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.

Not really, because you've just done away with moral blame. If there can be no moral blame, then the moral classification of actions has no meaning.

Can you elaborate on why the space is simply too large to make this a possibility? From my observations of people suffering from severe addictions, it seems entirely possible that they have no agency when it comes to combating their addiction. They either are completely unable to grok the consequences of their actions or unable to choose actions that they know will benefit themselves.

> The mistake you and others who argue against free will make, is that you assume moral blameworthiness necessarily entails punishment

I don't think GP assumes moral blameworthiness necessarily entails punishment. I think, rather, he assumes that immoral acts are worthy of punishment. That is, if we happen to decide to punish a certain set of actions, we should punish immoral actions. I think this is a fair assumption. The primary goal of morality discussions is to determine which actions we want to strive for and which actions we want to avoid.

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.

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.

Who said that? In fact, I said that this exact argument is a mistake, conflating free will with retributive justice.

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.

It's only logical assuming free willing agents making logical choices.

Else, it's only automatic and predetermined, like everything else.

>Either you have negative stimuli to it from something more direct, such as in my situation, or perhaps just because of social pressure and the desire to conform, but morality still comes into existence from the causal nature of reality.

No, it doesn't. Morality (as we understand it) only comes into existence if we assume a causal nature PLUS free agents (not totally bound to that causal nature).

Else, there's no morality to a murder anymore than there's a morality to the formation of Earth. Both are events destined to do by the initial state of the universe in the big bang.

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.

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.

Yes. Because I have free will and chose to. In my experience, one's religious beliefs have no bearing on whether they act morally or not.

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.

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.

In other words, you acknowledge that you have no moral justification for assigning blame, you simply do it out of convenience. That's weak sauce IMO.

Giving up cognitivism and moral realism is very problematic on multiple levels, and your response hand waves away these other problems IMO [1]. You just end up reinventing free will and calling it something different.

For people that accept that moral propositions actually have truth values (most people), assigning blame requires free will, and ultimately, we end up in the same place anyway, just with a bunch more people being confused about why we have new jargon that serves the exact same function as the old jargon.

[1] Edit: for instance, life no longer has any intrinsic value, so you can justify all sorts of morally repugnant conclusions, like that totalitarian regimes are justifiable, or that a government should only care about the death rate of its citizens in order to keep it low enough to prevent widespread revolt.

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).

>> 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?

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.

How so?

People want to deeply believe this as true. I find it false because I see free will as an illusion. Majority of people think free will exists. Agreement on ethics cannot exist with this conflict because it inherently effects morality.

Isn't that backwards? Believing that someone is inherently bad is effectively equal to them having no free will and their fate being determined. You can swap out "born with an evil soul" for "genetic predisposition and early environmental factors".

If you really did replace the judicial system with one based on the view that free will does not exist, would the solution to habitual criminals be to simply separate them from the rest of society for life since they have no ability to determine their own actions? If instead you think they can be externally influenced by rehabilitation then how is this different from having a compassionate view of criminal behaviour that could include free will? Having free will doesn't mean that a person will always make the correct choice or even the moral choice, we're limited and imperfect after all.