Implications of The Doctrine of Double Effect in Captain America: Civil War

The movie Captain America: Civil War contains a battle scene that serves as a case study on the mechanics and implications of the Doctrine of Double Effect (DoDE). The DoDE was developed to determine morally permissible responses in situations that lead to both good and bad consequences. The DoDE entails trade-offs, where the good outcomes favor the actors (those committing the responses), and the bad effects are to the detriment of all others.

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Arguments Against Moral Determinism

The premise of determinism is that, just as the physical laws of the universe prescribe all matters of cause and effect (past, present and future), by extension, morality is predetermined. We do not exercise free will, rather, we act according to baked-in moral principles (known or unknown), that mechanistically trigger consequents based on given antecedents.

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Are Possible Worlds Concrete or Abstract?

Concretism, ala David Lewis (et al), is the view that all objects in the physical universe stand in relationship to one another in space-time, from beginning to end. The “actual world” we experience is an “indexical” of all other possible worlds. While other (concrete) worlds are possible, the “me” in this world is different from a counterpart in another world. If two worlds were to “collide”—a plotline in some writings—they would constitute one and the same world. In the spirit of Occam’s Razor, this view does not require some other invention to explain the state of affairs in one world versus another.

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