Argumentative Essay On Dualism

The ideas of dualism have drastic impacts on historical and contemporary philosophy, many of those effects in my view are negative. It would take far more time than I have available to express the totality of my disagreements with dualism so for now, I will focus on dualism and ethics, more specifically, ethics in relation to free will. As must always come before a proper argument definitions are in order. For the purposes of this paper I will be using the term “Dualism” to refer to “the idea that the mind is separate and distinct from the physical body yet maintains at least a unidirectional transfer of information” While there may be some dualists who would take issue with this definition (for example some proponents of epiphenomenalism who believe the mind is separate from the body but that it has no

Is it true that ethical obligation dies along with free will? If we take something of an Aristotelian approach I don’t believe it does. Aristotle's idea of virtue is excellence in function or “practice” and it seems as if from all sides of ethics this is quite portable. The Kantian believes they must be excellent in their function of rationality, the utilitarian believes they must be excellent in their function of utility, so on so forth. Regardless of which ethical stance we wish to take if it is proven that some action/consequence is more ethically preferable than another moral obligation can still survive the death of free will. Even if we take the most deterministic stance possible and claim humans are just meat computers that still doesn’t eliminate the possibility of right and wrong answers. Any calculator that outputs 2+2=5 is clearly malfunctioning (acting poorly in its function) and if humans are meat computers it does not rule out the possibility that some outputs will just be better than others. Therefore so long as one “output” is better than another we can still say it is right and preferable for us to give that