The Importance of Every Choice
In talking about free will and moral responsibility, one of the ideas that comes to surface again and again is that what we do is in some way determined by who we are - that is, the type of character we have. Further, some would say that we can only be truly free and morally responsible if what we do flows naturally and determinately from our characters. As an illustration, Martin Luther is famously quoted as saying, after refusing to recant of his published ideas that helped launch the reformation, “Here I stand. I can do no other.” Many think we should here take his statement literally, presuming that he meant that his character and what he believed literally made it impossible for him to recant.
If this is really how our characters affect our decisions, then a regress argument can be developed to show that we are never really free or responsible (Galen Strawson is one well-known defender of this type of argument). Suppose Bob performs some action and it is free because it naturally follows from his character. We may well form the question at this point, ‘But where did his character come from?’ Obviously, if someone or something else were responsible for his character, and his character determines his action, he doesn’t seem truly free. Intuitively, the answer seems to be that his character has been developed by his previous actions and choices. But these choices surely must have been free, and that means that if we look at any particular of those actions, they would have been determined by his character at that point. But where did his character come from at those points? Presumably, by other free actions. But what about those? The infinite regress should be clear.
One way out of the regress is given by Robert Kane. Although Kane concedes that many if not most of our free actions are determined by our characters, he argues that there must be actions that we do at key points in our lives which are not determined by our characters. Rather, these actions were ones for which there were genuine alternative possibilities and which actually contribute to the formation of our characters, which in turn determine certain future actions. These he calls self-forming actions (SFAs).
Philosophically speaking, I am generally inclined to think that for almost all of our morally significant choices we have genuine alternative possibilities, but I agree that our characters at least greatly affect our probabilities to do certain actions and may even limit the number of possibilities we have. I also think there is something to the claim that our actions form our characters and who we are. Reflecting on this has led me from the abstract to the intensely practical, as I realized recently something seemingly obvious and which I had heard many times before, but which never really set in - every single choice I make affects the type of person I am and will become. Thinking of this in times of temptation has greatly helped me recently. We often trick ourselves into thinking that any one individual wrong choice can be quickly and easily atoned for and doesn’t matter much. But the truth is that every single choice we make is important in forming who we are and taking us either further down the path of godliness or further away from it.