But it is not merely a matter of flat utilitarianism, it is not even
unjust, if society, without inquiring whether the Will is free or not,
makes the individual responsible for his actions and only makes an
exception from this universal rule in extreme cases. Even though his
will is subject to the law of causation, and the individual always acts
as he must, he nevertheless has a means of keeping within the moral law
despite inner impulses and outer pressure, and that is by his judgment
and its instrument, inhibition. Like every organic function which is not
purely vegetative and therefore beyond the influence of the Will,
judgment and inhibition can be strengthened and perfected by methodical
exercise, while total neglect of them will weaken and finally atrophy
them. The community may demand that each of its members shall devote
attention to the development of the natural functions which permit him
to discriminate and to suppress any inclination to evil which may
appear. It facilitates this duty towards itself and himself for the
individual--for it is a question of the increase of his organic
efficiency and of his personal worth--by the institutions it founds for
the education of youth, by schools which not only impart knowledge, but
also form the character, by instruction after the school age, by the
honours with which it distinguishes especially excellent persons,
thereby holding them up to example. The community prescribes that
everyone should acquire a certain minimum of knowledge, and for this
purpose forces each individual by law to go to school for a certain
number of years. It may and ought to force him also to render himself
more capable of obeying the moral law by methodical exercise of his
will. Every citizen is responsible to the state for being able to read
and write. In this sense the individual is also responsible for
sufficiently strengthening his faculty of inhibition to be able to
control his selfish, anti-social and immoral desires.
The particular purpose for which he is to employ his faculty of
inhibition depends on the current moral law of the age, which is
determined not by the individual, but by the community. The individual
does quite enough and is free of blame if he strives with all his might
to approximate his actions to the ideal which the community demands at a
given time for the life of its members in common and for their mutual
relations. To alter and perfect this ideal is the business of a few
select men with wider judgment, stronger will and warmer sympathies than
the average. In these exceptional cases it is not the community which
imposes its ideal on the individual, but, on the contrary, the
individual who works out a new ideal for the community, and, so to
speak, thanks to his personal qualities, establishes a new record in the
gymnastic of the Will which beats all earlier ones.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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