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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that A karmic system of cosmic justice requires a persisting self

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.Karmic rebirth functions as a system of reward and punishment: fortunate births result from good deeds in prior lives, unpleasant births from evil past deeds
      ?

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    • 2.A system of reward and punishment is just only if the recipient of the karmic fruit is the same person as the agent of the original action
      ?

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    • 3.Personal identity across lives requires some persisting constituent that carries over from one life to the next
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Locke's psychological continuity theory holds that personal identity consists in continuity of memory and consciousness across time, not substance.
      ?

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    • 2.If karmic memory-traces (Sanskrit: samskara) constitute a continuous psychological chain across lives, Lockean identity is preserved without a Cartesian soul.
      ?

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    • 3.A karmic system grounded in psychological continuity satisfies the justice condition in P2 while still requiring a persisting informational structure across lives.
      ?

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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Derek Parfit concedes in Reasons and Persons that even without strict identity, desert-based relationships can obtain where there is sufficient psychological connectedness.
      ?

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    • 2.Karmic inheritance across lives exhibits precisely the causal-psychological connectedness Parfit identifies as sufficient for responsibility attributions.
      ?

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    • 3.Therefore, karmic justice requires at minimum a persisting causal-psychological thread—a functionally persisting self—even if not a metaphysically simple soul.
      ?

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