Instances of the Deconstruction of Free Will and Autonomy in Poe and Lovecraft

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
András Molnár
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Significant Influence ◽  
Autonomous Agents ◽  
Personal Autonomy ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
American Gothic

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how the conception of free will and personal autonomy is deconstructed in the works of Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. These authors are classics of American Gothic fiction, and Poe exerted a significant influence on Lovecraft. In this paper, I examine the ways the two authors represented their characters as the results of deterministic laws of nature, rather than autonomous agents who possess the ability of free will. First, I am going to analyze Poe’s gothic crime fiction tales, in which the perpetrator-narrators committed their crimes under the effect of “perversity,” and even their confessions after the fact are directed by the same force, which makes these confessions morally meaningless. Then, with respect to Lovecraft’s tales, I point out atavism and the characters’ familial heritage as factors that make free will seem illusory.

scholarly journals For whom does determinism undermine moral responsibility? Surveying the conditions for free will across cultures

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivar Hannikainen ◽  
Edouard Machery ◽  
David Rose ◽  
Paulo Sousa ◽  
Florian Cova ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Initial Conditions ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Causal Determinism ◽  
Cognitive Reflection ◽  
Ultimate Source ◽  
And Control ◽  
Alternate Possibilities

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one’s actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one’s actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhibiting greater cognitive reflection were more likely to view free will as incompatible with causal determinism. We discuss these findings in light of documented cultural differences in the tendency toward dispositional versus situational attributions.

Critique of Personal Autonomy

2020 ◽  
pp. 91-152
Author(s):  
Lucas Swaine
Keyword(s):  
Autonomous Agents ◽  
Personal Autonomy ◽  
Immoral Action

This chapter provides a detailed critique of personal autonomy. It distinguishes several hazards affecting agents who are personally autonomous, moving beyond received understandings and critiques. The chapter explains how personal autonomy offers normatively inadequate boundaries with respect to deliberation, volition, capabilities, and the generation of options, respectively. Included in this chapter is discussion of extreme actions, and of evil, to serve to establish the central points of argumentation. The critique presented here is robust even granting that theories of personal autonomy do not countenance immoral action, much less egregious law-breaking or terrible rights violations, on the part of personally autonomous agents.

Your Brain as the Source of Free Will Worth Wanting

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eddy Nahmias
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Neural Activity ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Mental Processes ◽  
Neural Processes ◽  
What Matters

In Chapter 14, Eddy Nahmias begins by considering various reactions one could have to neuronaturalism—the thesis that, in imagining options, evaluating them, and making a decision, “each of those mental processes just is (or is realized in) a complex set of neural processes which causally interact in accord with the laws of nature.” Although dualists and reductionists tend to think that neuronaturalism conflicts with people’s self-conception, Nahmias argues that most people are amenable to whatever metaphysics makes sense of what matters to them. He argues that even though we do not yet have a theory of how neural activity can explain our conscious experiences, such a theory will have to make sense of how those neural processes are crucial causes of our decisions about what to do. He concludes by suggesting that interventionist theories of causation offer the best way to see this.

scholarly journals Gothic Discourse in Jeffrey Eugenides’s 'The Virgin Suicides' – Challenging Suburban Uniformity and (Re)Imagining “The Other”

Linguaculture ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-40
Author(s):  
Ana-Cristina Băniceru
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Demographic Change ◽  
The Other ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
American Gothic ◽  
Close Proximity ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Ontological Uncertainty ◽  
Literary Phenomenon

This paper argues that Jeffrey Eugenides, in his début novel, The Virgin Suicides, first questions and then challenges ‘the homeliness’ of the American suburbia by adopting an unsettling gothic discourse and by creating gothic subjects (the Lisbons). Gothic discourse includes the gothic tropes of confinement, persecution, alienation and contagion. My approach to the American Gothic tends to side with Siân Silyn Roberts who convincingly argues that this literary phenomenon questions the place of the individual in what he calls “a diasporic setting” (7). In eighteenth century Great Britain, Gothic fiction differentiates a literate middle class from “the other”, meaning other nationalities, ethnicities and cultures. The individual becomes a container of “cultivated sensibility” (Roberts 3). In America, this model was seriously challenged due to “a climate of ontological uncertainty and rapid demographic change” (Roberts 5). The cosmopolitan city, a place of invasion, of close proximity to the other, has become the perfect setting for gothic subjects, characterised by Roberts as mutable and adaptable. However, suburbia, with its apparent idyllic life, tries to uniformize the heterogeneous tendencies of the cosmopolitan city.

scholarly journals Something Wicked Westward Goes: Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson’s Californian Uncanny

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 47
Author(s):  
Robyn Pritzker
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Gold Rush ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
American Gothic ◽  
American Author ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship

This essay offers a first critical reading of American author Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson’s short story “The Warlock’s Shadow” (1886), asserting that the tale appropriates historical traumas in order to navigate, and transgress, boundaries of genre and gender. The strangeness of the text’s Central Californian setting, to the narrator, precipitates a series of Gothic metamorphoses, and “The Warlock’s Shadow” engages with this transformation via a concept that this essay defines as the “Californian Uncanny”. The latter framework is a result of the specific, layered indigenous and colonial identities of post-Gold Rush California coming into contact with the unstable subjectivities of the Gothic genre. “The Warlock’s Shadow” manifests the Californian Uncanny primarily through the relationship between the home, the environment, and the “unassimilable” inhabitant. Stevenson’s text illustrates, through these images, the ways in which late-nineteenth-century American Gothic fiction has allowed the white feminine subject to negotiate her own identity, complicating the binary distinctions between Self and Other which underpin American colonialism both internally and externally. The phenomenon of the Californian Uncanny in “The Warlock’s Shadow” reflects these gendered and geographical anxieties of American identity, confronting the ghosts of the nation’s westernmost region.

Religion and Hope

2021 ◽  
pp. 149-174
Author(s):  
Derk Pereboom
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Problem Of Evil ◽  
Natural Evil ◽  
Divine Providence ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Problem Of Evil

Chapter 7 defends the rationality of hope for humanity on both theistic and non-theistic grounds. Hope is appropriate when our interest lies in an unknown outcome due to factors completely beyond our control, as is the case if our future is rendered inevitable by theological determination or by the past and the laws of nature. Conceptions of divine providence, whether or not they endorse free will, are challenged by moral wrongdoing and natural evil that appear not to be justified by any good to which they contribute. Responses to the problem of evil, e.g. theodicies, are not decisive, but they allow for rational hope that a providential God exists. There is a related hope that is rational on either theistic or atheistic presuppositions, a counterpart of John Dewey’s “common faith,” a faith in the survival and progress of humanity embedded in a thriving natural environment.

scholarly journals The issue of practical discourse: substantiation of moral norms

2021 ◽  
Vol 62 ◽  
pp. 129-142
Author(s):  
Nikolay I. Gubanov ◽  
Nikolay N. Gubanov
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
External World ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
Ethical Theories ◽  
Value Judgments ◽  
Cognitive Approach ◽  
Logical Foundations ◽  
Moral Standards ◽  
The Mind

The paper provides analysis of the main problem of practical discourse — the issue of substantiation of moral standards — and addresses logical foundations of the so-called principle or law of D. Hume, according to which a logical transition from “is” to “should” is impossible, that is, from descriptive judgments to normative ones. The study shows that this law does not exclude all ethical theories, but only those that justify the norms of morality, deducing them from any realities of the external world: laws of nature, direction of evolution, objective course of history, etc. Hume only limits the methods of substantiating normative propositions, but does not exclude the very possibility of justifying them. The authors discuss various types and attempts to substantiate value judgments and propose to use a new concept of normative correctness. They also perform analysis of cognitive and non-cognitive concepts (I. Kant, C. Bayer, M. Singer, D. Rawls, P. Lorenzen, E. Tugendhad, Karl-Otto Apel, J. Habermas). The paper gives preference to the cognitive approach, and within its framework — the ethics of discourse developed by J. Habermas. The central point in the ethics of discourse is the principle of universalization, which is discussed in detail. The study shows that the principle of universalization and other provisions of the ethics of discourse seem to be well-founded, and the approach itself is the most promising of all other modern ethical undertakings. It also attests to the fact that the ethics of discourse is best suited to the spirit of genuine democracy. As the authors conclude, one way to persuade people to exercise free will and to apply the principle of universalization is through enlightenment, appealing to the mind, and demonstrating that a program to substantiate the ethics of discourse is the best in clarifying our everyday moral intuitions and defending democracy.

scholarly journals A deterministic worldview promotes approval of state paternalism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivar Hannikainen ◽  
Gabriel Cabral ◽  
Edouard Machery ◽  
Noel Struchiner
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Personal Autonomy ◽  
Personal Choice ◽  
Scientific Explanations ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
State Paternalism

The proper limit to paternalist regulation of citizens' private lives is a recurring theme in political theory and ethics. In the present study, we examine the role of beliefs about free will and determinism in attitudes toward libertarian versus paternalist policies. Throughout five studies we find that a scientific deterministic worldview reduces opposition toward paternalist policies, independent of the putative influence of political ideology. We suggest that exposure to scientific explanations for patterns in human behavior challenges the notion of personal autonomy and, in turn, undermines libertarian arguments against state paternalism appealing to autonomy and personal choice.

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