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

reassuring. Marxian economic theories, Freudian psychoanalysis, and modern genetics all come down firmly on the side of determinism. And if the so-called Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, to which increasing numbers of theoretical physicists are lending their considerable authority, proves relevant to the ultimate version of physical reality endorsed by modern science, then the case for absolute free will may prove impossibly difficult to make. What place is there for ethics in a “multiverse” in which all that can happen does happen, in which, in other words, every decision that can be made is made? The thought of eternal return, the most burdensome thought for Nietzsche, and provocation enough for a revaluation of all values, seems rather lightweight by comparison. And today, even science fiction’s grim fantasies of simulated humanlike worlds have achieved, in the eyes of at least some mainstream theorists, a demonstrably nonzero probability of accurately capturing the “reality” of our human condition. Can there be an ethics of virtual reality?

Philosophy, too, has questioned the stability of the concepts habitually invoked to define humans as ethical beings. The concepts of responsibility and irresponsibility are especially pertinent in this respect if only because they depend inescapably on the possibility of moral freedom. Milton was not the first to recognise this when he defended the wisdom of the deity in permitting the primal transgression. It was necessary for Adam to be endowed with the ability to decide whether to transgress, the ability to choose responsible action, simply for him to be a reasonable and meaningful creature, and not “a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions”, which is to say, a puppet. “Reason”, Milton puts it succinctly, echoing the Nicomachean Ethics, “is but choosing”, and of course as much is true of freedom (733). From Aristotle on, philosophical ethics has been a domain in which the concepts of responsibility and moral freedom are necessarily advanced in their interrelatedness, and with a view to subjecting the former to an exigent demand, a true obligation. Ethical thought must presuppose the idea of moral freedom and so attempts to show that the idea leads back logically to an injunction to be responsible. Søren Kierkegaard, choosing the