A New View of Society

Answers

• Q06AUTOMATON

  Can people be morally responsible for actions that follow necessarily from their bodily constitution and circumstances?

  No. people are not proper objects of blame for characters formed by circumstance. A person's character is formed for him by circumstances, not by him, so it is unjust for society to punish the characters its own arrangements produce; crime should be prevented, not punished.

  The commencement of the work will, in fact, ensure its accomplishment; henceforth all the irritating angry passions, arising from ignorance of the true cause of bodily and mental character, will gradually subside, and be replaced by the most frank and conciliating confidence and goodwill. Nor will it be possible hereafter for comparatively a few individuals unintentionally to occasion the rest of mankind to be surrounded by circumstances which inevitably form such characters as they afterwards deem it a duty and a right to punish even to death; and that, too, while they themselves have been the instruments of forming those characters. Such proceedings not only create innumerable evils to the directing few, but essentially retard them and the great mass of society from attaining the enjoyment of a high degree of positive happiness. Instead of punishing crimes after they have permitted the human character to be formed so as to commit them, they will adopt the only means which can be adopted to prevent the existence of those crimes; means by which they may be most easily prevented.

  First Essay · Opened Yale Avalon Project text of the First Essay, which speaks of circumstances 'which inevitably form such characters as they afterwards deem it a duty and a right to punish'. First essay published 1813.