Force and Determinism

Social and Ethical Responsibility against Social Determinism

Background: Because of the highlighted role of ethical responsibility in social and individual life, it is looked as an important issue in ethics area. Social responsibility that is defined as a sub-factor of ethical responsibility will have such an important place. What is discussed in responsibility discussions commonly is the “human will”. Responsibility is more based on the free will. In th...

Why should they believe us? Determinism, non-determinism and evidence

In Software Engineering, as in Computing Science, the topics that we teach to our students can be considered as falling into two broad categories: the deterministic, and the non-deterministic. Deterministic topics are those where a specific scenario or operation leads to outcomes that can be assessed in terms of true/false values, and so this classification encompasses large elements of compute...

Determinism and Criminal Law

Moral Responsibility and Determinism

conditions, would they choose to hold on to the concrete judgment that Bill is morally responsible or the abstract judgment that no one can be responsible in a deterministic universe? The results showed no clear majority on either side. Approximately half of the subjects chose to hold onto the judgment that the particular agent was morally responsible, while the other half chose to hold onto th...

Choice, Determinism, and Cooperation

A goal-pursuing agent must somehow ascertain when an action would serve as a means to achieving a goal. Various criteria (causal, evidential, counterfactual) have been proposed (e.g. Joyce 1999). Examining Newcomb’s Problem (Nozick 1969) and more-mundane thought experiments, I argue for an acausal but non-evidentialist counterfactual criterion (but without invoking the “possible worlds” of e.g....