Sunday, February 03, 2019

Guiltless feelings of guilt

A stock objection to Calvinism is that if our actions are predestined, there's no basis for blame or regret. However, that intuition depends on the illustration. Here's a counterexample:

In “Moral Luck”, Williams famously argues that it makes sense for a faultless lorry driver to experience a kind and intensity of regret about the death of the child who runs in front of the vehicle that it would not be open to a mere bystander to experience. This is not remorse about some voluntary lapse on the part of the lorry driver (since by hypothesis he has done nothing wrong), but regret about an event, the death of the child, that stands in a causal relationship to his exercise of agency in driving the lorry. 


Both the bystander and the driver deeply regret the child's death, but for the driver, the regret is more personal even though the accident was beyond his control to avert. Unlike the bystander, the driver is in the causal chain of events that kills the child. He couldn't stop the trolly in time. The accident was inevitable, given the confluence of factors.

Although he's blameless, he's haunted by the child's death because he was operating the trolly. In a sense, he killed the child. If he hadn't been the driver, he wouldn't feel the same way. 

Thereafter, the child's death is always in the back of his mind. He feels some responsibility for the tragedy, even though he's inculpable. But from the standpoint of freewill theism, how can blame and regret be detached? Why feel guilty if you're guiltless? 

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