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    Created things are not truly agents — Carmelics
    Home/Divine Attributes
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    Created things are not truly agents

    Divine AttributesMoral Responsibility
    ?Rate how convincing each reason is below to see the overall strength.
    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.Created things are both passive and active
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    • 2.Being truly an agent requires acting without being acted upon
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Aquinas's doctrine of secondary causation holds that creatures genuinely cause effects through their own natures, not merely as instruments of divine action.
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    • 2.A cause can be real and efficacious even when itself dependent on a prior cause, as evidenced by the coherence of causal chains in Aristotelian physics.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Al-Ghazali's occasionalism was explicitly rejected by Averroes, who argued that denying natural causation in creatures undermines the intelligibility of science.
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    • 2.If being acted upon disqualifies something from being a true agent, then even the Unmoved Mover, moved by its own final causality, would fail the criterion.
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    Divine AttributesMoral Responsibility

    Related

    A cause can be real and efficacious even when itself dependent on a prior cause,...Al-Ghazali's occasionalism was explicitly rejected by Averroes, who argued that ...Aquinas's doctrine of secondary causation holds that creatures genuinely cause e...Being truly an agent requires acting without being acted upon
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    Created things are both passive and activeIf being acted upon disqualifies something from being a true agent, then even th...

    Similar

    All agents other than God are only metaphorically agents83%Rational agents are objects of this self-constituting kind.82%Being truly an agent requires acting without being acted upon79%It does not matter what an agent will do78%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: al-kindi
    View source passageHide passage
    Al-Kindi goes on to explain that whereas God is a “true” agent, since He is a cause of being and acts without being acted upon, all other agents are only “metaphorically” agents, because they both act and are acted upon. The force of the term “metaphorical” here is the same as it was in On First Philosophy: just as created things are both many and one, and thus not “truly” one, so they are both passive and active, and thus not “truly” agents.
    Extraction notes

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

    Details

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