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    Carmelics

    A reasoning platform. Break down any belief into clear reasons, explore both sides, and weigh the evidence honestly.

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

    It is not the case that The objection that karma across lives requires a transmigrating self to justify desert can be resolved by rejecting the assumption that persons are ultimately real entities that bear moral properties like desert.

    ?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.Desert-based moral responsibility requires not merely conventional persons but a diachronic subject who is the same entity that deliberated, acted, and is now held accountable.
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    • 2.Buddhist 'conventional persons' are functional aggregates lacking the numerical identity over time that grounds the normative link between past action and present desert.
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    • 3.Dissolving persons to resolve the desert problem eliminates the very subject for whom karmic soteriological liberation is supposed to be beneficial, generating a parallel paradox.
      ?

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    Reason for 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Parfit's reductionism shows that eliminating persons in favor of continuity relations does not dissolve desert but transforms it: overlapping psychological connections still ground degree-sensitive responsibility.
      ?

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    • 2.If psychological continuity grounds karma across lives without a transmigrating self, then interrupted or branching continuity chains produce indeterminate desert attributions that the Buddhist account cannot adjudicate.
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    • 3.A theory that cannot adjudicate edge cases of fission or psychological discontinuity fails as a general account of moral responsibility, not merely as a response to the specific transmigration objection.
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.The objection assumes persons deserve reward and punishment depending on the moral character of their actions.
      ?

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    • 2.Denying desert wholesale leads to moral nihilism, which the Buddha's middle path rejects.
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    • 3.A more promising denial is that there are ultimately no persons to bear moral properties like desert.
      ?

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    Strongest counterpoint
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