Ethics : Volume III

This volume is devoted to the thesis that morality is possible only in a world determined throughout, mentally as well as physically, by the law of cause and effect. But as organic life, although deupon mechanical laws, cannot be explained by them, so moral life cannot be explained by physiological and psychological processes. Responsibility, imputability, and the sense of guilt imply that man is free to do otherwise than he actually does. If man is not free in this sense, then his consciousness of responsibility and of guilt is a delusion. He is in fact determined neither by the moral law nor by the laws of nature, but is self-determined.