Virtue and Choice
On the connection between the two.
Listening to Christian Watson responding to Sam Harris’s totalitarian apologetics, I was struck by Watson’s emphatic statement, “If the government tries to force you to become a good person, you don’t become a good person; you become an actor.”
This statement strikes me as both true and timely.
There are certain supererogatory behaviors — good things that are above and beyond the demands of moral permissibility — that the New Right wishes to coerce individuals to perform in order to create a more virtuous society.
But, as Watson correctly points out, the virtuous is the chosen.
Just as we wouldn’t regard as evil an action that one human is forced by another to perform, it would be illogical to regard its converse — a virtuous action — evidence of a man’s virtue if he were made to perform it. To reify this point: If, under penalty of fine, injury, &c., someone “donated” money to a charity, we would not regard this action as evidence of benevolence the way we do when some man freely chooses to part with his property to benefit someone who did not force its forfeiture.
When people are free to choose, they often choose poorly — I’m certainly not going to dispute this. In this scenario, there are good and bad people. In the scenario in which individuals are deprived of the ability to choose, i.e., volition, you don’t just eliminate bad actions; you eliminate people. That is, if a human person is understood to, in essence, be that creature which possesses both reason and volition, and you deprive him of either one of these two essential aspects of his being, you have rendered him an automaton.
Ayn Rand articulates Watson and my point pithily:
“The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed.”