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tion between acts and agents which is foreign to the moral consciousness. It cannot be admitted that "he who saves a fellow creature from drowning does what is morally. right, whether his motive be duty, or the hope of being paid for his trouble." He ought, of course, to save the other person from drowning, but at the same time he ought to save him from a better motive than a wish for money. It It may be that "he who betrays his friend that trusts him is guilty of a crime, even if his object be to serve another friend to whom he is under greater obligations"; but surely his guilt would be greater if he betrayed his friend, say, in order to gain some personal advantage thereby. Intentions and motives are subjects of moral valuation not separately, but as a unity; and the reason for this is that moral judgments are really passed upon men as acting or willing, not upon acts or volitions in the abstract. It is true that our detestation of an act is not always proportionate to our moral condemnation of the agent; people do terrible things in ignorance. But our detestation of an act is, properly speaking, a moral emotion only in so far as it is directed against him who. committed the act, in his capacity of a moral agent. We are struck with horror when we hear of a wolf eating a child, but we do not morally condemn the wolf.

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A volition may have reference not only to the doing of a thing, but to the abstaining from doing a thing. It). may form part not only of an act, but of a forbearance. A forbearance is morally equivalent to an act, and the volition involved in it is equivalent to an intention. "Sitting still, or holding one's peace," says Locke, "when walking or speaking are proposed, though mere forbearances, requiring as much the determination of the will, and being as often weighty in their consequences as the contrary actions, may, on that consideration, well enough pass for actions too." Yet it is hardly correct to call them acts. Bentham's division of acts into acts of com

1 Ibid. p. 26.

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2 Locke, op. cit. ii. 21. 28 (Philosophical Works, p. 218).

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mission and acts of omission or forbearance is not to be recommended. A not-doing I do not call an act, and the purpose of not doing I do not call an intention." But the fact remains that a forbearance involves a distinct volition, which, as such, may be the subject of moral judgment no less than the intention involved in an act.

Willing not to do a thing must be distinguished from not willing to do a thing; forbearances must be distinguished from omissions. An omission-in the restricted sense of the word-is characterised by the absence of volition. It is, as Austin puts it, "the not doing a given act, without adverting (at the time) to the act which is not done." 3 Now moral judgments refer not only to willing, but to not-willing as well, not only to acts and forbearances, but to omissions. It is curious that this important point has been so little noticed by writers. on ethics, although it constitutes a distinct and extremely frequent element in our moral judgments. It has been argued that what is condemned in an omission is really a volition, not the absence of a volition; that an omission is bad, not because the person did not do something, but because he did something else, "or was in such a condition that he could not will, and is condemned for the acts which brought him into that condition." In the latter case, of course, the man cannot be condemned for his omission, since he cannot be blamed for not doing what

1 Bentham, op. cit. p. 72.

2 Cf. Clark, Analysis of Criminal Liability, p. 42.

3 Austin, op. cit. i. 438.

4 Alexander, Moral Order and Progress, p. 34 sq. So, also, Professor Sidgwick maintains (op. cit. p. 60) that "the proper immediate objects of moral approval or disapproval would seem to be always the results of a man's volitions so far as they were intended-i.e., represented in thought as certain or probable consequences of such volitions," and that, in cases of carelessness, moral blame, strictly speaking, attaches to the agent, only "in so far as his carelessness is the result of some wilful neglect of duty."

A similar view is taken by the moral philosophy of Roman Catholicism (Gopfert, Moraltheologie, i. 113). Binding, again, assumes (Die Normen, ii. 105 sqq.) that a person may have a volition without having an idea of what he wills, and that carelessness implies a volition of this kind. Otherwise, he says, the will could not be held responsible for the result. But, as we shall see immediately, the absence of a volition may very well be attributed to a defect of the will, and the will thus be regarded as the cause of an unintended event. To speak of a volition or will to do a thing of which the person who wills it has no idea seems absurd.

he "could not will"; but to say that an omission is condemned only on account of the performance of some act is undoubtedly a psychological error. If a person forgets to discharge a certain duty incumbent on him, say, to pay a debt, he is censured, not for anything he did, but for what he omitted to do. He is blamed for not doing a thing which he ought to have done, because he did not think of it; he is blamed for his forgetfulness. In other words, his guilt lies in his negligence.

Closely related to negligence is heedlessness, the difference between them being seemingly greater than it really is. Whilst the negligent man omits an act which he ought to have done, because he does not think of it, the heed-less man does an act from which he ought to have forborne, because he does not consider its probable or possible consequences.1 In the latter case there is acting, in the former case there is absence of acting. But in both cases the moral judgment refers to want of attention, in other words, to not-willing. The fault of the negligent man is that he does not think of the act which he ought to perform, the fault of the heedless man is that he does not think of the probable or possible consequences of the act which he performs. In rashness, again, the party adverts to the mischief which his act may cause, but, from insufficient advertence assumes that it will not ensue; the fault of the rash man is partial want of attention. Negligence, heedlessness, and rashness, are all included under the common term "carelessness."

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Our moral judgments of blame, however, are concerned with not-willing only in so far as this not-willing is attributed to a defect of the will, not to the influence of intellectual or other circumstances for which no man can be held responsible. That power in a person which we call his "will" is regarded by us as a cause, not only of

1 The meaning of the word "negligence," in the common use of language, is very indefinite. It often stands for heedlessness as well, or for carelessness. I use it here in the sense in which it

was applied by Austin (op. cit. i. 439 sq.).

2 Austin, op. cit. i. 440 sq. Clark, op. cit. p. 101.

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such events as are intended, but of such events as we think that the person "could have prevented by his will. And just as, in the case of volitions, the guilt of the party is affected by the pressure of non-voluntary motives, so in the case of carelessness mental facts falling outside the sphere of the will must be closely considered by the conscientious judge. But nothing is harder than to apply this rule in practice.

Equally difficult is it, in many cases, to decide whether a person's behaviour is due to want of advertence, or is combined with a knowledge of what his behaviour implies, or of the consequences which may result from it-to decide whether it is due to carelessness, or to something worse than carelessness. For him who refrains from / performing an obligatory act, though adverting to it, "negligent" is certainly too mild an epithet, and he who knows that mischief will probably result from his deed is certainly worse than heedless. Yet even in such cases the immediate object of blame may be the absence of a volition --not a want of attention, but a not-willing to do, or a not-willing to refrain from doing, an act in spite of advertence to what the act implies or to its consequences. I may abstain from performing an obligatory act though I think of it, and yet, at the same time, make no resolution not to perform it. So, too, if a man is ruining his family by his drunkenness, he may be aware that he is doing so, and yet he may do it without any volition to that effect. In these cases the moral blame refers neither to negligence or heedlessness, nor to any definite volition, but to disregard of one's duty or of the interests of one's family. At the same time, the transition from conscious omissions into forbearances, and the transition from not-willing to refrain from doing into willing to do, are easy and natural; hence the distinction between willing and not-willing may be of little or no significance from an ethical point of view. For this reason such consequences of an act as are foreseen as certain or probable have commonly been included under the term "inten

tion,"1 often as a special branch of intention—“ oblique," or "indirect," or "virtual" intention; but, as was already noticed, this terminology is hardly appropriate. I shall call such consequences of an act as are foreseen by the agent, and such incidents as are known by him to be involved in his act, "the known concomitants" of the act. When the nihilist blows up the train containing an emperor and others, with a view to killing the emperor, the extreme danger to which he exposes the others is a known concomitant of his act. So, also, in most crimes, the breach of law, as distinct from the act intended, is a known concomitant of the act, inasmuch as the criminal, though aware that his act is illegal, does not perform it for the purpose of violating the law. As Bacon said, "no man doth a wrong for the wrong's sake, but thereby to purchase himself profit, or pleasure, or honour, or the like." s

Absence of volitions, like volitions themselves, give rise not only to moral blame, but to moral praise. We may, for instance, applaud a person for abstaining from doing a thing, beneficial to himself but harmful to others, which, in similar circumstances, would have proved too great a temptation to any ordinary man; and it does not necessarily lessen his merit if the opposite alternative did not even occur to his mind, and his abstinence, therefore, could not possibly be ascribed to a volition. Very frequently moral praise refers to known concomitants of acts rather than to the acts themselves. The merit of saving another person's life at the risk of losing one's own, really lies in the fact that the knowledge of the danger did not prevent the saver from performing his act; and the merit of the charitable man really depends on the loss which he inflicts upon himself by giving his property to the needy. In these and analogous cases of self-sacrifice for a good end, the merit, strictly speaking, consists in not-willing to

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