Criticising Strawson’s Compatibilism
Nurana Rajabova is wary of an attempt to dismiss determinism to keep free will.
The belief that human beings have moral responsibility is used to judge people based on their actions, then to reward or punish them accordingly. But is this just?
Back to that again. But if every single thing we think, feel, say and do is "somehow" compelled by whatever explanation there is for the existence of the laws of matter themselves, then justice is just another inherent/necessary manifestation of the only possible reality in turn. And, as well, some are compelled to argue for this, others against it.
This question becomes unavoidable when the theory of determinism enters the discussion.
Or, as I am more inclined to suggest, when these theoretical dicussions make contact with actual flesh and blood human interactions...relationships that go well beyond a world of words. Unless, again, this too is just six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Determinists claim that every event or occurrence in the world, including human desires, thoughts, and acts, are predetermined by physical laws of cause and effect.
But what they can't pin down is whether or not the claim itself is just another domino toppling over on cue going back to...the Big Bang? The multiverse?
In such a world there is no space for free will, since any person’s action at any time could not have been different, if all the physical conditions causing it remain the same. As there is no human free will, say the determinists, there can be no moral responsibility either.
Unless, of course, "somehow" the soft determinists among us are able to convince me that compatibilism actually makes sense.
At the other end of the axis stand libertarians who also view the two phenomena as incompatible, yet the theory they reject is determinism, as they believe that humans do possess free will.
Then the part where I argue that accepting something as true solely because you were never able to reject it as false makes sense...how?
The part that continues to [compelled or otherwise] baffle me the most:
Therefore, assigning moral responsibility is justifiable according to their view. In-between these two positions are the compatibilists, who claim that determinism and moral responsibility are not mutually exclusive after all. Different compatibilists explain this with different arguments.
That in and of itself might be no less entangled in the gap between what we think we understand about the human condition and all that we don't even know about existence itself.
