Speaking Past Anon or "A Footnote of My Own"

Regrettably, I believe I articulated only poorly my position on determinism during the conversation with Q that he references in his last post. My point about determinism wasn't that it shouldn't have a practical effect on our treatment of human beings as "sentient, responsible individuals with moral agency", it was rather that determinism (regardless of its truth value) simply doesn't have any practical effect on our treatment of human beings as moral agents.

I want to say that whether or not the universe is deterministic is a moot point of academic interest at most, and I want to say this because the assumption of agency undergirds virtually all human social practices - even, especially, that of rational discourse.

That is to say that the determinist, when he argues for a deterministic universe, does so within a framework undergirded by the idea that human beings have some sort of substantial agency. For practices such as giving and accepting reasons, coming to conclusions, making distinctions between good and bad arguments, etc. to be sensible, a prima facie assumption of agency must exist; and this assumption does much to work against the argument of the determinist, who is at pains not to find some sort of notion of agency Trojan Horsed into his position (it is the rare determinist, after all, who hasn't contemplated the implications of how we ought to behave towards one another, if, indeed, our reality is a deterministic one; a concern, which, when examined, is obviously senseless.)

This, of course, doesn't mean that the universe isn't deterministic. It just means that the notion of a deterministic universe, when taken seriously, is largely incoherent from our current, human, perspective.