The Non-Triviality Principle and Objections to Its Application
In Chapter 6, six objections to the application of the Non-Triviality Principle in the triviality argument are examined. According to the first objection, the Non-Triviality Principle does not apply to the kind of facts referenced in the triviality argument. According to the second and third objections, the triviality argument depends on what are claimed to be false assumptions about causation—respectively, that causation comes in degrees and that probabilistic causation implies that causation is scalar. The fourth objection is that the relation that matters varies in strength with the strength of the causal connection, but the triviality argument wrongly assumes otherwise. The fifth objection is that the triviality argument works only if reasons externalism is true, but reasons internalism is true. The sixth objection is that the triviality argument fails if particularism or brutalism applies to what matters in survival. None of these objections, it is argued, hit their targets.