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Freedom and Moral Responsibility: A Reply to Hunter's Reply

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2010

P. Gosselin
Affiliation:
Brandon University

Extract

In the preceding article John Hunter attempts to show that my criticisms of his position on freedom and responsibility are defective.

Hunter believes that (what he calls) my first criticism is directed against his explanation of why so many people have come to believe in the freedom principle (i.e. the principle that freedom is necessary for moral responsibility). But at no point in my paper do I even consider the merit of that explanation. What Hunter calls my first criticism is in fact merely a preliminary point I make before attacking his arguments against the freedom principle itself. The preliminary point is that in evaluating Hunter's arguments one must bear the following in mind: in some of the examples of unfreedom he provides it is doubtful that the actions are unfree at all; they are at best borderline cases of unfree acts.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1980

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References

NOTES

1 Gosselin, P.D., “Is There a Freedom Requirement for Moral Responsibility?Dialogue, XVIII (September, 1979), 294–95Google Scholar.

2 Hunter, J.F.M., “Acting Freely and Being Held Responsible”, Dialogue, XII (June, 1973), 236–37Google Scholar.

3 Ibid., 299.