S
Sciborg_S_Patel
Addendum to, well, every post I've made in this thread:
Causation is Not Your Enemy
Causation is Not Your Enemy
We argue in this paper that an aspect of causation has been misunderstood over a long period,especially in its connection with issues of modality, and this error has had a particularly significantand damaging influence on the direction of the free will debate. A tight connection has been drawn between causation and necessity, for instance, and this has been highly problematic to thoseseeking any kind of credible libertarian stance on free will. It is necessity that is the threat, we claim. Causation is seen as part of the problem of free will when really we should be looking to it as part ofthe solution.
If there is a straight choiceto be made between determinism and indeterminism, it looks like there can be no free will. Part of the difficulty has been to see how there is any other option than these two. There is one, we insist,but the key to it is getting causation right, in particular the proper modality that holds between causes and effects. To see this, we should first motivate the connection between our freedom and causation and thus how we need to be causes in order to act. The free will problem is then seen as a problem of causation and a modal problem, produced when they are not conceived accurately
Last edited by a moderator: