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I never cease to be amazed by people saying how things will play out if we can just convince people they're not free. That's absurd. We have no naturalistic causal theory to predict behavior with any specificity at all. The extent to which we can predict with relative specificity is based on analogical motivational theory using the additional analogical inference that people typically choose after adjudicating which motives are "better" in terms of greatest long-term value, creating new habitual behaviors thereby. Take away that, and we can't predict much about human behavior. But that is just another way of saying people are free and rational to some extent.
What's worse, the anti-free-will crowd typically appeal to experiments that supposedly prove that that the neuro-chemistry precedes conscious choice. But this is just another way of saying epiphenominalism is true. But per epiphenominalism, education is worthless. For it has no effect on the physical world. But this is absurd, for it would prove that an extreme case of correlation has no indications about causality--and this about a matter of great importance to human satisfaction.
The causality that epiphenominalism rules out is precisely the causality that renders moral/legal accountability intelligible. This is why governments that gravitate to naturalistic metaphysics become so despotic and tyrannical--they have destroyed any way to intelligibly conceive of moral accountability, leaving all law mere positive law in every sense (in other words, might makes right). Contra this view of government is the natural law approach of Jefferson etal that is grounded in benevolent/competent teleology.
Post Edited (Similitude) : 8/19/2012 11:22:38 AM (GMT-5) |