HKB
10 passages · search this phrase →
Often appears with: justice as a virtue · will, choice, and freedom · fate, destiny, and necessity · sin, guilt, and repentance · money, coin, and credit · virtue as free · the problem of evil and theodicy · the fear of death · supreme reason · spendthrift corruption · self-determining power · resurrection from death
Usually: argument (7) · injustice endured (5) · censure (3) · narrative (2) · detachment (2) · exhortation (2) · indignation (2) · skepticism (2) · reflection (1) · betrayal (1)
“Virtue is free, and as a man honours or dishonours her he will have more or less of her; the responsibility is with the chooser—God is justified.” Plato, The Republic · precept
“Him they told to look and listen, as he was to be their messenger to men from the world below.” Plato, The Republic · observation
“for justice and injustice, praise and blame, punishment and reward cannot attach to necessary actions” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Freiherr von, Theodicy · insight
“I venture to affirm, moreover, that however we may bring our understandings into bondage to the more comprehensible doctrine, simply because it is comprehensible under the forms of the understanding, every man does, in fact, believe himself possessed of freedom in the higher sense of self-determination.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection; and, The Confessions of an Inqui · insight
He offers rules for dealing with wrongs by looking at whether the city as a whole is harmed, reflecting on flux and vast time, and then concluding that one’s proper role is still to do one’s nature’s work.
to do them any wrong. And for all external things belonging either to this thy wretched body, or life, to remember that they are neither thine, nor in thy power. XXVIII. Thou mayest always speed, if thou wilt but make choice of the right way; if in the course both of thine opinions and actions, thou wilt observe a true method. These two things be common to the souls, as of God, so of men, and of every reasonable cre…
The narrative continues: Candidus’ protected ward becomes a spendthrift who flees with money and ruins his patron, leading Johnson to argue contracts and bonds fail without reciprocal safeguards.
youth for a few years at his own house, afterwards placed him with a merchant of eminence, and gave bonds to a great value as a security for his conduct. The young man, removed too early from the only eye of which he dreaded the observation, and deprived of the only instruction which he heard with reverence, soon learned to consider virtue as restraint, and restraint as oppression: and to look with a longing eye at …
An interpreter gives the souls lots and life samples so each chooses a new fate, stressing that virtue is free and that the greatest human danger is ignoring how to choose the better life.
spindle, and Atropos with her left hand touching and guiding the inner ones, and Lachesis laying hold of either in turn, first with one hand and then with the other. When Er and the spirits arrived, their duty was to go at once to Lachesis; but first of all there came a prophet who arranged them in order; then he took from the knees of Lachesis lots and samples of lives, and having mounted a high pulpit, spoke as fo…
Er, the soldier Armenius’s son, is resurrected after ten days to describe judgment: the just ascend by a heavenly way, the unjust descend, and punishments and rewards proceed in proportion to deeds.
and the evils which you attributed to the unfortunate just, do really fall in the end on the unjust, although, as you implied, their sufferings are better veiled in silence. But all the blessings of this present life are as nothing when compared with those which await good men after death. ‘I should like to hear about them.’ Come, then, and I will tell you the story of Er, the son of Armenius, a valiant man. He was …
Aquinas argues that a habit is “midway” between power and act, so it is more potent than the act in both good and bad, though acts remain worse or better in themselves.
a habit produces its actions both as to their goodness and as to their badness. Therefore a habit is more potent than its act, both in goodness and in badness. *On the contrary,* A man is justly punished for a vicious act; but not for a vicious habit, so long as no act ensues. Therefore a vicious action is worse than a vicious habit. *I answer that,* A habit stands midway between power and act. Now it is evident th…
Leibniz argues that linking causes and effects does not remove moral responsibility, and he distinguishes harmful from harmless kinds of necessity while criticizing views that use necessity to deny justice or excuse evil actions.
will make it happen is written also. Thus the connexion of effects and causes, so far from establishing the doctrine of a necessity detrimental to conduct, serves to overthrow it. Yet, without having evil intentions inclined towards libertinism, one may envisage differently the strange consequences of an inevitable necessity, considering that it would destroy the freedom of the will, so essential to the morality of …
He argues that divine foreknowledge and providence make future events certain, which seems to remove human freedom; thus, critics claim moral responsibility and justice collapse because humans are compelled to good and evil.
and evil that he does, and in consequence that he deserves therefor neither recompense nor chastisement: thus is the morality of actions destroyed and all justice, divine and human, shaken. 3. But even though one should grant to man this freedom wherewith he arrays himself to his own hurt, the conduct of God could not but provide matter for a criticism supported by the presumptuous ignorance of men, who would wish t…
Epictetus argues that evil and wrongdoing come from mistaken opinions, so you should not rage at offenders but pity them like the blind, since perception governs action.
“’Tis true I know what evil I shall do, But passion overpowers the better counsel.” She thought that to indulge her passion and take vengeance on her husband was more profitable than to spare her children. It was so; but she was deceived. Show her plainly that she is deceived, and she will not do it; but so long as you do not show it, what can she follow except that which appears to herself (her opinion)? Nothing el…
Using a comparison with brutes, Coleridge argues that if moral and spiritual affections still operate by the same deterministic cause-and-effect law, then moral responsibility and conscience cannot be rationally grounded.
causes out of the will, according to our nature, then I maintain that a moral nature has no more to do with the feeling of responsibility than any other nature. Perhaps the difficulty may be made more obvious in this way. It will be admitted that brutes are possessed of various natures, some innocent or useful, otherwise noxious, but all alike irresponsible in a moral point of view. But why? Simply because they act …
He insists that avoiding these moral and religious perplexities requires either a self-determining will beyond nature or else embracing Necessitarianism, which he says makes the Supreme Reason a blind Fate.
their nature. They preclude the very idea of a free-will, and render the feeling of moral responsibility not an enigma merely, not a mystery, but a self-contradiction and an absurdity. Turn the matter as we will--call these correlatives, namely, the inherent susceptibilities and the causes acting on them from without, natural, or moral, or spiritual--so long as their action and reaction, or the law of reciprocity, w…