Humans After All: Moral Reform, Unitarianism and Free Will

Abstract In this chapter, I argue that Jevons attempted to reconcile scientific determinism and free will. He believed that the universe was governed by God’s deterministic laws, which applied to both nature and human society. Nevertheless, he believed in human self-determination. Jevons’s position on these matters is also important to his view of social reform as moral reform: he believed that social and political reform was rooted in the improvement of individual character. This chapter also considers Jevons’s position in relation to the new school of Unitarianism, a strand in nineteenth-century British Unitarianism which rejected determinism and affirmed free will, in contrast to the traditional Unitarian perspective. I will show how Jevons’s link to new-school Unitarianism sheds light on how he tried to bridge scientific determinism and free will. Drawing on both Jevons’s notes on religion collected by his wife and his published works, I show how Jevons maintained free will within his deterministic conception of nature. God gave humans faculties which enabled them to transcend matter. They occupied a special place in Creation, not being entirely subject to the laws of matter. These faculties allowed humans to make voluntary choices and to perfect themselves.