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The Ground Every Doctrine of Moral Accountability Needs

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The Ground Every Doctrine of Moral Accountability Needs

Libertarian free will is the position nearly every tradition's account of sin, merit, and moral accountability quietly assumes, since praising or condemning a choice seems to require that the person could genuinely have chosen otherwise, not merely that they did what prior causes, divine or physical, always guaranteed they would do; this is exactly why theological determinism, whether Calvinist predestination or a strict reading of divine foreknowledge, has generated centuries of internal religious controversy over whether it can be squared with genuine human responsibility at all.

Compatibilists argue the whole worry is misplaced, since freedom worth wanting never required this strong, causally uncaused kind of choice in the first place, only the absence of external coercion; libertarians reply that compatibilist freedom is freedom in name only, a watered-down substitute for what moral responsibility actually requires. The position's own hardest problem remains locating a coherent, non-random source for an undetermined choice, since an event with no sufficient cause at all looks, to determinist critics, indistinguishable from mere chance, however much libertarians insist that a reasons-responsive agent choosing among live options is something other than a coin flip.

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