Literature and Ethics: Questions of Responsibility in Literary St ...

INTRODUCTION

Questions of Responsibility

Brendan Quigley

I know that philosophically a murderer is not responsible for his crime, but I prefer not to take tea with him.

—Albert Einstein

The sciences seem to have conspired over the past two centuries in an assault against the meaningfulness of an idea that has long been of singular importance in the valuation of human beings and in the successful functioning of civil society. Knowledge and theories of unconscious desires and drives, of prevailing and coercive ideologies, of material and cultural conditions, of familial and societal conflicts, of genetic codes and mutations, of forces of innumerable kinds, threaten to expose as chimerical the idea of moral freedom. The apparent discovery in the early decades of the twentieth century of an irreducible principle of indeterminacy embedded in the structure of reality has hardly proved