{"id":1697,"date":"2017-06-15T11:45:31","date_gmt":"2017-06-15T15:45:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=1697"},"modified":"2017-06-15T11:45:31","modified_gmt":"2017-06-15T15:45:31","slug":"james-hodgkinson-left-degrees-moral-responsibility-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2017\/06\/james-hodgkinson-left-degrees-moral-responsibility-2.html","title":{"rendered":"James Hodgkinson, the Left, and Degrees of Moral Responsibility"},"content":{"rendered":"

In response to a recent article<\/a> of mine on James Hodgkinson\u2014the Bernie Sanders supporter and despiser of all things Republican who attempted to assassinate Republican congressmen in Alexandria, Virginia on June 14\u2014a reader who self-identified as being \u201cas far right as it gets\u201d accused me of going \u201cUNDER the gutter\u201d for implicating the Democrats\u00a0 and the left generally in Hodgkinson\u2019s crime.<\/p>\n

In my piece, I quoted from the shooter\u2019s Facebook pages and those who knew him. My aim was to establish that, politically<\/em>, Hodgkinson was of exactly one and the same mindset as any and every other leftist politician, celebrity, media personality, and academic who has been laboring incessantly for decades to convince the world that the Republican Party is the embodiment of evil.<\/p>\n

As one notable 20th<\/sup> century conservative thinker once famously put it, ideas have consequences. Since, then, ideas are expressed in and understood through words, words have consequences.<\/p>\n

It is precisely because of this that those who espouse them, and do so repeatedly, must assume some ownership of the actions performed by those who have taken those ideas and words to heart and acted upon them.<\/p>\n

In most contexts, no one has any difficulty understanding this.<\/p>\n

Among the moral philosophical traditions of the West, the oldest is what is known by moral philosophers as \u201cvirtue ethics.\u201d\u00a0 Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle endorsed this vision of morality, and Aristotle specifically is universally recognized by philosophers as the <\/em>premiere exponent of it, the first to give it systematic expression.<\/p>\n

Christian thinkers in the classical and medieval periods, like Saints Augustine and Aquinas, would adapt virtue ethics to their faith.<\/p>\n

By the lights of the virtue ethicist, morality is not, as many of our contemporaries are disposed to think, essentially<\/em> a matter of following rules and\/or principles<\/em>.\u00a0 Morality is essentially<\/em> a matter of character-development<\/em>. \u00a0\u201cWhat kind of a person do I want to become?\u201d This is the key moral question.<\/p>\n

Virtues, like their contraries, vices, are habits.\u00a0 Virtues are character excellences that the virtuous person acquires by habitually acting virtuously.\u00a0 Conversely, vices are character flaws that the vicious person acquires by habitually acting viciously.<\/p>\n

Human beings become<\/em> virtuous and vicious, respectively, by acting virtuously and viciously.\u00a0 Acting leads to being.\u00a0 However, the only way for a person who is not yet virtuous to know how to act virtuously is for him or her to imitate <\/em>someone who already is<\/em> virtuous<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Knowledge of morality, then, is not, strictly speaking, taught but, rather, imparted. The recipients of a moral education\u2014this would mean all of us\u2014imbibe the knowledge that is imparted to us by moral exemplars<\/em>, virtuous human beings who today many are inclined to call \u201crole models.\u201d<\/p>\n

We learn morality as we learn so much else in life, through the example of others, whether these exemplars are people who we know intimately, pillars of our local or national communities, historical personages, or even fictional characters.<\/p>\n

Of course, we also learn how to become immoral, or vicious.\u00a0 And we learn this in the same ways in which we learn to become virtue\u2014through the example of others.<\/p>\n

Now, words are never mere words. Every utterance is a speech-act, an action of sorts.\u00a0 Again, we all know this to be true, a fact borne out every time we praise and condemn people, especially those in positions of influence, for their words.<\/p>\n

We praise and condemn people for their language, for the ideas that they express, because we all readily understand that words and ideas have consequences<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Moral agents, i.e. adult human beings, are unique in that they are not just causally, but morally, responsible for their actions. These actions, of course, include their speech-acts, what they say and how they say it.<\/p>\n

Moral responsibility is not the same thing as causal responsibility. When a bolt of lightning, a force of nature, strikes a power grid, the former is causally responsible for the damage that it inflicts upon the latter. The lightning determines<\/em> the damage caused to the power grid.<\/p>\n

In stark contrast, moral responsibility presupposes free will, or indeterminism. No moral act is ever determined by antecedent conditions.\u00a0 Moral acts are determined, if you will, only by those who immediately and directly choose to perform them.<\/p>\n

So, James Hodgkinson is causally responsible for firing bullets into those Republicans who he preyed upon on the morning of June 14.\u00a0 He also shoulders the largest share of the moral responsibility for this action, for it was Hodgkinson and no one else who chose <\/em>to do what he did.<\/p>\n

That being said, there are<\/em> degrees of moral responsibility.\u00a0 To suggest that those Democrats and leftists with loud and influential voices, those who served as Hodgkinson\u2019s moral exemplars, those who imparted and reinforced the ideas that fueled him to go on a Republican hunting spree, shoulder zero culpability for the fruits of their tireless endeavor to demonize Republicans stretches credibility to the snapping point.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s like saying that all of the responsibility falls upon a black person who shoots police officers after being exposed to hordes of Black Lives Matter activists chanting, \u201cWhat do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it? Now!\u201d This person is ultimately the most responsible for the act that he chose to do, certainly.\u00a0 Yet it is equally certain that those who urged actions of the sort that this shooter engaged in also must assume some <\/em>responsibility for their words, their speech-acts.<\/p>\n

Their hands are not without blood on them. They are not without guilt.<\/p>\n

And neither are those Democrats and leftists who continually spout the worst sort of lies about Republicans without the blood on their hands of the five Republicans who James Hodgkinson shot up in Alexandria.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In response to a recent article of mine on James Hodgkinson\u2014the Bernie Sanders supporter and despiser of all things Republican who attempted to assassinate Republican congressmen in Alexandria, Virginia on June 14\u2014a reader who self-identified as being \u201cas far right as it gets\u201d accused me of going \u201cUNDER the gutter\u201d for implicating the Democrats\u00a0 and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nJames Hodgkinson, the Left, and Degrees of Moral Responsibility<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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