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

    It is not the case that 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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    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 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 for 2 of 2
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    • 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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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 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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