By Scott Hill
Forthcoming in Analysis
Abstract: People who report believing in God fear death. They also experience grief when someone they love dies. Philosophers and social scientists sometimes claim that this can only be plausibly explained by the hypothesis that people who claim to believe in God do not really believe in God. I show that this is mistaken. I identify three independently plausible explanations of why people who genuinely believe in God would have these behaviors and attitudes. First, there is an evolutionary explanation of why the fear of death would be resilient even if one genuinely believes God has good things in store for us after death. Second, people often fear low probability outcomes. It may be that religious people are afraid of hell or the cessation of existence even if they judge those outcomes to have a low probability. Third, belief in God is typically combined with views according to which death is accompanied by the permanent loss and radical transformation of important relationships.
By Scott Hill
Forthcoming in Journal of Philosophy
Strawsonian accounts of moral responsibility are widely associated with opposition to hard determinism. However, it is only an historical accident that these views are bundled together. I show that Strawson鈥檚 deepest commitments are perfectly consistent with, and even support, a new and improved form of hard determinism. The resulting view is not revisionist about our practices in the way that extant versions of hard determinism are. After setting out my view, I then turn to Latham and Tierney鈥檚 (2022) objection to manipulation arguments. I make two points about their objection. First, while extant versions of hard determinism are vulnerable to Latham and Tierney鈥檚 objection, my version of hard determinism is not. Second, I argue that their objection raises important questions about what it is for two cases to be morally equivalent. I defend a principle about when cases are morally equivalent. My principle suggests a way to improve Latham and Tierny鈥檚 objection to manipulation arguments that are paired with extant variants of hard determinism. However, when paired with my version of hard determinism, manipulation arguments may accommodate Latham and Tierney鈥檚 objection.