I got up early in the hope that I would be able to bring McKenzie (the kitten) to a specialty vet for a second opinion this morning, but the other vet's office had no openings this morning. So I'm sitting here sipping my coffee, thinking about someone I never met, and about cat food, and about Calvinism - strange combination!

I'm thinking about my own bad choices in the past. For example, every time I see a roadside sign advertising the candidacy of Brian Stewart for state Supreme Court, I remember that I have owed his sister and his brother-in-law an apology for over twenty-five years and have never had the courage to do it. I could look them up right now and send some kind of apology, if they are both still around after all this time, and I might try to do that today, but that wouldn't change the fact that I didn't do it for more than twenty-five years.

I finally have a hard copy of the entire book The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect and Accountability by Stephen Darwall (I had previously read significant portions of it online), and I'm in the process of thinking through my own beliefs on free will and accountability. Does this relate to the Calvinism stuff? Yes, it does.

Here's the basic question I'm working with: Is our moral responsibility as human beings co-extensive with our freedom to choose our actions? In other words, can we rightfully be punished for the conduct which we genuinely could not control? By "genuinely could not control" I don't mean the phony powerlessness of those who claim that they "couldn't help it" when their behavior was clearly voluntary, and I am not referring to my own bad choices either. They were choices and I am clearly responsible for them. I am referring to an inherent, unchangeable inability to act differently, such as in the Calvinist view of salvation and damnation.