Philosophy Now Forum

phyllo wrote: ↑Tue Aug 08, 2023 10:18 pm
It terminates a discussion, since there is no true/false evaluation to anything that is said. All is babble.

No, our discussions continue. And they are hardly construed by us to be babble. Same with the discussions I have with others in my dreams. They are by and large entirely coherent.

That's probably because you don't actually believe it. Or, click, you pretend that you have free-will.

I certainly don't believe it.

But it does get tiresome when you bring it out as the answer to everything determinism/compatibilism.

It killed the 'Determinism' thread at IPL because you wrote it as a reply to almost everything that Peacegirl posted. Dozens, maybe hundreds of times. One could almost see her foaming at the mouth.

phyllo wrote: ↑Tue Aug 08, 2023 10:18 pm It terminates a discussion, since there is no true/false evaluation to anything that is said. All is babble.

It's hypocrisy to assert, unless it is presented as a fear, for example. It could terminate a discussion. And in any discussion it doesn't move things forward.
I see he says the discussions are coherent. Well, this is claming one can sort out coherent from incoherent and also that we are all being coherent.
That sounds like settled positive evaluation, so, yes, things can now move forward, at least potentially.

iambiguous wrote: ↑Tue Aug 08, 2023 11:59 pm

It sounds to me like all those words are just saying, in short, that to you compatibilism doesn't make sense.

Good. Fine. Lots of very bright, intelligent people don't think compatibilism makes sense. If you don't think compatibilism makes sense, that's allowed. I'm not going to try to make it make sense to you. I don't believe there's any sequence of words I could possibly say that could make it make sense to you. Much less demonstrate that it's true.

My goal here was much more achievable than that - just to clarify for you what compatibilism means. That it means, simply, that free will and determinism can be compatible, and that it doesn't mean making exceptions to determinism inside of bifurcated brains. If you understand that, but come away thinking compatibilism doesn't make sense, that's perfectly acceptable. I do not think you're intellectually or morally required to accept compatibilism or to even think it makes sense.

So, Compatibilism/Determinism and moral responsibility.

I don't like the abortion issue since it seems to presume the person would be immoral if they have free will.
But let's take murderer.

A guy's girlfriend breaks up with him and when she starts seeing a new guy, he goes to her apartment, breaks down the door and shoots her (after screaming, so the neighbors can hear, that she should have staying with him, that she's a slut because she's seeing someone else).

Is he morally responsible?

Morally: with reference to the principles of right and wrong behaviour.
Responsible: being the primary cause of something and so able to be blamed or credited for it. (often meaning 2 for responsible)

I think the catching point is 'primary cause'. The cause that is of chief importance.

I do think people who believe in determinism and even some versions of compatibilism could question responsibility as it is usually defined.

But in the end I think it makes sense to treat that guy as dangerous and segregate them from society. Maybe we think, when we are thinking in the abstract, less judgmentally about them. That is what they are. It's like getting angry at a tiger for killing you in the jungle. A natural reaction, but hey, it's a tiger. And this guy was someone who converted heartbreak or perhaps even what he considers insults to his ego into violence.

We need to keep that person away from other people. At least until the pattern can be changed, which I don't rule out.

So we could spend years fussing around with 'morally responsible', but I think in the end we are dealing with a person we need to do something about. And most of those somethings are going to look like punishments, even if we stop thinking of them that way.

Thinking in terms of determinism might lead us to spread that responisibility out more often then we would under a model with some kind of freedom. We might take measures also against parents, social groups, societal structures that we notice contribute to the actions of individuals.

I don't think the issue is irrelevant to what we do and how we conceive it. But in general, I think we will still end up dealing with many people as primary problem areas.

Of course our court systems have built in measures that can take into account mitigating factors and so on. Not that this is organized and much of it is at the whim of the very powerful (in their courts) judges. Our court system has an underlying mix of views about causation but it is made to see individuals as problems, and individual companies (especially on the litigation side of things).

And then on the social level, I see no reason for me, should I become a compatibilist or determinist, to suddenly drop my reactions to the guy in my example. I wouldn't want to be around him. I would want him segregated, as part of whatever measures are taken.

He is the guy who wanted to do X. He's that guy. Free or not free.

I think there is a kind of fallacy to say that his urges compelled him, since this sentence structure implies that those urges are not him. They are a part of him. His urges don't make other people do things. They are a part of his body's processes.
I don't like his tendencies. Even if I have sympathy for the feelings he had.

So at the interpersonal level I don't think compatibilism rules out lots of our currect reactions to other people or makes these reactions somehow hypocritical.

I think we should remember also, that free will would make actions random. Free will, in the traditional sense of not being caused by anything internal or external prior to the act/choice, would mean that we are all free at any moment to go against laws, rules, social pressures, our own desires and values and goals, our own emotions. Nothing guides our decisions. That makes us all potential muderers rapists assholes cannibals at any moment.

Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Wed Aug 09, 2023 10:33 am
A guy's girlfriend breaks up with him and when she starts seeing a new guy, he goes to her apartment, breaks down the door and shoots her (after screaming, so the neighbors can hear, that she should have staying with him, that she's a slut because she's seeing someone else).

Is he morally responsible?

For me, a fun and enlightening way to approach the question is to instead ask, "do we want to do something about it? And what would be the best thing to do about it?"

That goes for murder, for abortion, for whatever. Someone does something, and instead of asking something that can be almost irreducibly abstract like "is he morally responsible?", We ask, "what do we want to do about it? And does it make sense to do that thing about it? And would doing this thing about it stop it or prevent it from happening again?"

This allows me to bypass the question of "primary cause" in a neat way, while actually ANSWERING it in a perhaps more subtle way.

I'm going to leave it there, give you something to chew on while maintaining an air of mystery.

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Wed Aug 09, 2023 10:41 am For me, a fun and enlightening way to approach the question is to instead ask, "do we want to do something about it? And what would be the best thing to do about it?"

I think that's the core of my suggestion/reaction to the issue. We still want to do something. And I think that something will bear a lot of similarities to what we do now.

And then I added in the social aspects. I don't think these change so much either. Why should they?

To oversimplify most interpersonal problems: if someone slaps me in the face everytime I see him, I will dislike him immensely and avoid him. I'd warn others about this guy also.

We can decide after decades of discussion that we shouldn't use the phrase 'morally responsible' if determinism is the case. But I still would judge, dislike, avoid (and warn others about) him.

My judgment might be different, but things wouldn't look very different on the ground.

In a sense fussing over 'morally responsible' is up in the clouds, so I am joining you (or you, me) in focusing on the pragramtics measures.

Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Wed Aug 09, 2023 11:15 am
We can decide after decades of discussion that we shouldn't use the phrase 'morally responsible' if determinism is the case. But I still would judge, dislike, avoid (and warn others about) him.

Yeah, so for me, the vocabulary of morality becomes shorthand for all sorts of long winded stuff about "we want a society of people who behave in these ways and not these ways, how do we achieve that?"

Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Wed Aug 09, 2023 11:15 am

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Wed Aug 09, 2023 10:41 am For me, a fun and enlightening way to approach the question is to instead ask, "do we want to do something about it? And what would be the best thing to do about it?"

I think that's the core of my suggestion/reaction to the issue. We still want to do something. And I think that something will bear a lot of similarities to what we do now.

And then I added in the social aspects. I don't think these change so much either. Why should they?

To oversimplify most interpersonal problems: if someone slaps me in the face everytime I see him, I will dislike him immensely and avoid him. I'd warn others about this guy also.

We can decide after decades of discussion that we shouldn't use the phrase 'morally responsible' if determinism is the case. But I still would judge, dislike, avoid (and warn others about) him.

My judgment might be different, but things wouldn't look very different on the ground.

In a sense fussing over 'morally responsible' is up in the clouds, so I am joining you (or you, me) in focusing on the pragramtics measures.

You can see what's coming, right?

You could never not think that getting slapped in the face is bad.

You could never not dislike him.

You could never not judge him.

Then all the others who could never not react in a different way.

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Wed Aug 09, 2023 11:35 am Yeah, so for me, the vocabulary of morality becomes shorthand for all sorts of long winded stuff about "we want a society of people who behave in these ways and not these ways, how do we achieve that?"

I agree. In the past we have included condemnation/judgment. Which can be viewed as part of how we get what we want or as some objective value judgment of that person or both (or neither).

If absolute free will existed, one of the first humans would have already destroyed the world at least tens of thousands of years ago, just by wanting it. And since then the world would have been destroyed millions, billions of times over. Yet we are still here.

If there's free will, it's actually pretty small, limited. Small enough that the entire free will/determinism issue is irrelevant to the issue of moral responsibility. The real question is what hidden motivations people have for mixing these two issues.

phyllo wrote: ↑Wed Aug 09, 2023 11:59 am You can see what's coming, right?

You could never not think that getting slapped in the face is bad.

You could never not dislike him.

You could never not judge him.

Then all the others who could never not react in a different way.

Sure. Those are true. So, the hypothetical person responding this way would need to make clear: are these assertions, if held true, a criticism of what I said.

The last point about others who react different, that's true regardless of whether determinism (or subform compatibilism) or free will is the case. People are going to disagree. This thread is focused on whether we should hold someone morally responsible within compatibilism. So, it presumes an objective morality, for the sake of argument.

Does it even need to be objective? Can't we just subjectively decide that certain behaviours are abhorrent and it's worth building a society where they are curtailed somehow?

Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Wed Aug 09, 2023 12:17 pm

phyllo wrote: ↑Wed Aug 09, 2023 11:59 am You can see what's coming, right?

You could never not think that getting slapped in the face is bad.

You could never not dislike him.

You could never not judge him.

Then all the others who could never not react in a different way.

Sure. Those are true. So, the hypothetical person responding this way would need to make clear: are these assertions, if held true, a criticism of what I said.

The last point about others who react different, that's true regardless of whether determinism (or subform compatibilism) or free will is the case. People are going to disagree. This thread is focused on whether we should hold someone morally responsible within compatibilism. So, it presumes an objective morality, for the sake of argument.

Those statements aren't really true because they are a butchering of grammar. Specifically the use of the word 'never'.

What they suggest is that all reactions are independent of an underlying reality. The reaction is forced by the "laws of nature" rather than any reasonable derivation from experience.

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Wed Aug 09, 2023 12:25 pm Does it even need to be objective? Can't we just subjectively decide that certain behaviours are abhorrent and it's worth building a society where they are curtailed somehow?

Sure.
We're looking at, if I understood the thread correctly, how compatibilism affect moral judgments or what moral judgments would make sense given compatibilism, if any.
I don't think it makes a difference if it is a society or a person trying to figure out how to move towards a good society or one that they prefer. I think how one would assess people would be very similar.
Obviously in either situation there would be diverse opinions. But I am guessing most, regardless of their metamorals would want segregration of the murderer in my example. They might have other measures in mind also.

phyllo wrote: ↑Wed Aug 09, 2023 12:37 pm Those statements aren't really true because they are a butchering of grammar. Specifically the use of the word 'never'.

What they suggest is that all reactions are independent of an underlying reality. The reaction is forced by the "laws of nature" rather than any reasonable derivation from experience.

Sure. I wanted to bypass all that, since it delays me saying a kind of 'so what'.

One pattern I notice in this thread and others is the implicatory response. I think that response you came up with for a hypothetical person is an implicative response.

IOW it is presented as if it is a critique. It has an implied 'Hey you're wrong because.....'
But I don't think it entails any critique at all of what I said.

So, I could have gone into the grammar, but I think it's better to respond more in the spirit of 'OK, so?'

It's up to the hypothetical person to demonstrate how that makes what I said false.

One thing some hypothetical persons have a habit of not doing.