"...if we understand that there are good evolutionary reasons for our wanting people to suffer when they have done direct or indirect harm to us, then we can account for our strong feelings about the appropriateness of retribution without presuming they are a guide to moral truth....
A commitment group helps its members make and keep commitments toward a common goal.
To help group members make and keep commitments to action that will reduce global warming, to help create and sustain the personal and political will to act now.
Make friends, influence people, develop group cohesion and identity, find a larger purpose in life, get group discounts on environment-related products.
Libertarian Tibor Machan, writing in the Desert Dispatch (and reprinted in Free Inquiry, Oct-Nov, 2005), inveighs against liberals, claiming that "Liberals tend to excuse all evil with stories about bad luck and disease and a bunch of other impersonal forces that make people do bad things." He goes on to say that "The basic philosophical thesis behind the liberal mentality...is the denial of free will." So according to Machan, by accepting that evil has causes, liberals deny free will, and in so doing deny the basis for moral judgments.
On June 5, 1998, the Boston Globe published columnist and libertarian George Will's piece "Prosecuting 'Crimes' of the Mind?" in which he takes government to task for trying to influence character development and personal behavior. What caught my attention in this otherwise typical anti-regulation rant were the following paragraphs on free will. Will is describing Richard Dooling's novel, "Brain Storm," which raise issues of free speech, political correctness, and, interestingly, the implications of neuroscience for the prospects of control (Will's text is indented):
Worldview naturalism has progressive implications for politics and policy, some of which are explored in this section. It is no coincidence that scientists and others with a naturalistic worldview tend to be liberals. They see no good justification for supposing any class of individuals, such as females, gays, religious minorities, races or ethnicities, deserves unequal treatment. Conservatives, on the other hand, are more likely to hold non-naturalist views about human nature that serve to reinforce inequalities based on such classifications.
Using simple examples, this lexicon defines common terms related to responsibility, morality and free will within a naturalistic world view. That is, in these definitions no appeal is made to the notion that the person could have done otherwise given the governing conditions, both inside and outside the body.
Here are some questions which people often ask when first learning about naturalism. Click on a question you'd like to explore, and the answer will appear underneath the question.
It’s pretty much inevitable that you will walk across a street at some point. How you cross it is determined by a number of factors, including your desire to cross it safely. Although it’s not inevitable that you will cross the street with your eyes open, it’s a good bet, given your desire not to be injured or killed.
Determinism holds that every thing and event is a natural and integral part of the interconnected universe. From the perspective of determinism, every event in nature is the result of (determined by) prior/coexisting events. Every event is a confluence of influences. While determinism regards humans as "one with" the unfolding matrix of the natural universe, supernaturalism and fatalism regard humans as existing outside of this system.
