Una 'pietra fondamentale' della morale?. L’etica senza libero arbitrio

A 'Foundation Stone' of Morals? Ethics without Free Will · According to Kant, that the thinking self is free in its voluntary actions is one of the foundation stones of morals and religion; if empiricism is true, then moral ideas and principles lose all validity. Such a sharp conclusion was flatly rejected by Sidgwick, who argued that accepting determinism changes nothing in the content or the validity of morality. The paper argues that, while Sidgwick was right in showing that morality needs not break down with the belief in libertarian free will, nonetheless to accept universal determinism deeply affects the meaning of human action and of moral evaluation. It substantially modifies the sense of our deliberative practice, of our notion of moral responsibility, and of our deontic judgments; moreover, it also tends to modify our normative conceptions, by depriving deontological theories of one of the main argum ents in their favour.