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ArgumentThe causal-closure argument
Every effect has a cause: why would our decisions make an exception?
Supports
- Everywhere we look, we find causes: on inspection, no phenomenon turns out to have no antecedent. The physical world appears , every effect within it having a cause that is itself physical.
- A decision is one event among others, carried by a physical brain woven into that same causal fabric.
- By the , nothing happens without a reason that determines it; to grant the will alone a causeless power would be an exception without justification.
Therefore Our decisions are therefore by their causes, like any other event.
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Deepenings
Why would nothing happen without a cause?
- The principle of sufficient reason states that, for every fact, there is a reason why it is so rather than otherwise.
- To deny it is not to discover a freedom, it is to give up understanding: an event with no cause at all would be, literally, unintelligible.
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Laplace's demon
- Laplace imagines an intelligence that would know, at a given instant, all the forces of nature and the position of every being.
- For such an intelligence, he writes, nothing would be uncertain: the future, like the past, would be present to its eyes.
- The image is not about what we can predict, but about what strict determinism commits us to: everything, in principle, is already settled.
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Put to the test