> 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.
> 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 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.
> if punishment doesn't work, we can stop wasting time on it and expend our energy on more constructive responses
You assume we can choose which direction to go towards. With no free will, we have as much choice in expending our energy as offenders had in committing offenses. It's absurd to state 'we can' or 'we should' while assuming a fully deterministic world.
> If the universe is deterministic, how can punitive justice be justified?
Determinism doesn't necessarily mean that organisms always act in the same way. They act in the same way given the exact configuration of them and the world.
Obviously, justice changes the configuration of an organism (fines, prison, ...).
To me it boils down to the question whether justice decreases the likelihood to commit crimes again. Given that our systems of justice have evolved over a long time, I'd give them the benefit of the doubt.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> The fact that I was determined to choose to lift my arm doesn't seem relevant to whether the thought caused my arm to lift.
It is relevant to the moral implications, however. 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. It may still be morally tolerable to use them for rehabilitative or preventative means, but if you accept that they had no agency in the decisions, then applying more restrictions than the minimum needed to protect society seems to create another victim.
> It seems like, punishment would need to be interpreted purely as societal cost. So you tally up the wreckage from the car accident example above, say $25,000 and 2 lives.
I don't think so. I think determinism makes "punishment" as a concept, completely nonsensical--you can't punish someone for something they didn't choose to do. I think determinism pushes the focus to rehabilitation rather than punishment, which for many types of crimes (i.e. drug use, computer hacking, nonviolent robbery) is clearly more effective in preventing recidivism (and I'd argue that for crimes where it's not effective, that we haven't really explored rehabilititation because of the widespread belief in free will).
> I don't really see how we can have both manslaughter and murder, without free will. What extra thing did the angry guy do? He didn't make a choice, because (for the sake of argument) he has no free will. What is the characteristic that makes what he did worse? The cost to society is the same.
Agreed. But does this highlight a problem with a deterministic world view, or does it highlight a problem with the distinction between manslaughter and murder?
>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.
> In general, I think all forms of justice in the west are based on free will being true. If some form of determinism is true, then "punishment" doesn't make sense.
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.
> You say you disagree, but what you describe is not what I meant. My point is exactly to argue that if people could not have acted differently, punishing people for the sake of causing them suffering in retribution rather than for another purpose such as rehabilitation or deterrence is no morally different than enacting the same on someone who had not carried out a crime.
If it wasn't clear, I was disagreeing that "punishment as vengeance" is the primary motive for punitive justice, while pointing out some grounds typically used to justify it (deterrence mainly). I think reducing punitive justice to vengeance is largely a strawman.
Furthermore, I'll just note that Fankfurt refuted the principle of alternate possibilities decades ago, so I don't find this particular quality you ascribe to free will meaningful.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> With no notion of free will, how do we distinguish between manslaughter and murder?
I'd argue that the distinction is not indicative of a phenomenon that exists.
I think a much better model would be predictive and preventive rather than punitive--the level assignment to rehabilitation should be based on the probability and severity of recidivism, rather than the level of punishment being based on the severity of the crime.
> But if there is no free will in the choices we make, what's the point of punishing people
What's the point of hitting a ball to score a goal if the ball had no free will and it was moving deterministically?
You punish people in order to provide incentives for people that would align with society's goals.
Human being, having the input and knowledge that they would get punished, would make them avoid doing certain things.
"Deserves" is just a way to provide some idea of a framework on what is the behaviour expected from people for society to perform at its best, together.
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.
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