PHL 503 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Determinism, Compatibilism, Incompatibilism

• School: Ryerson University
• Department: Philosophy
• Course: PHL 503
• Professor: Julien Beillard

Document Summary

A note on compatibilism and incompatibilism (with respect to freedom and determinism) Most people would agree that you are morally responsible for what you do only if, or to the extent that, you do it freely. Your choices or actions can"t be blamed or praised or morally evaluated or judged in any way, we tend to think, if those choices or actions were not free choices or actions. Causal determinism is, roughly, the theory that every event, down to the least detail, is the inevitable result of causes at work earlier in the history of the universe. So the relevant kind of freedom may seem to conflict with causal determinism. For it seems that if causal determinism is true, no event could be (or could have been) any different from the way that it was.