It does. When we look at criminals we nowadays take into account medical and psychological conditions, we are aware that people are not always in full control of what they are doing. This is obviously a weaker form than full blown determinism, but we certainly take into account that people are not completely free in their actions at all times. Similarly the assumption of a deterministic universe will influence ethics and morality, even though it will of course not be the only thing under consideration. [1]

[1] Ignoring the big complication that talking about considerations and things like that in a deterministic universe is itself something that needs a lot of care.

Because I think only one has moral relevancy, not all three. I've been saying it's a mistake to conflate the others with the one specific to moral responsibility.

> The only thing needed [in hard determinism] is causality in order to find the ideal "organization" of the world to optimize for whatever factors are settled on by other parts of the argument.

The "ideal organization" necessarily designate faulty parts which don't conform to the ideal, and so the parts that require rehabilitation. That's blame however you want to spin it.

> To Bambrough's child surgery example, I think that only shows that that moral fact is true only subjectively to humans - it's not an "objective" moral truth. It is derived from the traits of a human, and the example generally works because it takes a clear cut case we can all agree on.

I think you're missing the forest for the trees by mistaking an existential claim for a universal claim. Suppose we swap out the human child with an alien that doesn't feel pain as we do, but has an adverse reaction to some other stimulus. The same argument applies by parity of reasoning. You're focused on the specifics of the human case, but the moral fact in that case is just an instance of a more general principle from which this fact derives.

It's like I'm pointing out 1+2=3, that's a fact, an instance of the general rule of addition. You then agree that 1+2=3, but gotcha, 1+3!=3, therefore 1+2=3 is not a general fact applicable to all numbers. No argument there, but it was never suggested as such.

> I suspect definition will be the issue here again - are "moral facts" derived from the combination of human traits and our perspective considered objective or subjective?

"Objective" means "mind independent", which is to say, that any form of intelligence will reach the same conclusions given the same understanding.

Any intelligence will reach the same conclusion that a human child undergoing a painful surgery ought to be given anesthetic, all else being equal, assuming they fully understand the meaning of every word in that sentence.

I think this gives ethicists the task of accepting deterministic reality the way it's always been, and developing a moral framework that is in harmony with that reality. Morals can still exist without the principle of free will, just like they can exist without God dictating a list of 10 commandments. Murder can still be wrong without free will, just like it can still be wrong without God saying so.

No argument here, but knowing them still seems useful to humans. So in relation to humans, those terms and ideas are 100% needed. You're taking moral nihilism and jumping straight to general nihilism without any steps.

> Arguments for determinism always have these "answers" to morality, but the only convincing one is moral nihilism.

Error theory is a form of moral nihilism - what are you exactly disagreeing with here?

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The bigger question is where you go from that moral nihilism. There is nothing that says just because our formal definitions of morality are false that the entire world doesn't matter. I still care for my happiness and life. So do many others. We need both this idea and these further terms and ideas in order to be able to answer the questions we were originally attempting to answer with objective morality because those problems did not magically go away.

Subjectivisms (both individualist and things like cultural relativism) and error theory are perfectly compatible with determinism. I personally ascribe to and argue for error theory which essentially leads to moral psychology actually dictating what ethics are. Based on that, it's quite easy to get to "murder is bad" via human traits like empathy and our social nature.

You've just made another coincidental compatibility here, so I'm curious - how did you arrive at only valuing material circumstances? For me, that is explicitly derived from following determinism into meta-ethics which then follows into a consequentialist physicalist view.

> 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.

That's a different argument. Something else has to underpin that, and I would again be curious what that is, and if that also shares compatibility.

> The questions of what we optimize for are also highly impacted by free will/determinism. > How so?

I'm still formulating this fully, but essentially it follows from determinism that objective ethics essentially don't exist (I go with error theory here), which then passes off all of practical ethical meaning to the physical state of the universe in relation to what all beings care about, which I suspect is the step that ends up causing much of the coincidence. So for morality, things that humans (and other beings, but we'll set them aside for now) care about are ethics. I tend to focus on happiness, empathy, and fairness, but there's of course a lot more there. Generally, it means moral psychology actually informs ethics quite a bit.

Since I suspect this isn't going to change anything you specifically believe given the compatibility seen elsewhere, let me highlight some specific ethical views that immediately come under intense pressure from those conclusions:

- basically all deontology (Immanuel Kant and others)

- virtue ethics are then limited to admitting to being a practical compromise at best (originally Aristotle but virtue ethics has been on the rise in many modern debates, and this could 100% shape those)

- even many forms of consequentialism make arguments to optimize for a singular thing or one somewhat removed from humans. This highlights the optimization function is not on a single or even a few variables given that humans don't have a single psychological focus. Or maybe we do and we should be spending more of our time in ethics doing psychological research. But all of this derives originally from that conclusion on determinism.

Basically, even a small difference in underpinning can still lead to different focuses and conclusions down the chain of course.

(And so it's particularly frustrating that they didn't bother addressing our work pointing out why they are wrong: https://philpapers.org/rec/MANWIT-6 )

Debatable and depends on the choice of either deontological or consequentialist theory of ethics.

As a hard determinist, you'll have to re-invent concepts of pseudo-moral blame in order to justify rehabilitation for those who break the law rather than simply changing the law itself to accomodate rule breakers, at which point you've just reinvented free will and called it something else.

Moral error theory has problems of its own, so I don't think these all hang together very nicely.

Objectivism does not.

1. I feel like we keep talking in circles on the definitional aspect. I'm with you on the many definitions causing confusion and I would love to see expanded vocabulary around this. But you haven't said anything to convince me against the idea that all three have moral relevancy in various ways.

2. To be clear, I do not believe hard determinism needs any sort of pseudo-blame to be workable, at least how I understand you are using that term. The only thing needed is causality in order in order to find the ideal "organization" of the world to optimize for whatever factors are settled on by other parts of the argument.

3. I actually agree with you on the lack of convincing of 1 and 3 for error theory (slightly different reasons but details not needed), but the argument from queerness seems to fit quite well. I'm not sure what part you're claiming is misunderstood.

4. The mentioned "justifications" on hard determinism are going the wrong way logically - you don't decide if something is true by if you need it to make morals that look nice, you follow what is true and see the results, and only then can you "check your work" with a sanity test. You've seem to cut off your thoughts on determinism before ever getting to a point where it actually produced a full set of moral ideas to check in favor of compatabilism simply because it produced something that passed said check, but if the underlying principle is false that's simply a coincidental state. Obviously you've also personally eliminated error theory, which is the core of our disagreement.

As to justice, I fully agree on that being way oversimplified. For context, looking ahead, my theories on morality out of error theory basically lead to a consequentialist version of Rawls, so that's about where I stand re justice, with some nuance.

> I think there are reasons to think we already know some moral facts.

Can you give examples? Single or multiple, whatever you think is more useful in this context. I don't see how we get to moral facts without them being tied back subjectively to humans, which either invalidates the objectivism tract (now we're back at arguing metaethics fully) or you'd have to get there from the error theory route I've been talking about.

To Bambrough's child surgery example, I think that only shows that that moral fact is true only subjectively to humans - it's not an "objective" moral truth. It is derived from the traits of a human, and the example generally works because it takes a clear cut case we can all agree on.

All of this reasoning is still useful to an error theorist, but it is laid on the groundwork that morality is subjective to the state of humans/beings. If you mean to say that this is objective, then there is basically infinite moral facts in existence, we just debate them because humans and society are complex. That is to me the precise meaning of that "optimal organization" I reference, which is essentially that collection of all true moral facts, which I would argue are always subjective to the deterministic state of the world. Change anything about the world, and you likely change ethics itself. The argument from queerness highlights that without our perspective and values, objective morality wouldn't exist at all.

I suspect definition will be the issue here again - are "moral facts" derived from the combination of human traits and our perspective considered objective or subjective? To me, that is subjective and then the combinations of subjectiveness along with the lack of inherent meaning or value produces a single objective level practical morality. I can understand the argument to classify that set of things itself as objective morality, but I think that weakens the base of the argument needlessly.

You skipped the more relevant application in this case though - not the treatment of criminals, but, to get a bit minority report here, the treatment of pre-criminals. Given their lack of responsibility and control of their being, how do you design a society that treats them fairly? What is fair? How much effort does morality dictate we owe to their happiness?

The lack of moral responsibility doesn't change the real world effects or causal responsibility, you're right there. However, these questions get very different answers based on if the world has formalized free will or not.

Essentially, if you accept determinism, society becomes a configuration optimization game. The questions of what we optimize for are also highly impacted by free will/determinism.

> you don't need to invoke a lack of free will to justify humane treatment of criminals.

There are absolutely many ways to get here, I'm simply pointing out determinism also leads to it as a data point that determinism can lead to moralities that pass the sanity check. Many, including the author if this piece, write off or get very worried about that issue.

Do you have any particular ethics in mind? There is a vast range of positions, almost any position that can coherently be defended has been defended by one author or another. Some of them are by definition not culturally biased, for example many forms of utilitarianism, whereas others are strongly emphasizing that ethics requires a great deal of contextual understanding, for example Dancy's particularism.

I just wonder why you address these particular points, because it's more common to hear the opposite criticisms, that ethics is unable to provide any sensible guideline because there is too much persistent disagreement between ethicists (Mackie's error theory), or because contemporary ethics is too relativist.

I agree 100%. However, you are mismatching objective moral truth with subjective moral truth. I am saying that once you realize the lack of objective moral truth/existence, all that is left is the subjective. Human nature then essentially requires it to become a collective subjective. Subjective preferences of all being essentially become the practical "morality". That's what I am referring to here, not the objective morality that does not and cannot logically exist.

Morality is derived not from the physical world but from our own moral psychology. If we change humans in any way, we change morality. And thus morality is also different for every human. Traits like our social nature, empathy, and equal lack of inherent meaning then morph the problem into a collective/intertwined singular subjective morality based on the world state itself.

> - but your happiness is already determined. There is nothing you can do to increase or decrease it, it will be what it will be based on the initial conditions.

This is where you conflate determinism / free will with agency / choice, which are not the same thing. We do not have the ability to see our future choices and path, so we still have to "function" through it, even if it's a set path. And the questions we have to answer along the way are the reason we looked into morality in the first place, and are no less important or worth of time and effort.

> It seems, in general, that you need to cling to ethics as a way to convince your belief in determinism - to cover up for its deficiencies, you have to find a way to convince people that ethics still matter, despite continual argument that it doesn't.

You've got the wrong direction of how philosophy works - I started with determinism at the base, I'm simply asking what it leads to. You're only disagreeing with what comes after moral nihilism, but you've made no actual argument other than "no it's not that way". I'd truly love to understand more what your critique of my steps after is.