Epicurus on determinism and free will

“The good Epicurean believes that certain events occur deterministically, that others are chance events, and that still others are in our own hands.

He sees also that necessity cannot be held morally responsible and that chance is an unpredictable thing, but that what is in our own hands, since it has no master, is naturally associated with blameworthiness and the opposite.

Actually it would be better to subscribe to the popular mythology than to become a slave by accepting the determinism of the natural philosophers, because popular religion underwrites the hope of supplicating the gods by offerings, but determinism contains an element of necessity, which is inexorable.”

(Letter to Menoeceus, II)

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