Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The University of Missouri Studies Philosophy and Education Series, Vol. 1: The Treatment of Personality by Locke, Berkeley and Hume, a Study, in the Interests of Ethical Theory, of an Aspect of the Dialectic of English Empiricism
The question, then, What is ethical freedom? Should be put in its genuine form, What is an ethically free person? Putting it in this way leads us far toward the answering of the question itself. With reference to this question, let us turn to certain deliverances Of modern moralists of a prevailing school, who have come near to putting the question in the ultimate form which has been insisted upon. In that general school where evolution is made the universally reigning law, the question of whether actions, or volitions, or motives are free is often resolved to the deeper question Of whether these acts, motives, volitions, belong to the agent in some sense or other, - Of whether the agent himself is free in some sense or other. So far, good. But, Obviously, the whole question is, which sense or other is the one that will guarantee any real freedom, a freedom that makes the agent's act really and finally his own, and which thus gives him that moral responsibility in whose interest is any search for freedom at all. Now, in the school referred to, what is usually meant by saying that the agent is free is that he is not moved entirely from without, but also from within; that there is a reaction Of an inner in?uence upon extraneous in?uences. It is explained that each man has an inner necessity as well as an outer necessity; that he has a character of his own. His brain does not merely receive, but it transforms excitations. A man is free in so far as he is not coerced by anything outside himself. In this sense he may be said to mold his own future.
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