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Descriptive

Does understanding all excuse all?

On the axis: Moral responsibility · the universal excuse

If every act has its causes, the excuse valid for one, the tumour, the constraint, should hold for all, and no one would be to blame. Unless the excuse precisely distinguishes between causes, and understanding is not excusing.

Philosophers' positions

Spinoza

Major
+0.9
Compatibilism
Justification

If everything follows from God's nature with the same as a triangle's properties follow from its essence, no act of will can be an exception. The argument also explains the illusion of : like a thrown stone that would believe itself free, we are conscious of our desires but ignorant of the causes that determine them.

A stone receives from an external cause that pushes it a certain quantity of motion... Now conceive that this stone, while it continues to move, thinks and knows that it is striving, as far as it can, to move. This stone, surely, since it is conscious only of its striving, will believe itself entirely free.Letter 58 to Schuller

Ethics, I, prop. 29 and appendix · Letter 58 to Schuller (the stone that thinks itself free)

Anchors: Spinoza · P.F. Strawson

leads to: Freedom of the will (Could I have done otherwise?)