Connections to Other Materials

Here is a link to a Simon & Garfunkel song that deals with determinism in human life, called "Patterns".

This song, "Free Life", is from Dan Wilson.  The narrator of this song takes for granted that there is such a thing as a free life.

In this post, I relate determinism to Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5.

Here I link to the implicit bias tests.  Is unconscious bias preventable?  Are we responsible for it?

Moral Responsibility Revisited

Here are many links to other posts about the readings for moral responsibility:

DoC vs PAP

PAP vs. PPP

Van Inwagen vs. Frankfurt

No True Scotsman Informal Fallacy

Heaven, Hell and Strawson

Strawson's Basic Argument & Responses to the Basic Argument

Shame vs. Guilt

Moral Responsibility and PAP

In this post, I define some basic terms.  Here I talk about PAP and moral responsibility. 

Here I give answers for Pfizz #1.

In this post, I describe the Jones and Black thought experiments that Frankfurt discusses

Rap and Responsibility

In "Market Made Murder", rapper Sims (of Doomtree) considers the ways in which modern Americans may be subjected to forces beyond their own personal control.  This song, featuring fellow Doomtree MC and SoCal native Mike Mictlan, seems to raise many problems about free will and the possibility of moral responsibility in our country.

PID and Moral Responsibility

PAP, otherwise known as the principle of alternative possibilities, is the claim that someone is not morally responsible for actions when he could not have done otherwise.  How we define a person certainly has consequences, then, for claims about personal moral responsibility.  Recall that Locke thinks that humans and animals are different than machines because whereas machines must be operated by someone, humans and other animals are the source of their own movement. If determinism is true, then it seems like even our own thoughts are mechanical insofar as they are caused by external forces.  So if humans are 'mechanical' in this sense, then they never seem to have the ability to act other than they have.  As a result, it seems like humans could never be morally responsible. 

Derren Brown Messes with Memory

In this post, I talk about a short clip where Derren Brown messes with Simon Pegg.

This clip might make us worry that memory is too unreliable to serve as a criterion for personal identity.

Parfit on Personal 'Identity'

The problem of personal identity is the question about how we define a person.  In other words, what makes me me?  How do we decide if there is some person who is the same person as me?  Locke answers this problem by saying that personal identity consists of autobiographical memories.  Reid shows that this theory will violate the transitivity of identity.  Parfit's contribution to the literature on the problem of personal identity is to note that strict numerical identity might not be the appropriate concept.  Rather, he talks about survival.  The question of whether you survive is the same question as whether there is some person who is you.  In the links below, I discuss the difference between identity and survival in more detail.

Parfit on PID.

Identity vs. Survival.