Anti-Climacus

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING: Hilary Bok's Freedom and Responsibility is to philosophy what Hein Goeman's War and Punishment is to empirical IR, at least for me: one of the very few books I've read that convinces me that its central claims are correct. I first read parts of it in my senior philosophy seminar at Michigan, and it remains the framework I use to think about questions of free will and moral responsibility. Indeed, it makes possible the almost-but-not-quite Calvinist theological views that I have ('it all makes sense, once you sort of theoretical and practical reason!'). One of my favorite parts, from the "Excursus on Guilt":

"Changing our character for the better is rarely amusing. It is long, slow, and often tedious work, which requires, moreover, that we actually give up our vices, whether or not we find it easy or pleasant to do so. If we want to avoid giving them up while reassuring ourselves that our failure to do so does not reflect moral insensitivity or a lack of concern with the wrongness of our actions, self-flagellation is an obvious solution. Tormenting ourselves can be, in a peculiar way, more gratifying than the hard work and unpleasant sacrifices that any sort of serious attempt to change our character involves. It is certainly easier. And precisely because it involves punishing ourselves for our wrongdoing and torturing ourselves with the idea of our own iniquity and unworthiness, it allows us to reassure ourselves that we are genuinely concerned with morality while relieving us of the need to actually become good."