When engaged in the philosophical dialectic, we should be careful to avoid proving our point on the basis thought experiments regarding scenarios that are far-fetched. I think everyone would grant that no thought experiment that involves two contradictory claims can be allowed. And pretty much everyone would agree that a thought experiment involving an event that is highly improbable but quite possible should be allowed. Besides these two alternatives there is a thought experiment of a third type: it asks us to imagine something that may in fact be impossible in the same way that it's impossible that "green ideas" would "sleep furiously": not a contradiction between two statements but an incoherency in one statement. When we are unsure of what the words mean; when determining what those words mean; and when one of the candidate meanings would mean, if accepted, that the scenario in our thought experiment is incoherent, then making use of such a thought experiment to shore up belief in a controversial thesis is an example of question-begging.
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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