engleski

Determinism and miracle working

Joseph Campbell has made a well-known criticism of the Consequence Argument that it fails to prove incompatibilism, which if true is necessarily true, because at least one of its premises is a contingent truth. The premise that he has in mind is that there are events in the distant past that, if determinism is true, causally determine our actions. Campbell points out that it is possible for there to be a deterministic world W wherein there is an agent who has no distant past but exists from the very first moment. As her actions are not determined by the events of the distant past, the Consequence Argument cannot show why she has no free will. Since there is at least one possible deterministic world W for which the Consequence Argument cannot address why an agent does not have free will in it, Campbell concludes from this that the Consequence Argument is not an argument for incompatibilism. Recently, Brian Cutter has repeated the same criticism with the difference that he attacks another premise of the argument, namely, that the laws of nature, if determinism is true, determine our actions. He points out that just as there is a possible deterministic world W wherein there is an agent without a distant past, so there is a possible deterministic world W wherein there is an agent capable of miracle working. As at least some of her actions that are not determined by the laws of nature, there is another possible deterministic world W for which Consequence Argument cannot address why an agent does not have free will in it. Therefore, Cutter concludes, the Consequence Argument fails to prove incompatibilism. In my presentation, I argue that Cutter's Miracle worker objection is unsound by showing that under determinism, no miracle working is possible. Then, I will incorporate this insight into a version of the Consequence argument that I co-developed with Davor Pećnjak as a response to Campbell's original criticism.

consequence argument, determinism, laws of nature, incompatibilism, free will

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