xvi FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 307 



absurd. Nobody has ever believed that in declaring in 

 favour of free-will he was committing himself to any 

 such consequences. Nobody, therefore, could possibly be 

 a Libertarian, if this were what Libertarianism meant. 

 Probably, therefore, the Determinists have merely cari 

 catured their opponents position. 



Investigation speedily raises this probability to a 

 certainty. The grotesque cockshy which serves as the 

 type of Libertarianism for the purpose of deterministic 

 refutations is an absurd exaggeration of certain of its 

 implications. But it is probably prompted, not so much 

 by conscious unfairness as by an unconscious bias. It is 

 derived ultimately from an unwillingness to take from 

 experience our notions, either of the nature or of the 

 range, of our Freedom. For if philosophers had only 

 been willing to admit that alike what our freedom was, 

 how much of it we had, how powerful it was, how far it 

 baffled expectation, how far it loosened the joints of the 

 universe, were all questions to be decided by empirical 

 observation, they could hardly have helped seeing that 

 their proof of the impossibility of Freedom was fallacious, 

 and that Freedom, so far from being a puzzle leading to 

 terrible consequences, was involved in every unbiassed 

 description of the act of choice. 



-The central fallacy in the Determinist argument lies in 

 the assumption that if a choice is real, it is necessarily 

 motiveless. This assumption, however, rests on a confu 

 sion between three distinct conceptions choice, absence of 

 motive, and indetermination. Choice (in the Libertarian 

 sense) implies indetermination, but not absence of motive. 

 A choice is necessarily between alternatives, but these 

 would not be such if they did not appeal to the chooser 

 and influence his character. It is a choice, therefore, 

 between alternative goods, and these goods are motives to 

 action which cannot all be realized together. Choice, 

 therefore, implies motives, but if it is a real choice, it is 

 really free to choose between them. Motiveless choice, 

 therefore, is an implicit contradiction. Now all the 

 terrible consequences of Libertarianism as depicted by the 



