| Phi 109-01 Fall 2013 |
|
(Site navigation is not working.) |
Wolf’s article is not divided into sections, so the way I’ve organized my comments below is just one way it might be divided into smaller units.
• (Pp. 228-231) Wolf’s initial discussion sets out a problem she sees with traditional discussions of freedom and determination. Along the way, she introduces a number of terms that she will use later (sometimes much later) in the article; note especially what she calls “the condition of freedom” and the ideas of “psychological determination” and of a “conditional analysis” (of the condition of freedom).
• (Pp. 231-235) Next Wolf outlines the “asymmetry” referred to in her title. As you might suspect, this is where she sets out her key idea.
• (Pp. 235-239) Around the middle of p. 235, she returns to the idea of a conditional analysis of the condition of freedom. But she is not concerned only with a proper formulation of this condition: this is where she goes the furthest in explaining and justifying her view of freedom and responsibility.
• (Pp. 239-242) In the last few pages of the article, Wolf turns her attention to “indetermination” and moral failure. She will use her earlier characterization of psychological determination when she distinguishes it from other sorts of determination (on p. 241).
When you think about Wolf’s examples of generous men on p. 234, you might compare the following passage from Kant’s Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals (Abbott, tr., pp. 398f in the Akademie edition of Kant’s works).
To be beneficent when we can is a duty; and besides this, there are many minds so sympathetically constituted that, without any other motive of vanity or self-interest, they find a pleasure in spreading joy around them and can take delight in the satisfaction of others so far as it is their own work. But I maintain that in such a case an action of this kind, however proper, however amiable it may be, has nevertheless no true moral worth, but is on a level with other inclinations, e.g., the inclination to honour, which, if it is happily directed to that which is in fact of public utility and accordant with duty and consequently honourable, deserves praise and encouragement, but not esteem. For the maxim lacks the moral import, namely, that such actions be done from duty, not from inclination. Put the case that the mind of that philanthropist were clouded by sorrow of his own, extinguishing all sympathy with the lot of others, and that, while he still has the power to benefit others in distress, he is not touched by their trouble because he is absorbed with his own; and now suppose that he tears himself out of this dead insensibility, and performs the action without any inclination to it, but simply from duty, then first has his action its genuine moral worth. Further still; if nature has put little sympathy in the heart of this or that man; if he, supposed to be an upright man, is by temperament cold and indifferent to the sufferings of others, perhaps because in respect of his own he is provided with the special gift of patience and fortitude and supposes, or even requires, that others should have the same—and such a man would certainly not be the meanest product of nature—but if nature had not specially framed him for a philanthropist, would he not still find in himself a source from whence to give himself a far higher worth than that of a good-natured temperament could be? Unquestionably. It is just in this that the moral worth of the character is brought out which is incomparably the highest of all, namely, that he is beneficent, not from inclination, but from duty.