I’m currently reading Derk Pereboom’s Living Without Free Will, which defends what Pereboom calls “hard incompatibilism” and then explores its implications.
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Posted by
Tom Clark on 08/06 at 10:13 PM
"I conclude that libertarian free will of the kind that agent causation theorists attempt to describe is not even a coherent concept."
Quite right, but from lots of experience I can testify that some people will use any intellectual contrivance, any rhetorical stratagem, any appeal to personal experience (as opposed to logic and evidence) to hold onto it.
Some believers in libertarian free will eventually let it go after lots of tribulation, very much like relinquishing a belief in god. Others, like yourself, never believed in it and can't imagine being so attached to an absurdity.
Weaning ourselves from the contra-causal conception of human agency is quite a project, but critically important given the advantages of paying attention to the real causes of human behavior. Not to mention that it might lead to more compassionate attitudes. As Spinoza put it: ""The mind is determined to this or that choice by a cause which is also determined by another cause, and this again by another, and so on ad infinitum. This doctrine teaches us to hate no one, to despise no one, to mock no one, to be angry with no one, and to envy no one."
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