Implications for moral responsibility and religious belief

Overview

Recall questions on hard determinism and blame, the fate of normative ethics, soft determinism, punishment, the link with evil, omnipotence and omnibenevolence, election, prayer and miracles.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What does hard determinism imply about moral responsibility?

   Model answer

   If nobody could ever have acted otherwise, then no one is genuinely responsible for what they do and desert has no application.

2. 2

   What becomes of rightness and wrongness if hard determinism is true?

   Model answer

   Judgements of right and wrong lose their grip, since it makes little sense to say an agent should have done what they were never able to do.

3. 3

   How can a hard determinist still speak of moral value at all?

   Model answer

   They can call acts harmful or beneficial and treat moral language as a useful social tool, while denying that anyone deserves credit or blame.

4. 4

   Is there any value in blaming a moral agent if hard determinism is true?

   Model answer

   Blame as deserved punishment makes no sense, though a determinist may defend it as one more cause shaping how people behave in future.

5. 5

   What happens to normative ethics under hard determinism?

   Model answer

   Telling people what they ought to do appears pointless if they could not do otherwise, so normative ethics seems to lose its subject matter.

6. 6

   How might a determinist defend the usefulness of normative ethics?

   Model answer

   Moral teaching is itself among the causes that shape behaviour, so it can genuinely change what people do even if no one could have chosen differently.

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