Human moral responsibility
Human moral responsibility
But is it fair to blame human beings for their misconduct? Are we really responsible for our actions? Are we not more often victims of other agencies than free agencies ourselves, and so more sinned against than sinning? A whole gamut of scapegoats is ready at hand – our genes, our chemistry (a temporary hormonal imbalance), our inherited temper and temperament, our parents’ failures during our early childhood, our upbringing, our educational and social environment. Together these seem to constitute an infallible alibi.
Perhaps no more comprehensive attempt has been made to undermine the traditional concept of personal responsibility than Professor B. F. Skinner’s book Beyond Freedom and Dignity. His thesis is that ‘the terrifying problems that face us in the world today’ (especially the threats of population overgrowth, nuclear war, famine, disease and pollution) could all be solved by ‘a technology of human behaviour’. That is, ‘vast changes in human behaviour’ could be secured by changes in the human environment. Man could be programmed to behave properly. What stands in the way, then? Answer: the concept of ‘autonomous man’, his supposed ‘freedom’ (in that he is held responsible for his actions) and his supposed ‘dignity’ (in that he is given credit for his achievements). But these things are an illusion, for ‘a scientific analysis shifts both the responsibility and the achievement to the environment’ (pp.9–30). Man must have the courage to create a social environment or culture which adequately ‘shapes and maintains the behaviour of those who live in it’ (p.141). This is essential for the survival of humankind, which is more important than the traditional, ‘flattering’ concept of our ‘freedom and dignity’ (p.208). To be sure, C. S. Lewis called this ‘the abolition of man’. What would be abolished, however, is only ‘autonomous man, ...the man defended by the literature of freedom and dignity’. Indeed, ‘his abolition has been long overdue’ (p.196). Peering into the future, in which man creates an environment which controls him, and so performs ‘a gigantic exercise in self-control’, B. F. Skinner ends his book with the words: ‘We have not yet seen what man can make of man’ (p.210). It is a chilling prospect of self-determined determinism.
The human spirit rebels against it, however. The concept of ‘diminished responsibility’ we certainly accept, but not the total dissolution of all responsibility, except in the most extreme circumstances. The parallel between moral responsibility and legal liability is instructive at this point. Generally speaking, the criminal law assumes that people have it in their power to choose whether they will obey or break the law, and it treats them accordingly. Nevertheless, responsibility for crime can be diminished, and even excluded, by certain ‘excusing’ conditions. In his essays in the philosophy of law entitled Punishment and Responsibility, H. L. A. Hart defines the principle as follows: ‘In all advanced legal systems liability to conviction for serious crimes is made dependent, not only on the offender having done those outward acts which the law forbids, but on his having done them in a certain frame of mind or with a certain will’ (p.187).6 This state of mind and will is known technically as mens rea which, though a literal translation would be ‘a guilty mind’, really refers to the person’s ‘intention’. For example, the distinction between intentional and unintentional homicide, that is, between murder and manslaughter, goes right back to the Mosaic law. The principle also has a wider bearing. If a person commits an offence while insane, under duress or as an automaton, criminal liability cannot be established. Provocation may reduce murder to manslaughter. The plea of insanity has been accepted for centuries, and has been interpreted since the MacNaghten Rules of 1843 as ‘disease of the mind’, leading to such ‘a defect of reason’ that the offender either did not know ‘the nature and quality of the act he was doing’ or, if he did know it, ‘did not know he was doing what was wrong’.
The Rules were criticized, however, for concentrating on the ignorance of the offender, rather than on his lack of capacity for self-control. So the Infanticide Act of 1938 made provision for acts done by a woman when ‘the balance of her mind was disturbed by reason of her not having fully recovered from the effect of giving birth...’, and the Homicide Act of 1957 provided that a person ‘shall not be convicted of murder if he was suffering from such abnormality of mind...as substantially impaired his mental responsibility for his acts...’. So, too, the British Parliament has decided that no child under ten years can be held guilty of an offence, while between the ages of ten and fourteen it has to be proved specifically that an offending child knew that what he or she was doing was seriously wrong.
Thus, legal liability depends on mental and moral responsibility, that is, on mens rea, the intention of mind and will. But pleas based on lack of consciousness or control will always need to be precisely defined, and exceptional. An accused person certainly cannot plead his genetic inheritance or social upbringing as an excuse for criminal behaviour, let alone personal negligence (‘I simply wasn’t thinking what I was doing’). No, generally speaking, the whole procedure of trying, convicting and sentencing in the courts rests on the assumption that human beings are free to make choices and are responsible for the choices they make.
It is the same in everyday situations. Admittedly we are conditioned by our genes and upbringing, but the human spirit (not to mention the Christian mind) protests against the reductionism which declares a human being to be nothing but a computer (programmed to perform and respond) or an animal (at the mercy of his instincts). Over against these concepts we appeal to the ineradicable sense which men and women have that within reasonable limits we are free agents, able to make up our own minds and decide our own actions. Faced with an alternative, we know we are able to choose. And when we make a wrong choice, we reproach ourselves, because we know we could have behaved differently. We also act on the assumption that other people are free and responsible, for we try to persuade them to our point of view, and ‘we all praise or blame people from time to time’.7
Sir Norman Anderson is, I think, right to draw attention to this human sense of responsibility. On the one hand, he writes, we can speculate about the extent to which people are ‘preconditioned by the constitution and condition of their brains, by the psychological make-up they have inherited or acquired, by the blind and inevitable course of “nature” or by the sovereignty of a Creator God, to behave in the way they do’. But on the other hand it is possible ‘unequivocally to affirm that there is no reason whatever to suppose that ordinary men and women are mistaken in their firm conviction that they have, within limits, a genuine freedom of choice and action, and that this necessarily entails a corresponding measure of moral responsibility’.8
The three contributors to the 1982 London Lectures in Contemporary Christianity, entitled Free to Be Different, came to the same conclusion. Professor Malcolm Jeeves spoke and wrote as a psychologist, Professor Sam Berry as a geneticist, and Dr David Atkinson as a theologian. Together they investigated the respective influences on human behaviour of ‘nature’ (our genetic inheritance), ‘nurture’ (our social conditioning) and ‘grace’ (God’s loving and transforming initiative). They agreed that these things evidently both shape and constrain our behaviour. Nevertheless, their lectures were a vigorous, interdisciplinary rejection of determinism and assertion of human responsibility. Although the whole subject is admittedly complex and it is not possible neatly to disentangle all the threads, yet the three contributors were able to express this common conclusion:
We are not automata, able to do nothing but react mechanically to our genes, our environment or even God’s grace. We are personal beings created by God for himself....Moreover, what God has given us is not to be regarded as a static endowment. Our character can be refined. Our behaviour can change. Our convictions can mature. Our gifts can be cultivated....We are indeed free to be different....9
When we turn to the Bible, we find the same tension, of which we are aware in our personal experience, between the pressures which condition and even control us, and our abiding moral responsibility nonetheless. There is a strong biblical emphasis on the influence of our inheritance, of what we are ‘in Adam’. The doctrine of original sin means that the very nature we have inherited is tainted and twisted with self-centredness. It is, therefore, ‘from within, out of men’s hearts’, Jesus taught, that evil thoughts and actions come (Mark 7:21–23). It is not surprising that he also described the sinner as ‘a slave to sin’ (John 8:34). We are, in fact, enslaved to the world (public fashion and opinion), the flesh (our fallen nature) and the devil (demonic forces). Even after Christ has liberated us and made us his slaves instead, we are not yet entirely rid of the insidious power of our fallenness, so that Paul can conclude his argument in Romans 7 with the summary: ‘So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin’ (v. 25b).
Scripture recognizes the subtlety and strength of these forces, which indeed diminish our responsibility. It is because God ‘knows how we are formed’ and ‘remembers that we are dust’ that he is patient towards us, slow to anger, and ‘does not treat us as our sins deserve’ (Ps. 103:10, 14). Similarly, God’s Messiah is gentle with the weak, refusing to break bruised reeds or to snuff out smouldering wicks.10
At the same time, the biblical recognition that our responsibility is diminished does not mean that it is destroyed. On the contrary, Scripture invariably treats us as morally responsible agents. It lays upon us the necessity of choice between ‘life and good, death and evil’, between the living God and idols.11 It exhorts us to obedience and remonstrates with us when we disobey. Jesus himself pleaded with recalcitrant Jerusalem to acknowledge and welcome him. Often, he said, addressing the city in direct speech, ‘I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing’ (Matt. 23:37). He thus attributed Jerusalem’s spiritual blindness, apostasy and coming judgment to her obstinacy. It is true that he also said ‘no-one can come to me unless the Father...draws him’, but only after he had said ‘you refuse to come to me’.12 Why is it that people do not come to Christ? Is it that they cannot, or is it that they will not? Jesus taught both. And in this ‘cannot’ and ‘will not’ lies the ultimate antinomy between divine sovereignty and human responsibility. But however we state it, we must not eliminate either part. Our responsibility before God is an inalienable aspect of our human dignity. Its final expression will be on the day of judgment. Nobody will be sentenced without trial. All people, great and small, irrespective of their social class, will stand before God’s throne, not crushed or browbeaten, but given this final token of respect for human responsibility, as each gives an account of what he or she has done.
Emil Brunner is surely right to emphasize our responsibility as an indispensable aspect of our humanness. ‘Today our slogan must be: no determinism, on any account! For it makes all understanding of man as man impossible.’13 Man has to be seen as ‘a thinking – willing being’, responsive and responsible to his Creator, ‘the creaturely counterpart of his divine self-existence’. Further, this human responsibility is in the first instance ‘not...a task but a gift,...not law but grace’. It expresses itself in ‘believing, responsive love’ (p.98). So then, ‘one who has understood the nature of responsibility has understood the nature of man. Responsibility is not an attribute, it is the “substance” of human existence. It contains everything..., [it is] that which distinguishes man from all other creatures....’ (p.50). Therefore ‘if responsibility be eliminated, the whole meaning of human existence disappears’ (p.258).
But has not the Fall seriously weakened man’s responsibility? Is he responsible for his actions any longer? Yes, he is. ‘Man never sins purely out of weakness, but always also in the fact that he “lets himself go” in weakness. Even in the dullest sinner there is still a spark of decision’, indeed of defiant rebellion against God. So man cannot shuffle off his responsibility for his own wickedness. ‘No Fate, no metaphysical constitution, no weakness of his nature, but himself, man, in the centre of his personality is made responsible for his sin’ (pp.130–131).