II.—Freewill and Responsibility

Abstract

MY subject is the compromise between determinism and libertarianism that is typical of the English empiricist tradition. Good examples can be found in R. E. Hobart (Mind, 1934) and (more briefly) Lord Samuel (Philosophy, July, 1956, p. 206-7). I shall try to defend this tradition. In recent years this compromise view has come under considerable attack-. Mr. A. C. Maclntyre ends his article on Determinism (Mind, Jan. 1957), with the words: There is no way out in arguing that determinism and a belief in human responsibility are really compatible. Whatever else is uncertain in this area of argument, of the genuine existence of the conflict that creates the whole problem there can be no doubt whatever. In a review in the same issue of Mind, Mr. B. A. 0. Williams criticises the fashionable anodynes of prescription v. description and constraint v. cause (p. 109). (For a more detailed criticism see Sir Isaiah Berlin's long footnote in Historical Inevitability. (O.U.P. 1954, p. 26.)) The whole question is tied up with that of responsibility, and one of our tasks will be to ask what kind or degree of freewill this implies. Some philosophers have gone so far as to deny all application to the concept of responsibility (e.g., W. I. Matson, Mind, Oct., 1956), but whether or not responsibility can be saved by the 'paradigm' argument (on which in general see Urmson in Essays in Conceptual Analysis (ed. A. Flew)), I think it would be usually agreed that to have to dismiss it entirely would be very paradoxical, and any account of man which really does imply such a dismissal would be suspect. Before going any further there is a group of problems to be mentioned concerning determinism, predictability and fatalism. The view that determinism means predicta-