That is, a reductively materialistic view of human nature excludes the sort of openness to the meaning of the universe that is associated with spirituality. Or it replaces true spirituality with a debased, consumerist version thereof: I will create a meaning of my life for myself while you create a meaning for yourself. The latter involves no communion with something greater than ourselves. No reverence. Only self-worship. To seek a meaning that others can also discover, a meaning that is not your own private little creation, is to rely on something godlike in yourself that is capable of reaching beyond the here and now: it is to reject the more reductive of materialism.
Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson. He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal. My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this. I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true. Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist. In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
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