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Diana and Ernie return: on Carolina Sartorio’s Causation and Free Will

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Abstract

In the final chapter of her Causation and Free Will, Carolina Sartorio offers (among other things) a novel reply to an original-design argument for the thesis that determinism is incompatible with free will and moral responsibility, an argument that resembles Alfred Mele’s zygote argument in Free Will and Luck. This article assesses the merits of her reply. It is concluded that Sartorio has more work to do if she is to lay this style of argument to rest.

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Notes

  1. By “compatibilism” in this article, I mean compatibilism both about free will and about moral responsibility, except when I have occasion to be more specific.

  2. See, for example, Barnes (2015), Deery and Nahmias (2017), Schlosser (2015), Todd (2013, 2017) and Waller (2014). I mention my story here (Mele 2006) rather than Sartorio’s because mine has been in existence long enough to have prompted many published reactions and Sartorio’s appeared too recently to have done so.

References

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Gabriel DeMarco and Carolina Sartorio for comments on a draft of this article. This article was made possible through the support of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.

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Correspondence to Alfred R. Mele.

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Mele, A.R. Diana and Ernie return: on Carolina Sartorio’s Causation and Free Will. Philos Stud 175, 1525–1533 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1058-y

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