Note 53 — Chapter VI · THE STUDY OF NATURE. FUNDAMENTAL POSITIONS.

(β) Moral responsibility vindicated. In reference to human actions, the Stoics did not allow the freedom of the will, in the proper sense of the term;53 but were of opinion that absence of freedom does not prejudice the character of the will as a deciding power. For is not one and the same all-determining power everywhere active, working in each particular being according to the law of its nature, in one way in organic beings, in another in inorganic beings, differently again in animals and plants, in rational and irrational creatures?54 And albeit every action may be brought about by the co-operation of causes depending on the nature of things and the character of the agent, is it not still free, the resultant of our own impulses and decision?55 Involuntary it would only be were it produced by external causes alone, without any co-operation, on the part of our wills, with external causes.56 Moral responsibility, according to the Stoics, depends only on freedom of the will. What emanates from my will is my action, no matter whether it be possible for me to act differently or not.57 Praise and blame, rewards and punishment, express the judgment of society relative to the character of certain persons or actions.58 Whether they could have been different, or not, is irrelevant. Otherwise virtue and vice must be set down as things not in our power, for which, consequently, we are not responsible, seeing that when a man is once virtuous or vicious, he cannot be otherwise;59 and the highest perfection, that of the Gods, is absolutely unchangeable.60 Chrysippus61 even endeavoured to show, not only that his whole theory of destiny was in harmony with the claims of morality and moral responsibility, but that it presupposed their existence. The arrangement of the universe, he argued, involves law, and law involves the distinction between what is conventionally right and what is conventionally wrong, between what deserves praise and what deserves blame.62 Moreover, it is impossible to think of destiny without thinking of the world, or to think of the world without thinking of the Gods, who are supremely good. Hence the idea of destiny involves also that of goodness, which again includes the contrast between virtue and vice, between what is praiseworthy and what is blameworthy.63 If his opponents objected that, if everything is determined by destiny, individual action is superfluous, since what has been once foreordained must happen, come what may, Chrysippus replied:—There is a distinction to be made between simple and complex predestination; the consequences of human actions being simply results of those actions, are quite as much foreordained as the actions themselves.64