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    An action can be inevitable and yet still be a free action. — Carmelics
    Home/Free Will & Foreknowledge
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

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    Supports→Even a very specific prophecy that renders an action inevitable does not thereby make that action unfree.

    An action can be inevitable and yet still be a free action.

    Free Will & Foreknowledge
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Freedom of action is distinct from freedom of will.
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    • 2.An action is free when the agent has a powerful desire to perform it, the agent's will is not causally determined by anything external or by pathological factors within the agent, and the inaccessible alternatives are alternatives the agent has no desire to pursue or has some desire not to pursue.
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    Reasons Against

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    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Genuine freedom requires the ability to do otherwise, such that if an action is inevitable, no alternative was ever genuinely available.
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    • 2.A desire unconstrained by external causes is insufficient for freedom if the space of possible choices was always causally or logically closed.
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    • 3.Compatibilist accounts that define freedom via internal desire-satisfaction conflate the phenomenology of choice with its metaphysical conditions.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Frankfurt-style cases notwithstanding, Peter van Inwagen's consequence argument establishes that inevitability entails the agent could not have initiated any different causal chain.
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    • 2.If an agent could not have initiated a different causal chain, moral responsibility—which the supporting argument implicitly preserves—is undermined alongside libertarian freedom.
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    Topics

    Free Will & Foreknowledge

    Connections

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    Moral Responsibility2 linked

    Related

    A desire unconstrained by external causes is insufficient for freedom if the spa...An action is free when the agent has a powerful desire to perform it, the agent'...Compatibilist accounts that define freedom via internal desire-satisfaction conf...Even a very specific prophecy that renders an action inevitable does not thereby...
    +5 moreShow less
    Frankfurt-style cases notwithstanding, Peter van Inwagen's consequence argument ...Freedom of action is distinct from freedom of will.Genuine freedom requires the ability to do otherwise, such that if an action is ...If an agent could not have initiated a different causal chain, moral responsibil...Rendering an action inevitable is not the same as making the action unfree.

    Similar

    Rendering an action inevitable is not the same as making the action un...91%An action can be free and subject to moral assessment even if only one...80%An action is free when the agent has a powerful desire to perform it, ...79%Even a very specific prophecy that renders an action inevitable does n...79%

    Source

    AI-extracted
    SEP: prophecy
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    Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, probably the most prominent advocates of the atemporal eternity view, have defended the atemporal eternity approach to prophecy against Widerker’s objection (see Stump and Kretzmann 1991). They point out that most prophecies are conditional or vague, so that they leave “room” for different ways in which they might be fulfilled (400–401). If a prophecy were to be very specific, then it might actually render the action in question inevitable, they admit, but th

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    premise
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    3 (1 for, 2 against)
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