509  Most moral acts are performed without deliberation as a natural response to a situation.  These acts range from spontaneous rage or altruistic sacrifice to everyday acts of kindness, meanness or indifference that, collectively discharge the values and character of a person over time in a variety of circumstance.  In such actions, choice is not absent, but is implicitly resolved without becoming an object of awareness. The choice is ”automatic,” but with hesitation or delay it can become a conscious terminus.

510  The closer the choice to the endstage of the process, the greater the constraints on the final form, and the less possibility for the unexpected to occur.  The shift from the automatic to the volitional in speech is a microcosm of what occurs when there is hesitation in action.  When the hesitation or indecision in action is a sign of choice or conflict at a conscious or unconscious phase, as in word search, there is also a feeling of effort or agency, and prominence of the conceptual precursors of the action and of options prior to act-selection.

511  An act of heroism may be foolhardy, one of caution or cowardice may be prudent, but the act, whatever its content or assessment by the agent, or by others, is an expression of the core self or character.  …The more immediate or impulsive the response, the greater its affinity with that of other people in similar circumstances.  Rage, fear and flight, for example, are common to all of us,  Hesitation penetrates the ground of impulse by a diversity of individual thought, and the ensuing action is more expressive of the uniqueness of personality.  The result is often a partial or stepwise action that illustrates the value-distribution over time, as opposed to an immediate action, which illustrates the dominant value at the moment.  …More often, reflection cancels an action, or replaces it with ambivalence.

512  At times of uncertainty, decision is most likely to be guided by adaptation to the social  environment.  The egoism of a moral calculus tends to prevail when right conduct is clear yet self-interest prevails.  In some respects, the more deliberative the action, the more it approximates that of an informed political decision, where impulse is fractionated by the complexity of the situation and the best strategy to achieve a goal.  …An act that occurs without reflection suggest the pimacy of instinctual will or uncouscious motivation.  An act that engages conscious intention is rooted in moral logic and choice.  The contrast of spontaneity and deliberation is that of automatism and freedom.  This contrast is central to the relation of thought to action.

513  Deliberation is no guarantee of good conduct.  Spontaneous action can involve moral or immoral outcomes, deliberation can lead to ethical or unethical conduct, or obstruct a person from acting in an ethical way.

514  The value-configuration undergoes a gradual evolution with age and experience, hopefully in the direction of a lessening of egoism.  However, at any stage of life, unless the individual undergoes a personal crisis or a spiritual conversion, the equilibrium of self and other is unlikely to dramatically shift simply through learning.  The criminality of the young may dissolve into the benignity of age, but the reverse also occurs, as the idealism of the young gives way to the corruption of power and money.  It is doubtful that an immoral person, young or old, could be persuaded to abort a planned criminal act by an appeal to an other-centered value, though an egoistic one, e.g., fear of punishment, might be a deterrent.

515  We see this in both the individual and in society, when conflict leas not to an action that is energetic and forthright, but to compromise, inaction and delay, though there are occasions when inaction and/or compromise are preferable.  When a decision is distributed over many people with differing views, or when one person hold beliefs and values that are incompatible, or if one set of values does not predominate, conflict or compromise is inevitable.

517  An examination of the microstructures of choice (Brown, 1996) affirms that concepts are not conveyed, but survive into consciousness, as deliberation or indecision uncovers the covert struggle in their actualization.

518  Competing claims on (within) the individual owe to opposing values or beliefs.  In a sense, there are competing selves.  Mandelbaum (1955) has written that moral conflict within a person has the same general form as conflicting judgments between people, just as obligation takes a similar form whether it is internal or external.  …Ideas propagate as knowledge infiltrates concepts to add nuance to bias.  Latent contents are activated out of memory and novel arguments are elicited through propagation or metaphoric extension.  Knowledge has its effect by impression or imaginative fusion.  Lines of thought or patterns of memory are facilitated and brought to bear on precursor concepts.  The gradual assertion of a leading concept reinforces the action path, less by impulsion than an elimination of competing trends.  Deliberation is not anticipatory , it revives past objects obscured by a fixation on the present.  Ideally, it forges an act that is seamless and spontaneous, as the study of a musical piece leads to a flawless performance.  Spontaneity in moral conduct as an outcome of knowldge and reflection is preferred to goodness as a resuolt of moral drill.  However, the effect of knowledge is to facilitate commitment by reinforcing presuppositions, not by adding conviction.  Did Kant no say, “I must abolish knowledge to make room for belief.”

520  The value of self and other are co-temporal at their origination, and continuous in the process leading from self to object.  When two egocentric desires or values clash independent of the needs of others, the choice is non-moral.  When ego- and exo-centric values clash, the choice is moral.  Since values derive from drives, which are adaptive, the origin of every value supposes a social factor.

522  Only when a person is oblivious to his own motivations can an act be considered and end in itself.  That is perhaps why goodness seems to occur in people of great simplicity.  Only when the means to achieve an end are transient can they be said to portend goals.  When a fractious truce becomes a substitute for a lasting peace, when deliberation persist beyond the conflict that was its source, we can say the end is superseded by the means.  But, in many cases this simply implies that the original goal has been forgotten, attention has been diverted, other priorities take its place, etc.  Unless this goal is continuously in sight, the means/end relation will be uncertain.

524 – 525  A coherence of the synthetic and the analytic, the universal and the particular, occurs when the whole resonates in the parts and the parts partake of the whole.  A powerful realization of this relation has been, for many thinkers, from Aristotle to Shcopenhauer, the very definition of genius.  …Concepts are not inductions of facts, but generate facts as realization of value.  The accommodation of concept to fact is an historical process of fact-creation, the transition of conceptual valuation into objects that seem value-free.  Concept and fact are reconciled in the relation of thought to action, or deliberation to spontaneity.  We see comparable reconciliation of abstract potential to concrete possibility in the adjustment of ambition to achievement or of the desired to the attainable.  …The conceptual and the material, like the mental  and the physical are symbiotic concepts.  The one supposes the other, to which it is a response.  A fixation on facts as building blocks of concepts can suffocate an ambiguity that may be our best approximation to truth.  Assertion and refutation seem to be the sole paths to knowledge, but what sort of truth survives?  A negation, unlike a refutation, constrains; it does not reject but exposes the nugget of truth that remains after a mountain of error has been excavated.  The limits of any theory are at stake when anything is described, for a description is a piece of the theory that supports it.  For every category, there is another just beyond its contours.  Every statement plumbs the depths of the presupposition on which everything depends.  …The consequences of an action are the grounds on which we decide whether or not a person is responsible.

526  …within the domain of immediate, automatic or spontaneous action, for good or bad, there should be equal responsibility according to the psychological structure of the act regardless of its moral worth.

527  We do not attribute the same degree of volition to immoral acts as moral ones, regardless of whether they are spontaneous or deliberate.  This dissociation introduces mercy and compassion into the system of justice, but makes no sense at all from the standpoint of human psychology.  …It seems to boil down to a choice between a theory that is universal to volition or one that is individual to character.  A theory of volition, in order to be useful in attributing responsibility , would have to entail that choice is independent of character, for otherwise intention would be a sideshow to the main act of personality, with every act a sampling of some aspect of character.  If conduct is determined by character, which in turn is the outcome of one’s causal ancestry, volition would be a sort of psychic slight-of-hand en route to acts and objects.  If intention is fully based in character, conduct should be judged irrespective of whether or not it is voluntary.  The self, slave to the mistress of character, still believes it is living freely.  …If intention does uncouple from character, a person would have the power to choose the right – or veto the wrong – course of action, to some extent independent of what sort of person he is.  Then it would be fair to judge that action as a unique volition.  There is a problem with either case.  If we judge the individual according to his character, of which the volition is an expression, the volition is irrelevant.  A volition independent of character is a momentary quirk.

528 -529  Volition is ingredient as the self goes out to its subjective aim in a trajectory from unconscious potential to the definite and the real, from value to fact.  Every thought or action begins with the values, belief and personal experiences that, collectively, comprise a personality.  Character is fundamental  to who we are, what we think how we act.  Reason develops out of the ideational context created by conceptual feelings, which in turn are generated from the core personality, as an expressive, not instrumental, feature.  Values enrich those construct that incline the self to personal and social ends.  They facilitate dispositions to configure concepts and their implementation in words and acts.  It is more likely that character lays down volition than that volition influences character and, thus, that responsibility begins with character, not volition.  Even if we are not the authors of our own character but its victims or beneficiaries, the question remains whether the self freely chooses, or whether character spills through intention into behavior.  IF the latter, the objective judgement is the only judgement we can make, even if it stops where the subjective is felt to begin.  A judgement of conduct by others leaves untapped those inner states that constitute the great part of its structure.  For an object theory these states are inferred.  For microgenetic theory, the process leading to the act, not the act itself, is the primary datum.  …If volition is bound to character and free choice is illusory, which is not to say inefficacious, is there a possibility that character can be changed by an act of will?  If a person cannot choose his acts, can he decide his values?  If not, we are automatons without agency or personal responsibility, with as little reason to praise a good act as blame a harmful one.

530  Can the self assume a posture that is receptive to moral education?  The subjective criterion of responsibility would then not be restricted to whether a person acts responsibly, for this may be beyond his control, but whether he is mindful of his moral failings and open to the growth of personal values that are empathic and life enhancing.

485  Choice is the fork in the road of of value that gives direction to agency and intention.  The feeling of agency is value flowing from the self into action.  Apart from whether agency is a real or illusory capacity, the feeling is central to the claim that people can choose between right and wrong independent of who they are, i.e. that choices are the inevitable outcomes of character.  Free will and choice are an escape from the impact of the immediate situation and the determinism of one’s causal ancestry.  Values and intentions arise in the core self.  Free will arises in relation to temporal structure of an action, or the duration of the present.  …The thesis of this chapter is that a deeper understanding of freedom, choice and efficacy entails a radical re-thinking of the perceptual process, no less than that of action, since the feeling of agency is largely perceptual.  It is a matter of the transparency of the choice or selection through which a content individuates.  Agency and choice come to the fore in action, especially in verbal imagery (inner speech), as an accentuation of penultimate phases in the language act.  This experience is central to the feeling of conscious choice, intention and desire.

486  In perception and action, there is a progressive analysis of character (self) to choice (selection), decision (specification) and effectuation.  The act/object sequence corresponds with a series from will (drive) to desire and from, intention to act or object.  Moral responsibility depends on the mix of ego- and exo-centric values.  In perception, values are transmitted to objects of interest.  In action, they delimit conduct in relation to self-interest and the needs of others. …The world might be a Laplacean film-strip that comes into awareness as it unreels, but the individual feels the future is open and that the self is positioned at the forward edge of change to a mix of fate and chaos, certainty and chance, destiny and randomness, but not as wholly deterministic.

487  The experience of foreknowledge is linked to the feeling of agency for the event that is foreseen. This association of self and action in agent causation is equivalent to – perhaps the source of – our idea of god’s absolute foreknowledge and his causal power to make all events occur.  …The linkage of foreknowledge and agency in the self, i.e. a thought in advance of an action that is its cause, is transposed to the agency of god.  The individual “projects” the psychic experience of a self that freely acts upon the objects of thought or perception onto a god who sets in motion and intervenes in the passage of nature.  In other words, the concept of god’s agency is derived from the feeling of human intention, as the perception (theory) of object causation is derived from the feeling of agent-causation.

490 – 491  …change our thinking in relation to cause and effect, namely that the former are phases in a single existent, as opposed to elements in causal succession, where cause and effect are distinct objects.  On this view, potential does not exist until it becomes actual, and it is then not causal but ingredient.  The transition from potential to actual is causal if it is divisible into intervening phases, but this does not apply if potential and actual are part of – as stem to leaf – the same entity.  Potential perishes at the moment of actuality, not successively at each phase in the path to the actual, since potential at each phase is part of the actuality it leads to, i.e. part of the epoch of its actualization.  Potential and actual are successive phases in a single momentary existence.  - The feeling of agency –  The intuition of agency begins in action and extends into perceptual objects as a relation that connects a cause to an effect.  …There is an inference in the present state of an effect in the immediate future. The origin of agency in early cognition is also the beginning of a theory of subjective time.  The agency felt in the transition from self to act, both causal and decisional, is displaced into the world in the transition from one object to another.  …The further individuation of the self and mental objects leads to greater autonomy and an opposition of self to inner and outer object, fostering the growth of intentional feeling.  …A purposefulness that goes all the way down is the path to theism.  An evolutionary psychology has purposefulness developing in relation to the direction of feeling.  The repeatability of the direction gives the appearance of purposefulness.  Prior to establishing anisotropy of direction, the becoming of the entity is arbitrary.  Purposefulness undergoes an advance to intention.  The argument that advanced forms exist in earlier ones in statu nascendi is also the critique of an evolutionary account of consciousness and value.   Purposefulness achieves it aim when it terminates.  The aim is not given beforehand. As feeling takes on direction, what is implicit in drive becomes explicit in desire.  An object, and idea, an image or a feeling, as a content in consciousness, is an intentional object.  In human thought, the derivation of affects and ideas out of the conceptual feeling of the self gives intention its directional character.  The immediate action of simple agency arrives at conscious intention when an idea crystallizes between the self and the world.  The interposition of a conscious idea or feeling abbreviates the outgoing stream, further separating the self from its objects.  Intention is the awareness of the goal or the “aboutness” of this direction.  …Mental objects are wider surrogates that forecast the denotations of external ones, as potential undergoes delimitation, action is delayed, and immediacy becomes deliberation (Chapter 19).  A desire discriminates one thing from (all) others.  The choice in desire, especially for absent or imaginary objects, is the root of personal freedom.  The implicit causation in agency is the orderly in perception that underlies the incompleteness of conscious deliberation.  Freedom is achieved by relinquishing the illusion of predictability for that of uncertainty.  The theory of nature as mechanical obscures a diminishing contingency inherent in the evolutionary series all the way down to the inorganic.  The intrinsically contingent is a mark of potentiality.  Volition is made possible by a contingency inherent in the object that is not a mere dependency on the unforeseen vicissitudes of extrinsic change.  Mind is a figural prominence of psychic nature, autonomy an artificial focus - an excessive individuation – of one organism in a society of others, actual or unrealized.

492  -Causation, autonomy and freedom –  Autonomy and causation are linked concepts.  The artificiality of the individual in relation to the field of organic life, or the self in relation to its own objects, is like a cause or effect in isolation from the whole of nature.  They both depend on a mode of thought that replaces continuity with an exceptional degree of separation.  …The distinction of cause and effect in object-causation is parallel to the distinction of self  and world in agent-causation.  In the former, such problems as the demarcation of the cause, its transition to the effect or the attribution of contingency to accidental causation resist analysis by the methods of the very theory they subtend.  Since they cannot be explained by the doctrine of external relations, they vitiate the theory.  A theory that cannot explain its core assumptions is vacuous, not merely incomplete.  A persistent incoherence is close to an unacknowledged refutation.  But here, contingency translates to free will and the connection of cause to effect is even more obscure.

494  In sum, freedom in non-cognitive nature, as well as in the brain state, is grounded in contingency or probability or creative advance, yet the concept of object causation is inherited from human agency, just as the concept of probability is inherited from human choice.  The potential, the novelty and the possibility that are so forceful an experience with an image in the mind survive in the contingency of external objects.  The feeling of volition that is lost as the object exteriorizes is replaced by the feeling of a causal force  that is extrinsic to the observer.  The will exteriorizes with the object as its causal power.  In a word, object causation is mental causation objectified.  The free will that imposes certainty on indecision becomes the power of causation that imposes necessity on contingency.

495  We intuit in our own minds what we find in our models of the universe.  Instead of asking if the mind conforms to the principles of physical science, we should regard these principles as expressions of fundamental patterns of human thought.  This is in agreement with Stapp’s comment that the founders of quantum physics concluded “that the mathematical formalism of quantum theory is about our knowledge,” which somehow has to be reconciled with “nature herself.”  On this view, the objects of physics have their correlates in human thought.  The “laws” of the mind that give the objects of perception (and science)become the physical  laws that govern mind-independent entities as well as mind.

497  The more objective the choice, the less the personal responsibility.  People tend to objectivize personal choices to avoid responsibility – the “shoulds” and “have-to’s” of ordinary discourse – as they blame others for their own failings or attribute a kind of coercion to their own decisions, e.g. I must go to the doctor.  The politician or diplomat may finesse a choice to evade or distribute a responsibility.  There are many ways to disinvigorate choice, by altering its terms, by dilution or contextualization, by postponement, by shifting the responsibility to others, and so on.  When such maneuvers reach the point where the “plain-spoken” yet decisive person who accepts responsibility for his actions is dismissed as naive or foolish, when choices are cleaved from moral obligations, or in cynicism, and when such attitudes become widespread, regardless of the sophistication of the rationale, it points to a dissipation in the character of a society that is a fatal mark of decay.

498  Contingency, like probability, excludes god’s foreknowledge of possible outcomes, and “makes-room” for free will by allowing a multiplicity of possible futures.  Contingency also refers to the conditional in language – if this, then that – but at a deeper level it pertains to unpredictability.  …Some authors have attempted to uncouple volition and conscious decision and postulate a parallel arising of action and intention (Brown, 2003).  This postulates two mechanisms when one is sufficient, and may even require a third mechanism to integrate the other two.  The microgenetic account is more parsimonious.  It posits that intention, or an awareness of the goal or choice in acting, is ordinarily buried as an implicit phase in the action development.  Conscious indecision or hesitation reflects unconscious conflict, since the action (or inaction) is pre-set.  What occurs in consciousness is the awareness of what, in advance, has been unconsciously biased.

499  This agrees with the conclusion of Libet and others that the onset of a purposeful action at least 400 msec, prior to the action, and prior to awareness of the intention to act, indicates unconscious pre-activation, i.e. a voluntary act is not instigated in consciousness.  Libet’s notion of a bubbling-up of the action is consistent with microgenetic concepts.  …Potential resolves to definiteness in the actualization of acts and objects.  Similarly, contingency resolves to causation as the indeterminacy  of potential is fixed by the necessity of definiteness.

507  Creativity demands contingency, or possibility, or potential, or probability, not agent causation.  Joseph Conrad wrote that explicitness “is fatal to the glamour of all artistic work, robbing it of all suggestiveness, destroying all illusion.”  The ambiguity is the indefiniteness prior to agency and actuality, and points, just as do command hallucination, to the passivity of the agent to his own creative imagination.  …The “gap” from mind to world is fundamental to the entire edifice of western thought.  Yet the assumed confrontation of the self with objects that are, in fact, tributaries of the observer’s mind is an error only slightly less pernicious than the separation of mind from physical nature.  The diachronics of subject and object corresponds with the synchronics of self and physical process.  The subject/object relation of phases in a single mind is a succession, while the concurrence of the mental and the physical at each phase in the mind/brain state is simultaneous (Brown 1996).  Freedom seems to require a juncture in the transition from character to act.  Yet the self is realized out of character, conduct is realized out of the self, in a progressive individuation that extends without rupture from mind to world.  The self achieves freedom in the virtual (illusionary) present that frames the action sequence. On the continuity hypothesis, each act is a self-and world-creation.

508  The feeling of a free self unencumbered by antecedent events, a self that can take each moment as it comes and act accordingly, or make unexpected decision, is the result of an occasional accentuation of preliminary phases in a continuous transition to novelty.  Self and choice are successive segments in becoming.  In fact, the awareness of choice owes in part to the “location” of the self antecedent to act and object selection, prior to final definiteness.  The creative would seem to be the “highest” expression of free will, as habit and repetition are its nadir.  But the creative is not a product of the self, for the self is re-created with its contents.  Process is creative at every phase.

457  - Greater happiness –   In Utilitarian ethics, happiness is an impersonal measure of the quantity of pleasure in the greatest number of people, though personal happiness is pleasure in the free exercise of personality.  Since one can obtain pleasure from non-moral or immoral conduct, it is necessary for goodness that virtue motivate the pursuit of happiness to align it with ethical conduct and guarantee that its goods have equitable distribution.  Virtue is an objective assessment of the goodness of character, happiness a subjective assessment of pleasurable feeling.  Virtue is a quality, happiness a state.  They are not coordinate concepts.  A virtuous person may be unhappy, a non-virtuous person may be happy.  If happiness is independent of virtue, they must be combined for the individual to receive pleasure from acts of moral goodness.  …Happiness was virtue in pursuit of the Good.  Thus, we say that virtue is not to be bartered, it is, as the saying goes, “it’s own reward” and should, if genuine and consistent with desire, be a source of personal pleasure.

458  Schopenhauer wrote that the goal of moral development is for the oughts to disappear.  The closer the pursuit of one’s objects to the values that evoke them, the more happiness is aligned with goodness of character, or to the Greek ideal of happiness in relation to virtue.

460  …the question of what is required of a person for the greater happiness.  The happiness of the ordinary persona may consist in nothing more than work, shelter, food and companionship.

461  Utilitarianism dilutes and transforms moral feeling to an objective quantity of shared experience.  Bentamism is social theory, not moral philosophy.  Bradley put it well when he wrote of Utilitarianism that “its heart is in the right place, but the brain is lacking.”  …The more impersonal the perspective, the more axiomatic the rule, the more artificial the methodology (e.g. Rawls), and the more the morality becomes a metapsychological attitude distinct from its affective base.  To see a situation from  another perspective is not to feel the situation as if one were actually in it, which entails an experience of oneness or fusion with the other.  One may have a tolerant attitude towards persecution until one’s own family is assaulted.  A fusion with the other mitigates this disparity.  A detached perspective reduces self-interest and should increase the moral value of an action. but it is engagement, not detachment, that aligns moral feeling with right conduct.

462  The major problem with greater happiness is that it is act-bound and linked to outcomes, not values or motives.  A life conceived as the sum of its acts ignores the intrapsychic portion, which is the inner life.  …Does the moral choice in these situations not depend on the agent’s moral character rather than the actual outcome?  Indeed, the contradiction in the calculus is shown in the fact that Utilitarianism would tolerate a great benefit from the use of medical data obtained by Mengele, even if the man and his methods are denounced as immoral.  …The move from intrinsic to extrinsic relations is the shift from personal value, which is qualitative, to impersonal fact as a quantity.  MacKinnon wrote of Utilitarianism as the “sovereignty of fact.”  Basically, it is the moral calculus, upside-down with a kindly face.

463 – 464   Happiness consists in the ability and opportunity to seek that which one desires.  It is the enjoyment of a subjective aim, an alignment with the forward-going process of life, a finding that contrasts sharply with the Buddhist concept of desire as the source of suffering and the extinction of desire as the key to happiness.  ..A philosophy that avoids psychology by positing givens just when psychological explanation is required may constitute an edifice that is logically consistent all the way down, until it arrives at its own foundations.

465  We cannot derive a feeling from a rational argument.  The fact that an object ought to give pleasure or that it is logic al that a given object should bring pleasure, e.g. that virtue leads to pleasure or happiness, does not explain why, or even predict that, it gives pleasure.  However, I do think there is more to be said than that objects are “dear in and for themselves.”  …A person can have immense pleasure on hearing a new piece of  music for which he has not yet developed a desire,  Even solitude is a source of inestimable pleasure.  Such observations raise questions for any theory of pleasure that depends on the value of its objects.

466  The more primitive the music, the more bodily is enjoyment and the communal the activity.

467  The feeling in the performer is not necessarily transmitted to the listener, just as the donor’s pleasure in an act ofr self-denial is not the same pleasure as that felt by the recipient.  Inevitably, the expression of feeling is both aided and impeded by its articulation in action.  Speech is constantly attempting to exhaust concepts and feelings, but it fails  when there are intese or subtle feeling that are essentually wordless, ineffable, unanalyzable.  … – Agents and victims –  Does it matter if sacrifice for others leads to personal happiness or unhappiness?  If a good act makes one happy, the agent’s values are aligned with his conduct.  If the same good act incurs a sense of obligation or makes one bitter or frustrated, does that diminish its moral value?  …The values and intentions of the agent are intrinsic to the immediate moral consequences of the action, just as are the values of those affected.  …If subjectivity is not a factor in the origin of the act, it has to be introduced later in the interpretation of its consequence.  To permit it at one point and exclude it at another is arbitrary.  In sum, if the subjective is eliminated at one end. it cannot be reinserted at the other without inflicting a fatal incoherence in theory.

468  A fully objective or act-based account of moral conduct, or one based on conformance to an external standard or ideal excludes reason, motivation, character and the psychic concomitants of injury.  An action cannot be severed from the private states of those involved.   …Luck begins at conception with the genetic endowment, continues through the pregnancy, and after birth with health, family, educational opportunities and so on.

469  One can aggressively hunt a partner, but finding the right  one seems more a matter of chance (or fate) than volition.  The suspension of agency accounts for the feeling that one “falls” in love, or is “swept” away.  …Since we desire good luck and hope to avoid bad luck, the feeling of agency in good and bad luck is not symmetrical.  Once bad luck strikes there is often little we can do about it, but good luck engages volition in preparedness and exploiting an opportunity.

470 -471  What is coincidence or fortune for one person is destiny for another.  Luck takes the unexpected as accidental, fate perceives the same event as inevitable.  One who believes in luck could think that the world process is unpredictable, contingent or determined.  One who believes in fate thinks process is fixed.  I think the latter view entails an absence of true agency in the mind, and for many people a surrogate agency in the world, a deus ex machina in physical nature, for how could anyone otherwise believe that Laplacian causation could be  so  particular and rigidly determined as fate requires?  The idea of god’s will, the “divine luck” of Aristotle, introduces  the specificity of god’s agency into accidents of probability.  Fate is the hand of god, the laws of nature, universal causation, impacting on events that would otherwise be random or probabilistic.  …The mind wavers on a tightrope between probability and fate.  The probability of an event is like its potential.  Once the event occurs, and probability becomes actual, its actuality become its fate.  The openness of probability is opposed to the irrevocability of fate, as a manifold of possibilities collapses to the inevitability of the actual.  Probability, like potential, looks ahead, fate like actuality is retrospective.  A definite if unforeseen future is inferred from the fixity of the past.  The fixity of the ast is imposed on the openness of the future.  This openness derives from an intuition of the potential in each actuality.  The actuality itself is not prospective, it perishes and is replaced.  Once the actuality is settled, its potential evaporates, giving a succession of actualities in what appears to be a causal  chain, the sequence of which is what it must be since it could-not-have-been-otherwise.  That is why a look backward in life suggest to many a plan that guided the life along.   Fate is to agency and decisiveness as probability is to choice or uncertainty, but fate and probability, being extrapersonal and outside human agency, are not related to moral conduct in the same way as agency and choice, which are intrapsychic.

472  The more that personal agency plays a role in the event, the less that luck or chance intervenes.  Agency is irrelevant to a person who believes all events are fated to happen as they do.  And what is fate if not universal causation, or the mind of god depositng the accidents of life that human thought forges into destiny?

473  Luck introduces a kind of magic when need is not satisfied by determinism or contingency.  Fate is the objective interpretation of what  otherwise seems accidental.  Luck is the subjective interpretation of why fate is distributed unfairly.

480  The locus of agency is precisely at the junction of inner and outer, where the presumptive freedom of the will meets the causal world.  That is why a psychology of agency, as Nagel points out, is a central goal if we are to understand the complex issues that pertain to culpability, regret and responsibility.

482  In sum, regret tends to occur when a deliberate action turns out to have been unlucky, whereas if that action is the cause of an injury to another person there is remorse.  In regret, there is self-pity, in remorse pity for others, which is a form of compassion.  …Regret is for personal choices, moral or not, while remorse, which has great moral weight, involves retroactive compassion, or guilt over acts harmful to others for which one feels responsible.

431 – 432  Suicide and altruism: self and community – The progression in evolutionary and social development is from genus to species, whole to part, community to individual.  Dependency is prior to separation.  The individual becomes autonomous through a process of individuation.  In line with this pattern, altruist suicide precedes egoistic suicide as the community or whole precedes the individual or the part.  A suicide for the other engages the community as an isolated suicide does not.  Ordinary suicide tends to be more common in advanced societies.  Durkheim claimed that altruistic suicide was more prominent in primitive societies.  Most people who helped the Jews during the Holocaust were not the professional or intellectual class, but ordinary people.  Rationality may well be the enemy of sympathetic feeling even as it justifies compassion.  …Though evolution entails an individual genetic adaptation, evolutionary process subordinates the individual to the species.  In this, human altruism is an atavistic trait, a form of adaptive process with an incomplete individuation of the organism as a unique instance and its pruning for the sake of the group.

435  Suicide for others - Altruism and self-sacrifice may have a suicidal outcome, but they posses a moral value in love, compassion and obligation that suicide foregoes.  Love exist for its own sake, it does not require that one do something.  Charity is like this, but one is usually prompted to help.  Compassion without action is sympathy.

436  It is only when courage is applied  to acts of goodness that it becomes virtuous.  …Generally, altruism entails the sustenance of the life or well being of others by self-denial or suicide.  …To sacrifice one’s life to destroy evil is an act of nobility and virtue.

437  The suicide bomber has a cause, a principle that governs his behavior.  Like the soldier, he is drilled to carry out his duty without question.  Unlike the altruist who dives in the river to save a child, the planning and deliberation of the suicidal bomber add to the moral credit, or blame, of the action.  For those who applaud the act he is a martyr and a hero, for others, a murderer and a coward.

438  The policeman acts out of a sense of duty or obligation, the missionary out of a saintly calling.  The important difference is the relative  emphasis  on feeling or conduct, which is a sign of the relative proximity of action to subjective desire or objective necessity.  The closer the emphasis to conduct, the further from core beliefs, and the less the other is the need of the person one loves to that action is guided by the ought of duty, irrespective of compassion.  Shame, not morality, is the guardian of courage.

439  One could argue that a white saving a black, a Nazi saving a Jew, a Turk saving a Greek, has greater value, for it overcomes bias in the respect for a common humanity regardless of racial, ethnic or religious loyalties.  We need the objective as a sign of the scope of moral feeling, but to include it in evaluating conduct introduces a quantitative element that undermines the qualitative nature of character.

440  Value is not a quantity. The attempt to quantify objects or events irrespective of the feeling directed to them confuses the act-value, e.g. a dog, a child.  The mix of intentions, object-nature and extra-personal knowledge contaminates and threatens to erode the altruism of the act.

442 – 443   Certainly, political decisions tend to be more complex than those of individuals, and responsibility is often distributed, but I think this is largely a self-justification when one tries to balance competing interest and objectives rather than giving a clear statement of moral purpose.  …Clearly those who act risk condemnation for conduct that may pale in terms of outcome and responsibility to those who could act but do nothing.  …historical perspective, however necessary for the moral calculus guiding political decision, is an untrustworthy guide to an assignment of individual moral credit or blame.  The original context is forgotten, or at least not experience in the same way, and the judgement will vary with the changing mood of the society.  …Altruistic and ordinary suicide make death interesting, for unlike ordinary dying they are both liked and separated by intentional meaning.  One becomes the other according to its interpretation, which could be a judgement by the agent, a weighing of intentions, the verdict of others, the context and outcome.  …Altruism and suicide are anomalies that are fundamental to human nature.   They are important because they reflect the extinction of self-interest in despair, or the sacrifice of one’s self for others or futurity.

445  One who lives for another round of sexual intercourse, tomatoes in the garden, fresh coffee in the morning, has found a purpose, albeit a pig’s happiness, but even here there is a re-commitment to extend life another moment.  In this respect, it is a conceptual analogue of the rebirth of a cognition in the ashes of the just-prior state.

446  A thing must be renewed or die.  The self is renewed out of the unconscious of that moment.  Bored with daily events, we are refreshed in each perception.  We can decide to terminate the series of replacements or leave that decision to illness, accident or old age.  …Some people continue for the pleasure of recollection, the revival and the savoring, others for a better future, still others, the wisest of all, live in amazement at each passing moment.

447  There is not only the death of the body and the self, but with them a lifetime of knowledge and skill.  In truth, however, it is knowledge in the present or the potential for present knowledge, not a lifetime of experience that is lost.  …Whether  a life is a drop in the ocean of time, or an ocean is a drop in a living moment, the duration of life is meaningless, a span somewhere between death as a stillborn and life as a vampire, the infinitely brief, the eternally long, a life snuffed before a drop of experience or one of unending recurrence.

448  The subjectivity of the duration of a life, as with the duration of the present, differs for each subject.  We all run on slightly different times.  For most of us, life passes too quickly, for some it is too long.  A single day may seem interminable or fly by unnoticed.  In fact, the length of a life is the feeling of its duration, the the chronology it consumes.  The feeling is like a mood with indistinct limits and contents. A mood is punctuated  by feelings.  But a mood is not a collection of feelings into which it disperses, as a  duration is not a boxcar of moments in a process of summation.

449  Once we sense the teachings of the unconscious in every act or decision we have made, we understand that life is whole.  Even the regrets and what-ifs of life, its accidents and catastrophes, can be interpreted or justified by this awareness.  The occurrence of novelty as an iterated flowering of potential helps to explain how life is derailed from what might have been its more authentic course.  The fortuitous and incidental may have a greater impact than crisis of decision that, at the time, seemed momentous.  Once a life is perceived as a whole, it feels complete.  What follows is inessential to the life that has passed.  This feeling can occur at any point in life, and is one element of suicidal ideation.  …- The disappearance of time –  Fundamentally, in suicide there is a shift in the sense of time, obvious in the wish of the individual to dissolve into non-existence from a temporal world of identity  and self-repeatability, but apparent as well in subtler changes.  For those who contemplate suicide, the length of life in the future shrinks to zero. …To live in the past or present is to live at an early or final segment in the mind/brain state.

450  When a rescued suicide moves on, the will to suicide may not follow.  Like a drive, it discharges and is satisfied in the act, even if unsuccessful

452  A suicide abandons his responsibilities to others or the state in many less weighty circumstances.  Such an act might well constitute  a serious moral breach, especially because there is no possibility of retribution.

453  The loss of will is a loss of intentional feeling that accompanies a disinterest in the future. …If death is the mistress of fear, the conquest of the fear of death should make one fearless.

454 – 455  Dying is simple, which is not to say comprehensible.  The truly simple is never so simple that it does not have an element of wonder.  The passage to the inorganic is simplicity and mystery.  The divide between the living and the dead, the passage to oblivion is like the drab frontier one crosses on leaving a land of suffering.  Its markers are the inaudible gasp, the slow exhalation, a road sign missed in a blink.  …Death cam quietly as they left this world.  I gave them comfort, held their hands, listened, reassured.  A glance to the side, the relaxation of a grip, they were gone.  …For those still living, the loss of a life filled with promise is a challenge to mind meaning where its surrogates in goals and hope can no longer be realized.  …Every throb of life is a cry in the void, a declaration, a defiance.  The search for the sources of creative energy in layers beneath the conscious life, the recognition that meaning and purpose are not in the world waiting to be discovered but are generated in a process of self-creation, are the beginnings of true individuality.

407  The ought is a sign of conflict in both moral and non-moral choice. …When the ought and the want coincide, the ought drops out. The conflict between the ought and the want is part of the sense of obligation, which is the feeling that one should or must do something for the self or for another person that is contrary to one’s desires. …This is the tension of duty and necessity.  What one ought to do is what is best to do, but that one is obligated to do what one ought to do is another matter.  One ought to do many things, yet one chooses do to very few of them.

408  The impotence of reason in such instances arise because oughts involve values, not true or untrue statements.  A value is not a feeling attached to a proposition, it is a complex disposition that discharges in acts or propositions but is not reducible to them.  In a situation such as a conflict of loyalties, how is one to act?

409  To say a person should do the right thing regardless of whether he wants to, for example, murdering a tyrant, even if it is inconsistent with his desire and character, assumes that he knows what the right thing is.  The “good” thing to do may be consistent with character, but it may not be the “right” thing to do.  The good is centered in character, the right in conduct.  …In contrast, a decision based on value stems from character.  It is what is considered the right and natural thing to do regardless of the outcome.  …Two obligations of equal truth do not have equal weight because the conflict is between the values they represent, not their “quantity” of truth, as in the case of loyalty to family or to country.

416  The mirroring and exaggeration of normal psychological process in brain pathology remind us that the different forms of obligation are subjective in origin.  Specifically, they are an objectification of subjective phases through which they materialize, even those that seem thouroughly objective.

418  The distinction has been discussed in terms of moral luck (see Chapter 17), but the shooter who misses or only wounds is “lucky” in avoiding capital punishment only because the law chooses to emphasize outcomes.  The emphasis is warranted for different intentions that lead to different crimes, not different outcomes that arise from the same intention.

419  What about those who are aware of right and wrong but cannot resist an extrinsic compulsion? This was the Nazi defense that conduct was “right” in conforming to the conventions of the culture, that there was no opposing “wrong,” and that conduct was in conformance with the obligations of an officer in the Wermacht, i.e. action according to duty or obligation.

420 -421  We admire a virtuous person of moral courage who acts to save a single life.  On the other hand, a mean-spirited egoist may discover an antibiotic that saves the lives of millions, with no motivation other than the excitement of scientific research.  We would speak highly of the moral character of the first and poorly of the second, in spite of the enormous disparity in the “amount” of good derived from their efforts.  This illustrates the disparity between the quantitative and qualitative orientations to moral conduct, the one being a calculation of cost and benefits on a large scale, the other, a striving for the good in the heart of every individual.  …It is difficult to resolve these competing modes of thought, though the aim of moral “evolution” is the eventual triumph of subjectivism, with the result that the calculus is no longer necessary.  However, given the cycle of existence and the incessant renewal and assertion of egoist drive, this is surely a fatuous hope.  In a less than ideal world, safety depends on placing limits on the strong to insure the protection and greater good of the weak.  If a calculus is not motivated by a moral principle or obligation, or if compassion does not underlie the calculus, there is an ever-present danger that ruthlessness or miscalculation will put large populations at risk.  A subject-centered morality is qualitative through and through.  This does not entail that each individual has a unique moral perspective, but that life is not a commodity.  Subjectivism is neither  impersonal nor egocentric.  Social adaptation sees to that.  Impersonality is achieved, not by objectivity or rationality,  but through empathy, self-denial and acts of “imaginative fusion.”

422  Whether or not we accept a higher moral standard was at stake in the Nuremberg trials.  The Americans who resisted conscription during the Vietnam war were prosecuted and jailed for recognizing this principle.  The Nazi defense of a duty to the state was disputed bu the argument of a higher duty not to kill.  The Americans claimed the same obligation but, unlike the Nazis, did not kill or betray anyone.  It could be conceded that in both cases lives were at peril.  The Nazi would be shot for refusing a command, the American jailed for evading conscription.  Otherwise, the cases are not symmetrical.  The Nazis have enormous moral blame because their actions were guided, if not by a belief in the Nazi ethic, by careerism, power, brutality, indifference to their victims, etc.  In contrast, the resisters have moral credit only if their conduct was not guided by cowardice, disloyalty  or self-interest.  The prosecutor is merely a judge of the discrepancy between conduct and convention.  In the first instance, a judgement was applied by one community to another that did not share its values.  In the other, the judgment reflected the failure of a subset of the citizenry to honor the conventions of its own society.  Such judgements within or across societies are closer to law than moral philosophy.  Ideally, the individual is his own moral judge.  That is the higher obligation to which the Nazis were held, and to which the Vietnam resister, to give them the benefit of the doubt, held themselves.  In hindsight the country has come to agree with the protesters, yet such a principle might be thought inconsistent with the interest of the community, in that it fosters a reckless disregard for the law.  Socrates is the example here.  Morality is, finally an obligation to one’s ideal self or the best of one’s character.

423  The point of this exercise is that obligations are not true or false proposition, but values that elicit or coincide with disposition.  For all of us the obligation to obey the law, or in some instances to defy it, is instilled in childhood through education and example.  …An obligation is only felt as objective when it does not call up a corresponding value.

424  There were then, and there are now, solitary voices of courage, but the masses absorb and tacitly condone the values responsible for their own shame or subjugation.  - Subjectivity and relativism –  The subjectivization of external obligation, where the uniformity of an external duty shifts to the perspective of personal responsibility, does not entail a moral relativism, it merely recognizes the primacy of personal values in determining what is right and wrong.

428  A bias of values to a percept-development induces an obligation that feels external and compulsory, whether it is or not.  A bias of values to an action-development induces a desire that feels internal and freely initiated, whether it is or not.  Loyalties express features of both or, put differently, the values that account for a loyalty  are specified in a way that is equally distributed across the two components.

429  The psychology of obligation involves a displacement to the other, i.e. to its own exocentric values of agency and control, the self disowning its own volitional impulse.  The abeyance of self-interest and the agency that goes with it accentuate the demand of the other on the self.

430  The distinctions between desires, loyalties and obligations, and the choices that are made, depend  as much on feeling as the content of what is desired or obligated.  But it is not feeling alone that decides; rather, feeling is a marker for the neural configurations that deposit occasions of experience, which include the subject and the state of choice.  Each occasion is a pattern of emphasis on action, perception or their linguistic derivations, as on the concepts and values enlisted in their activation.  This pattern, the path of emphasis, the phase in the path that is accentuated, and the concepts that undergo  derivation, determine whether the subject feels and desire, an obligation, a loyalty and so on, while the belief and values that instigate the pattern determine what content actualizes.  It is an observation of some interest, and one that fortifies the claim that a perceptual or action bias determines whether the subject feels a desire or an obligation, that choice settles on two competing categories of action rather than a broad menu of possibilities.

383  - 384  The relation of custom to law on the objective side, and to desire and promise on the subjective side, or the relation of an implicit agreement to the publicity of obligation and enforcement, can be examined in other activities that differ from moral feeling, and yet provide arguments for a psychological theory of value in relation to intrinsic process: specifically taste and manners.  Here, we are concerned with taste as refined perception, not an individual preference, such as a liking for Burgundy wine, Swiss chocolates, or romantic movies, in which the principle of de gustibus no disputandum applies.  We will see that a refined taste is a perceptual appreciation of the quality that owes to a tradition of knowledge and judgement. …Taste and manners can, with cultivation, reach a degree of specialized knowledge, refinement or degeneration that can serve as the basis for social exclusion and class distinction.  Taste at such an extreme is a perversion of aesthetics when it lapses into decadence or effetism.  Manners at such are frozen routines emptied of intent and other-directed feelings.  With great refinement often comes detachment and les immediacy of feeling than in the naturalism of an untutuored aesthetic, a genuine consideration for others, and simplicity of moral goodness, from which it should ideally emanate. …The step from taste to innovation is like that from prodigy to geniusl   One is the perfection of the available the other, a capacity to extend it.  …Good taste assumes a prior  consensus that neutralizes any opinions which might undermine its authority.   …The comparison in taste tends to be among proximate items in a category.

385 Ordinarily, what is judged better or worse has little to do with moral feeling, except in so far as it approximates a standard of quality.

386  Valuation generates desire, which creates worth in ordinary objects.  Worth trickles out of desire into the value of an ordinary object.  The distribution of feeling on an axis  from desire to worth determines the subjective or objective emphasis.  The greater the desire, the more personal the worth.  The greater the worth, the more impersonal the desire. …The emphasis in feeling preference accounts for its greater subjectivity, the emphasis on conceptuality accounts for the greater objectivity of taste.

388  Taste is a derivative of the initial perception that objectifies value in relation to knowledge articulated by learning in a specific domain of experience.

390  The continuity of taste with morals appears when a judgement of the worth of inanimate objects shifts to one of human worth.

401  Manners probably arose as instruments of conflict avoiadance and/or resolution so if they became transparent devies for betrayal or degenerate to the abusive action they were designed to avoid they become a provocation for an aggressive response.  Bad manners hurt the sensitivities of others, or assert the indifference or selfishness of the offender, but their moral impact would appear to be limited and relatively innocuous.  A person that is deliberately rude or offensive violates a tacit obligation to be kind and courteous.  In so doing, he probably reveals a character that in other situations would act on egoism, but not one that is necessarily immoral.

403  - A note on fame and mediocrity –  The discussion of taste would not be complete without a comment on its consequences in art and science.  We begin with the question, is it preferable to deserve recognition but not achieve it, or achieve it but not deserve it?  To be applauded for the least of one’s works would seem more insufferable than to be ignored for the best of one’s efforts.  …Is fame at any price worth the price?  I have known academics and other celebrities who were well aware of the hollow nature of their fame, at times assuming a becoming modesty as a shield against criticism.  Others who were deserving were eluded by fame in a profession too collegial to acknowledge the importance of their discoveries, or they lacked the marketing skills and insider politics needed to promote even the most original idea.  Some circumvent the profession and achieve celebrity by an appeal to the public taste that in this day and age is often the arbiter of success.  Within the profession, favor goes to those who do the work the profession approves.   Originality is rare, though brilliance is rewarded.  However pleasing, scholarly and impressive the work in a profession, it is generally conventional, for the academies are resistant to abrupt transitions.  Every discipline that stifles new ideas.  The more novel the idea, the more it undermines the tradition on which the discipline rest.  …For this reason, innovation that might radically alter a dominant trend in thought tends to occur at its boundary with an adjacent field.  The origination of a novel approach outside a field is often easier to accept than transformation within one.

404  The masses, lay or professional, favor those who amuse them, moving from one amusement to another, seeking novelty as a surrogate for depth.  Popular fame discovers the public taste and appeases it, ignoring that fraction of the public thirsting for something beyond a cursory delight.  It is not an exaggeration to say that barely 1% of those in any field are responsible for transmitting the higher art of the discipline to the next generation or extending it into novel areas.  An entire tradition of Russian ballet could have disappeared except for the efforts of a few individuals. …Most careers exploit the known, some extend it, still fewer transform it.

405 – 406   Presently, in many fields, we are in an age of technique and instrumentalism, conductors who only conduct, concertgoers who follow the celebrities but recall no more than a few modern composers, and then not the best.  …The media, reflect, promote and level taste.  In psychology, the ease of communication, the proliferation of books and journals, access to the internet, takes a heavy toll on originality.  It is often remarked that in an age of the global village, it would be exceptional if genius was overlooked, since everyone has access to just about everything.  But a tidal wave of trivia swamps the solitary voice.  …I have know many in this country who were gifted, intellectual terrorist who grew acrid in the ashes of their own frantic ambition.  The best of them displayed a centerless technique that rippled over ideas dazzled at its own ingenuity, teasing, inciting, leaving the essential untouched, a ricochet about the table of incandescent wit, like fireworks, shimmering, electric, mesmerizing, yet finally, suddenly, vanishing into thin air.  Where is the Darwin who waits years to publish?  Where is the Freud who probes an idea for its wealth of connections?  The ideals of the young are seduced by small meretricious enthusiasms.   There is either an economy of knowledge and only the essential is retained, or there is a succumbing to the master of some local detail, in which the scholar is fearful of endangering his authority by extending his field of interest.  The best crop of creative artist, writers, composers, philosophers are dwarfed even by their recent ancestors.  …for the success of those who cater to public taste is not wholly without consequence.  The mediocre is not innocuous, it distort the capacity of the public — even the professionals — to appreciate quality.   The more the admiration for the unworthy, the harder the burden on the deserving, the more difficult their task in conforming the public taste so that their own contributions can be enjoyed.  Finally, there is money, the healing salve of conscience.   …The ideals of the great are not hostage to the whims of the public, but seek an audience of peers, if only a few in a generation.