Imagine that tomorrow’s newspaper comes with a surprising headline: ‘Scientists Discover that Human Behavior is Entirely Determined.’ Reading through the article, you learn more about precisely what this determinism entails. It turns out that everything you do – every behavior, thought and decision – is completely caused by prior events, which are in turn caused by earlier events… and so forth, stretching back in a long chain all the way to the beginning of the universe.
via OUPblog » Blog Archive » Is free will required for moral accountability?.
Thought this might be interesting, giving recent discussions in the blogosphere.
Related articles
- The free will illusion illusion (psychologytoday.com)
- “Craig vs Harris” and related posts (metamagician3000.blogspot.com)
- Moral Responsibility vs. Moral Judgement (unfspb.wordpress.com)
- The Science of Morality (atheistethicist.blogspot.com)
- Deterministic Moral Responsibility? (war-on-error.xanga.com)
- The value of believing in free will (endhereditaryreligion.com)
- Lost in the Moral Landscape (seeingfaith.com)
Sounds like classic determinism. I kicked my daughter cuz an elephant stepped on a flower three thousand years ago. I think that knowledge (Rom 1) is a sufficient basis to establish responsibility.
Finally, we may have gotten away from the old religious excuse of, “the devil made me do it.” Thanks to science I will be able to give the new excuse of, “unknown previous events made me to it.”
If I saw that headline on tomorrow’s newspaper I would read the article with interest, chuckle, and then decide what to have for lunch.