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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Disputes about free will ineluctably involve disputes about metaphysics and ethics.

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

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Free will debates can be resolved purely at the level of conceptual analysis of 'could have done otherwise' without invoking substantive metaphysics.
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    • 2.G.E. Moore's compatibilist analysis reduces 'could have done otherwise' to counterfactual conditionals about behavior, requiring no deep metaphysical commitments.
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    • 3.If free will is a folk concept amenable to ordinary language analysis, its resolution belongs to philosophy of language, not metaphysics or ethics.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Derk Pereboom's hard incompatibilism shows free will questions can be settled on purely logical grounds—incompatibilism is true and determinism is likely—bracketing normative significance entirely.
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      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 2.The ethical implications of free will's absence are a downstream consequence, not a constitutive part of the free will dispute itself, making ethics separable from the core debate.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.In ferreting out the kind of control at stake in free will, we are forced to consider questions about causation, laws of nature, time, substance, ontological reduction vs emergence, the relationship of causal and reasons-based explanations, the nature of motivation and more generally of human persons.
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    • 2.In assessing the significance of free will, we are forced to consider questions about rightness and wrongness, good and evil, virtue and vice, blame and praise, reward and punishment, and desert.
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