It is said, in the first place, that necessity destroys responsibility;
that, as it is usually put, we have no right to praise or blame actions
that cannot be helped. Hume's reply amounts to this, that the very idea
of responsibility implies the belief in the necessary connexion of
certain actions with certain states of the mind. A person is held
responsible only for those acts which are preceded by a certain
intention; and, as we cannot see, or hear, or feel, an intention, we can
only reason out its existence on the principle that like effects have
like causes.
If a man is found by the police busy with "jemmy" and dark lantern at a
jeweller's shop door over night, the magistrate before whom he is
brought the next morning, reasons from those effects to their causes in
the fellow's "burglarious" ideas and volitions, with perfect confidence,
and punishes him accordingly. And it is quite clear that such a
proceeding would be grossly unjust, if the links of the logical process
were other than necessarily connected together. The advocate who should
attempt to get the man off on the plea that his client need not
necessarily have had a felonious intent, would hardly waste his time
more, if he tried to prove that the sum of all the angles of a triangle
is not two right angles, but three.
A man's moral responsibility for his acts has, in fact, nothing to do
with the causation of these acts, but depends on the frame of mind which
accompanies them.
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