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Ascribing to humans the power to have broken the laws of nature (in the sense that their different choices would have made Maxwell's equations non-laws) is counterintuitive and not directly supported by Humeanism.

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1 reason for

2 reasons against

Reasons For

1 perspective

Reason for

1.It is unpalatable intuitively to ascribe to persons law-breaking power.
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2.The conditional claim 'if I had chosen otherwise, Maxwell's equations would not have been laws' does not follow directly from a Humean approach to laws of nature.
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Reasons Against

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Reason against 1 of 2

1.On Humean supervenience, laws are just patterns in the mosaic of events, not governing constraints over and above those events.
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2.If an agent had chosen differently, the total history of events would differ, and the best-system laws supervening on that history would differ accordingly.
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3.Therefore, the conditional 'had I chosen otherwise, the laws would differ' is not a bizarre law-breaking power but a trivial consequence of Humeanism itself, as Lewis argued in 'Are We Free to Break the Laws?'
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Reason against 2 of 2

1.Compatibilists like van Inwagen's interlocutors distinguish the ability to render a law false from the ability to act such that, had one so acted, a regularity would not have been a law.
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2.The Consequence Argument's force depends on treating laws as external constraints agents must 'break,' but this assumes a non-Humean, necessitarian conception of laws.
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3.Charging Humeanism with counterintuitive law-breaking power illicitly imports non-Humean modal commitments into an account that explicitly rejects them.
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Topics

Free Will & Foreknowledge

Key Terms

Ascribing power(as used in philosophical arguments): Attributing or assigning an ability or capacity to someone or something. Here, it means saying that humans have the ability to do something.
Counterintuitive(describes the strange result that the statement's logic produces): A conclusion that seems wrong or goes against what we'd normally expect, even if it might be logically correct.
Humeanism(Lewis's Humean denial of necessary connections): The doctrine denying necessary connections between entirely distinct existences
Maxwell's equations(as a specific example of scientific laws): A set of four mathematical equations discovered by physicist James Clerk Maxwell that describe how electricity and magnetism work and relate to each other.
laws of nature(Dispute between Ellis and Lowe over the modal status of laws): Regularities grounded either in essential facts about natural kinds (Ellis) or in the contingent possession of properties by kinds (Lowe)

Charging Humeanism with counterintuitive law-breaking power illicitly imports no...Compatibilists like van Inwagen's interlocutors distinguish the ability to rende...If an agent had chosen differently, the total history of events would differ, an...It is unpalatable intuitively to ascribe to persons law-breaking power.

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On Humean supervenience, laws are just patterns in the mosaic of events, not gov...The Consequence Argument's force depends on treating laws as external constraint...

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SEP: determinism-causal

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On second thought, however, it is not so surprising that broadly Humean philosophers such as Ayer, Earman, Lewis and others still see a potential problem for freedom posed by determinism. For even if human actions are part of what makes the laws be what they are, this does not mean that we automatically have freedom of the kind we think we have, particularly freedom to have done otherwise given certain past states of affairs. It is one thing to say that everything occurring in and around my body

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Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

Details

Type: claim
Perspectives: 3 (1 for, 2 against)
Edits: 1 edit

Ascribing to humans the power to have broken the laws of nature (in the sense that their different choices would have made Maxwell's equations non-laws) is counterintuitive and not directly supported by Humeanism.

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