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

both the inestimable advantage of the publisher’s approval and is also, in fact, better representative of the content of the book, for the good reason that posing questions of irresponsibility for most of our contributors meant first posing questions of responsibility. The traces of the original title remain nonetheless legible throughout, and perhaps especially in Miller’s typically good-humored yet deadly serious contemplation of the everydayness of “getting irresponsible”.)

If philosophy and science both hold little comfort these days for those enamoured of the idea of free will, or of the human ability to be responsible or even meaningfully irresponsible, it could not be said that such threats to the more noble conceptions of human dignity are especially new. Proponents of these concepts have for a long time had to do battle with increasingly sophisticated opponents. The history of literature, from its representations of the machinations of the Greek Moirae to the mostly ill-soliciting Weird Sisters of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, is replete with examples of the hideous unfolding of dire fate or inexorable necessity. The most admired heroes are doubtless those who defy the objective negation of human freedom, but defiance is typically in vain. The history of religion, for its part, has given us predestination and the bondage of the will, while the Enlightenment, though seeking to release humanity from the bondage of superstition, did nothing to upset the theory of determinism, the mechanistic universe of Newton, to which Einstein, too, clung tenaciously for so long.

It may be disheartening that there are still more reasons available to us moderns than were once available for justifying moral scepticism, for thinking that decisions are perhaps not really decisions, that crimes and thoughts and aspirations are shaped by forces beyond the direct, voluntary control of individual agents, that actions are determined, and overdetermined. Yet there is a sense in which none of this much matters, or in any case is allowed to matter, in the face of the most patent and unyielding fact of the human need simply to consider itself free at all costs, and therefore to consider itself capable of choosing to be responsible or not, moral or not despite all evidence. Hegel, for whom the heroes of Attic tragedy are mere one-sided attachments to particular ethical laws—the