Living the Good Life

5. Loving and Choosing

47 5 loving and C hoosing Those who have reason have freedom to will or not to will, although this freedom is not equal in all of them. Human souls are more free when they persevere in the contemplation of the mind of God, less free when they descend to the corporeal, and even less free when they are entirely imprisoned in earthly flesh and blood. Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius Deterministic Behaviorism The will plays a central part in the moral life, and yet many people want to deny that we have a will. They say that we are merely complicated animals, whose emotions are less inborn and more learned than in other animals. Nevertheless, they are inborn, and they are learned. We have no choice by which we can influence our emotions; we have no freedom by which we can get beyond our genes and our environment. We are fixed and determined by our heredity and our upbringing. What we desire 48 loving anD Choosing we must desire; what we do we must do. Such are the claims of deterministic behaviorists, who point to various influencing factors upon our behavior. Growing up in a family with alcoholism trains a child to behave in one way; growing up in poverty trains a child to behave in another; and growing up in wealth yet another. These children, and the adults they become, must act as they act. Their emotional dispositions are fixed, not through their own choices but by the forces that have acted upon them. In protest against this view, some thinkers, including Aquinas , point out that without a will and choice, no actions are voluntary , and if actions are not voluntary, then a person cannot take responsibility for them. He is to be neither praised nor blamed for what he does. Further yet, it makes no sense to tell him what he ought to do, for his behavior is determined anyway. Ultimately, morality itself makes no sense, for if we are not free to choose, then we can do neither good nor evil (De Malo 6). Deterministic behaviorists respond by claiming that morality is just one more environmental force that can be used to control other people’s behavior. Telling a person that he “ought” to tell the truth might in fact get someone to tell the truth. Behaviorists further argue that rewards and punishments make sense without freedom, for they too are tools to control people. We reward a child for sharing because we seek to make him share in the future. We punish someone for theft because we hope to influence him or others so that he will not steal in the future. On this rather bleak worldview, morality is nothing more than manipulation. Of course, some behaviorists attempt to sound high-minded and suggest that we should use our manipulation to create a world of plenty and happiness. But why bother? Why shouldn’t we follow the trend of human history and try to make a world in which we are rich and powerful at the 49 loving anD Choosing expense of others? Behaviorists cannot say that we “ought” not, for we recognize that ploy (morality) as simply a form of their own manipulation. We won’t dwell upon the argument. Instead we will turn to Aquinas, who thinks that as human beings we are indeed free on account of our will, a power distinct from either the emotions or reason. A Choosing Power Perhaps we cannot really prove that some particular action is free. If I claim that I have freely chosen to return the extra twenty-dollar bill, then the determinist will insist that it was my heredity, or my environment, that fixed my dispositions such that I was determined to return it. Unless we were to realize every causal factor involved with my choice, a feat impossible to the human mind and very far removed from our present knowledge, we could not say with absolute proof that any given human action is free or determined. Aquinas thought that, in a more general way, we could show that as human beings we have the capacity for free actions. Since we have reason, and can perceive diverse ways of achieving our goals, it follows that we are not always determined in our actions. We will not, however, dwell upon this rather difficult argument. Rather, we will provide certain indications of our freedom, the...