> The absence of free will forces us to stop judging people..
Why would that be?
If A harms B, then your argument is that B has no right to retaliate it, because, that A should harm B was inevitable, and was totally out of the control of A.
But my argument is that just like A's harming B was inevitable, so is B's judgement of A and the further retaliation in response to the A's action..Inevitable.
In other words, the world should just go on as it is, even in the total absence of free will. What is important, I think, like many other things, is the 'appearance' of having free will. Because without that, all life looses it's meaning.
> If A harms B, then your argument is that B has no right to retaliate it
Yes and no. Yes, because no judgment allowed means no punishment allowed. But: the correct answer to A's action would be a sanction against A, in the sense that it would prevent A from harming again in the future. The wrong answers are: judgment, retaliation, punishment, revenge.
> In other words, the world should just go on as it is
It will. And it's also exactly what's happening here.
> What is important, I think, like many other things, is the 'appearance' of having free will. Because without that, all life looses it's meaning.
Not to worry, we'll always have this appearance, because causes and effects work on every macro and micro level. No system of sensors will ever be able to measure all variable, no model will ever be able to include all variables and no computer will ever be powerful enough to model everything. So, the magic remains.
> If they have no free will, there is absolutely no justification for punishing them.
This presumes a very specific sets of views on morality. One might argue that it makes whatever reaction you feel like justified, because it was not a choice. Certainly if we can't punish you for hitting someone, we can't punish the person you hit if they hit back.
Others would argue that while it would remove the moral justification for retribution, free will or not does not need to affect the moral argument for punishment as a means to reduce the chance of reoffending or even general effects on the rest of the population.
Free will only affects whether or not you had any immediate control over what you did, not on the effects it had on society, nor to what extent you pose a future risk or whether failure to punish you affects the future risks to society from others, all of which are factors in peoples views on the extent to which punishment is moral.
> If you agree that the process that led to an action was deterministic, then it's entirely unreasonable to use punishments as vengeance, for example.
I disagree, punishment could still be justified if it were effective at deterring or altering future behavior, particularly if it were more effective than any other alternative. You can make a straightforward utilitarian calculation for this, for example.
In any case, the matter of justice is separate from the question of free will. Once you have free will, you still require further assumptions to argue for punitive or restorative justice.
> E.g. if you genuinely believe the notion that we have free will is nonsense (and I do), then the logical extension is to be very uncomfortable with the notion of e.g. prison used for vengeance or anything at all other than to the bare minimal extent required to protect others, because the logical conclusion of thinking people don't have agency is that there was no way other than other external stimuli in their lives that they could have come out making other decisions.
I think this lacks imagination for human cruelty. If they had no free choice but to steal my things, then I guess I don't have any free choice but to torture them in revenge. Hard determinism does not erase the possibility of punishment.
> Either the universe is fully deterministic and free will and agency do not exist, and we should be much kinder to people who e.g. commit crimes (they were forced to do it by their brain state, after all)...
I don't think that's consistent, as the same reasoning applies to the people (i.e. the 'we' in your statement) who will, in some way or perhaps not at all, censure the perpetrator of said crime.
In other words, if full determinism removes agency from the perpetrator, then it also removes it from everyone else.
> The argument that people need to believe in free will to be good people hasn't been proven fundamentally true.
I did not make that argument. I only argued that having free will or not makes no difference as long as we cannot tell whether we have it. Even supposing we all believed none of us has free will, it doesn't follow that we wouldn't agree to have rules. It also doesn't follow that believing we have or might have free will is what makes us behave well, but having rules does seem to help that.
As to fairness, there's also fairness to the rest of society -- if a person cannot help but commit crimes, then maybe they shouldn't be free to do so. You might think that unfair to the criminal, but it is certainly better for everyone else. Call this whatever you want, but it is pretty much how all societies work, from the most primitive to the most modern -- we have rules, and we seek to enforce them.
>From societies perspective there is no difference between someone with free will choosing bad (illegal) decisions from a bad entity programmed to make bad decisions.
Says who? Those strike me as different. Society could certainly choose to recognize them as different.
>Intent is exactly what is fair to punish someone for. What can be fairer?
It isn't fair if people have no control over their intentions, which they don't if they don't have free will.
You're mistaken. Free will is needed to identify who the criminal is in any given situation, ie. who are the morally responsible parties. You can't escape that with the arguments you presented, and you just skipped it to talk about justice, which is a whole separate matter.
> I am less sure about the idea of assigning blame in general, especially as I am pretty convinced that free will does not exist.
Of course it doesn't, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't incentivize or disincentivize certain behaviours by assigning blame to the correct source of the behaviour. I case of religion it makes sense to assign blame to religion instead of treating people as cruel, since the way to remove the source of suffering is through removing religion itself, not the cruelty of the person (since the cruelty is likely not present).
>You're missing the last step that closes the loop: in order for society to exist and function, moral blame is essential. Therefore some notion of moral responsibility for breaking the law must be imposed, so we invent some quasi-free will notion that's compatible with determinism in order to do this.
If your argument that it is necessary for the public to believe in free will (because of the negative consequences if they don't), regardless of whether or not it actually exists, then that's different. I thought you were arguing that free will must necessarily exist because of those consequences. I apologise and withdraw.
> does that not mean there is no free will, and therefore that morality does not exist
Or in other words, free will is necessary for morality to exist. I beg to differ.
Morality can be evaluated at population level - do the actions of an agent hurt or help the others? Punishment can be seen as simply compensating for bad influences in society.
If you look at game theory you can see how behavior relates to cooperation or betrayal, how these are also related to the context, and how society needs to weed out those who betray it.
>> Any discussion of my responsibility for my actions must take into account my personal contribution to the decision as a being.
>> again whence comes responsibility?
The only reason I can think of to assign responsibility is to "correctly" respond. Particularly in the form of reward or punishment. But if a person is not responsible for their actions, then neither is anyone responding to them. "Responsibility" comes from some sense of morality, which doesn't really exist without free will does it?
> I would argue that is because the conception of morality you are using happens to be compatible with the resulting morals that I believe arise from determinism here.
Indeed, we are coincidentally in agreement from a values perspective since my argument with respect to determinism could remain unchanged even if I e.g. favored a retributive system of justice.
> Given their lack of responsibility and control of their being, how do you design a society that treats them fairly
Any possible conception of fairness exists entirely with respect to the material circumstances of reality in the moment, the ethereal weight of determinism is not detectable on the scales of justice.
To put it another way, if we lived in a universe capable of libertarian free will, it would not follow logically that we should then amplify the needless suffering of criminals.
Imagine two criminals living in such a universe, both having committed identical crimes under identical circumstances, but only one is capable of libertarian free will... what changes? The deterministic criminal didn't choose to want to commit the crime, but he still wanted to commit the crime by following the same reasoning that the free criminal willed himself into, in every observable aspect of reality their motivations are equally damning. This is further compounded by the fact that both victims are equally harmed regardless of which criminal committed the crime. From the victim's perspective, two equally harmful acts should merit the same consequences, one victim does not suffer less because the crime was committed deterministiclly.
>The questions of what we optimize for are also highly impacted by free will/determinism.
> if you genuinely believe the notion that we have free will is nonsense (and I do), then the logical extension is to be very uncomfortable with the notion of e.g. prison used for vengeance or anything at all other than to the bare minimal extent required to protect others
Not really. You can view it as a game theoretic situation. Will the use of prison likely produce a good outcome or a bad outcome? Whether or not the criminal was deterministically required to commit the crime, the structure of punishments will (perhaps deterministically) affect the incidents and severity of future crimes.
Just because the creature in Black and White may have made decisions deterministically doesn't mean I won't punish it if it behaves in an inappropriate way. If anything, believing the agents are deterministic would make me even more keen to punish in situations where it will change behaviour usefully.
> This is to such an extent that I'd feel surprised to find anyone seriously try to justify it, which is why I didn't really engage with your apparent suggestion that it was an important justification.
I mean, a key example of how vengeance still plays into punishment is the level of support for capital punishment.
I'm glad we find it equally unjustified.
Also, I agree that you certainly can dismiss vengeance as a valid argument without dismissing free will, btw. - a lot of people who do believe in some variant of free will absolutely do reject vengeance. My point was more to offer up an example of something that is very hard to reconcile with rejecting free will.
> It's the intention that matters... to work as deterrent, to change them so that they won't repeat their crime in the future...to let people feel "they got what they deserved."
When I said "punishment" I meant the purely revenge version. I was basically working from that assumption, and this is what we'd been previously discussing.
So, I was purely speaking from a harm perspective. The argument is that it makes no sense to try to harm anyone, for any action, no matter how evil.
Without "free will" this is a violent act of senseless aggression against the innocent. Interestingly, if it's an animal we think it probably doesn't have "free will", however we accept this as a reason IN FAVOR of disregarding their rights (eg. the killer bear doesn't think and feel like us, just shoot it).
With modern sensibilities, you shouldn't hurt people unless they do something under their own "free will"; but this is never true, if we don't have "free will" to begin with.
So if an animal kills we use their lack of free will as a reason to kill them, but if a person doesn't have free will, then that's a reason they should be spared; doesn't this just seem like we've created another spiritual concept, to shape based on our cultural values.
P.S. Even arguing the inverse case, it's tempting to use lack of free will as a justification for leniency; at the same time you'll be very quick to use some form of it as a reason in favor of the sanctity of life.
> E.g. if you genuinely believe the notion that we have free will is nonsense (and I do), then the logical extension is to be very uncomfortable with the notion of e.g. prison used for vengeance or anything at all other than to the bare minimal extent required to protect others, because the logical conclusion of thinking people don't have agency is that there was no way other than other external stimuli in their lives that they could have come out making other decisions.
There's this dialog from some centuries ago (I guess it's from some Enlightenment philosopher?) that goes like this
- Guards, please, set this murderer free: he has no free will, so he can't be held responsible for his actions.
And the guard replies
- Uhm.. no. But if I'm making a mistake, don't worry: per your own explanation, I can't be held responsible for it either.
Why would that be?
If A harms B, then your argument is that B has no right to retaliate it, because, that A should harm B was inevitable, and was totally out of the control of A.
But my argument is that just like A's harming B was inevitable, so is B's judgement of A and the further retaliation in response to the A's action..Inevitable.
In other words, the world should just go on as it is, even in the total absence of free will. What is important, I think, like many other things, is the 'appearance' of having free will. Because without that, all life looses it's meaning.
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