Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This book presents a critical examination of Hume's views on the subject of freedom and moral responsibility. It is widely held that Hume's discussions “Of liberty and necessity,” as presented in both the Treatise and first Enquiry, constitute the classical statement of the “compatibilist” position – the view that freedom and moral responsibility cannot only be reconciled with causation but actually require it. According to the classical interpretation, what is central to Hume's strategy is a distinction between two kinds of freedom: a freedom that implies the absence of causation and a freedom that implies the absence of compulsion. Hume is understood as claiming that it is the second kind of freedom that is required for moral responsibility, whereas the first kind would make moral responsibility impossible. The general argument leading to this conclusion is taken to be essentially logical or conceptual in character. Contrary to the classical interpretation, I argue that it is the workings of moral sentiment, and not the concept of freedom that is fundamental to Hume's views concerning moral responsibility. More specifically, the compatibilist strategy that Hume pursues must be interpreted in terms of his detailed description of the circumstances in which people are felt to be responsible. These naturalistic commitments are directly relevant to Hume's complex understanding of how freedom relates to responsibility. It is his view that we must not exaggerate the importance of voluntariness and control for moral responsibility. These “naturalistic” aspects of Hume's position are not only crucial to understanding the nature and character of his own (distinctive) position on this subject they are also the key to understanding the considerable contemporary relevance of his naturalistic approach (e.g., in relation to P. F. Strawson's influential contributions on this subject).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".