Abstract:George Eliot often uses the language of determinism in her novels, but we do not understand her view very well by treating such phrasing as addressing debates about the freedom of will directly. Instead she uses seemingly deterministic terms, like the 'law of consequences', to depict and analyse a particular problem in moral psychology: those instances where we ourselves make it impossible to act on our own best judgements. When we fail to act on our best judgement, this has downstream effects, since it can pr… Show more
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