Graduate 113: Philosophy vs. Christianity

Occasionally I get asked what it's like being a Christian in a graduate philosophy program. Am I facing any opposition to my faith or values? Is the Church frequently a target of attack? Is it hard to be studying and immersed in so many philosophical ideas, outlooks, and ideologies that are contrary and opposed to Christianity?

They are good questions--important questions that need to be taken seriously. Reflection and introspection are very much appropriate, as it is easy to just get swept along by the coursework and lose sight of how it's really affecting me.

But as I think about it, to those who have asked, I might want to ask these questions:

What's it like being a Christian in the place that you live and work? Are you facing any opposition to your faith or values? Is the Church frequently a target of attack? Is it hard to be living amidst and immersed in so many ideas, outlooks, and ideologies that are contrary and opposed to Christianity?

They are good question, I think--important questions that need to be taken seriously. Reflection and introspection are very much appropriate, as it is easy to just get swept along by the day-to-day and lose sight of how it's really affecting you.

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Now I am not posing a "look-to-the-plank-in-your-own-eye" sort of critique, at all. And I'm not critiquing the motivations or consciences of any actual person who has spoken to me about my studies. I just want to offer a little food for thought.

The challenges to my basic values that come from my philosophical studies are many (I realize as I think about it more) and often very subtle. One example comes to mind from a recent conversation I had with another first-year student who has done some work in Medieval philosophy and especially the work of Thomas Aquinas. He has recently become interested in the work of St. Bernard of Clairvaux on love. St. Bernard identifies four levels of love between the self and God--loving the self for the self's sake, loving God for the self's sake, loving God for God's sake, and loving the self for God's sake. This grad student is wondering whether Bernard's view can be incorporated into St. Thomas' philosophical system; the challenge comes in connecting St. Bernard's decidedly God-focused outlook and the St. Thomas' more self-centered eudaemonism.

Eudaemonism refers to an ethical system that is grounded in the pursuit of happiness. (eudaimon: Gk. 'happy') This approach to ethics goes back to Aristotle who judged happiness to be the proper end (or goal) of human life. Now there is a long and rich history of the fruitful development of eudaemonism in Christian thought (and nothing said here should cause one to doubt that St. Thomas was a devout Christian and a pivotal character in Church history), but one might still feel that there is a fundamental opposition between the pursuit of happiness and the ideal of loving the self for God's sake. Indeed, given how self-centered our culture is generally, it is probably not clear to most at the first glance just how one could love one's self for God's sake. What would that even look like?

How many world philosophies and value-systems are fundamentally eudaemonistic? To what degree is that an unquestioned assumption in our ethical thinking and practical reasoning? If I am constantly forcing my thought into this mold and mode of thought, how will it affect my thinking the rest of the time? How will it affect my openness and freedom and ability to love God and to love myself and to love others for God's sake?

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This is just one example of the kind of challenge that I face. It is, in some respects, more subtle then you might think. It's fairly unlikely that I will read some argument for the non-existence of God, become convinced of its irrefutability, and become a professing atheist. But it is very likely (which is why I must guard against it) that I will come to rely on my own ability and intellect to sort through the various challenges that I face; and in relying on my own ability, I will come to rely on the Holy Spirit less. That is the greater threat to a close and abiding walk with God.

Now what about in your case? What do you need to more-carefully scrutinize about the pattern of your day-to-day life? What do you accept uncritically and assimilate automatically into your way of thinking about and approaching the world? How much is your way of approaching your life conditioned by the messages that you receive from this world and not from what God has revealed about the true reality of things?

I'm not talking about the obvious stuff. It's fairly unlikely that you will read some view expressed in Time magazine refuting the existence of God, become convinced of its irrefutability, and become a professing atheist. Seeing sex in a movie or violence on a television show will not make you lascivious or thuggish. Seeing an ad on the Internet will not automatically compel you to buy that product or service. The true danger is far more subtle.

Are you dissatisfied with your life? Are you unhappy about how you look, about your job situation, about the amount of money you have, about where you live, about what you have? Do you feel threatened by people? Are you in competition with other people for positions at work? Are you always working really hard to impress people? Would embarrassment or humiliation be the worst thing that could possibly happen to you? Do you dread the thought that someone doesn't like you or does the thought that someone doesn't respect you make you angry? If it's going to get done correctly, does it have to be you that does it? Do you have enough time? Is there always somewhere else that you need to be? Is there never time for you to take a break? Are you able to sit down and enjoy a meal? Do you feel inadequate? Are you worried about the future? Are you haunted by the fear that you won't be able to handle what life sends your way? Or have you poured enormous amounts of time and energy and money into building a protective hedge around yourself? Are you comfortable in your own skin? Or do you constantly feel awkward and out of place? Are you afraid of failing? What would happen if you didn't succeed in the ways you hoped?

These are but a small fraction of the questions that we might consider. I expect your answers to these and others like them will reveal how much you have been influenced by the world.

The world constantly presents itself to us as a threatening place--as one that needs to be managed. It's dangerous to trust people; they may let you down and even betray you. It's hard to succeed; you have to work day and night in order to do so. You don't measure up as you are; you need to change if you're going to be 'acceptable'. The messages are spread across television shows and movies, in advertising and the evening news, they fill the Internet, newspapers and magazines. They are woven into the stories that we read, the songs we listen to, and the conversations we have. They are not as blatant as, "BUY THIS NOW!" but they are constantly presenting themselves to us, nonetheless.

I hope that no one will think that I'm being unreasonable in what I'm saying. It is not my intention to be reactionary or extremist in my critique. My point is just that the challenges that I face as a graduate philosophy student, at one level, really are not that different from the challenges that you face in your job and home and neighborhood. I am tempted to rely on my own intellect, my own subtlety and wisdom and ability, to accomplish my work--and so are you.

Just compare a world in which you need to manage your life and relationships, in which people can be allies or enemies, in which success depends upon you and what you accomplish, in which happiness is one more purchase away, in which the future is something that is fearful and to be guarded against--just compare that with the world that Jesus describes in Matthew 6:25-34. Compare it to the world that David inhabits in Psalm 23. Compare it to the world in which Paul finds himself in Philippians 4.

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I'm a Christian in a graduate philosophy program, and I find my faith being challenged constantly. You are also a Christian in the world; and, whether or not you realize it, your faith is being challenged constantly too. Really, we're not so different. And the remedies are not so different either.

Am I anchored in the Word? Am I communing with God in prayer? Am I fellowshipping with other believers? Am I relying on the sufficiency of God's grace to sustain me in the day-to-day? Am I setting my heart on things above and not on things below? Are you? The strategy works well for graduate philosophy students and for other kinds of people as well. Have you applied it recently?

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God is in this place,
And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.

Graduate 112: Moral Responsibility 04

Galen Strawson. "On 'Freedom and Resentment'". From Freedom and Belief. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.)

[1] Galen Strawson takes quite a different view from that of P.F. Strawson on the question of and debate over the compatibility of determinism with responsibility. Overall, I find his treatment much more compelling although there are a few points at which I differ with even him. One of the main thrusts of Galen Strawson's paper involves the suggestion "that it [i.e. P.F. Strawson's treatment] may mislocate the true centre of our commitment [to true responsibility] in our interpersonal rather than inour self-regarding attitudes." (67)

He then invites the reader to, "Consider a man who becomes a determinist. He is often pictured as being faced first and foremost with the problem of what he is to make of other people, given his new belief. But of course, his judgement of determinedness extends also, and far more immediately, to himself." (68) This seems right to me. As I pointed out, in my treatment of P.F. Strawson's paper, it is not impossible (or even prohibitively difficult) to imagine a world in which I am the only person that is truly responsible—a world in which every other person (because of some psychopathic disorder to which I, alone, am immune, for instance) is not truly responsible for his or her actions. But when I try to imagine, myself, thinking and deliberating in a world where I am aware that determinism is true--that is a puzzle and seemingly insurmountable challenge.

One of Galen Strawson's concerns in this paper is to answer P.F. Strawson's claim that our natural commitment to the reactive attitudes undercuts the pessimist's (incompatibilist's) commitment to their (the reactive attitudes') incompatibility with determinism. In Galen Strawson's view, this claim only works because the commitment in question is taken to be non-rational. "So the products of the pessimists' excogitations, although properly called beliefs, simply fail to connect with our non-cognitatively natural belief in responsibility in such a way that they and it can be assessed (with the negative result) for mutual consistency." (70) But for this very same reason, one may question (and Galen does question) whether the pessimist's position has really been dissolved or only cleverly bypassed.

[2] Galen Strawson is concerned to take seriously all of our intuitions about moral responsibility. So, he notes that if there are one set of intuitions that seem to yield an inderacinable commitment to the reality of moral responsibility, it still remains the case that we also possess a set of equally strong intuitions from which follow the conclusion that the truth of causal determinism poses a serious challenge to that very same sense of moral responsibility. There is a real conflict, on his view and attempts to dissolve the tension have proven problematic. One such attempt, made by P.F. Strawson, involves drawing a comparison between our natural commitment to moral responsibility and our commitment to the validity of inductive belief-formation. Galen Strawson shows the flaw in this comparison in the following: "The correct sceptical objection to commitment to the validity of inductive belief-formation is not that it involves a demonstrably false belief, but only that it involves a belief that cannot be shown to be true, and in that sense cannot be justified, although it may in fact be true (it may in fact be true that there is a real material world governed by certain fundamental forces that are intrinsic to the very constitution of matter, a world in which everything takes place in accordance with what one may perfectly well call 'natural necessity'). The sceptical objection to belief in true responsibility, however, is that it is a belief that is apparently demonstrably false." (72)

P.F. Strawson also tries to argue that there can be no single 'rational' course of action that follows from the truth of determinism and that the debate is, therefore, vacuous. But Galen Strawson insists: "it does not follow, from the fact that the truth of determinism cannot by itself make it rational to try to adopt the objective attitude, or from the fact that there is no single rational choice to be made in this case, that the correctness of the objective attitude does not in some sense follow from the truth of determinism." (74) In other words, the debate is still open.

[3] But what sense can be made of the idea that one ought to alter one's beliefs to conform to some fact like the truth of determinism? One's initial thought might run something like this: "…according to what one could call the 'natural causality of reason'… if one genuinely believes that the propriety of certain of one's feelings presupposes the correctness of certain beliefs, and if one then comes to think that these beliefs are false, then this may understandably cause one to cease to have these feelings; it may cause them to change or weaken, at least." (75) But even this principle does not make clear how one would go about imposing an 'obligation' on someone to alter his or her beliefs--or what the form of such an obligation would even look like. It's not clear that changing attitudes is something that one does--as opposed to something that happens to a person. Galen Strawson suggests: "If a change in one's feelings and attitudes were produced in this way by one's coming to believe in determinism, this would be something that happened to one, not something one did." (75-76)

Part of what is being questioned here is the relationship between beliefs and actions, as well as whether the causal connection is one that is willfully voluntary or somehow involuntary. Part of what is troubling about considerations of the possibility of determinism and its implications is that a positive belief in the determinism does not seem to entail, automatically, a change in one's treatment of or attitudes toward other people. This being the case, is the rational thing to do (1) setting about intentionally altering one's behaviour to conform to this belief or (2) accepting that one's actions, as they stand, are compatible with the determinist thesis.

There do seem to be cases in which intentional action is a necessary and appropriate course of action for bringing one's actions into sync with the facts of reality. For instance, a person, who grew up in a house lit by gas lanterns that just had electric lights installed, would not necessarily automatically assume a disposition toward his altered environment that is consistent with the experienced availability of electrical power. His first inclination might still be to light the lantern as opposed to flipping the switch. Or consider the individual who learns that one of his favorite snack foods is very unhealthy for him and that he must abstain from it in the future. Without even thinking about it, he may find himself reaching for the bag of snacks and it may require very great effort on his part to overcome that natural tendency and habit that have developed. Now there are many ways in which one might account for these kinds of scenarios, not all of which would find parallel application in the moral responsibility/determinism case. But Galen Strawson makes the excellent point that the question, itself, cannot be sidestepped by appealing to fatalism or by otherwise ruling the question out as impossible or inconceivable in some significant way.

[4] Indeed, the challenge is most pressing in one's own case. I have suggested, previously, that it is not very difficult to imagine being in a world where everyone else lacks the capacity for genuine moral responsibility. But what could that mean when applied to one's own case? What would it be like to truly believe that "My own actions are completely causally determined" and then to act?

[It would be helpful, along these lines, to learn how psychopaths, neurotics, schizophrenics, and others deemed to lack responsibility in some important respect perceive their own capacity for genuine agency? If they do still see themselves as genuine moral agents, then we must think carefully about the basis upon which we judge them to be morally incompetent. If they do not, then this may give some clue as to what the experience of the determined individual might be.]

Galen Strawson offers a thought experiment intended to show just how difficult it is to adopt such a view. When one attempts to do so, one thoughts tend to oscillate between two poles. "At one pole, the freely deciding and acting 'mental someone' somehow goes out of existence altogether. At the other pole, the mental someone continues to exist, but one cann no longer see oneself as a freely deciding and acting being in any way. One's thought is likely to oscillate around this second pole when the thought-experiment has not been engaged with full force, and is not having its full effect of strangely dissolving the (sense of) self." (79) But this dissolution or repudiation of the self does strike as a strange move. One may wonder whether it really can be done? More commonplace ways in which we tend to think of ourselves as determined (by environment, for instance, or upbringing) are not strong enough to capture the force of this puzzle. "A person may theoretically fully accept that he, or she, is wholly a product of his or her heredity and environment--many of us do--and yet, in everyday life, have nothing like the kind of self-conception that is here required of the genuine incompatibilist determinist (non-self-determinationist). In fact such a self-conception seems scarcely possible for human beings. It seems to require the dissolution of any recognizable human sense of self. Certainly one cannot adopt such a radically 'objective' attitude to oneself at will." (81) But does that mean that the question really is 'unreal'?

[5] If one wishes to retain the sense of self, it seems that action becomes impossible, for the idea of one's acting (nonsense in a determinist world) paralyzes one. The only way out of it seems to be to fall back into the exigencies of life. "It seems, then, that a genuine belief in determinism or non-self-determinationism, uneasily coupled with an unreconstructed conception of self, may produce a total paralysis of all purposive thought as it is ordinarily conceived and experienced." (84) But that is the mistake of fatalism. Galen Strawson observes, on the other hand, that "We are all effortlessly capable of the magnificent inconsistency of beliefs and attitudes that this appears to involve." (85) Other factors would have to be taken in consideration if one were to set about a program of reforming one's attitudes towards people.

[6] Galen Strawson turns to a slightly different set of considerations at this point. He observes: "Our sense of self and of freedom is in many respects profoundly libertarian in character. But it is also naturally and unhesitatingly compatibilistic in many other respects. And since this natural compatibilism is part of what underlies our commitment to belief in freedom, it deserves some consideration at this point." (86) But this exploration of natural compatibilism does not bear as much fruit as one might hope, as far as the current debate is concerned. Galen Strawson asserts at one point, I think--controversially, that there is a strong pre-philosophical inclination to accept histories that are totally determined and to deny even the possibility of genuine self-determination. I don't know what to make of this (empirical) claim except that it seems to capture only one side of the issue. He describes most people as committed to a kind of freedom wherein they are able to act in accordance with their character, beliefs, commitments, within certain contexts, etc. But it seems to me that we very naturally think that we could act in ways contrary to our character, beliefs, and commitments. We might not be able to do so for very long, but the ability to do any number of mundane or shocking things at just about any particular moment seems to be open to us, and that requires more than Strawson seems to grant to the 'normal person's' intuitions.

So I think he is wrong when he offers the following as one of the strongest points in defense of compatibilism: "Behind the whole compatibilist enterprise lies the valid and important insight that, from one centrally important point of view, freedom is nothing more than a matter of being able to do what one wants or chooses or decides or thinks right or best to do, given one's character, desires, values beliefs (moral and otherwise), circumstances, and so on." (90)

[7] Galen Strawson does offer a set of points in favor of incompatibism. Interestingly it seems to be certain natural compatibilist intuitions that give rise to the incompatibilist position. For the compatibilist implicitly embraces a distinction between attitudes and thoughts that are his own and those that are essentially foreign to him. But it is this very division, even though the compatibilist is supposed to be willing to grant that his ideas are, in a sense, not his own, that allows the incompatibilist to demand that we account for the ideas that are our own.

[Galen Strawson speaks more here on the relationship between our sense of freedom and our belief in the existence of other minds as well as our use of language and the role of the social environment in developing our self-concept.]

[8] He concludes by painting a picture of a Buddhist monk and the regimen of exercises (including meditation) through which he goes in order to purge the 'false view of individuality'. Indeed, similar challenges seem to manifest themselves in this case as in the determinism case. And, indeed, it may be possible that once one has crossed a certain threshold, the appearance of the world will be radically altered. Whereas one might adopt such a program for certain rational reasons, those reasons might play no part in one's life and action once one has reached a certain level. This kind of situation is not inconceivable and, in my opinion, presents the most compelling picture of how the adoption of such an objective attitude toward the world might be developed. It is interesting, however, how Galen Strawson concludes and betrays his own bias. "But there is no reason to think that they need to be inhuman in any pejorative sense; and whatever nirvana is supposed to be life, it is clear that adoption of the objective attitude is in no way incompatible with compassion." (100)

[0] One final set of general observations about the readings up to this point: I think that part of what makes the determinism/moral responsibility puzzle so difficult to resolve is that we have accepted a view of reality where that allows for a substantial disconnect between 'the way things are' and 'how we act'. Even atheists may concede that believing in God is 'helpful' for some people even though it is false. And some people would be attracted to something like Nozick's experience machine. The difficulty comes in trying to articulate why one should not enter the machine, or why one should not believe in a God that doesn't exist, or why one should not continue to treat people as if they are responsible in a determined universe. It is not persuasive to say, "Because it's not true," or "Because it's not real." We are willing to accept any number of falsehoods into our lives so long as things go well. But what sense, then, can be made of the idea of life 'going well'?

We have come to accept, what would seem to be, an arbitrary "norm" of life. We continue to hold on to that norm even when its philosophical underpinnings are removed by the 'death of God'. We continue to hold on to it even though its philosophical underpinnings are dissolved by the truth of determinism. And all is well and good and everybody is happy--until something goes wrong. And because we have 'killed God' and denied the Stoic route, we find ourselves convulsed by forces beyond our control.

Why do we guard this norm if it is, indeed, arbitrary? The point is, of course, that it isn't arbitrary. There is a reason why our way of living works (more or less) but we cannot hope to truly live well until we connect that way of living to facts about the world. Vague notions about continuing to accept reactive attitudes in spite of the truth of determinism will not, ultimately, help anybody.

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God is in this place,
And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.

Graduate 111: The Burning Bush

[A Narrative Sermon Outline]

I fell in love with the account of the burning bush during my time in Oxford. In the course of my studies, I came to a new and profound appreciation of the immanence of God--His presence in the world, in our midst, though it seems we so rarely have the eyes to see it. Elizabeth Barrett Browning writes, "Earth's crammed with Heaven, and every common bush afire with God; but only he who sees takes off his shoes."

That's absolutely right--Earth's crammed with Heaven, and every common bush afire with God.

All the world is shrouded by, but, a thin veil. Lift up a corner of it and what will you see?--fire, light, energy, Spirit, power. It's all there; we just don't see it. C.S. Lewis wrote, in a well-known passage, in his sermon, "The Weight of Glory": "It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship...".

The bush may not even be the most compelling illustration of this point. Moses spent regular time conversing with God on Mount Sinai. To be in the very presence of Almighty God must have torn that veil to shreds. The people noticed and responded: "Never mind the bush. Moses' face is on fire," and they compelled him to wear a cloth veil because the radiance of God was too much for them to handle. (Exodus 34:29-35)

What an utterly thrilling picture of God's presence and power in this world. But I want to look at the burning bush from a slightly different angle today. Really, I don't want to make a different point, but to make the same point in a different way. During Advent, I wrote up a series of short reflections on several Old Testament passages and was particularly struck when I came to Exodus 3. I hope that you may be encouraged as I was.

The basic story is pretty straight-forward. Moses has been working and living in Midian as a shepherd. One day God shows up in a burning bush and tells Moses to go to Egypt and lead His people out of bondage. Moses doesn't want to go at first; he's afraid and makes all sorts of excuses, but God finally compels him to go. Part of what I want to focus on is why Moses was afraid. Have you ever thought about it? Was he afraid of the Egyptians? Was he worried that the people wouldn't follow him? What was it? In fact, I think that if we consider carefully Moses' fears, we will gain some insight into our own fears--more-so than if we just stop at "He was afraid."

So here's the scene:

"Now Moses was pasturing the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian; and he led the flock to the west side of the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. And the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a blazing fire from the midst of a bush; and he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, yet the bush was not consumed. So Moses said, "I must turn aside now, and see this marvelous sight, why the bush is not burned up." When the LORD saw that he turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush, and said, "Moses, Moses!" And he said, "Here I am." Then He said, "Do not come near here; remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground." He also said, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." Then Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God." (3:1-6)

The Scripture says that Moses was afraid, but I'll bet he was also exhilarated. He was about eighty years old at this point. As far as we know, this is the first time that God has spoken to him. Imagine, if you can, being suddenly ripped out of your daily routine in this way; Moses knows that something big is going to happen--God's either going to strike him dead or give him some big project. After all, God doesn't show up at the side of the road on just any day.

If you want to extend your imagination a little farther, maybe Moses had been hoping and praying for this day. He probably knew something of his Hebrew heritage. (2:11) He knew of this God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. Like many of us (Christians) he may have been waiting for a call, hoping for a call, praying for a call. Now it's come, and this is what God says:

"And the LORD said, "I have surely seen the affliction of My people who are in Egypt, and have given heed to their cry because of their taskmasters, for I am aware of their sufferings. So I have come down to deliver them from the power of the Egyptians, and to bring them up from that land to a good and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanite and the Hittite and the Amorite and the Perizzite and the Hivite and the Jebusite. And now, behold, the cry of the sons of Israel has come to Me; further, I have seen the oppression with which the Egyptians are oppressing them." " (3:7-9)

Everything sounds great up to this point, but I think this is the moment when Moses' heart falls and his mouth goes dry: "Therefore, come now, and I will send you to Pharaoh, so that you may bring My people, the sons of Israel, out of Egypt." (3:10)

What's going through Moses' head at this moment? Have you ever had an experience like that? You're praying, "Lord, please send me. Lord, please use me. Lord, please send me. Lord, please use me." And then God shows up and says, "I want you to go there," and your immediate reaction is, "Oh no, Lord God, anywhere but there." Have you ever had that experience? A lot of people don't pray for God to lead them--they don't want to surrender their lives to God--just because they are afraid that God will send them there.

I think that's exactly what's going through Moses' head at this moment. I can imagine him praying for the last several years, "Lord, please send me. Lord, please use me. Lord, please send me. Lord, please use me." And then God shows up and says, "I want you to go to Egypt," and his immediate reaction is, "Oh no, Lord God, anywhere but there."

(**) Why would he not want to go to Egypt? Well, you may recall that his departure from that country was not exactly a very happy one. Actually, he fled the country because he was wanted for murder. He killed an Egyptian for beating a Hebrew slave. For that, Pharaoh tried to have him killed. On top of that, while one might have expected that the Hebrew people would have been grateful to Moses--maybe in his more wild imaginings, that they would have hailed him as a liberator and risen up behind him as their leader to deliver them from bondage--instead they rejected him. "Who made you a prince or a judge over us?" they said. (2:14)

Have you ever found yourself running from your past? Ten years, twenty years, even thirty years after the event, the memory still haunts you? The embarrassment, the shame, the sense of failure--meeting you unexpectedly on lonely nights when you stare at the ceiling for hours, trying to fall asleep but unable to do so. Running over the events again and again, you wish and will, sometimes amidst tears, that the events would finally disappear into the past. Forty years might be barely enough time to get over it--to feel that the past really is past, that the consequences of those failures are finally beyond you and can't reach you any longer. Forty years might be barely enough time to feel like you've really gotten a new life and are really a different person.

For forty years, Moses has, perhaps, tried to put his life in Egypt behind him. He has poured himself into his life in Midian. And on most nights, the sting of those memories is either very dull or absent altogether.

And then God shows up and ruins everything. "Therefore, come now, and I will send you to Pharaoh, so that you may bring My people, the sons of Israel, out of Egypt." (3:10) Have you been there? Having barely escaped the fire, have you ever found God calling you right back into it?

You can bet that Moses' mind is racing at this point. In a moment all the memories that he has tried to put behind him are flooding back into his mind--the pain, the hurt, the agony. Whereas he was first thrilled to be speaking to God, now he feels revulsion. He doesn't want to be used by God; he just wants to slip back into obscurity--to escape the past, to lead his small and insignificant life. But how to go about this. One can't just say, "No," outright to the God of the universe. One has to go about the task more subtly. And aren't we adept at making clever excuses as ways to get out of following God's call? Moses is an expert and master of the craft.

"But Moses said to God, "Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh, and that I should bring the sons of Israel out of Egypt?" " (3:11)

First, Moses pulls the humility-card. This is a classic. If you can get out of following God and look humble while doing it ("Who am I...?), that's a bonus. In effect, Moses claims to be a no-body who is not fit for the task that God has called him to. But God doesn't buy it.

"And He said, "Certainly I will be with you, and this shall be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you; when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God at this mountain." " (3:12)

Notice the "sign" that God offers--that after Moses has brought the people out of Egypt, they will worship on this mountain. That's not exactly the kind of guarantee that Moses is apt to appreciate. He (and most of us if we were in his place) would prefer some sort of guarantee that we can have ready and on hand and don't have to wait for. In fact, this is just what Moses asks for, in effect:

"Then Moses said to God, "Behold, I am going to the sons of Israel, and I shall say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you.' Now they may say to me, 'What is His name?' What shall I say to them?" " (3:13)

Of course, we should take this question seriously as its stated. It's a very straight-forward question. But there's also a layer of subtext that, I suspect, is not lost on God. In the cultures of the ancient Near-East, names were extremely important. Names were closely tied to the essence of an individual--be he human or supernatural. Many people believed that if you knew the names of spirits or deities, you could call them, compel them to obey your wishes, and control them in very useful ways. This belief plays a part in the book of Genesis, in the account of Jacob wrestling the angel. He asks the angel for his name and the angel refuses to give it to him, but blesses him instead.

Here, Moses asks for the name of God. And God gives him His name, but its not what Moses might have expected.

"And God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM"; and He said, "Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, 'I AM has sent me to you.' " And God furthermore, said to Moses, "Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, 'The LORD, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.' This is My name forever, and this is My memorial-name to all generations." "

"I AM WHO I AM". Another way of translating that is, "I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE." In effect, God says to Moses, My name is: YOU CANNOT CONTROL ME. Maybe Moses had in mind that he would appear before the people of Israel and call on God to appear before them in some powerful way that would force them all to acknowledge that he was God's appointed servant so that they would give him no trouble. Maybe he thought that if he ran into Pharaoh, who still wanted to kill him, he would just call God like a genie from a lamp to take care of the situation for him. But God makes clear to Moses, by revealing His name, that He will not be manipulated or controlled; he will not bow to Moses or stand by at his every beck and call.

How often do we try to treat God like that? How often do we try to make God work for our plans and projects instead of surrendering to what He has in mind for us and our lives? Throughout Scripture, God reveals that He is faithful and trustworthy, but he will not be manipulated. He will not surrender Himself to our control; and He will not surrender Himself to Moses' control. He makes that clear and then reiterates His instructions:

" "Go and gather the elders of Israel together, and say to them, 'The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, has appeared to me, saying, "I am indeed concerned about you and what has been done to you in Egypt. So I said, I will bring you up out of the affliction of Egypt to the land of the Canaanite and the Hittite and the Amorite and the Perizzite and the Hivite and the Jebusite, to a land flowing with milk and honey." ' And they will pay heed to what you say; and you with the elders of Israel will come to the kind of Egypt, and you will say to him, 'The LORD, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us. So now, please , let us go three days journey into the wilderness, that we may sacrifice to the LORD our God.' But I know that the king of Egypt will not permit you to go, except under compulsion. So I will stretch out My hand, and strike Egypt with all My miracles which I shall do in the midst of it; and after that he will let you go. And I will grant this people favor in the sight of the Egyptians; and it shall be that when you go, you will not go empty-handed. But every woman shall ask of her neighbor and the woman who lives in her house, articles of silver and articles of gold, and clothing; and you will put them on your sons and daughters. Thus you will plunder the Egyptians." " (3:16-22)

Of course it all sounds very good. But remember, the main things on Moses' mind right now are the fear and shame and humiliation that have been quietly festering for forty years in the wilderness of Midian. Maybe he thought he had dealt with the issues of his past, but all he really had done was shove them into a far back corner of his mind and try to ignore them. Because of that, he's not able, really, to hear God's invitation for the great and incredible opportunity that it is. All he can think of is how he's going to get out of this while still saving face.

Have you ever noticed how your unresolved issues get in the way of being able to enter whole-heartedly into God's call for you? You want to be able to say, "Yes!" to God, but fear and anxiety and doubt get in the way. They take a strangle-hold of your spirit and confidence, like so many weeds.

This is where Moses is at at this point. So he makes yet another excuse.

"Then Moses answered and said, "What if they will not believe me, or listen to what I say? For they may say, 'The LORD has not appeared to you.' " And the LORD said to him, "What is that in your hand?" And he said, "A staff." Then He said, "Throw it on the ground" So he threw it on the ground, and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from it. But the LORD said to Moses, "Stretch out your hand and grasp it by its tail"--so he stretched out his hand and caught it, and it became a staff in his hand--that they may believe that the LORD, the God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has appeared to you." And the LORD furthermore said to him, "Now put your hand into your bosom." So he put his hand into his bosom, and when he took it out, behold, his hand was leprous like snow. Then He said, "Put your hand into your bosom again." So he put his hand into his bosom again; and when he took it out of his bosom, behold, it was restored like the rest of his flesh. "And it shall come about that if they will not believe you or heed the witness of the first sign, they may believe the witness of the last sign. But it shall be that if they will not believe even these two signs or heed what you say, then you shall take some water from the Nile and pour it on the dry ground; and the water which you take from the Nile will become blood on the dry ground." " (4:1-9)

Do you see how far God is going to accommodate Moses? And that probably only makes Moses more frustrated; because what Moses is really trying to do is to get out of having to go to Egypt, but God keeps on taking away his excuses. It is a question worth considering when we find ourselves unable to "discern God's will" for us--is it that God is not being adequately clear or that we are simply not willing to listen? Most Christians will admit (or will feel compelled to admit) that God's call should be enough. But God is even willing to go beyond that and to grant signs and assurances. But it's a very serious thing to continue to flout God even when he has given us those assurances, as Moses begins to see.

"Then Moses said to the LORD, "Please, Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither recently nor in time past, nor since Thou hast spoken to Thy servant; for I am slow of speech and slow of tongue." " (4:10)

Moses is really stretching at this point. Again, he's trying to pull the humility-card and going to almost comic lengths to do so. Moses was raised in Pharaoh's house; that means he would have received the best education available to Egyptians at that time, which would have included lessons in rhetoric. Very likely Moses was an excellent speaker. But don't we also sometimes go to the extreme of out-and-out lying about ourselves in order to avoid doing what we don't want to do?

Of course, Moses' excuse sounds even more ridiculous when considered alongside the point that God makes about the origin and source of man's voice and abilities.

"And the LORD said to him, "Who has made man's mouth? Or who makes him dumb or deaf, or seeing or blind? Is it not I, the LORD? Now then go, and I, even I, will be with your mouth, and teach you what you are to say." " (4:11-12)

Any sensible person would have backed off at this point and recognized that he was treading on dangerous ground; but not Moses. That's how single-minded and focused he is right now. That is the blindness that comes from fear.

"But he said, "Please, Lord, now send the message by whomever Thou wilt." "

Moses still doesn't go so far as to say, "No," to God. Notice what else he doesn't do: he also doesn't admit how fearful he is. Have you been there? You try to make excuses to God and to yourself, you try to justify your disobedience, and you simply refuse to admit to God and yourself that the reason you refuse to simply follow God's call is that you're scared. Throughout this entire dialogue, Moses has not admitted to the real reason behind his refusal to simply submit to God. Instead he has tried to maneuver around God, manipulate God, and even lied to God. Maybe, if he's really good at it, he's able to convince himself that he's only being humble; but is it really "humility" if it involves treating God like that? God presents Moses with nothing short of the opportunity of a life-time, and all Moses can think about is how to get out of the situation, or else manipulate God in order to fulfill his own ends. Have you been there?

And God is so patient and accommodating--up to a point. But God will only take so much of our insults and disrespect. Moses reaches that point and God finally puts a stop to his masquerade.

"Then the anger of the LORD burned against Moses, and He said, "Is there not your brother Aaron the Levite? I know that he speaks fluently. And moreover, behold, he is coming out to meet you; when he sees you, he will be glad in his heart. And you are to speak to him and put the words in his mouth; and I, even I, will be with your mouth and his mouth, and I will teach you what you are to do. Moreover, he shall speak for you to the people; and it shall come about that he shall be as a mouth for you, and you shall be as God to him. And you shall take in your hand this staff, with which you shall perform the signs." " (4:14-17)

If this scene were set in a more modern context, one might imagine a phone conversation between some uncooperative middle-manager and the president of the company. When the president has had enough of the manager's excuses, he lays out the bottom line: "This is the way it's going to be, Moses. No more argument. I want you on the first plane to Egypt, Monday morning, and that's final!" *Click.*

That's the end of the debate. That's the end of the discussion. That's the end of the manipulation and feigned humility and sycophancy. Moses has received his instructions. Now he must decide whether he will obey. Have you been there? --where you know, with perfect clarity, that God is calling you to go there? But there's still the choice to be made: will you obey? And everything inside you is screaming that you should not do it, that you should run away, that going that way will only lead to hurt and pain and more agony. But there's the other side of you that knows that God is calling you--the call is unmistakable. What will you do?

A good idea would be to do what Moses does. He gets some accountability.

"Then Moses departed and returned to Jethro his father-in-law, and said to him, "Please, let me go, that I may return to my brethren who are in Egypt, and see if they are still alive." And Jethro said to Moses, "Go in peace." " (4:18)

Maybe Moses was asking his father-in-law for permission as a last-ditch effort to find an excuse. After all, if his father-in-law said, "No," then it couldn't possibly be in God's will for him to go. But Jethro approves; and anyway, I think there's another way of looking at this verse.

Jethro was a sharp guy. [We see that clearly demonstrated in chapter 18.] I suspect he was kind of like my dad; nothing gets past him and he won't allow you to get away with anything. So even though Moses may not have been too sure about his commitment to following God, he knew that if he told Jethro about his plans to return to Egypt, (and this is sometimes the way we think) then it would definitely happen. If a week passed and Moses hadn't left yet, then Jethro would come around asking tough questions like, "Weren't you supposed to be gone by now?" and "Why haven't you left yet?" and "What are you waiting for?" Moses was probably more worried about getting the evil eye from his father-in-law than he was about getting on the wrong side of God.

Strangely enough, that's sometimes how we think about the world. And, yes, it's rather backwards, but if it actually gets us doing God's will, we can probably look on those people as a blessing and gift from God. The important thing for Moses is that it represents a concrete, practical step in the process of obedience. And it gets a response from God; He shows up again. This is how I picture it happening:

Moses has received the blessing from his father-in-law, Jethro, to return to Egypt. Mustering the courage to actually commit to that by telling his father-in-law probably took a bit of work. Yet, amidst the back-and-forth still going on in his own mind and heart, he managed to ask permission and now he knows that he will be on his way. And, maybe, for the rest of that day, he feels alright. The decision has been made; it is going to happen.

But everything changes at night, as anyone whose been in this kind of situation will tell you. Zipporah lies asleep, as do their two sons. But Moses is still awake. He's been awake for what seems like hours. He rolls back and forth in bed, trying to quiet the voices in his head long enough to drift to sleep. But sleep is the farthest thing from him at this point. His pillow (if they had pillows) is soaked with sweat... and also with tears. Quietly he agonizes over the decision that he has made and the path that he faces.

"What am I going to do?" he wonders to himself. "I've already committed to this; I can't back out now. But what am I going to do? How could I be so stupid to think that I could get away with this. As soon as I cross the border of Egypt, they'll arrest me. There'll be a trial and probably flogging and maybe torture and finally death. And that's not even the worst of it.

"Oh, God, I remember when I was a prince--when everything I wanted was given to me; when nothing that I wanted was ever denied me. And then I made that stupid, stupid choice. I still can't believe that I did that--that I actually murdered someone. Me! Lord God, how can you use me. I've been a failure and an embarrassment my whole life.

"I remember how they looked at me. The disappointment. The anger. The way they turned their backs on me. Oh, Lord God, I can't face that again. I can't face their condemnation, their contempt. I'll take the flogging and the torture and the death, but don't make me face their resentment.

"Even my own people rejected me. Here, I had tried to help them and it blew up in my face. I can't help them. I can't help anybody. Why?--Why, Lord God, did you have to choose me?"

Maybe, in the quietness of that lonely moment, Moses was able to admit what he would not admit when he faced God at the burning bush. "God, I'm afraid. I'm so afraid. I am paralyzed, petrified, mortified by fear."

Have you been there?

Notice what happens next. God shows up. Out of the blue--no spectacular displays or fancy fireworks. I imagine, just a still, small voice.

"Now the Lord said to Moses in Midian, "Go back to Egypt for all the men who were seeking your life are dead." " (4:19)

Did you catch it? Let me say it again: "Go back to Egypt for all the men who were seeking your life are dead."

Now there are two ways in which I like to think about this moment--one of which is irreverently comical and the other of which I find deeply moving. You will forgive me if I take the time to develop both ways.

The first way I imagine this moment recalls a scene from a movie I never actually saw: "Meet the Parents" (2000). I didn't see the movie because I'm not a fan of Ben Stiller, but there's a scene from the trailer that I still remember and find amusing. The basic plot of the film centers on this couple, Greg and Pam, that are soon-to-be-married, and the first time that Greg meets his future in-laws. Tension is high and gives way to very comical situations as, among other things, Pam's dad, Jack, former CIA, brutally sets about testing the mettle and quality of his future son-in-law. The funny scene comes at their first meeting. Introductions are made and Jack comments in a friendly manner, "What are you driving there, a Ford?" "Oh, yeah--" Greg begins, but Jack interrupts him with a slighting tone and look: "It's an interesting color? You pick it?" To which Greg naturally (and untruthfully) replies, "Oh, no. No. The first guy picked it. Why?" To which Jack replies, "Well, they say geniuses pick green. ... But you didn't pick it."

The dynamics of this interaction are hilarious to watch. Jack and Greg both know how terrified Greg is. They both know that he wants to make a good impression. And by the end of the scene, they both know that Greg did pick out the car color and that he just lied to try and impress Jack; but he's been tricked--and he knows it, and Jack knows it and Pam knows it, and they all know that there's no way that he can get out of it without looking like a fool.

That's one way that I imagine this situation between God and Moses. God comes to Moses and says, "I want you to lead my people out of Egypt." Moses doesn't want to go, but he also doesn't want to admit that he's afraid, so he makes all sorts of ridiculous excuses and goes to great lengths just to get out of the situation. In the end, he is compelled to go and commits to going, and it is only after all that is said and done that God shows up, as if with a smug expression and a slight smirk to say, as if in an afterthought--"by the way, all the people who were wanting to kill you are already dead." God had already taken care of everything. God wasn't leading Moses into a situation in which he would be at the mercy of the Egyptians. God had already taken care of that.

And in that moment, I'll bet, Moses knew that he really was a coward; and, what's more, he knew that God knew that he was a coward. God knew all along; he hadn't fooled God for a second with all his feigned humility and excuses.

And Moses probably thought to himself, "If only You had told me at the beginning." Imagine, if God had appeared to Moses in the burning bush and said, "Moses, I have a mission for you. All the people who wanted to kill you in Egypt are dead, so I want you to go and lead my people out." Then Moses could have stood with confidence before God and said, "Yes, Lord, I will follow you in obedience as all people should--without asking for guarantees or assurances, but trusting wholly in your steadfast love and abiding faithfulness." And the Bible would have recorded that Moses was the most incredible man of faith in the history of the human race and people would have praised Moses for his willingness to follow God and trust in him whole-heartedly, etc., etc.

But of course, if that had been how it happened, then Moses never really would have been trusting in God at all. Or he would have trusted God only so long as he was perfectly comfortable with the situation--as long as he felt that the situation was something that he could handle.

The Bible records that, "Moses was very humble, more than any man who was on the face of the earth." (Numbers 12:3) And I'm pretty sure that the humility being described was not the fake kind of humility of people pretending to be less than they are or feigning self-abasement. Certainly Moses had plenty of that, as we've seen. But then God got a hold of him and really humbled him. Moses was afraid--and God knew it. And God allowed Moses to make his excuses and to think that he was fooling God; and in doing so, Moses made a fool of himself before God. In that, he was truly humbled. He came to understand that there is no pretense before God.

That's where true humility comes from--from recognizing who we really are before God and avoiding all pretense and pretending. When we pretend to be more than we are or holier than we are or even more humble than we are--God sees through it and, from his love for us, he will not allow us to continue making fools of ourselves in that way.

This is one way that I like to look at that moment when God reveals to Moses that all the Egyptians who wanted to kill him are dead. It emphasizes the lesson of humility that Moses learned (and that we need to learn). We can spend so much time and effort and energy trying to put on a show and convince people and convince God and convince ourselves that we are someone other than who we are; we make excuses for disobeying God and try to explain it away in terms of inadequacy or lack of calling or something else or anything else. But when we do that, we prevent God from being able to work in us as we are. And the truth is that God wants to work with us--even amidst our inadequacies and fears and doubts and uncertainties and failures and embarrassments. If we will only stop hiding those from Him and meet Him face-to-face, then our lives will be transformed (--for the better, if that isn't obvious).

But there is another way of looking at this moment in the life of Moses that may cut even more deeply. Have you been where Moses may have been on that night? Agonizing about how to manage the tasks to which God has called you? Have you ever silently screamed to God, "Why!?!" We can work ourselves into such a state; and we saw how fear prevented Moses from really hearing God's invitation. All he could think about was how to weasel his way out of God's call.

Imagine, then, the absolute relief that must have washed over Moses when he heard those words: "all the men who were seeking your life are dead."

I hope you can see, now, why I claim that the main thing that was motivating Moses' fear was the fear of those who wanted to kill him. Go back up to the paragraph marked with the (**) to see where I make that claim. It's very important to me as a teacher that you understand where I got this idea; it won't do for you to simply take my word for it. I realize that there is no point in the biblical text in which it says, explicitly: "Moses did not want to return to Egypt out of fear of those who wanted to kill him. He was running from that memory for some forty years." The Scripture is not that explicit. But when we see him making all those excuses, its appropriate to ask the question "Why?" And then for God to show up after Moses has already committed to obediently following God's call, and then tell him that He has taken care of those who wanted to kill Him--that is so in keeping with the character of God that it convinces me that that is what was holding Moses back.

Remember, earlier when I asked, "Why didn't God tell Moses about that at the beginning?" This isn't the only place in Scripture where that kind of pattern is manifest.

God told Noah to build an ark years before he sent the flood; for possibly decades, Noah worked on building an enormous boat that, to all appearances, was completely useless. It was only after he built it that the flood came. (Genesis 6ff)

When God called Abram to leave his home and his family and all his earthly security, He did not tell him where he was to go. He only told him to follow and after he was committed, showed him where to go. (Genesis 12ff)

When the nation of Israel prepared to enter the promised land, they had to cross the Jordan river. He instructed the priests to step down the steep banks into a flood-stage rushing river and then he would part the waters. He only parted the waters after the priests had stepped into the river. (Joshua 3)

During a terrible famine, God sent the prophet Elijah to a widow in Zarephath so that she could take care of him. When he asked her for food, she told him that she had only enough flour and oil to prepare the last meal for herself and her son before they died of starvation. The prophet told her, "make me a little bread cake from [the ingredients] first, and bring it out to me, and afterward you may make one for yourself and for your son. For thus says the LORD God of Israel, 'The bowl of flour shall not be exhausted, nor shall the jar of oil be empty, until the day that the LORD sends rain on the face of the earth.' " (1 Kings 17) She obeyed and God provided for her.

One day, God appeared to a man named Moses and called him to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt. Moses was afraid to go, but after he committed himself, God revealed that He had already taken care of what Moses most feared and promised to continue to be with him and protect him.

That's the pattern of how God works. He calls on us to trust Him. If we are only trusting in ourselves, then we will only last as long as we can handle the situations we face. But if we are to accomplish the great things that God has for us, then we must enter situations that are bigger than what we can control--that involve more than we can handle. And if we are to enter those situations successfully, we must trust in the God who is able to handle those situations and who is in control. Only then can we follow in the footsteps of Moses.

"So Moses took his wife and his sons and mounted them on a donkey, and he returned to the land of Egypt. Moses also took the staff of God in his hand." (4:20)

--

Have you ever been where Moses was at? Do you have unresolved issues with the past--memories that still haunt you and sap your ability to trust in God? Maybe you sense God calling you to minister to people who you once knew--people that you have been trying, for the longest time, to forget. Maybe it's somebody that you hurt; one of the hardest things to do in life is face the people that we have hurt. Maybe it's somebody who hurt you; maybe the anger that wells up in you at the thought of them is too much for you to even consider trying to face them. Maybe it's something else.

Some people simply choose not to pray to God because they are afraid that he will send them there. Maybe there is deepest, darkest Africa. (For those Africans who are reading, maybe there is deepest, darkest America.) Maybe you would be overjoyed to accept God's call to a foreign country; but if God calls you to minister to your family or to your relatives--or to those, particular relatives--or to those troublesome neighbors, well, that's a different matter.

Maybe you know where God is calling you, but the fear of what that would mean for your life is just too much for you to handle. You want to obey, but you can't muster the courage, and you are filled with self-loathing and self-contempt because you know that you are living in disobedience to God.

How do you resolve these issues, these fears, these struggles? Probably the first step is to be honest. Don't hide behind false humility or feigned self-deprecation. Don't pretend like you have it all together when you don't.

Only after you stop pretending, can God begin to work on you and with you. And be assured that He will. He loves you. Jesus offered a long list of those who are broken and hurting and in pain and fear and doubt and uncertainty. You know what he said of them? He said, "They are blessed." (Matthew 5) And if you will only stop pretending and present yourself openly and transparently before God, He will not condemn you, but rather lavish upon you His abundance and grace and love and peace and joy--as much as you can handle and more.

And as you live and walk with God, you'll discover what Moses discovered--that God has already taken care of everything. That doesn't mean that everything will be smooth sailing, easy, and trouble-free. Moses faced a whole lot of challenges. But every time he trusted in God, God took care of him. And we saw in the account of the bush that God was taking care of things even before Moses knew that they needed to be taken care of.

It is so easy to lose sight of God's goodness. We get too focused on this world and lose sight of what God is doing. And when we lose sight of God we stop trusting in Him. So we need to be constantly returning to and giving attention to God. Remember, that he is not distant and far off. Rather, he is right here with you. If you could only lift a corner of that veil, you would see a world bright and overflowing with the presence of God. Lift the veil over here--yes, God is here. Lift the veil over there--yes, God is there. Not just one bush, but every bush is afire with God. May we know that in our heart of hearts. May we remember it every moment of every day. May we see it all around us, and respond appropriatel--by taking off our shoes.

Earth is crammed with heaven!

This is holy ground!

--

God is in this place,
And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.

Graduate 110: Moral Responsibility 03

Peter Strawson. "Freedom and Resentment." (1963)

[1] Peter Strawson endeavors to speak to the debate between (what he terms) the optimists (compatibilists) and pessimists (libertarian incompatibilists) with respect to the relationship between moral responsibility and the thesis or doctrine of determinism. According to the optimists, the truth of determinism would not (or does not or cannot) undercut moral responsibility; according to the pessimists, the truth of determinism would undercut moral responsibility. Though he claims to be unclear on what exactly is meant by the doctrine of determinism, ("If I am asked which of these parties I belong to, I must say it is the… party of those who do not know what the thesis of determinism is." p. 45) Strawson, nevertheless, attempts to reconcile these positions and to show that the reality of moral responsibility does not hang on (or could not be altered by) one's conclusions about determinism at all.

[2] The problem, as the pessimist sees it, is laid out basically as follows: "that just punishment and moral condemnation imply moral guilt and guilt implies moral responsibility and moral responsibility implies freedom and freedom implies the falsity of determinism." (46) The optimist tries to answer by offering a slightly different account of moral responsibility and freedom, according to which the truth of determinism is compatible with that kind of responsibility and freedom. One way to do that is to develop a picture of moral responsibility as grounded in the regulation of social behavior; to which the pessimist replies: "But the only reason you [the optimist] have given for the practices of moral condemnation and punishment in cases where this freedom (emphasis mine) is present is the efficacy of these practices in regulating behaviour in socially desirable ways. But this is not a sufficient basis, it is not even the right sort of basis, for these practices as we understand them." (47-48) This, then, would seem to be the lacuna in the optimists position. The pessimist is committed to a more robust picture of freedom and moral responsibility that seems to be absent from the optimist's account.

[3] In order to make things clearer, Strawson steers the discussion away from considerations of "punishing and moral condemnation and approval" which are fairly abstract. Instead, he engages with "the non-detached attitudes and reactions of people directly involved in transactions with each other; of the attitudes and reactions of offended parties and beneficiaries: of such things as gratitude, resentment, forgiveness, love, and hurt feelings." (48) His hope is that resolving the debate in this context will shed light on how to resolve it in the more abstract context.

Though benefits and injuries are generally ascribed to individuals--in view of their responsibility for action--quite apart from the reactive attitudes, Strawson also wants to take seriously the ways in which these attitudes are, themselves, forms of benefit and injury. "We should consider also in how much of our behaviour the benefit or injury resides mainly or entirely in the manifestation of attitude itself." (49) This is in response to a concern of Strawson's "to keep before our minds something it is easy to forget when we are engaged in philosophy, especially in our cool, contemporary style, viz. what it is actually like to be involved in ordinary inter-personal relationships, ranging from the most intimate to the most casual." (50) This is a valid concern, so stated, but I am concerned that it is not appropriate in this situation. Or I am concerned that focusing unduly on these sorts of non-detached cases may not clarify but rather confuse the issues when thinking about the compatibility of moral responsibility with determinism. We shall see how that move on Strawson's part plays into his analysis and ultimate conclusion.

[4] Having turned to focus on our reactive attitudes, Strawson then asks about the conditions that are appropriate for modifying or mollifying these attitudes. According to the pessimist, the truth of the doctrine of determinism would entail that in situations where we might normally think that it is appropriate to feel gratitude or resentment or another reactive attitude, in fact, it would not be appropriate to do so. Before evaluating that claim, Strawson asks about the situations and circumstances under which we normally think it appropriate to suspend those attitudes. He divides the circumstances into two groups.

In the first group are circumstances that we take to warrant the suspension of responsibility for that particular event but not the total suspension of responsibility for that agent. "To the first group belong all those which might give occasion for the employment of such expressions as "He didn't mean to", "He hadn't realized", "He didn't know"; and also all those which might give occasion for the use of the phrase "He couldn't help it", when this is supported by such phrases as "He was pushed", "He had to do it", "It was the only way", "They left him no alternative", etc." (50)

In the second group are circumstances that we do take to warrant the total suspension of responsibility for that agent. Such cases as " "He's only a child", "He's a hopeless schizophrenic", "His mind has been systematically perverted", "That's purely compulsive behaviour on his part". Such pleas as these do… invite us to suspend our ordinary reactive attitudes toward the agent, either at the time of his action or all the time." (51) Whereas our interactions with ordinary people generally involve a variety of reactive attitudes, in the presence of psychological or moral abnormalities, we are disinclined to engage in the same way as we normally do but tend to adopt a more "objective" stance toward that individual. This "objective" attitude may be adopted with respect to other normal agents—we may (for a time) dispassionately appraise the actions of a person who is hurting us, for instance; but we generally cannot keep that up for long (especially if the hurt is very strong or immediate).

The question then becomes, would the discovery of the truth of determinism qualify as a legitimate (rational) reason to abandon our normal reactive attitudes and traditional ways of interacting with people. "What effect would, or should, the acceptance of the truth of a general thesis of determinism have upon these reactive attitudes? More specifically, would, or should, the acceptance of the truth of the thesis lead to the decay or the repudiation of all such attitudes?" (53) At this point, Strawson's arguments become very strange indeed.

The most significant argument involves the case of individuals with abnormal psychological or moral conditions. It is possible to conceive of an individual who has been incapacitated with respect to commonplace moral sensitivies. "He is thus incapacitated, perhaps, by the fact that his picture of reality is pure fantasy, that he does not, in a sense, live in the real world at all; or by the fact that his behaviour is, in part, an unrealistic acting out of unconscious purposes; or by the fact that he is an idiot, or a moral idiot. But there is something else which, because this is true, is equally certainly not true. And that is that there is a sense of "determined" such that (1) if determinism is true, all behaviour is determined in this sense, and (2) determinism might be true, i.e., it is not inconsistent with the facts as we know them to suppose that all behaviour might be determined in this sense, and (3) our adoption of the objective attitude towards the abnormal is the result of prior embracing of the belief that the behaviour, or the relevant stretch of behaviour, of the human being in question is determined in this sense. Neither in the case of the normal, then, nor in the case of the abnormal is it true that, when we adopt an objective attitude, we do so because we hold such a belief." (55) Basically, the argument is that since we understand certain circumstances to differentiate between the normal and abnormal case, it is not appropriate to claim that all cases are "abnormal" on the grounds of determinism. Strawson restates the basic point as follows: "when we do in fact adopt [an objective] attitude in a particular case, our doing os is not the consequence of a theoretical conviction which might be expressed as "Determinism in this case", but is a consequence of our abandoning, for different reasons in different cases, the ordinary inter-personal attitudes." (55) And this seems right, but doesn't go as far as Strawson seems to want to take it.

Just because determinism does not play a role in our normal reasoning about when it is appropriate to adopt the objective attitude does not rule out the possibility that it might serve as a reason. Strawson might still argue that if determinism were true then since every case would be "abnormal" it would not be possible to distinguish a set of, perhaps, "doubly-abnormal" (my locution) cases. But that doesn't seem right. Considerations of psychopathy or moral idiocy yield different reasons from those that follow from the truth of determinism.

Strawson offers another argument to the effect that while the idea of a world devoid of reactive attitudes is not "absolutely inconceivable", it is "practically inconceivable"; but that argument seems mistaken as well, as is his earlier claim that "it cannot be a consequence of any thesis which is not itself self-contradictory that abnormality is the universal condition." (54) By no means is it inconceivable that abnormality would be the universal condition. Imagine that the entire human population is infected with a disease that causes every person to die at the age of forty. That is an "abnormal" condition given the natural human condition; but nothing precludes our ability to envision it being the universal condition. What about the case of suspending reactive attitudes? Imagine that the entire human population is infected with a disease that produces certain psychopathic tendencies or other moral-sensitivity-inhibiting condition in its subjects. In fact, conceivability does become a problem when we try to envision what it would be like to have that disease and be in an actually-morally-impaired state, but that is as much a problem for the psychopathy case as it is for the determinist case. The point is that it is not inconceivable that a set of circumstances should obtain wherein a condition that compromises the appropriateness of reactive attitudes becomes ubiquitous.

Finally, there seems to be one key gaping hole in Strawson's analysis. He is willing to accept psychological abnormalities as candidates for suspending reactive attitudes but not determinism. But the pessimist will argue that what is salient about the psychological cases is the compromise of a certain kind of control—a compromise that is also manifest in the determinism scenario. Strawson does not offer an alternative account as to why cases of psychological abnormality legitimately call for the suspension of reactive attitudes. Such an analysis seems indispensable if he is to make a convincing argument that the truth of determinism does not call for the same. [Apparently Jay Wallace offers just such an analysis.]

Strawson's argument on the basis of human enrichment or impoverishment strikes as curious. Certainly, as we are now, it would seem that abandoning reactive attitudes would result in a very poor quality of life, but that is not necessarily the case. One can imagine a spiritist saying the same thing about the advancement of empirical science—that a world in which everything is accounted for in terms of the movement of molecules and atoms is one that is impoverished when compared to a world alive with the supernatural; but such an argument has not stood in the way of science. The natural intuition that drives the advancement of science is something along the lines of this: the best life is one that is best aligned with reality. It seems odd to say that, if determinism is true, we ought to ignore the natural consequences of that discovery. Sure, embracing determinism might eliminate many of the "goods" in the world; but it would also eliminate many of the "evils"; moreover, we may discover that a Stoic ideal is actually far superior to the chaos of emotion in which we live now. [I don't actually agree with the position I am advancing here, but it seems a plausible counter-position to that proposed by Strawson and, thus, should be considered.]

[5] Strawson next sets about expanding his picture of the reactive attitudes to those that reflect our understanding, not only of others obligations to us, but also of others obligations to others and of our obligation to others. Similar problems to those found in the paradigm case also emerge in these cases, in Strawson's view, when we ask whether they might be suspended based on some discovery of the truth of determinism. Here he is even stronger than before: "First, we must note, as before, that when the suspension of [a reactive] attitude or such attitudes occurs in a particular case, it is never the consequence of the belief that the piece of behaviour in question was determined in a sense such that all behaviour might be, and, if determinism is true, all behaviour is, determined in that sense. [This seems an untroubling observation; one might still argue that determinism offers a reason to suspend reactive attitudes.] For it is not a consequence of any general thesis of determinism which might be true that nobody knows what he's doing or that everybody's behaviour is unintelligible in terms of conscious purposes or that everybody lives in a world of deluson or that nobody has a moral sense, i.e. is susceptible of self-reactive attitudes, etc. [All of this is quite true (except, perhaps, for the part about self-reactive attitudes), and also quite irrelevant to the question of whether determinism actually would compromise moral responsibility.] In fact no such sense of "determined" as would be required for a general thesis of determinism is ever relevant to our actual suspensions of moral reactive attitudes. [This is also true, but we're not talking about past "actual" suspensions of moral reactive attitudes.]" (59-60)

Again, Strawson acknowledges that there are contexts in which it is appropriate to adopt an objective attitude toward agents. But this is not the norm. It either emerges in cases of the intractably abnormal or with individuals who are, by degrees, being brought into a state of full responsibility. So he uses the example of child-rearing. He says, "The punishment of a child is both like and unlike the punishment of an adult." (61) Inasmuch as the child is not a full responsible agent, punishment serves the role of regulating his or her behaviour; but it also serves the purpose of bringing that child into full standing as a responsible agent. Strawson balks at a picture of child-development as moving from a state of determination to one of non-determination. But there is a part of me that balks at the idea of child-development as moving from a state of non-responsibility to one of responsibility. Is that the most accurate picture? This raises, I think, a point that I made in my treatment of "Two Faces of Responsibility" about the problem of construing responsibility principally in terms of the appropriateness or inappropriateness of sanctions. Better to let a child remain in a state where they are not the appropriate object of censure, punishment, and retributive attitudes. Maybe? Or maybe the picture of responsibility is fundamentally flawed.

[6] The result of our analysis is to bring us back to consider that lacuna in the optimist's argument—the inadequate view of responsibility that the pessimist finds unacceptable. Indeed, what seems to be so objectionable about that picture of responsibility is that it amounts only to responsibility in that objective sense that falls so far short of our robust experience of responsibility in the context of social interactions and reactive attitudes. But Strawson concludes that both the optimist and the pessimist have erred in their construals of moral responsibility. "Both seek, in different ways, to overintellectualize the facts. … The existence of the general framework of attitudes itself is something we are given with the fact of human society." (64) The implication is that those attitudes cannot be suspended on merely theoretical grounds and that attempts to do so or debates along those lines fail, fundamentally, to understand the close relationship between those attitudes and human society.

Strawson concludes from this that moral responsibility is the sort of thing that is totally indifferent to the truth or falsity of determinism. In some respects, he acknowledges, his view is closer to the optimists, but he altogether repudiates the construal of responsibility, in terms of the regulation of behaviour in a social context, that arises from that perspective. Yet, I cannot help feeling that his view may be closer to the optimists than he is willing to admit. The last pages of this essay are a pseudo-critique of traditional metaphysics and theoretical science/philosophy. I suspect that Strawson's analysis would have benefited from a little bit more of both.

--

God is in this place,
And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.

Graduate 109: Exhilaration

I had a funny experience during my prayer time, Monday morning. As I woke up and began to think about my day, I realized that I had a lot to do; a lot to do and potentially more than I could handle. I needed to write up and e-mail a piece before noon for my Plato class. In order to do that I had to finish reading an article and review the dialogue that we were working with. I had class (Moral Responsibility) at two o'clock and needed to finish composing my notes and review the two articles that we would be treating in that session. There was also the possibility of a lunch meeting that might fill up two hours of my precious time. I wasn't sure that I could spare the time, but I didn't want to outright cancel the meeting. The meeting might happen in Riverside or it might happen in Covina; I wasn't sure at that point. And I also hadn't finished the reading for my Tuesday Epistemology class and wouldn't necessarily have a lot of time after Monday's class to finish reading it.

As I thought about these things, I could feel that sense of dread welling up in the pit of my stomach--worry about whether I would get everything done, fear that I would let someone down, doubt about my ability to take care of everything. So I began to pray; and I prayed that God would take care of everything on my to-do list, that he would provide the time and focus and energy and resources to accomplish what needed to be accomplished, that he would take care of the entire situation and that he would help me to be content with the results. And as I prayed, I still had that feeling of dread, but another sensation began to grow in me, that was entirely unexpected--a feeling of... exhilaration.

Why would I feel exhilaration? Because that is exactly where I wanted to be--in over my head and completely dependent upon God's grace to sustain me.

Don't get me wrong--I still had that sense of dread. Even moreso because it's scary to hand everything over to God's hands, because as soon as I let go, it may all come crashing down around me. If I hand everything over to God, He's then free to fix it up the way I had in mind or to chuck it all out the window if it suits Him. And I have to be content and accept that that result is the best. That's why it's scary.

But why is it exciting? Because if I choose to embrace (rather than just accept) God's plan and choice and decisions, then I've opened myself up to a world full of supernatural possibilities that are utterly beyond me and quite unattainable by my own strength. When we surrender our lives to God and he takes and chucks it all out the window (all the things that we thought were so precious and valuable), its only to make room for something even better. How utterly terrifying! How positively exhilarating!

I got just a small taste of that, Monday morning, as I prayed. I was scared to death and I was so excited. And God did take care of me. Monday and Tuesday--everything was taken care of (even better than I could have hoped). The question is: Will I trust Him next time? Will you?

That morning, this is what I wrote in my journal:

"As I pray, it occurs to me: the most important thing about this day is not my class. It is not my potential meeting or anything I might or might not do. The most important thing about this day is that God is on the throne. It's not my social calendar, not my assignment calendar, not my actions or activities or interactions. And how easy it is to go about setting a list of priorities and neglect the truth that the first priority and truth is one that I need not bring about but is true quite apart from me--God is on the throne. God is in this place. And that changes everything."

--

God is in this place,
And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.

Graduate 108: Moral Responsibility 02

Second entry in this series.

Gary Watson, "Two Faces of Responsibility". (1996)

[1] John Dewey offers a picture of responsibility that is tied to self-disclosure. "We are responsible for our conduct because that conduct is ourselves objectified in actions," he says. (Watson, 260) But this self-disclosure or "real self" view of responsibility has been criticized by such as Susan Wolf, who charges that such views (i) fail to take seriously the importance of normative competence and (ii) only capture a "superficial" kind of responsibility that belongs equally to animals and objects. According to Wolf, a sense of "deep" responsibility requires a reasons view (as opposed to a real self view) according to which "responsible agency consists in 'the ability to form, assess, and revise those values [i.e. those values that are taken as the root of one's self-disclosure] on the basis of a recognition and appreciation of… the True and the Good.'" (262) She insists that responsibility must involve accountability to some standard.

Gary Watson offers an alternative interpretation, according to which, the self-disclosure (or real self) view captures one crucial aspect of responsibility--namely, attributability--that is related, but ultimately distinct from accountability, proper. Along these same lines, he points out that moral accountability "is only part, and not necessarily the most important part, of our idea of responsibility." (263) He goes on to say, "In virtue of the capacities identified by the self-disclosure view, conduct can be attributable or imputable to an individual as its agent and is open to appraisal that is therefore appraisal of the individual as an adopter of ends." (263) Attributability and self-disclosure are captured in the aretaic face of responsibility.

[2] In order to help us distinguish between these two faces of responsibility, Watson introduces an illustration offered by Peter van Inwagen. Specifically, he points out how appreciating the distinction between attributability and accountability may deflate van Inwagen's accusation of inconsistency on the part of his 'colleague'. To attribute "shoddy" action to someone may well involve a kind of assessment or appraisal of that person's conduct. To hold that person accountable for his action involves something more--some further response to the agent. Watson writes:

"This point can be put in terms of the concept of blame. In one way, to blame (morally) is to attribute something to a (moral) fault in the agent; therefore, to call conduct shoddy is to blame the agent. But judgments of moral blameworthiness are also thought to involve the idea that agents deserve adverse treatment or "negative attitudes" in response to their faulty conduct. The former kinds of blaming and praising judgments are independent of what I am calling the practices of moral accountability. They invoke only the attributability conditions, on which certain appraisals of the individual as an agent are grounded. Because many of these appraisals concern the agent's excellences and faults--or virtues and vices--as manifest in thought and action, I shall say that such judgments are made from the aretaic perspective." (266)

These remarks strike me as potentially problematic. I am concerned by a move that seems to effectively (and, perhaps, artificially) prize apart the various elements of moral responsibility. Are the assessments of praise and blame really so distinct from the "practice" of moral accountability? The danger of separating them is that a sense of unreality can take hold of one or the other. There is already a strong tendency to treat systems of reward and punishment as purely conventional; and, of course, there is a basis for this. But there is a difference between 'convention' and 'arbitrariness' or 'unreality' or 'construction' that needs to be taken seriously, I think.

Watson does want to make clear, though, that both attributability and accountability are aspects of responsibility. Thus it is inconsistent to practice aretaic attribution while denying the notion or concept of responsibility. Also, he does retain, in his understanding of attribution, a sense of normative competence that answers the first charge, by Wolf, against the self-disclosure view of responsibility.

[3] At this point, he turns to consider Wolf's second charge--that the self-disclosure view is too "shallow"; that it does not yield a concept of responsibility that effectively distinguishes between the human case and the, merely, animal case. On this point, he brings in comments from Christian Crucius (1744) and says of them, "Two separate points are asserted in these passages--first, that so-called responsibility on the real self views is merely causal (and therefore ethically superficial); second, that what I am calling aretaic appraisals are simply descriptions of a thing's qualities and differ in kind from moral blame in the strict (deep?) sense. On the self-disclosure view, to blame someone for an outcome is to trace this effect to some fault (imperfection) in the thing. I want to dispute both of these points." (268-269)

The first assertion, Watson thinks, makes a category mistake. It takes issue with the self-disclosure view on the grounds of lack of control, which has more to do with accountability than with attributability. "The significant relation between behavior and the 'real self' is not (just) causal but executive and expressive." (270) Watson, moreover, emphasizes that attribution and aretaic appraisal are closely tied to practical identity. "To adopt an end, to commit oneself to a conception of value in this way, is a way of taking responsibility. To stand for something is to take a stand, to be ready to stand up for, to defend, to affirm, to answer for. Hence one notion of responsibility--responsibility as attributability--belongs to the very notion of practical identity." (271)

[4] Watson acknowledges that issues of control are relevant to the self-disclosure view, but insists that they are subsidary to those of attributability. "Control bears on responsibility only so far as its absence indicates that the conduct was not attributable to the agent." (272) The two are distinct and play different explanatory roles. "Consider the way in which hypnosis or brain-washing are thought to engender "motivation" for which the agent is not responsible. Whereas other views would explain this by appealing to the absence of control, the problem on the self-disclosure view is to explain how these processes undercut attributability." (272)

[5] Control does, nonetheless, play a significant role in our understanding of responsibility and, Watson will argue, in particular, our notion of accountability. We have already established that attributability may be distinguished from accountability without contradiction, but what more is involved in our idea of accountability? Why is control so much more an issue for accountability than for attributability? Watson says, "Because some of these practices--and notably the practice of moral accountability--involve the imposition of demands on people... they raise issues of fairness that do not arise for aretaic appraisal. It is these concerns about fairness that underlie the requirement of control (or avoidability) as a condition of moral accountability." (273-274)

Another way of capturing the difference is by distinguishing between holding someone to be responsible (attributability) and holding someone responsible (accountability). The latter emerges in a context of (appropriate) expectations, which, in turn, presupposes a capacity for control on the part of the agents. For instance, holding someone responsible for failing to execute an action that they are incapable of executing seems unfair. Along these same lines, punishing someone for failing to meet a standard that they are not capable of meeting also strikes as unfair. If the results are outside of one's control, then it seems unfair to hold one accountable (as through punishment) for those results. This unfairness, Watson thinks, arises just from considerations of the propriety of sanctions.

[6] He says, "Holding accountable... involves the idea of liability to sanctions. To be entitled to make demands, then, is to be entitled to impose conditions of liability. / Practices of holding accountable give rise to two questions. First, by what authority do we subject one another to sanctions? And, second, what kind or kinds of sanction are involved in a particular practice?" (275-276) The answers to these may differ from context to context, but Watson takes it as a general principle that "It is unfair to impose sanctions upon people unless they have a reasonable opportunity to avoid incurring them." (276) One may avoid a certain consequence within a context of rewards and punishments or one may avoid the context altogether. Keeping these in mind will, presumably, help to ensure the legitimacy of a given system of accountability and the appropriateness of the sanctions thereof.

[7] This begins to answer the question of what exactly separates the aretaic case from the accountability case. (Recall Crucius' second point in section [3].) Watson says that "accountability blame is a response to the faults identified in aretaic blame." (278) He also says:

"The aretaic sense seems to collapse any distinction between blaming and judgments of blame. In this sense, one is worthy of blame just in case the attribution of fault is warranted. 'S is blameworthy for C' stands to 'S's conduct is faulty' as ' "P" is true' stands to 'P'; judging blameworthy is virtually blaming. In the accountability sense, however, there is a difference." (278)

In the case of accountability, it is possible to distinguish between judging someone to be blameworthy and actually blaming them. The actual act of blaming, then, involves those responses and actions that we referring to as 'sanctions'. In a sense, too, the act of blaming, itself, is a kind of sanction, where blaming is taken to involve something like "indignation, resentment, and disapprobation". (278) This interpretation has its own problems, for one might wonder in what sense blaming could be taken as a sanction where that sense of indignation, etc. is not felt by the recipient. One might blame a person who is insensitive to feelings of indignation or one might blame a dead person for a past action (and they certainly cannot feel the sting of that blame).

This suggests that blaming is, in certain contexts, itself, not a kind of sanction. Or it might suggest that sanctions are not the best (most fundamental) way to think about blame. Indeed, the account offered in this paper of the relationship between accountability, sanctions, fairness, and blame seems to me deeply problematic. [8] Watson acknowledges that it is very incomplete, but the problems lead me to wonder if the account should not be rejected altogether. He writes on the point of avoidability:

"Our earlier discussion led to the thought that people can be fairly subject to demands and their concomitant sanctions only if they had reasonable opportunities to comply. Indeed, Glover suggests that an appeal to justice of this kind can explain 'all the excuses' relevant to responsibility: 'We think it unfair to adopt an attitude of disapproval towards someone on account of an act or omission, where this was something outside of his control.' Assuming, again, that 'it is disagreeable to be disapproved of,' Glover takes this thought to derive from the principle that we do not deserve to suffer what we cannot avoid. Whether or not this generalization about excusing conditions is entirely defensible, it brings out something that many wish to say in particular cases." (279-280)

But we have already seen that the disagreeability/suffering condition does not work in cases of blaming the dead or those who are otherwise insensitive. The very idea of blaming being appropriate only where it is appropriate to inflict a certain kind of pain (namely, disapproval) on a person seems oddly backwards. I think part of this approach has to do with a description of moral accountability that is rooted in reactive attitudes (see Peter Strawson) rather than in moral properties; that is why these problematically exceptional cases are rearing their heads.

[9] But returning to the distinction between the aretaic and accountability cases, Watson cites as another instance of its explanatory utility the case of "blaming the victim". We can recognize action as arising from a person's character in such a way that he is responsible for it in the aretaic sense; but we can also recognize that his character was formed (at least in part, if not substantially) by forces that are or were outside of his control, prompting us to question whether he should be held accountable in the full sense. But again, Watson's explanation strikes me as curious and potentially problematic: "What gives rise to our "pity" are concerns about fairness. Facts about his formative years give rise to the thought that the individual has already suffered too much and that we too would probably have been morally ruined by such a childhood. What is inhibited by these concerns is accountability blame." (281) But is it really considerations of fairness? What does it mean to have suffered too much? What is the standard of measure? Again, I am concerned that a model of accountability that is based on whether or not it is appropriate to punish (which seems to be the main focus) may be fundamentally flawed.

[10] Interestingly, Watson seems to recognize this asymmetry. He describes Susan Wolf's position as follows: "Responsible agency is the capacity to respond to relevant reasons. If you do respond to relevant reasons (thereby acting well), you will have exercised that capacity, and be praiseworthy, even if you could not (say, psychologically) have done otherwise. But if you (psychologically) cannot respond to relevant reasons, you thus lack the capacity in question and are not blameworthy. Incapacity therefore undercuts blame but not praise." (282-283) Watson thinks that his attributability/accountability distinction helps to explain the appeal of Wolf's view.

But there is a second asymmetry that may be even more telling. "Like most writers on this subject, I began by talking about the connections between responsibility and praise and blame but became preoccupied with the negative case. We seem to have a richer vocabulary of blame than of praise. This slant is not due solely to mean-spiritedness. At least part of the explanation is that blaming tends to be a much more serious affair; reputation, liberty, and even life can be at stake, and understandably we are more concerned with the conditions of adverse treatment than with those of favorable." (283) Is this right? I think that Watson's description may be accurate, but should it be so? I am concerned just that grounding our account of accountability primarily in terms of the negative case may be fundamentally misguided. That is a point that would require development elsewhere, but I think it may speak to many different kinds of views of moral responsibility that have developed in recent history. I suspect that it reflects a special preoccupation with behavior control and regulation in a world where that seems so desperately necessary.

[11] Watson has attempted offer a rebuttal to critiques (like those of Susan Wolf) of real self views of responsibility. He has done so by identifying the self-disclosure (real self) view as only one of two faces of responsibility--aretaic or attributability. The other face is the accountability face of responsibility. Keeping these distinctions in mind, he is able to offer accounts that uphold many of our moral intuitions.