As a "hard determinist" Spinoza held that the state of the universe at any time was determined by its state at earlier times and laws of nature so that we lacked the sort of free will required for moral responsibility. As a consequence, he said, the more we understood, the less we blamed. Recognising that human actions, like all other events in the natural world, had deterministic, physical causes we would see that notions of responsibility, guilt and blame were, at best, fictions. Mark Stroman should not have been executed: the more we understand, the less we blame.
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