interplayintricate dance between divine providence and our personal moral reckoning.
Sometimes important philosophical questions wind up sounding like something a teenager would shout at parents through a closed bedroom door: What gives you the right to blame me?! or maybe *This is all really your fault — I didn’t ask to be born! *Patrick Todd, a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, thinks quite a bit about such questions, which lie at the intersection of free-will theology and what philosophers call the positionality of blame. Many religious traditions hold the theological position that humans will be called to account for their good and bad deeds, and most non-theists offer a conception of moral responsibility. But if free will is an illusion — if our actions are pre-determined, whether by cascading chemical and physical contingencies or by divine preordination — can we really be fairly blamed for our worst acts or lauded for our best ones?
“How could that be appropriate,” Todd asks, “if everything that we do is some in some way orchestrated by God or controlled by God? It would seem that God is both the person who sets up the actions and then criticizes the actions.”