (Collapsed across all other conditions): (A) interaction between rating type and deliberation, (B) interaction between rating type and choice, and (C) interaction between rating type and consequence error bars indicate SEM across all subjects of one group. Asterisks indicates significant difference for post hoc analysis (n.s.– p > 0.05, ∗∗ p < 0.01, ∗∗∗ p < 0.001).

Table 2. Descriptive statistics.

Ratings of Confidence

Throughout the conditions, confidence ratings were high ( M = 78.50; SD = 24.44), ranging from 67.73 to 86.86 ( Table 2 ). Thus, we found no evidence that participants were uncertain how to judge the scenarios.

Our results reveal important dissociations between judgements of freedom and responsibility regarding actions. Overall ratings of responsibility were higher than those of freedom. However, given the between-participant design of the study this overall difference might be a matter of scaling and is thus hard to interpret. The key finding is that the experimental variables affect these two types of ratings differentially: When an action was based on deliberation (rather than being spontaneous), the action was judged to be less free, but its agent was considered to be more responsible for it. When an action involved real-world consequences (vs. not), its agent was considered more responsible, but consequences did not affect the freedom. Whether an action was between equal options or not had no discernible effect on freedom or responsibility ratings.

Our study did not explicitly seek a representative sample (similar to many previous studies, e.g., those using Mechanical Turk). It consisted of a spontaneous sample of respondents responding to an invitation to participate. Overall, the distribution of ages in our sample is not that different than in standard experiments in psychology (mean age 25.03 years, standard deviation 7.76 years; please note that sampling from a Gaussian will always involve a few values from the tails). Our study was thus not designed to resolve the effects of age ranges. In order to address this important point we are currently obtaining data from representative samples on related scenarios, which is the only way to properly address these effects.

Previous studies have used similar designs to assess influences of experimental factors on free will and moral responsibility judgements ( Nahmias et al., 2005 , 2007 ). In one study ( Nahmias et al., 2005 ) switching from a negative action (robbing a bank) to a positive action (saving a child) increased moral responsibility ratings but decreased freedom ratings. However, this specific aspect of the study can only be observed descriptively because no direct test for an interaction between these two factors was provided (the focus of the study was otherwise). Another study ( Nahmias et al., 2007 ) showed for different manipulations (switching between neural and psychological determinism, switching between the real world and an alternate world, and switching between good and bad actions) that free will and moral responsibility were generally affected in a similar direction. In contrast, we find that factors such as deliberation and the presence or absence of consequences do have differential effects on free will and responsibility. Based on our previous work ( Deutschländer et al., 2017 ) one could speculate that these experimental manipulations might have been stronger in bringing out the dissociations between free will and responsibility.

In the present data, the freedom ratings considered alone were only affected by deliberation, but not by the nature of the choice (choosing/picking) or by the possible consequences. This is largely in line with a previous study where we found the factor of deliberation to have a moderate effect ( Deutschländer et al., 2017 ), whereas the factors of choice and consequences had only marginal effects. Presumably the minor differences are due to the lower number of participants in the current study.

One question is whether participants could have understood the deliberation vignettes differently. For example, if an agent acted spontaneously, participants might have thought that the agent had reasons but was not aware of them. In that case the difference between acting spontaneously versus deliberately was that the agent was aware of their reasons if they acted deliberately while they were not aware of their reasons if they acted spontaneously. In order to investigate this alternative interpretation, future research should distinguish between having reasons, being aware of those reasons, and forming reasons by deliberation. Furthermore, future studies could provide a more in-depth assessment between judgements of free will and responsibility by directly probing individual participants on both concepts within a single study.

Another interesting question is whether the freedom or responsibility effects pertain to the agent’s action or to the situation . In our first main finding the experimental manipulation is independent of the situational context: The difference between deliberative and spontaneous is only in the internal mental process, while the external conditions remain exactly the same. Here, the key effect of deliberation versus spontaneity can thus not be explained by differences in external conditions. In contrast, our second main finding of an effect of consequence involves a change in the situation the agent is in. However, please note that also in this scenario the participants were asked to rate the freedom / responsibility of the action, not the situation.

Another question is how exactly participants understood the factor Consequence. Participants have rated an agent as more responsible for an action with consequences than without consequences. When there are consequences of an action, there is more for the agent to be responsible for, so the agent is responsible for more. However, this is not to say that he has more responsibility. I can kill and steal with equal responsibility, even if I am responsible for more in the killing case. Participants might mistake the degree of responsibility of an agent with the harms the action causes. A potential follow-up needs to distinguish degrees of responsibility from degrees of harms for which a person is responsible in order to clarify what the participants had in mind.

Another interesting implication of our findings relates to Libet-style experiments ( Libet et al., 1983 ) Some researchers interpret the results of Libet’s experiments as evidence that human freedom is illusory and therefore the concept of responsibility also needs to be revised ( Wegner, 2002 ). Besides criticism by empirical researchers ( Schurger et al., 2012 ; Schultze-Kraft et al., 2016 ), especially Philosophers have pointed out a number of serious objections against the Libet-style experiments and their radical interpretation ( Sinnott-Armstrong and Nadel, 2011 ). Among those objections, one particular critique seems to be affected by our results. Some philosophers have suggested that the actions in Libet-style experiments do not qualify as free, because they lack reasons, distinguishable options, and real life consequences. “Arbitrary action (i.e., Libet Action) is at best a degenerate case of freedom of will, one in which what matters fails to hold” ( Roskies, 2011 , p. 18). Our results suggest that this particular objection might fail for the folk concept of freedom but still succeed for the folk concept of responsibility . From a folk perspective, actions in Libet-style experiments qualify as free action even if they are spontaneous, without much of a choice, and without consequences. The dissociation between freedom and responsibility in our study thus means that the Libet-style experiments do not speak to the issue of responsibility.

In general, the differential effects of deliberation on freedom and responsibility ratings raise questions as to whether freedom is considered a necessary condition for responsibility by lay people. We do not consider our folk psychological finding to mean that philosophers should avoid postulating this necessity, but our results serve as a warning that this necessity might not be intuitive, which is an important consideration given the immense public interest and engagement in the free will debate (e.g., Overbye, 2007 ). Please note, that many philosophers have argued that their positions should be in line with lay beliefs ( Jackson, 2000 ).

Our study might help to restructure debates about freedom and responsibility and partially alleviate the tension between neuroscience and psychology, which sometimes claim to refer to lay definitions of these terms ( Libet et al., 1983 ; Libet, 1985 , 2005 ), and philosophy, which often employs more elaborate definitions of freedom and responsibility ( Roskies, 2011 ). Lay intuitions of freedom are not in line with some common philosophical theories, because lay people ascribe more freedom in conditions of spontaneity and in the absence of reasons ( Deutschländer et al., 2017 ). However, the lay intuitions regarding responsibility are very well aligned with claims by many philosophers that responsibility requires consideration of reasons. These compatibilist philosophers do not normally think that actual deliberation is crucial for responsibility but only that the agent has to be able at least in principle to respond to reasons, an ability typically coined reason-responsiveness ( Fischer and Ravizza, 1998 ).

This account of responsibility opens up the possibility that agents sometimes have responsibility without freedom and that determinism is compatible with responsibility but not with freedom. Some philosophers ( Fischer, 2006 ) and scientists ( Gazzaniga, 2012 ) have explicitly endorsed this position, which is called semi-compatibilism. Our findings follow a pattern that would be expected if laypeople were to hold semi-compatibilist beliefs, according to which the ability to adequately consider reasons in deliberation increases responsibility but is not necessary for and might even reduce the sense of freedom. An interesting question is whether our results also extend to actions that are explicitly irresponsible (as opposed to less responsible). Our results don’t speak to this clearly enough because overall our responsibility ratings were high. However, this is certainly an interesting question for future research.

Our experiments obviously cannot prove directly that lay people are semi-compatibilists, as we did not ask them explicitly about their views on the relationship between determinism and freedom or moral responsibility. We doubt that lay people have stable, developed, or detailed views about such abstract theoretical notions 1 . Nonetheless, our studies do show that notions like reason and deliberation, which form an integral part of the necessary abilities for responsible agency according to semi-compatibilists, are in fact also positively associated with responsibility in the mind of lay people, in contrast with lay intuitions on freedom. The gap between the intuitions of lay people, scientific results and philosophical theorizing in this respect might be less deep than often assumed.

Ethics Statement

Study approved by the Ethics Committee of the Institute for Psychology, Humboldt University Berlin.

Author Contributions

RD designed the study and analyzed the data. TV designed the study. WS-A conceptualized the input. J-DH designed the study and supervised the data analysis. All authors wrote the manuscript.

This work was funded by the Stiftung Humboldt-Universität, DFG Cluster of Excellence Science of Intelligence, DFG Collaborative Research Center SFB 940, John Templeton Foundation, and Fetzer Franklin Fund.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

• ^ The debate over lay intuitions on determinism and compatibilism between Nahmias ( Nahmias et al., 2005 , 2007 ) and Nichols and Knobe (2007) seems very much to support this point.

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Keywords : freedom, responsibility, deliberation, consequence, experimental philosophy

Citation: Vierkant T, Deutschländer R, Sinnott-Armstrong W and Haynes J-D (2019) Responsibility Without Freedom? Folk Judgements About Deliberate Actions. Front. Psychol. 10:1133. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01133

Received: 05 September 2018; Accepted: 29 April 2019; Published: 21 May 2019.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2019 Vierkant, Deutschländer, Sinnott-Armstrong and Haynes. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: John-Dylan Haynes, [email protected]

† These authors have contributed equally to this work

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Freedom vs. Responsibility

What's the difference.

Freedom and responsibility are two sides of the same coin. While freedom allows individuals to make choices and pursue their desires without constraint, responsibility ensures that these choices are made with consideration for the consequences they may have on oneself and others. Freedom without responsibility can lead to chaos and harm, as individuals may act selfishly or recklessly. On the other hand, responsibility without freedom can result in a lack of personal agency and stifled growth. Therefore, it is essential to strike a balance between freedom and responsibility, where individuals are empowered to exercise their freedom while being accountable for their actions.

Further Detail

Introduction.

Freedom and responsibility are two fundamental concepts that shape our lives and society. While they may seem like opposing forces, they are intricately connected and play a crucial role in our personal growth, relationships, and the functioning of a democratic society. In this article, we will explore the attributes of freedom and responsibility, highlighting their importance and how they complement each other.

Defining Freedom

Freedom is a concept that holds different meanings for different individuals. At its core, freedom refers to the ability to act, think, and express oneself without external constraints or limitations. It is the absence of coercion or oppression, allowing individuals to make choices and pursue their desires. Freedom encompasses various aspects of life, including political, social, and personal freedoms.

Politically, freedom entails the right to participate in the decision-making process, vote, and express one's opinions without fear of persecution. Socially, freedom involves the ability to associate with others, form relationships, and engage in cultural, religious, or recreational activities of one's choice. On a personal level, freedom means having autonomy over one's own body, thoughts, and actions.

However, freedom does not imply absolute license or anarchy. It is important to recognize that freedom comes with certain limitations to ensure the well-being and rights of others. This is where responsibility comes into play.

Understanding Responsibility

Responsibility is the moral or legal obligation to act in a manner that considers the consequences of one's actions and respects the rights and well-being of others. It is the recognition that our choices and behaviors have an impact on ourselves, those around us, and society as a whole. Responsibility involves making informed decisions, being accountable for our actions, and fulfilling our duties and obligations.

Individual responsibility is crucial for personal growth and development. It allows us to learn from our mistakes, make ethical choices, and contribute positively to our communities. Moreover, responsibility is the foundation of a functioning society, as it ensures that individuals respect the rights and freedoms of others, follow laws, and uphold social norms.

Responsibility can be divided into different categories, including personal responsibility, social responsibility, and civic responsibility. Personal responsibility refers to taking ownership of one's actions, behaviors, and decisions. Social responsibility involves considering the impact of our actions on others and actively contributing to the well-being of society. Civic responsibility encompasses participating in the democratic process, obeying laws, and engaging in activities that promote the common good.

The Interplay between Freedom and Responsibility

While freedom and responsibility may appear to be contradictory, they are actually interdependent and mutually reinforcing. Without freedom, responsibility loses its meaning, as individuals would be coerced into fulfilling obligations without choice or agency. On the other hand, without responsibility, freedom can lead to chaos, harm, and the infringement of others' rights.

Freedom and responsibility form a delicate balance that allows individuals to exercise their rights while considering the well-being of others. When individuals exercise their freedom responsibly, they contribute to the overall harmony and progress of society. Responsible actions ensure that personal freedoms do not infringe upon the rights and freedoms of others, fostering a sense of fairness, justice, and respect.

Moreover, responsibility enhances the value and significance of freedom. When individuals understand the consequences of their actions and act responsibly, their freedom becomes more meaningful and purposeful. Responsibility empowers individuals to make informed choices, exercise self-discipline, and contribute positively to their own lives and the lives of others.

The Benefits of Freedom and Responsibility

Both freedom and responsibility bring numerous benefits to individuals and society as a whole. Let's explore some of these benefits:

1. Personal Growth and Empowerment

Freedom allows individuals to explore their potential, pursue their passions, and develop their unique talents. It provides the space for personal growth, self-expression, and self-actualization. Responsibility, on the other hand, empowers individuals to take charge of their lives, make choices aligned with their values, and learn from their experiences. The combination of freedom and responsibility creates an environment conducive to personal development and empowerment.

2. Respect for Diversity and Tolerance

Freedom encourages diversity of thought, beliefs, and lifestyles. It enables individuals to express their unique identities and perspectives, fostering a society that values pluralism and tolerance. However, responsibility ensures that this diversity is respected and protected. Responsible individuals recognize the importance of treating others with dignity, empathy, and fairness, regardless of their differences. The interplay between freedom and responsibility promotes a harmonious coexistence of diverse individuals and cultures.

3. Social Cohesion and Trust

Freedom allows individuals to form social connections, build relationships, and engage in collective endeavors. It is the foundation of social cohesion and the development of strong communities. Responsibility, in turn, strengthens these bonds by fostering trust, accountability, and reciprocity. Responsible individuals contribute to the well-being of their communities, support others in times of need, and work towards common goals. The combination of freedom and responsibility creates a sense of belonging and shared purpose.

4. Democratic Participation and Good Governance

Freedom is essential for the functioning of a democratic society. It enables citizens to participate in the political process, voice their opinions, and hold those in power accountable. However, responsibility is equally important to ensure the effectiveness and stability of democratic institutions. Responsible citizens educate themselves about political issues, vote responsibly, and engage in constructive dialogue. The interplay between freedom and responsibility strengthens democratic governance and promotes the common good.

5. Ethical Decision-Making and Moral Development

Freedom allows individuals to make choices based on their values, beliefs, and conscience. It provides the opportunity for ethical decision-making and moral development. Responsibility, on the other hand, guides individuals to consider the consequences of their actions and make choices that align with ethical principles. The combination of freedom and responsibility cultivates a sense of integrity, empathy, and moral reasoning.

Freedom and responsibility are not opposing forces, but rather two sides of the same coin. They are interconnected and essential for personal growth, social harmony, and the functioning of a democratic society. While freedom allows individuals to exercise their rights and pursue their desires, responsibility ensures that these freedoms are exercised in a manner that respects the rights and well-being of others. The interplay between freedom and responsibility creates a balanced and thriving society, where individuals can flourish while contributing to the common good.

Comparisons may contain inaccurate information about people, places, or facts. Please report any issues.

Skip to Main Content of WWII

Freedom, resistance, and responsibility: the philosophy and politics of jean–paul sartre.

The importance of World War II to Jean-Paul Sartre’s life and thought is often overlooked.

Top Image: Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, the year Sartre won the Nobel Prize. Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Gift of Charles (A.B.’84) and Linda Googe, 2019.17.157.

One risks dramatic understatement in designating Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) as among the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. Between roughly 1935 and 1970, when he was at his most productive, Sartre exerted enormous influence on such currents as existentialism (with which he is most associated), phenomenology, and philosophical anthropology. His works, including The Transcendence of the Ego  (1936), Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions  (1939), The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination  (1940), Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology  (1943), and “Existentialism is a Humanism” (1945), are still studied today.

Sartre also became a crucial figure in Marxist thought with “Materialism and Revolution” (1946), The Question of Method  (1957), and the first volume of Critique of Dialectical Reason  (1960). He was extremely active in leftist politics in France and internationally for more than 30 years. Always zealously guarding his independence as an author, Sartre wrote about topics as diverse as American literature (e.g. Faulkner and Dos Passos), jazz, opposition to colonialism, antisemitism, and psychoanalysis.

A sharp and incisive essayist and biographer, he also penned some of the greatest texts of twentieth-century literature like the novels Nausea  (1938) and The Roads to Freedom  series (1947-51), the short-story collection The Wall and Other Stories  (1939), and plays such as The Flies  (1943), No Exit  (1944), The Devil and the Good Lord  (1951), and The Condemned of Altona  (1959). What is often overlooked about Sartre is the importance of World War II to his life and thought.

To address the centrality of the Second World War in Sartre’s biography, The National WWII Museum’s Institute for the Study of War and Democracy has drawn on the expertise of Ian Birchall. Birchall is the author of a major study of the philosopher, Sartre against Stalinism  (2004), and has written numerous articles and reviews on Sartre’s philosophical and political thought. These works have contributed greatly to the contextualization of his place within the broader history of the French and European Left.

Beyond his work on Sartre, Birchall is the co-author (with Tony Cliff) of France: The Struggle Goes On  (1968), as well as Workers against the Monolith: The Communist Parties since 1943  (1974), Bailing Out the System: Reformist Socialism in Western Europe, 1944-85  (1986), The Spectre of Babeuf  (1997), A Rebel’s Guide to Lenin  (2005), and Tony Cliff: A Marxist for His Time  (2011). Birchall has also translated the writings of Victor Serge and Alfred Rosmer.

In an interview conducted in May 1975, Jean-Paul Sartre looked back on a “great change in my thinking” that occurred during World War II. What happened to Sartre, who had previously defined himself as an anti-bourgeois writer, in the early years of that conflict and what do The War Diaries  reveal about the evolution of his thought?

It is scarcely surprising that the Second World War had an enormous impact on Sartre’s thinking. It thrust him into a succession of new experiences—conscription into the army, detention in a German prisoner of war camp, then return to Paris and involvement with the Resistance. For Sartre, all this brought home the reality that questions he had previously considered as purely intellectual matters involved choices and alignments in the real world. Choices which, under a Nazi Occupation, could be matters of life and death.

As he wrote in his essay “The Republic of Silence,” “we have never been so free as under the German Occupation.” What he meant by this provocative paradox was that under a lethally authoritarian regime every choice could have grave implications, every decision about values could bring one into conflict with the existing order.

It was the period of the war that initiated Sartre into the political commitment that would last for the rest of his life. As he put it in a 1969 interview, “I was not made for politics, and yet I was remade by politics so that I eventually had to enter them.” It is important to remember that this period of Sartre’s major work was one of almost permanent war; the German occupation was followed by colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria, so that between 1939 and 1962, France was never at peace for more than a few months.

The War Diaries  show how Sartre’s thought was in permanent evolution during this period. The army brought him into contact with a wide range of people from backgrounds he had not previously encountered; in particular he observed the low morale of the troops (a sharp contrast with the nationalist fervour of 1914). And he developed a critical attitude to the whole analysis of the war:

“in September 1939 the war was welcomed by the bourgeoisie because the German-Russian treaty had brought Communism into disrepute …. The Communist Party would be dissolved. What ten years of politics could not do, the war would do in a month. Such is, it seems to me, the main reason for bourgeois support for the war. Under the guise of a national war, it is to a great extent a civil war.”

But two other points should be made. If Sartre developed in the war period, it was on the basis of what had gone before. A recent book by Sam Coombes— The Early Sartre and Marxism  (2008)—has shown that Sartre’s thought before 1939 was closer to Marxism than has previously been recognized. And it is clear that Sartre was much influenced by figures from the political left before 1939. Paul Nizan, who until just before his death was a loyal member of the Communist Party, was an important point of reference. His significance is widely recognized, but far less attention has been given to Colette Audry (perhaps because she was a woman).

Audry was a formidable intellectual—as early as 1934 she wrote an essay demonstrating the fascist elements in Heidegger’s thought. But she was also a tireless activist—in 1939 she helped to rescue some of the POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) leaders from Spain after Franco’s victory. (I met one of them some 50 years later and he still remembered Audry with gratitude). His pre-war discussions with Audry undoubtedly helped to orient Sartre in the choices he made after 1939.

Sartre’s role in the Resistance was real but modest, and mainly of a literary nature. Claude Morgan, the Communist editor of the clandestine Lettres françaises  recalled: “Sartre was a tremendous guy. …. He was ready to do anything for the Resistance.” In recent years his conduct during the Occupation has been criticized by writers like Michel Onfray. It was a difficult period and he may well have made misjudgements. But the harshest criticisms have come from a younger generation of writers (like Onfray) who have no first-hand experience of the realities of life under the Occupation.

At the time, activists who had suffered under the Nazis were happy to cooperate with Sartre. I’m thinking of David Rousset, who survived a Nazi camp, and Jean-René Chauvin. Chauvin was a remarkable individual who survived Auschwitz, Buchenwald , and Mauthausen . In the post-war period he worked closely with Sartre in the RDR (see below). If anyone had a right to criticize Sartre it was he. I interviewed him in 1997 and, though he had political differences with Sartre, he spoke of him with affection.

Many commentators singled out Sartre’s 1938 novel, Nausea , some of the early short stories (e.g. “Intimacy” and “Erostratus”), the sections of Being and Nothingness  on “others,” and the 1944 play No Exit —the often quoted phrase “Hell—that is other people”—that a fundamental pessimism about relations between human beings ran through Sartre’s thought. How do you respond to this claim?

In “Existentialism Is a Humanism” Sartre said of his critics: “their excessive protests make me suspect that what is annoying them is not so much our pessimism, but, much more likely, our optimism.” I would largely go along with that. Sartre’s reputation for “pessimism” derives from the fairly superficial fact of his preoccupation with some of the bleaker aspects of human experience, and the fact that he was an atheist.

The line “hell is other people” (spoken by a character in a play and not necessarily Sartre’s own opinion) is often cited. It is important to remember the context of the play as a whole. It is often summarized as being the interaction of three people confined to a room, all equally guilty of bad faith. A more careful reading of the play shows that one of the three, Inès, a working-class Lesbian, comes across as the most positive character and clearly has Sartre’s sympathy. Sartre’s developing views on class and oppression cannot be reduced to a mere statement about “hell is other people.”

But if Sartre was an optimist, it was not a facile optimism. He believed that human beings were free to change the world. But he recognized that this was a formidable responsibility and that it was certainly not guaranteed success.

Thus, Sartre did not go along with the rather superficial statements about working-class unity that came from the Communist Party. He recognised that there was no automatic unity between the French working class and the victims of colonialism. There were elements of conflict very deeply rooted in human relationships; hence the fact that many years later he was still grappling, not wholly successfully, with the concepts of “seriality” and the “fused group.”

And history held no guarantees. As he put it in “Existentialism and Humanism”: “Tomorrow, after my death, some men may decide to establish fascism, and others may be so cowardly or so slack as to let them do so. If so, fascism will then be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us.” This stands very much in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg’s alternative of “socialism or barbarism” and Marx’s warning that class struggle must produce either “a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or …. the common ruin of the contending classes.” His play, The Condemned of Altona , suggests that in the thirtieth century there will be nobody to judge our history except a “court of crabs”—the only surviving species. Sartre was thinking of nuclear war, but in our epoch of climate change it is a very apt image.

After his release from a German prison camp and return to Paris in 1941, Sartre helped form Socialism and Liberation. Can you describe the composition and aims of this organization? What was Sartre’s role in it?

Socialisme et Liberté was Sartre’s first involvement in a political organisation. He developed it from an earlier group Sous la Botte (under the jackboot). The significance of Socialisme et Liberté should not be exaggerated. It had perhaps 50 members, mainly young intellectuals from the same milieu as Sartre. There were one or two Trotskyists (their own organisations were in disarray) and other non-Communist leftists; Maurice Nadeau, who would become well-known as a publisher and critic, attended one meeting. It was essentially a discussion group with very little practical activity. One of its members, Nathalie Sarraute, recalled: “It was supposed to be a resistance group. In fact, we were writing essays about the France of the future!”

It is important to put this in political context. In the first year of the German Occupation, the French left was in complete disarray. The Communist Party, which had spent five years calling for an anti-fascist Popular Front, had been totally disoriented by the Hitler-Stalin Pact. It had lost many of its members and was seeking legal publication of its paper under Nazi rule. The Socialist Party (SFIO) was divided—a majority of its deputies had voted for Pétain.

The left split from the SFIO, the PSOP (The Workers and Peasants’ Socialist Party), had disintegrated; the Trotskyists who had worked within it were isolated and divided into small groups. The most serious journal of the non-Communist left, Pierre Monatte’s La Révolution prolétarienne  had ceased to appear. The anarchist organizations were not functioning. In this situation the left was, in effect, starting from scratch and had to think through its basic positions.

A few months later Hitler invaded Russia, the Communist Party entered the Resistance, and everything was changed. There was now no place for a marginal organization like Socialisme et Liberté and it wound up. Some of its members joined the Communist Party because that seemed to be the place where effective action could be pursued. (Jean Kanapa, later a leading Communist Party bureaucrat, was briefly a member). Others, like Sartre himself, had reservations about the Communist Party but worked with the Resistance.

In 2008, I attended a meeting in Paris addressed by two surviving members of Socialisme et Liberté (see report here ). Since no documents survive, it is difficult to establish a proper history of the organization. One interesting point was Dominique Desanti’s recollection of leafleting German soldiers. The first-class carriages on the métro were reserved for German soldiers, and she would get into the carriage, hand out leaflets, and rapidly disappear. This is significant because it anticipated the Trotskyist strategy of trying to fraternise with German soldiers rather than the Communist position of “chacun son boche”—i.e. assassinating rank-and-file German soldiers.

  Recently, Ronald Aronson argued that Sartre both helped “to construct the postwar myth that all of occupied France engaged in some form of resistance against the Germans” but also “indicated this narrative’s mythic dimension.” Do you think Aronson’s assertion captures Sartre’s attitude toward the French Resistance?

I’m not familiar with this particular argument by Aronson, who is generally a very shrewd and fair judge of Sartre’s positions. It is most certainly a myth “that all of occupied France engaged in some form of resistance against the Germans.” But the myth was encouraged by both the Gaullists and the Communists, who were trying to present themselves as the true heirs of the Resistance. Among other things, the myth tended to obscure two fundamental facts about the Occupation.

Firstly, that a significant group within French society not merely acquiesced in the Nazi Occupation but actively encouraged it; Vichy’s first antisemitic laws were introduced without any pressure from the Germans. And secondly, the Resistance contained many people of non-French origin, notably veterans of the Spanish Civil War and anti-Nazi Germans. (See for example Merilyn Moos & Steve Cushion, Anti-Nazi Germans —2020.) It has only recently been acknowledged that a key role in the liberation of Paris was played by Spanish troops—veterans of the Spanish Civil War.  

The myth of mass resistance was followed, in 1969, by Marcel Ophüls’ movie Le Chagrin et la Pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity), which encouraged an alternative myth that collaboration had been widespread. The reality, I would argue, was more accurately presented in David Drake’s Paris At War: 1939 – 1944  (2015), in which he argued that there was a small minority of courageous Resisters, and an equally small minority of collaborators. The majority simply aimed to “survive increasing hardship and deprivation while making as few compromises as they could.”

Sartre may at times have helped to support the myth of mass resistance—for example in “The Republic of Silence” (referred to above), where he said “we have never been so free as under the German occupation,” it is somewhat vague as to who the “we “ referred to.

But on the other hand, Sartre often challenged the myths. Just a couple of examples. In his 1946 book Anti-Semite and Jew  he focused his main attention on the antisemitism that had deep roots in French society (going back to the Dreyfus case and beyond). He hardly mentioned the Holocaust and certainly gave no support to the view that antisemitism was something primarily imposed on France by German occupiers.

Secondly, in his 1946 play Men Without Shadows , Sartre explicitly dealt with an episode from the Resistance, with a drama centering on five Resisters facing torture and death. Two things stand out very clearly. Firstly, the people responsible for the torture and death threats were not Germans but Miliciens, that is, members of the French organisation set up to crush the Resistance.  And secondly, the most articulate and determined of the Resisters was Canoris, who was not French at all, but a Greek Communist. Sartre was acknowledging that the Resistance was not simply a national struggle, but had an internationalist component.

  In Paris in October 1945, Sartre gave the famed lecture, “Existentialism Is a Humanism.” How would you characterize for our audience the philosophy of freedom and responsibility presented in that talk and why do you think it attracted so many people at the time?

In France at the Liberation there was a considerable audience looking for a radical perspective independent of the Communist Party. There were two daily papers, Combat  and Franc-Tireur  which offered a far left, indeed revolutionary, position ( Combat  used to carry the slogan “From the Resistance to the Revolution”). Their combined print run was higher than that of the Communist L’Humanité .

Within this milieu there was considerable interest in Sartre, who had acquired a certain celebrity thanks to his literary works and various articles. There was curiosity as to exactly what “existentialism” was. But Being and Nothingness  was not an easy read. So for Sartre to offer a popularization of his own philosophy was very welcome. There are vivid descriptions of the crowd who packed out the lecture and almost suffocated. It was published in book form a few months later.

In a sense it was a hostage to fortune. Many of Sartre’s critics based their polemics on “Existentialism is a Humanism,” without making the effort to engage the rather more sophisticated arguments developed in Being and Nothingness .

Nonetheless it was a tour de force. Sartre was both dramatist and philosopher, and he succeeded in presenting his philosophy in concrete and vivid terms. The central argument was that we are free and that freedom entails responsibility. Our choices are always choices of values so that our decisions always involve implications that stretch far beyond the individual context.

Sartre illustrated his argument with some striking concrete examples. For example, the story of the young man who was undecided as to whether to stay with his mother or leave France to join the struggle against the Nazis. He sought Sartre’s advice—but the choice had to be his.

The lecture was also notable for the confrontation in discussion between Sartre and Pierre Naville. Naville was a surrealist who had become a Trotskyist (he played a key role in organizing the founding conference of the Fourth International in 1938). He counterposed to Sartre’s philosophy of freedom a Marxist view (accusing Sartre of individualism and liberalism)—but the argument was conducted in a calm and fraternal tone, very unlike Sartre’s various confrontations with members of the Communist Party.

Jason Dawsey, PhD

Jason Dawsey, PhD, is ASU WWII Studies Consultant in the Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy. 

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5 Freedom and Equality

Elizabeth Anderson is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

• Published: 05 October 2016
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Freedom and equality are often viewed as conflicting values. But there are at least three conceptions of freedom-negative, positive, and republican-and three conceptions of equality-of standing, esteem, and authority. Libertarians argue that rights to negative liberty override claims to positive liberty. However, a freedom-based defense of private property rights must favor positive over negative freedom. Furthermore, a regime of full contractual alienability of rights-on the priority of negative over republican freedom-is an unstable basis for a free society. To sustain a free society over time, republican liberty must take priority over negative liberty, resulting in a kind of authority egalitarianism. Finally, the chapter discusses how the values of freedom and equality bear on the definition of property rights. The result is a qualified defense of some core features of social democratic orders.

Freedom and equality are typically presented as opposing values. In the quick version of the argument, economic liberty—the freedom to make contracts, acquire property, and exchange goods—upsets substantive economic equality ( Nozick, 2013 : 160–164). Suppose some people sail to an uninhabited island and divide its territory and the provisions they brought into shares of equal value. If they are free to produce, trade, and accumulate property, some would rapidly get richer than others due to good luck and good choices, while others would become poor due to bad luck and bad choices. Any attempt to enforce strict material equality across large populations under modern economic conditions would require a totalitarian state. Gracchus Babeuf, a radical of the French Revolution, and the first modern advocate of strict material equality under state communism, understood this perfectly. He saw that the only way to ensure strict material equality was for the state to run society like an army—to control all property and production, assign everyone to their jobs, and control everyone’s thoughts (lest some get the ideas that they deserve more than others, or that they should be free to choose their own way of life) ( Babeuf, 1967 ; Buonarroti, 1836 ). He thought such equality was worth the sacrifice of freedom. Few who have actually lived under communism agree.

While the quick argument is true and of great historical importance, it does not address moderate types of egalitarianism. Virtually no one today advocates strict material equality. Social democrats, particularly in northern Europe, embraced private property and extensive markets well before the collapse of communism. Friedrich Hayek (1944) argued that social democratic experiments would lead societies down the slippery slope to totalitarianism. His prediction failed: moderate egalitarianism of the social democratic type has proved compatible with democracy, extensive civil liberties, and substantial if constrained market freedoms.

To make progress on the question of normative trade-offs between freedom and equality within the range of options for political economy credibly on the table, we must clarify our concepts. There are at least three conceptions of freedom—negative, positive, and republican—and three conceptions of equality—of standing, esteem, and authority. Republican freedom requires extensive authority egalitarianism. To block arguments that freedom requires substantial material equality, libertarians typically argue that rights to negative liberty override or constrain claims to positive liberty. This chapter will argue that, to the extent that libertarians want to support private property rights in terms of the importance of freedom to individuals, this strategy fails, because the freedom-based defense of private property rights depends on giving priority to positive or republican over negative freedom. Next, it is argued that the core rationale for inalienable rights depends on considerations of republican freedom. A regime of full contractual alienability of rights—on the priority of negative over republican freedom—is an unstable basis for a free society. It tends to shrink the domains in which individuals interact as free and independent persons, and expand the domains in which they interact on terms of domination and subordination. To sustain a free society over time, we should accept the priority of republican over negative liberty. This is to endorse a kind of authority egalitarianism. The chapter concludes with some reflections on how the values of freedom and equality bear on the definition of property rights. The result will be a qualified defense of some core features of social democratic orders.

1. Conceptions of Freedom and Equality

Let us distinguish three conceptions of freedom: negative freedom (noninterference), positive freedom (opportunities), and republican freedom (nondomination). Sarah has negative freedom if no one interferes with her actions. She has positive freedom if she has a rich set of opportunities effectively accessible to her. She has republican freedom if she is not dominated by another person—not subject to another’s arbitrary and unaccountable will.

These three conceptions of freedom are logically distinct. They are also somewhat causally independent: one can enjoy high degrees of any two of these freedoms at substantial cost to the third. Lakshmi could have perfect negative and republican freedom on an island in which she is the only inhabitant. No one else would be interfering with her actions or dominating her. She would have little positive freedom, however, since most opportunities are generated in society with others. Maria could have high degrees of negative and positive freedom while lacking republican freedom. She could be the favorite of an indulgent king, who showers her with wealth and privileges, and permits her to say and do what she likes—but who could throw her in his dungeon at his whim. Finally, Sven could have high degrees of positive and republican freedom while being subject to many constraints on his negative liberty. He could reside in an advanced social democratic state such as Norway, where interpersonal authority is constrained by the rule of law (so he is not subject to anyone’s arbitrary will), and a rich set of opportunities is available to all, at the cost of substantial negative liberty constraints through high levels of taxation and economic regulation.

Traditionally, most discussions of freedom focused on the contrast between negative and positive freedom. The recent revival of the republican conception of freedom as nondomination adds an important dimension to thinking about the lived experience of unfreedom and the social conditions of freedom. Pettit (1997 : 22–25) stresses the contrast between negative and republican freedom in the case where a dominator could but chooses not to interfere with subordinates. He argues that such vulnerability to interference can make subordinates submissive, self-censoring, and sycophantic toward their superiors. It is also important to consider some differences between negative liberty constraints imposed by a dominating power and those imposed in accordance with the rule of law by a liberal democratic authority. Domination is often personal: think of the husband under the law of coverture or the violent husband today, the slaveholder, the bullying, micromanaging boss. Rule-of-law constraints are impersonal and of general applicability. This arm’s-length character of the rule of law often relieves people of the humiliation of submission to domination, since they know “it’s not about me.” Dominating interference can arrive unannounced. Rule-of-law constraints must be publicized in advance, giving people time to figure out how to pursue their projects in ways that avoid interference. Dominating interference does not have to justify itself. Rule-of-law constraints in a liberal democratic order must appeal to public reasons, which limits the constraints that can be imposed. Dominating interference is unaccountable. Applied rule-of-law constraints in a democracy are subject to appeal before an impartial adjudicator, and those who enact them can be removed from power by those to whom the constraints apply.

These remarks apply to ideal types only. Actually existing formally liberal democratic regimes have devised innumerable ways to exercise domination under the guise of the rule of law. It is possible to devise a set of impersonal, generally applicable, publicized laws that regulate conduct so minutely that almost anyone innocently going about their business could be found to have run afoul of one of them. Such is the case with traffic laws in the United States. If enforcement action on the trivial infringements were limited to mere warnings or token fines, as in police stops to warn drivers that their tail lights are broken, they could be a service to the drivers and others on the road. Often, however, such traffic stops are a mere pretext for police exercise of arbitrary power to harass, intimidate, invade privacy, and seize people’s property without due process of law. 1 In other cases, impersonal rule-of-law regulations impose constraints so out of touch with local conditions, with such draconian penalties for noncompliance, that enforcement amounts to domination. Such is the case with the high-stakes testing regime imposed by the federal government under No Child Left Behind, with uniform arbitrary progress goals foisted on local school districts without any empirical research demonstrating that these goals were feasible. In some cases, the NCLB regime has created a culture of intimidation and cheating ( Aviv, 2014 ). This is a centralized planning regime akin to the five-year plans of communist states. In both cases, the imposition of goals plucked out of thin air in combination with severe sanctions is premised on the assumption that lack of sufficient will is the primary obstacle to progress—an assumption that rationalizes domination of those required to meet the goals.

We should be skeptical of attempts to operationalize the conditions for nondomination in formal terms. Powerful agents are constantly devising ways to skirt around formal constraints to dominate others. Republican freedom is a sociologically complex condition not easily encapsulated in any simple set of necessary and sufficient conditions, nor easily realized through any particular set of laws.

Turn now to equality. In other work, I have argued that the conceptions of equality relevant for political purposes are relational: they characterize the types of social relations in which members of society stand to one another ( Anderson, 2012b ; Anderson, 2012a ). Relational equality is opposed to social hierarchy. Three types of hierarchy—of standing, esteem, and authority—are particularly important. In hierarchies of standing, agents (including the state) count the interests of superiors highly, and the interests of inferiors for little or nothing. In hierarchies of esteem, some groups monopolize esteem and stigmatize their inferiors. In hierarchies of authority, dominant agents issue arbitrary and unaccountable commands to subordinates, who must obey on pain of sanctions. Egalitarians oppose such hierarchies and aim to replace them with institutions in which persons relate to one another as equals. For example, they want members of society to be treated as equals by the state and in institutions of civil society (standing); to be recognized as bearing equal dignity and respect (esteem); to have equal votes and access to political participation in democratic states (authority). Each of these conceptions of relational equality is complex and implicates numerous features of the social setting.

These three types of hierarchy usually reinforce each other. Groups that exercise power over others tend to enjoy higher esteem, and often use their power to exact special solicitude for their interests from others. Sometimes they come apart. Upper-class married women under the law of coverture enjoyed high esteem and standing, but had little authority and were subordinate to their husbands and to men generally. Some ethnic minorities, such as Chinese Malaysians, enjoy high standing and authority through their ownership and control of most businesses in Malaysia, but are racially stigmatized in Malaysian society.

Given this array of distinct conceptions of freedom and equality, it is harder to argue that freedom and equality are structurally opposed. There is a deep affinity between republican freedom as nondomination and authority egalitarianism. These are not conceptually identical. Domination can be realized in an isolated, transient interpersonal case (consider a kidnapper and his victim). Authoritarian hierarchy is institutionalized, enduring, and group-based. Yet authority hierarchies cause the most important infringements of republican freedom. Historically, the radical republican tradition, from the Levellers to the radical wing of the Republican party through Reconstruction, saw the two causes of freedom and equality as united: to be free was to not be subject to the arbitrary will of others. This required elimination of the authoritarian powers of dominant classes, whether of the king, feudal landlords, or slaveholders. Republican freedom for all is incompatible with authoritarian hierarchy and hence requires some form of authority egalitarianism.

Authority egalitarianism so dominates public discourse in contemporary liberal democracies that few people openly reject it. However, conservatives have traditionally supported authority hierarchy, and continue to do so today, while often publicizing their views in other terms. For example, conservatives tend to defend expansive discretionary powers of police over suspects and employers over workers, as well as policies that reinforce race, class, and gender hierarchies, such as restrictions on voting, reproductive freedom, and access to the courts.

The connections between relational equality and conventional ideas of equality in terms of the distribution of income and wealth are mainly causal. Esteem egalitarians worry that great economic inequality will cause the poor to be stigmatized and the rich glorified simply for their wealth. Authority egalitarians worry that too much wealth inequality empowers the rich to turn the state into a plutocracy. This radical republican objection to wealth inequality is distinct from contemporary notions of distributive justice, which focus on the ideas that unequal distributions are unfair, and that redistribution can enhance the consumption opportunities of the less well off. 2 The latter notions are the concern of standing egalitarianism. Concern for distributive justice—specifically, how the rules that determine the fair division of gains from social cooperation should be designed—can be cast in terms of the question: what rules would free people of equal standing choose, with an eye to also sustaining their equal social relations? The concern to choose principles that sustain relations of equal standing is partly causal and partly constitutive. In a contractualist framework, principles of distributive justice for economic goods constrain the choice of regulative rules of property, contract, the system of money and banking, and so forth, and do not directly determine outcomes ( Rawls, 1999 : 47–49, 73–76). From this point of view, certain principles, such as equality of rights to own property and make contracts, are constitutive of equal standing.

Absent from this list of conceptions of equality is any notion of equality considered as a bare pattern in the distribution of goods, independent of how those goods were brought about, the social relations through which they came to be possessed, or the social relations they tend to cause. Some people think that it is a bad thing if one person is worse off than another due to sheer luck ( Arneson, 2000 ; Temkin, 2003 ). I do not share this intuition. Suppose a temperamentally happy baby is born, and then another is born that is even happier. The first is now worse off than the second, through sheer luck. This fact is no injustice and harms no one’s interests. Nor does it make the world a worse place. Even if it did, it would still be irrelevant in a liberal political order, as concern for the value of the world apart from any connection to human welfare, interests, or freedom fails even the most lax standard of liberal neutrality.

2. A Freedom-based Justification of Property Must Favor Positive or Republican over Negative Freedom

The conventional debate about freedom and distributive equality is cast in terms of the relative priority of negative and positive freedom. If negative liberty, as embodied in property rights, trumps positive freedom, then taxation for purposes of redistribution of income and wealth is unjust ( Nozick, 2013 : 30–34, 172–173; Mack, 2009 ).

One way to motivate the priority of negative freedom is to stress the normative difference between constraints against infringing others’ liberties, which do not require anyone to do anything (merely to refrain from acting in certain ways), and positive requirements to supply others with goods, which carry the taint of forced labor. This argument applies at most to taxation of labor income. Nozick (2013 : 169) tacitly acknowledged this point in claiming that “Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor” (emphasis added). People receive passive income (such as interest, mineral royalties, capital gains, land rents, and bequests) without lifting a finger, so taxation of or limitations on such income does not amount to forcing them to work for others. Such taxation is the traditional left-libertarian strategy for pursuing distributive equality consistent with negative liberty constraints. Land and natural resource taxes can be justified in Lockean terms, as respecting the property rights in the commons of those who lost access to privately appropriated land. Paine’s classic version of this argument (1796) claims that Lockean property rights should be unbundled: just appropriation entitles owners to use the land and exclude others, but not to 100 percent of the income from land rents. Citizens generally retain rights to part of that income stream. This grounds a moderate egalitarianism without resort to the extravagant premises needed to support a more demanding distributive equality in libertarian terms, as for instance in Otsuka (1998) .

Arguments for the priority of negative over positive freedom with respect to property rights run into more fundamental difficulties. A regime of perfect negative freedom with respect to property is one of Hohfeldian privileges only, not of rights. 3 A negative liberty is a privilege to act in some way without state interference or liability for damages to another for the way one acts. The correlate to A’s privilege is that others lack any right to demand state assistance in constraining A’s liberty to act in that way. There is nothing conceptually incoherent in a situation where multiple persons have a privilege with respect to the same rival good: consider the rules of basketball, which permit members of either team to compete for possession of the ball, and even to “steal” the ball from opponents. If the other team exercises its liberty to steal the ball, the original possessor cannot appeal to the referee to get it back.

No sound argument for a regime of property rights can rely on considerations of negative liberty alone. Rights entail that others have correlative duties. To have a property right to something is to have a claim against others, enforceable by the state, that they not act in particular ways with respect to that thing. Property rights, by definition, are massive constraints on negative liberty: to secure the right of a single individual owner to some property, the negative liberty of everyone else—billions of people—must be constrained. Judged by a metric of negative liberty alone, recognition of property rights inherently amounts to a massive net loss of total negative freedom. The argument applies equally well to rights in one’s person, showing again the inability of considerations of negative liberty alone to ground rights. “It is impossible to create rights, to impose obligations, to protect the person, life, reputation, property, subsistence, or liberty itself, but at the expense of liberty” ( Bentham, 1838–1843 : I.1, 301).

What could justify this gigantic net loss of negative liberty? If we want to defend this loss as a net gain in overall freedom, we must do so by appealing to one of the other conceptions of freedom—positive freedom, or republican freedom. Excellent arguments can be provided to defend private property rights in terms of positive freedom. Someone who has invested their labor in some external good with the aim of creating something worth more than the original raw materials has a vital interest in assurance that they will have effective access to this good in the future. Such assurance requires the state’s assistance in securing that good against others’ negative liberty interest in taking possession of it. To have a claim to the state’s assistance in securing effective access to a good, against others’ negative liberty interests in it, is to have a right to positive freedom .

Considerations of republican freedom also supply excellent arguments for private property. In a system of privileges alone, contests over possession of external objects would be settled in the interests of the stronger parties. Because individuals need access to external goods to survive, the stronger could then condition others’ access on their subjection to the possessors’ arbitrary will. Only a system of private property rights can protect the weaker from domination by the stronger. The republican argument for rights in one’s own body follows even more immediately from such considerations, since to be an object of others’ possession is per se to be dominated by them.

Thus, there are impeccable freedom-based arguments for individual property rights. But they depend on treating individuals’ interests in either positive or republican freedom as overriding others’ negative liberty interests. Against this, libertarians such as Nozick could argue that the proper conception of negative liberty is a moralized one, such that interference with others’ negative freedom does not count as an infringement of liberty unless it is unjust . Such a moralized view of liberty is implicit in Nozick’s moralized accounts of coercion and voluntariness (1969: 450; 2013: 262–263). Hence, no genuine sacrifice of others’ negative liberty is involved in establishing a just system of property rights.

In response, we must consider what could justify claims to negative liberty rights in property. The problem arises with special clarity once we consider the pervasiveness of prima facie conflicts of property rights, as in cases of externalities settled by tort law or land use regulation. Whenever prima facie negative liberty rights conflict, we must decide between them either by weighing their value in terms of non-liberty considerations, or in terms of some other conception of freedom—positive or republican. If we appeal to considerations other than freedom, we treat freedom as subordinate to other values. For example, desert-based arguments for property rights, which point to the fact that the individual created the object of property, or added value to it through their labor—treat freedom as subordinate to the social goal of rewarding people according to their just deserts. Similarly, Nozick’s resolution of conflicting claims in terms of a moralized notion of negative liberty covertly imports utilitarian considerations to do the needed normative work ( Fried, 2011 ). To base the justification of property rights on considerations of freedom itself, we must regard freedom as a value or interest and not immediately as a right. That is, we must regard freedom as a nonmoralized consideration. Otherwise we have no basis in freedom for justifying property rights or resolving property disputes when uses of property conflict.

A contractualist framework can offer a freedom-based justification of private property rights that departs from libertarian premises. In this picture, the principles of right are whatever principles persons would rationally choose (or could not reasonably reject) to govern their interpersonal claims, given that they are, and understand themselves to be, free and equal in relation to one another. If they chose a regime of privileges only, this would amount to anarchist communism, in which the world is an unregulated commons. Such a regime would lead to depleted commons—razed forests, extinct game, destroyed fisheries. It would also give everyone a greater incentive to take what others produced than to produce themselves. Few would invest their labor in external things, everyone would be poor, and meaningful opportunities would be rare. By contrast, adoption of an institutional scheme of extensive private property rights, including broad freedoms of exchange and contract, would create vastly richer opportunities for peaceful and cooperative production on terms of mutual freedom and equality. All have an overwhelming common interest in sustaining an institutional infrastructure of private property rights that generates more positive freedom —better opportunities—for all.

This argument justifies rights to negative freedom with respect to external property in terms of positive freedom. It does not suppose, as libertarian arguments do, that the liberty interests of the individual override the common interest. Rather, it claims that people have a common interest in sustaining a regime of individual rights to property. On this view, individual rights are not justified by the weight of the individual interest they protect, but by the fact that everyone has a common interest in relating to each other through a shared infrastructure of individual rights ( Raz, 1994 ). The infrastructure of private property rights is a public good, justified by its promotion of opportunities—of positive freedom—for all. A well-designed infrastructure provides a framework within which individuals can relate to one another as free and equal persons.

So far, the argument is one of evaluative priority only. It has been argued that if one wants to justify private property rights in terms of freedom, one must grant evaluative priority to positive or republican over negative freedom. Discussion of the implications of this argument for the content of a just scheme of private property rights—to whether a just scheme would look more libertarian, or more egalitarian—will be postponed to the last section of this chapter.

3. Republican Freedom and the Justification of Inalienable Rights

If negative freedom were the only conception of freedom, it would be difficult to offer a freedom-based justification of inalienable rights. If Sarah’s right is inalienable, then she is immune from anyone changing her right. This could look attractive, except that it entails that she is disabled from changing her own right—that she lacks the power to waive others’ correlative duties to respect that right ( Hohfeld, 1913–1914 : 44–45, 55). This is a constraint on her higher-order negative liberty. This liberty is higher-order because it concerns not the liberty to exercise the right, but the liberty over the right itself.

Inalienable rights might also leave the individual with an inferior set of positive freedoms than if her rights are alienable. Contracts involve an exchange of rights. There is a general presumption that voluntary and informed contracts produce gains for both sides. To make Sarah’s right inalienable prevents her from exchanging it for rights she values more, and thereby reduces her opportunities or positive freedom.

However, there are strategic contexts in which individuals can get much better opportunities if some of their rights are inalienable ( Dworkin, 1982 : 55–56). In urgent situations, when one party cannot hold out for better terms, the other can exploit that fact and offer terms that are much worse than what they would otherwise be willing to offer. Peter, seeing Michelle drowning, might condition his tossing her a life ring on her agreeing to become his slave, if her rights in herself were fully alienable. But if she had an inalienable right to self-ownership, Peter could not exploit her desperation to subject her to slavery, but would offer her better terms.

Such considerations leave libertarians torn between accepting and rejecting the validity of voluntary contracts into slavery. 4 Those tempted by the negative liberty case in favor of full alienability of rights should recall the antislavery arguments of the Republican Party before the Civil War. Republicans objected to slavery because it enabled slaveholders to subordinate even free men to their dominion. The Slave Power—politically organized proslavery interests—undermined the republican character of government. It suppressed the right to petition Congress (via the gag rule against hearing antislavery petitions), censored the mail (against antislavery literature), and forced free men, against their conscience, to join posses to hunt down alleged fugitive slaves. It violated equal citizenship by effectively granting additional representation to slaveowners for their property in slaves (via the three-fifths rule for apportioning representatives). By insisting on the right to hold slaves in the territories, the Slave Power threatened the prospects of free men to secure their independence by staking out individual homesteads. Slave plantations would acquire vast territories, crowding out opportunities for independent family farms. Chattel slavery of blacks threatened to reduce whites to wage slaves, subordinate to their employers for their entire working lives ( Foner, 1995 ).

The Republican antislavery argument is similar to the positive liberty argument above: it stresses how the constitution of a scheme of liberty rights provides the public infrastructure for a society of free and equal persons. The critical point is to institute a scheme of individual rights that can sustain relations of freedom and equality—understood as personal independence and nondomination—among persons. While the Republican Party limited its arguments to securing relations of nondomination among men, feminist abolitionists extended their arguments to married women, who, like slaves, lacked the rights to own property, make contracts, sue and be sued in court, keep their earned income, and move freely without getting permission from their masters (husbands) ( Sklar, 2000 ). Like the positive liberty argument for individual rights, it recognizes how individuals have a vital stake in other people’s liberty rights being secure against invasion or appropriation by others. The stability of this public infrastructure of freedom depends on individual rights being inalienable.

It is to no avail to reply that a libertarian scheme of fully alienable rights that permits voluntary slavery would reject the forced slavery of the antebellum South, along with the violations of free speech and republican government needed to secure the institution of slavery against state “interference.” For the Republicans’ antislavery argument was about the stability of certain rights configurations under realistic conditions. It was that a society that enforces rights to total domination of one person over another will not be able to sustain itself as a free society of equals over time. How the dominators acquired those rights, whether by force or contract, is irrelevant to this argument. Slaveholders, in the name of protection of their private property rights, used the immense economic power they gained from slavery to seize the state apparatus and crush republican liberties. This is a version of the classical republican antiplutocratic argument against extreme wealth inequality. But it was also directed toward the threat that slavery posed to economic independence of free men—to their prospects for self-employment, for freedom from subjection to an employer.

Debra Satz ( 2010 : 180, 232n40), citing Genicot (2002) , offers a similar argument against debt bondage, adapted to contemporary conditions. Two dynamics threaten the ability of workers to maintain their freedom if they have the power to alienate their right to quit to their creditor/employer. First, the availability of debt bondage may restrict opportunities to obtain credit without bondage. Bondage functions as a guarantee against destitute debtors’ default: they put up their own labor as collateral. However, the institution of debt bondage makes it more difficult to establish formalized credit and labor markets by which alternative methods of promoting loan repayment (such as credit ratings and garnishing wages) make credit available without bondage.

Second, living under conditions of bondage makes people servile, humble, and psychologically dependent—psychological dispositions that they are likely to transmit to their children. Servile people lack a vivid conception of themselves as rights-bearers and lack the assertiveness needed to vindicate their rights. Moreover, the poor are unlikely to hang on to their freedom for long, given their strategic vulnerability when others are already giving up their alienable rights under hard bargaining. A system of fully alienable libertarian rights is thus liable to degenerate into a society of lords and bondsmen, unable to reproduce the self-understandings that ground libertarian rights. A free society cannot be sustained by people trained to servility and locked into strategic games where some individuals’ alienation of their liberty rights puts others’ liberties at risk ( Satz, 2010 : 173–180).

This argument generalizes. Workers may have a permanent interest in retaining other rights besides the formal right to quit, so as to prevent the authority relations constitutive of employment from conversion into relations of domination. For example, they have a permanent interest against sexual and other forms of discriminatory harassment. Under U.S. law, workers have inalienable rights against such degrading treatment. In addition, since lower-level workers have minimal freedom at work, but spend their workdays following others’ orders, they have a vital interest in secure access to a limited length of the working day—in having some hours in which they act under their own direction. This is the purpose of maximum hours laws, which forbid employers from conditioning a job offer on having to work too many hours per week. The logic in both cases is strategic: once employers are free to make such unwelcome “offers” (or rather, threats), the decision of some to accept removes better offers from other workers’ choice sets, and thereby deprives them of both positive and republican freedom.

As in the case of contractual slavery, libertarians are divided over this type of argument. Mill (1965 : XI, §12) supported maximum hours laws as an exception to laissez faire, on strategic grounds. The early Nozick would probably have accepted laws against sexual harassment, because conditioning a job on putting up with a hostile atmosphere or compliance with the boss’s sexual demands makes workers worse off relative to a normative baseline of not being subject to unwelcome sexual affronts, and hence counts as coercive. 5 However, the Nozick of Anarchy, State, and Utopia would have rejected such laws as interfering with freedom of contract, given that he accepted contractual slavery. Eric Mack (1981) also upholds an absolute principle of freedom of contract, and so would be committed to the alienability of rights against sexual harassment and even assault in labor contracts.

Mack recognizes that it is disingenuous to claim that restraints on freedom of contract that improve workers’ choice sets violate their freedom of contract. Hence minimum wage laws, if they only raise wages and do not increase unemployment, do not violate workers’ rights. His complaint is that such restraints violate employers’ rights, coercing them into offering better terms to workers than they wanted to make. They treat employers as mere resources to be used by others in pursuit of goals the employer does not share ( Mack, 1981 : 6–8). This argument, if applied to laws against sexual harassment and similar forms of personal domination, is bizarre. One would have thought that employers who threaten their workers with job loss if they do not put up with sexual subordination are treating them as mere resources to be used by the employer in pursuit of goals the workers do not share.

Mack contrasts a morality of “social goals” with one of deontological side constraints, claiming that the former treats people as mere means and the latter treats people as ends in themselves. A deontology of complete alienability of rights in one’s person, however, leads to a society in which some are made others’ partial or total property, reduced to instruments of the others’ arbitrary wills, and deprived of all three kinds of freedom. That they entered such a state by choice does not undermine the conclusion. Rather, it proves that liberty does not only upset equality—it also upsets liberty. To be more precise: negative liberty upsets liberty.

Suppose our “social goal” is to sustain a society in which individuals relate to each other as free persons—which is to say, as equal and independent, not subject to the arbitrary will of others? That would seem to be not merely unobjectionable to a libertarian, but the very point of a libertarian view. The scheme of rights required to realize such a society cannot be devised without tending to the likely consequences of choices made within it. The infrastructure of rights needed to sustain a society in which individuals relate to each other as free persons requires that the rights most fundamental to the ability to exercise independent agency be inalienable, so that no one becomes subject to another’s domination. Thus, the fundamental freedom-based rationale for inalienable rights is based on considerations of republican freedom. It entails that a free society requires substantial authority egalitarianism.

4. Freedom, Equality, and the Definition of Property Rights

I conclude with some remarks on the definition of property rights. Much libertarian writing supposes that as soon as an argument is given to justify a right to private property in something, this justifies all the classical incidents of property—including rights to exclude, use, alter, and destroy it, to give, barter, or sell all or any parts of it or any rights to it, to rent, loan, or lease it for income, all with unlimited duration ( Honoré, 1961 ). Why is a separate argument not required for each of these incidents? Shouldn’t the nature and function of the property in question play a role in determining which rights are attached to it, and for how long? For example, while the right to destroy is easily granted to most chattels, the positive liberty of future generations provides compelling reasons to deny it to property in land and water resources. Such interests also justify limits on dividing property into parcels or rights bundles too small to use ( Heller, 1998 ). It is also questionable how any case for intellectual property rights can be grounded in considerations of negative liberty, given that a regime of universal privilege with respect to ideas does not interfere with the liberties of authors and inventors to create and use their works. A freedom-based case for intellectual property can only be made on positive liberty grounds, and then only justify limited terms for copyrights and patents, given the role of the intellectual commons in expanding cultural and technological opportunities.

A just system of legal rules of property, contract, banking, employment, and so forth constitutes a public infrastructure that can sustain a free society of equals over time. Since, in a well-ordered society, members sustain this infrastructure by paying taxes and complying with its rules, each member has a legitimate claim that the rules secure their access to opportunities generated by that infrastructure. The case is no different from the system of public roads. Fair distributions of access to opportunity matter here, too. A system of roads that accommodates only cars, with no pedestrian sidewalks, crosswalks, and stop lights, denies adequate opportunities for freedom of movement to those without cars. It would be absurd for drivers to object to pedestrian infrastructure because it interferes with their negative liberty. They have no claim that the publicly supported infrastructure be tailored to their interests alone.

Arguments over the rules defining private property rights are comparable. Since everyone needs effective access to private property to secure their liberty interests, property rules should ensure such access to all. Such distributive concerns might be partially secured, for example, by way of estate taxes, the revenues of which are distributed to all in the form of social insurance. As Paine (1796) argued, such taxes do not infringe private property rights, but rather constitute a partial unbundling of property rights to secure the legitimate property rights of others. That one of the incidents of property (protecting wealth interests) partially expires upon the death of the owner is no more a violation of property rights than the fact that patents expire after twenty years: such rules simply define the scope of the right in the first instance.

Three features of the public infrastructure of economic rights in social democratic orders promote, and arguably are needed to secure, decent opportunities for all to live on terms of republican freedom and hence authority egalitarianism with respect to everyone else. First, as argued above, individuals need a robust set of market inalienable rights, to avoid domination by their employers. Second, as Paine argued, they need a universal system of social insurance to secure their independence in cases of inability to work or to find work ( Anderson, 2008 ). Third, under modern conditions, they need free, universal education, to avoid domination by parents and others, and to secure a self-conception as someone with rights of personal independence. Each of these can be understood as individual property rights, secured via partial unbundling of classical private property rights. None require state ownership or management of productive enterprises, or bureaucratic administration of individuals’ lives. They merely constitute an alternative type of private property regime. It is superior to a libertarian one on grounds of freedom , because it better secures positive and republican freedom for all. Since any credible freedom-based argument for private property rights must already recognize the normative priority of positive and republican freedom over negative freedom, it is hard to run credible freedom-based arguments against these core institutions of social democracy at the level of abstraction at which these arguments proceed in political philosophy. Of course, the details of any particular implementation of these institutions may have many objectionable features, as is also true of private employment relations. Because the conditions of republican and positive freedom are sociologically complex, we cannot expect arguments at a high level of abstraction to settle disputes over the details of a property regime suitable for a free society of equals. The current chapter demonstrates that the ideal of a free society of equals is not an oxymoron: not only is relational equality not fundamentally opposed to freedom, in certain senses equality is needed for freedom. Inequality upsets liberty.

Ferguson, Missouri, the site of protests triggered by the police homicide of a black man stopped for jaywalking, illustrates this phenomenon. With a declining tax base, Ferguson turned to police to raise revenue by incessantly harassing mostly black citizens with traffic citations. They turned citations into the second-highest source of city revenue by issuing an average of three warrants and $321 in fines per household . Poor individuals who cannot pay the fines and fail to appear in court to explain why are often arrested and thrown into jail for weeks ( Tabarrok, 2014 ). By comparison to such gross violations of republican freedom, the negative liberty constraints of a regular tax raising the same total revenue are trivial.

Rawls clearly distinguished the republican concern that extreme wealth inequality leads to plutocracy from the egalitarian interest in the fair division of income and wealth as such. This is why he grounded progressive inheritance taxes in the principle of equal basic liberties (including the fair value of political liberties—an antiplutocratic principle), rather than the difference principle, which takes the fair distribution of income and wealth as its direct object ( Rawls, 1999 : 245, 70).

For the classic distinction between privileges and rights, see Hohfeld, 1913–1914 : 30–44.

For libertarians who oppose contractual slavery, see Mill (1859 : 184) and Rothbard (1998 : 40–41). For those who think slave contracts should be enforceable, see Nozick (2013 : 331), Alexander (2010) , and Block (2003) . Locke, an inspiration to libertarians, rejected contractual slavery; see Locke, 1824b : §23 and more aptly Locke, 1824a : §42. However, both his arguments rely on non-libertarian premises: in the Second Treatise , against a right to suicide; in the First Treatise , asserting a positive right to charity.

Nozick (1969) argues that a proposal can count as a threat, and hence be coercive, even if the proposer has a legal right to carry out the negative consequence for the recipient (452), and that such cases of coercion can include employer threats to fire workers if they fail to comply with the employer’s wishes (for example, by voting to be represented by a union) (453). Hence, in his early view, employers can coerce workers even if workers have exit rights and employers have the right to fire them at will. See also Flanigan (2012) , arguing that sexual harassment at work constitutes wrongful coercion if the empirical expectation for the job does not include sex work. This allows employers to get off the sexual harassment hook simply by listing sexual harassment in boilerplate contractual language for all employees, even for jobs such as cashier and carpenter that have nothing to do with performing sexual services. Still, it reflects some appreciation by a libertarian, however ambivalent, of the reality of workplace coercion.

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Divine Sovereignty and Human Freedom

Other essays.

Divine sovereignty, which is that God exercises efficacious, universal, and loving control over all things, is compatible with human freedom in that humans are free to do what they want to do, although God is sovereign over our desires.

The sovereignty of God is the same as the lordship of God, for God is the sovereign over all of creation. The major components of God’s lordship are his control, authority, and presence. To discuss the sovereignty of God, though, is to focus particularly on the aspect of control, though this should not bracket God’s authority and gracious presence out of the discussion. The control that God exercises over all things is both efficacious and universal; there is not one thing outside of his control. This even extends to human sin and faith. However, people still remain free and God remains innocent of sin. This is because humans have the freedom to do whatever it is that they want, while their desires are in turn decided by their natures, situations, and, ultimately, God.

The term sovereignty is rarely found in recent translations of Scripture, but it represents an important biblical concept. A sovereign is a ruler, a king, a lord, and Scripture often refers to God as the one who rules over all. His most common proper name, Yahweh (see Ex. 3:14) is regularly translated Lord in the English Bible. And Lord, in turn, is found there over 7,000 times as a name of God and specifically as a name of Jesus Christ. So, to discuss the sovereignty of God is to discuss the lordship of God—that is, to discuss the Godness of God, the qualities that make him to be God.

The major components of the biblical concept of divine sovereignty or lordship are God’s control , authority , and presence (see John Frame, The Doctrine of God , 21–115). His control means that everything happens according to his plan and intention. Authority means that all his commands ought to be obeyed. Presence means that we encounter God’s control and authority in all our experience, so that we cannot escape from his justice or from his love.

When theologians discuss divine sovereignty and human freedom, however, they usually focus on only one of these three aspects of God’s sovereignty, what I have called his control. This aspect will be in focus in the remainder of this article, but we should keep in mind that God’s control over the world is only one aspect of his rule. When we consider only his control, we tend to forget that his rule is also gracious, gentle, intimate, covenantal, wise, good, and so on. God’s sovereignty is an exercise of all his divine attributes, not just his causal power.

God’s Sovereign Control

It is important to have a clear idea of God’s sovereign control of the world he has made. That control is a major part of the context in which God reveals himself to Israel as Yahweh, the Lord. That revelation comes to Israel when that nation is in slavery to Egypt. When he reveals his name to Moses, he promises a powerful deliverance:

But I know that the king of Egypt will not let you go unless compelled by a mighty hand. So I will stretch out my hand and strike Egypt with all the wonders that I will do in it; after that he will let you go. (Ex. 3:19–20)

I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. I will bring you into the land that I swore to give to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. I will give it to you for a possession. I am the Lord.’” (Exo 6:7–8)

God shows Israel that he truly is the Lord by defeating the greatest totalitarian empire of the ancient world and by giving Israel a homeland in the land promised centuries before to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Nothing can defeat Israel’s sovereign. He will keep his promise, displaying incredible controlling power, or he is not the Lord.

God’s control is efficacious :

Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases. (Ps. 115:3)

Whatever the Lord pleases, he does, in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all deeps. (Ps. 135:6)

The Lord of hosts has sworn: “As I have planned, so shall it be, and as I have purposed, so shall it stand, that I will break the Assyrian in my land, and on my mountains trample him underfoot; and his yoke shall depart from them, and his burden from their shoulder.” This is the purpose that is purposed concerning the whole earth, and this is the hand that is stretched out over all the nations. For the Lord of hosts has purposed, and who will annul it? His hand is stretched out, and who will turn it back? (Isa. 14:24–27)

Also henceforth I am he [Yahweh]; there is none who can deliver from my hand; I work, and who can turn it back?” (Isa .43:13)

…so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it. (Isa. 55:11)

‘The words of the holy one, the true one, who has the key of David, who opens and no one will shut, who shuts and no one opens. (Rev. 3:7)

Not only is God’s control efficacious, it is also universal . It governs every event that takes place anywhere in the universe. Firstly, the events of the natural world come from his hand (Ps. 65:9–11, 135:6–7, 147:15–18, Matt. 5:45, 6:26–30, 10:29–30, Luke 12:4–7). Secondly, the details of human history come from God’s plan and his power. He determines where people of every nation will dwell (Acts 17:26). Thirdly, God determines the events of each individual human life (Ex. 21:12–13, 1 Sam. 2:6–7, Ps. 37:23–24, 139:13–16, Jer. 1:5, Eph. 1:4, James 4:13–16). Fourthly, God governs the free decisions we make (Prov. 16:9) including our attitudes toward others (Ex. 34:24, Judg. 7:22, Dan. 1:9, Ezra 6:22).

More problematically, God foreordains people’s sins (Ex. 4:4, 8, 21, 7:3, 13, 9:12, 10:1, 20, 27, Deut. 2:30, Josh. 11:18–20, 1 Sam. 2:25, 16:14, 1 Kings 22:20–23, 2 Chron. 25:20, Ps. 105:24, Isa. 6:9–10, 10:6, 63:17, Rom. 9:17–18, 11:7–8, 2 Cor. 2:15–16). But lastly, he is also the God of grace, who sovereignly ordains that people will come to faith and salvation :

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. (Eph. 2:4–10)

Therefore, salvation is God’s work from beginning to end, doing for us what we could never dream of doing for ourselves.

If we need any further evidence of the efficacy and universality of God’s sovereign control, here are passages that summarize the doctrine:

Who has spoken and it came to pass, unless the Lord has commanded it? 38 Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that good and bad come? (Lam. 3:37)

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. (Rom. 8:28)

In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will. (Eph. 1:11)

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! “For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” “Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?” For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen. (Rom. 11:33)

Human Freedom

So the question posed by the title of this article is very pointed. Granted the overwhelming power of God’s sovereign control, its efficacy and universality, how can human freedom have any significance at all?

The term freedom has been taken in various senses. In our current discussion, two of these are particularly relevant: (1) compatibilism, which is the freedom to do what you want to do, and (2) libertarianism , which is the freedom to do the opposite of everything you choose to do. Compatibilism indicates that freedom is compatible with causation. Someone may force me to eat broccoli; but if that is something I want to do anyway, I do it freely in the compatibilist sense.  Alternatively, if you have libertarian freedom, your choices are in no sense caused or constrained, either by your nature, your experience, your history, your own desires, or God. Libertarianism is sometimes called “incompatibilism,” because it is inconsistent with necessity or determination. If someone forces me to eat broccoli, I am not free, in the libertarian sense, to eat it or not eat it. On a libertarian account, any kind of “forcing” removes freedom.

In ordinary life, when we talk about being “free,” we usually have the compatibilist sense in mind. I am free when I do what I want to do. Usually, when someone asks me if I am free, say, to walk across the street, I don’t have to analyze all sorts of questions about causal factors in order to answer the question. If I am able to do what I want to do, then I am free, and that’s all there is to it. In the Bible, human beings normally have this kind of freedom. God told Adam not to eat of the forbidden fruit, but Adam had the power to do what he wanted. In the end, he and Eve did the wrong thing, but they did it freely. God’s sovereignty didn’t prevent Adam from doing what he wanted to do.

Our earlier discussion shows, however, that according to the Bible human beings do not have libertarian freedom:  As we have seen, God ordains what we will choose to do, so he causes our choices. We are not free to choose the contrary of what he chooses for us to do. Scripture also teaches that the condition of our heart constrains our decisions, so there are no unconstrained human decisions, decisions that are free in the libertarian sense.

People sometimes think that we must have libertarian freedom, for how can we be morally responsible if God controls our choices? That is a difficult question. The ultimate answer is that moral responsibility is up to God to define. He is the moral arbiter of the universe. This is the exact question that comes up in Romans 9:

You will say to me then, “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory—even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles? (Rom. 9:19–24)

This passage rules out any attempt to argue libertarian freedom as a basis of moral responsibility.

Nevertheless, we should remember that even this passage presupposes freedom in the compatibilist sense: God prepared the two kinds of vessels, each for their respective destiny. He made the honorable vessels so that they would appropriately receive honor, and vice versa. When a human being trusts in Christ, he does what he wants to do and therefore acts freely in the compatibilist sense. We know from that choice that God has prepared him beforehand to make that choice freely. That divine preparation is grace. The believer did not earn the right to receive that divine preparation. But he responds, as he must, by freely embracing Christ. Without that free choice of Christ, prepared beforehand by God himself, it is impossible for anyone to be saved.

Further Reading

• Benjamin B. Warfield, Biblical Doctrines
• Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority
• Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology
• D. A. Carson, Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility: Biblical Perspectives in Tension . See book summary here .
• J. I. Packer, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God
• John Frame, The Doctrine of God
• John Frame, No Other God: a Response to Open Theism
• John MacArthur, “ What is the Relationship Between Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility? ”
• Scott Christensen, What About Free Will? Reconciling Our Choices with Divine Sovereignty . See book summary here .
• Vern Poythress, Chance and the Sovereignty of God . See book review here .

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