Abstract
MOORE in Ethics (1912), ch. vii, writes — if I understand him right — that our basic experience of free-will resides in our certain feeling, in regard to our past actions, that we could have acted differently if we had so chosen; more exactly, that we should have acted differently if we had so chosen, which precisely means that we could have acted differently. He adds the qualifying adverb ‘sometimes’; I think we may well say always, keeping in mind, of course, (i) that we are only concerned here with ‘actions’ proper, as contrasted with involuntary movements, twitchings, starts, fits, etc., and also with wholly habitual, routine-like movements or manipulations performed without any attention and without the slightest deliberation, and (ii) that only such actions are meant here as are within our range of physical or psycho-physical power, which is anyhow implicit in the concept of choice: there is no sense in my saying that I might here and now ‘choose’ to carry this building on my back to Paris, to dismiss the present Government or to continue writing in impeccable Japanese. However, Moore is aware of the clearly meaningful objection that ‘acting as we choose’ (within those obvious limits) would not establish the fact of free-will unless it were also the case that our choice itself is (often) free, in other words that we not only choose to act so instead of acting differently but also choose to choose so instead of choosing differently.
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Notes
Professor J. L. L. Aranguren, Ética (Madrid, 1958), pp. 62–6 and 72. He borrows this basic distinction from X. Zubiri, whose disciple he professes to be. Morality as structure is inherent in man’s character as an agent, morality as content represents the moral standard and man’s possible conformance to it. The distinction is obviously akin to, but not identical with, that between formal and material ethics and that between ‘metaethics’ and the descriptive analysis of moral consciousness or phenomenology of moral experience.
A. Farrer, The Freedom of the Will (London, 1958), p. 106. With several other trains of thought of this pithy but somewhat diffuse book I feel to be in substantial agreement.
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© 1968 The Royal Institute of Philosophy
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Kolnai, A. (1968). Agency and Freedom. In: The Human Agent. Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27908-1_2
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