The realization that virtue and sin alike are the inevitable result of previous causes (as the Stoics should have held) is likely to have a somewhat paralysing effect on moral effort.

There are lots of good reasons why murder is usually a really bad thing: you cause distress to the friends and family of the murdered, you cause society to lose a potentially valuable member in which it has already invested a lot of food and education and resources, and you take away the life of a person who had already invested a lot into it. But

Varlam Shalamov was sentenced in 1937 to years of hard labor in a Soviet gulag. What were his crimes? The same crimes that brought most people to those frozen hellholes: Falling on the wrong side of a totalitarian regime. Random bad luck. Daring to criticize the powers that be. For not being communist enough. For not confessing, though that hardly

‘And besides,’ she said, evidently unable to speak frankly, ‘how will I know how to be good, if there is nobody to tell me?’ ‘Oh, goodness, what is it? Nobody can agree,’ said Thomas, in whom pain relief had raised a nauseated giddy sensation. ‘I scarcely agree with myself from one day to the next – sometimes I think goodness is something fixed and