Ethics

• Predestination is the theory that all events are the result of the will of God.
• Predestination is a form of religious hard determinism.
• Salvation requires our own efforts with assistance from the holy spirit.
• God cannot do everything for us, we need to take initiative ourselves.
• St Augustine believed that before the fall “man lived in the enjoyment of god and was good by gods goodness” however he writes that Adam turned his heart away from God which allowed the devil to successfully tempt him.
• The act of disobedience resulted in original sin: the tendency to evil supposedly innate in all human beings inherited from Adam in the consequence of the fall.
• “All humans are seminally presented in the loins of Adams”
• The tendency towards sin is now a defect of all humanity.
• Augustine called this concupiscence – humans have earthly desires which conflict with spiritual desires.
• As a result of the fall, all humanity is born “massa peccati”- a lump of sin.
• Augustine states that humanity is “so hopelessly corrupted that we are absolutely incapable of doing anything good”
• Humanities ability to choose freely is affected by sin – it is almost wasted on us.
• We all deserve to be punished because of this.
• There is nothing we can do but sin.
• Dennet does not deny that there are apparent “internal” causes to our actions, but argues that these are not independent of the physicality of the brain, which is causally linked with the rest of matter to the big bang.
• People create a self-deception of determinism, and the attempts of people to escape freedom is a clear sign that we do in fact have free will.
• Determinism does not prove that humanity has no free will, as Jean paul Satre argues that a person’s freedom is obvious because of the way people go about trying to deny it.
• There would still be a value in certain 'punishments', such as heavy fines for speeding which will reduce the number of deaths on the road.
• There is no worth in human ideas of right and wrong as if there was the proof that genes did affect the choices that someone made then our morals would completely shift based off of this.
• Psychological determinism argues that you can be conditioned by anything, and thus by punishing those who commit immoral acts we are conditioning the populus to no longer commit these actions because they know that there are punishments attached to them.
• There is worth in human ideas of morality as they know what is right or wrong and so going against it is to be seen as wrong as according to the moral values imparted upon them.
• My personality wrestles with my moral self, so they can't be the same thing.
• Freedom is the ability to act according to your desires, but most people would say that you aren't free.
• If every action is caused by prior activity, then what was prior to the commencement of activity.
• The implications of determinism include the worth of human ideas of rightness, wrongness and moral value.
• My moral self is free, and therefore I can be held morally accountable.
• Even if the Hard Determinist is right, blaming people can be a good way to change their behaviour.
• Locke argues that free will is an illusion.
• Given that there are external causes that force moral agents to commit certain actions which means there is no point praising someone for committing a good act or condemning them for committing a bad act as there was no choice for them to have done any other action than the one that they committed.
• Libertarianism rejects determinism and believes in an uncaused moral self.
• There is value in blaming moral agents for immoral acts.
• The major issue in understanding free will is the failure to clearly define what it means.
• Sometimes I know I ought to do something, but I don't want to.
• Augustine argues that through god’s grace some people will revive salvation, even though no person deserves such favour the choice of who to extend grace to is totally within god’s sovereign discretion.
• Augustine called these chosen people “the elect”
• Those who don’t get chosen are a “reprobate” – a sinner who is predestined to damnation
• Those in the middle are the “remanets” – who are sort of left behind
• Calvin believed in the absolute sovereignty of God.
• According to Calvin scripture makes clear that some people respond to the gospel and others don’t.
• Calvin believed sin had corrupted both the will and the intellect