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August 7, 2018

A Theological 'Slippery Slope' Argument for Compatibilism

When I first began studying philosophy, I was a convinced libertarian about free will. My reasons included supposed direct introspection together with what I now take to be two distinct but related intuitions, which I will now call the consequence argument intuition and the buck-stopping intuition. (I wouldn't have explained them like this back then, of course: I'm trying to do some autobiographical rational reconstruction.) The consequence argument intuition is the notion that if an event is necessitated—whether logically, metaphysically, or causally/nomologically—by factors outside my control, then that event is itself outside my control, and an event outside my control...
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January 29, 2013

A Theistic Argument for Compatibilism

One often hears it asserted that most theists are metaphysical libertarians. This seems to be supported, at least in the case of theistic philosophers, by the PhilPapers survey where target faculty specializing in philosophy of religion, who were overwhelmingly more likely to be theists than their peers in other specializations (72.3% for religion specialists vs. 14.6% overall), were also overwhelmingly more likely to be libertarians (57.4% vs. 13.7%). (Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way to compare theists to non-theists across the board, so we just have this correlation among religion specialists.) Now, I suppose there are some reasons...
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