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| | Thomas Reid |
 | | Reid does not rest content to defend the claim that human beings are the efficient causes of their own behavior by responding to the best objections to it; he also provides three positive arguments for the claim which he labels, prosaically, the ‘first ’, ‘second ’ and ‘third argument for moral liberty ’. |
 | | Reid accepts that the qualities which we ordinarily conceive objects to have — whether shapes, sizes and motions, on the one hand, or colors, sounds, tastes and smells, on the other — are genuinely possessed by those objects (barring illusions and disorders of various sorts, which are, incidentally, difficult for Reid to explain). |
 | | When Reid was writing, most, perhaps all, philosophers who denied that human beings were the efficient causes of their own behavior, but who nonetheless took us to be morally accountable, were drawn to conceptions of the purpose of punishment that do not require power on the part of the recipient for punishment to be appropriate. |
| plato.stanford.edu /entries/reid (12748 words) |
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