A Causal Network Response to Strawson's Determinism

  1. We accept Strawson's premise that all human actions are determined by prior causes outside our ultimate control ("luck swallows everything").

  2. Rather than changing the definition of free will or moral responsibility, we propose that moral responsibility exists as a property of causal relationships themselves.

  3. Moral agents are nodes in a causal network whose specific causal signatures make meaningful contributions to outcomes.

  4. Humans aren't special by being exempt from causation, but by having particularly complex and influential causal signatures within the network.

  5. A person's moral responsibility stems not from their ability to have done otherwise, but from their position as a distinctive and significant causal factor in producing outcomes.

  6. Just as we can meaningfully say a knife with poor design bears some responsibility for an injury without changing the meaning of "responsibility," humans bear responsibility without requiring contra-causal freedom.

  7. The difference between a murderer and a knife is one of complexity and scope of causal influence, not a metaphysical difference in kind.

  8. Punishment and praise are justified not because people "deserve" them in some ultimate sense, but because they are appropriate responses to certain types of causal nodes that can influence future causal patterns.

  9. Moral growth consists not in developing some metaphysical free will, but in modifying one's causal signature to contribute more positively to the causal network.

  10. This framework preserves moral responsibility within Strawson's determinism without redefining free will, by distributing responsibility across the causal network rather than requiring it to originate outside causation.

  11. We can acknowledge that luck swallows everything while still maintaining that what happens inside luck's mouth matters morally.

  12. The approach respects both the logical implications of determinism and our deeply held intuitions about responsibility by locating responsibility in the causal relationships themselves rather than in some escape from causation.