Schopenhaur on the Will, Intellect, and Moral Judgments

Arthur Schopenaur: The World as Will and Idea, Chapter 19 On the Primacy of the Will in Self-Consciouness

If now it is said of one man, “he has a good heart, though a bad head,” but of another, “he has a very good head, yet a bad heart,” every one feels that in the first case the praise far outweighs the blame – in the other case the reverse. Answering to this, we see that if some one has done a bad deed his friends and he himself try to remove the guilt from the will to the intellect, and to give out that faults of the heart were faults of the head; roguish tricks they will call errors, will say they were merely want of understanding, want of reflection, light-mindedness, folly; nay, if need be, they will plead a paroxysm, momentary mental aberration, and if a heavy crime is in question, even madness, only in order to free the will from the guilt. And in the same way, we ourselves, if we have caused a misfortune or injury, will before others and ourselves willingly impeach our stultitia, simply in order to escape the reproach of malitia. In the same way, in the case of the equally unjust decision of the judge, the difference, whether he has erred or been bribed, is so infinitely great. All this sufficiently proves that the will alone is the real and essential, the kernel of the man, and the intellect is merely its tool, which may be constantly faulty without the will being concerned. The accusation of want of understanding is, at the moral judgment-seat, no accusation at all; on the contrary, it gives great privileges. And so also, before the courts of the world, it is everywhere sufficient to deliver a criminal from all punishment that his guild should be transferred from his will to his intellect, by proving either unavoidable error or mental derangement, for then it is of no more consequence than if hand or food had slipped against the will.