Philosophy Now Forum

Iwannabemoe wrote: ↑Fri Dec 15, 2023 11:22 am

iambiguous wrote: ↑Wed Dec 13, 2023 11:29 pm

Flannel Stooge wrote: ↑Wed Dec 13, 2023 11:14 pm

Of the replies, the majority were from you, me, iwannaplato and phyllo. Of the views... I'd be really surprised if many people outside of those 4 listed were regularly looking, the majority of the rest are probably bots.

Now, if that's your audience - those 4 people - you're not looking so hot. 1 person likes what you have to say, and that's you.

Come, Mr. Wiggle, how many folks who respond to or view my posts here are bots? Surprise one of us, okay?

Also, you note that no really serious philosopher would read the tribe I post, and yet over and over and over and over again, you and phyllo and iwannaplato do read it.

Now is your chance:

"We only read it because our brains compel us to!!!"

Ah, I totally misread this post. Which caused at least a couple of false assertions on my part.

Now LOL!!!!!!

This video of a man farting....
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1m7dX_Zwt6c
has over 3.5 million views.

So, we know that your polemics are not quite as effective as farts. At least not yet. The century is young, I'll grant you that.

And, you are correct, what you post cannot be tribe (or perhaps tripe). It's not possible. Look at the view numbers!

But it's good to know what your priorities are. Your defense of your tactics is view numbers. I'm rather stunned, seriously. I actually would not have guessed this as a motive. And perhaps I should have: these threads which have dozens of posts of yours in rows where no one interacts.

You're not actually interested much in communicating with others, it's view which are prioritized. They show the value of your polemics.

This actually explains a lot. (not kidding)

So, we take what Iamb says here at face value and it means he has no motivation to respond cogently with respect, read well, not be a hypocrite, make actual arguments, etc. His polemics are effective because his views are high. That's actually less interesting. I have been naive, for the most part. I did really wonder how he could never notice or admit a mistake. In the abstract, sure, he admits it's possible, but in actual specific interactions, it never happens that he notices. That fascinated me. But now I see it's a non-issue for him.

Or perhaps Iambiguous is just half-lying here rather than admit he has some problems with communication. Also boring.

I'm done.

Absolutely shameless!!!

And he's DONE with me again!!!

What is it with him? He can in fact sustain an exchange with me that is reasonably substantive. But then eventually -- click -- he goes off the deep end into his "I gotcha!" declamations.

His Stooge Stuff.

As for views, what other means is there here to determine if others do appreciate what you post?

And now, just as I noted to FJ, who had posted above that I am "stupid", I note to iwannabemoe in turn: "and you're clearly too stupid yourself to stop reading them."

So, let's put an end to this farce. Iwannabeplato is done with me. Fine. I'm done with him too. We can both move on to others.

Why Sam Harris is confused about free will
Dan Jones

Presumably we’re not supposed to consider earthquakes and hurricanes morally responsible for the deaths they often cause. Yet that doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t want to stop them occurring again, which is why we would build prisons for them (or do whatever it took to stop them occurring). The same logic applies to people: if some people are going to hurt or kill other people, then regardless of the causes of their actions it would be wise to take them out of the population and keep them somewhere else (in prison or a psychiatric unit). Such decisions have got nothing to do with believing in a libertarian sense of free will or assigning moral responsibility.

And around and around I go. Earthquakes and hurricanes cause death and destruction. Human beings cause death and destruction. And while it would be wise to stop all three of them from doing so, if what we do to stop them is the only thing that we were ever able to do...? This distinction between those who "choose" to kill and harm others and those who "choose" to lock them up for it. From the perspective of some determinists it's a distinction without a difference if both the criminals and society are inherently intertwined in the only possible reality.

All this shows, however, is that there is a rationale for imprisoning people that is independent of questions of free will or moral responsibility. (The same goes for less severe responses to moral offences, such as fines or merely a good telling off; if these things cause people to fix their ways, even if this is a result of deterministic processes, then they’re useful tools for societies to wield.)

Again, it must be me, right? I simply fail to grasp that some "rationales" transcend the assumption particular determinists make that any "tool" society uses to sustain itself is in and of itself an inherent manifestation of the only possible reality.

Now, if, given free will, society is able to choose one tool rather than another, that's different. But if the "moral offenders" are never able not to offend and those who offended are never able not to use the punishment tool to contain them...?

Free Will
Materialism, Freedom & Ethics
Philip Badger constructs a materialist ethical theory, with the help of John Rawls.

I want to begin this article with the assumption that reality consists entirely of physical things and the forces which bind them. That is to say, I will assume the truth of materialism: the idea that the only things that ultimately exist are matter, energy, and physical forces.

Back then to how philosophers and scientists and theologians construe the human brain here. In other words, is it in sync with the laws of nature as all other matter seems to be...or "somehow" did it acquire autonomy?

Mind and matter? You tell me. But first you have to ask yourself [as always], "going back to what...the Big Bang? Biological matter? God?"

Then the attempt to close the gap between what you believe and what you are able to actually demonstrate is true for all rational men and women.

I will argue that this is consistent with a ‘materialistic compatibilism’ which preserves some sense of freedom and responsibility, and that this implies a positive conception of political and social liberty.

Of course, one can argue anything. After all, in order for an argument to be valid all that is necessary is that an agreement is reached regarding what the words mean. Thus, arguing about the nature of the human brain here is not the same is establishing empirically that we either do or do not have free will.

Materialism, Freedom & Ethics
Philip Badger constructs a materialist ethical theory, with the help of John Rawls.

Reality Consists of Physical Things

And yet who wouldn't acknowledge the human mind clearly seems to be like no other matter around? Even other creatures able to grasp the world around them with sense perceptions that can actually be more [far more] acute than our own, don't have brains capable of inventing...philosopohy? science? the Gods?

A materialist view of the world might strike you as characteristically modern and Western. In fact, it isn’t quite so modern, as Democritus was talking about reality consisting of ‘atoms and the void’ 2,500 years ago.

Maybe. But back then they were barely scratching the surface regarding that which science would eventually reveal to us. Unless, of course, some would remind us that in a thousand years -- a hundred years? a decade? -- many will look back at us today as having barely scratched the surface in regard to some things.

You might be itching to tell me that the idea is not originally a Western one, either. Nevertheless, let’s acknowledge that, for most of history, most people have lived with an explicitly dualist understanding of reality: they’ve thought that the world consists of what we might call ‘lumps of stuff’ on the one hand, and minds, spirits, or souls on the other.

Here we go again. Noting the gap between 1] what we think we understand about the material brain and that profoundly problematic ghost in the machine and 2] what we are still largely ignorant regarding. East or West, the parts we don't even know that we don't even know about any number of crucial things here hasn't gone away. And that is certainly the case regarding "spirits, souls and minds".

Yet what a great number of us think these days is that consciousness is not some non-physical thing, but something physical which emerges from the processes of the brain.

In other words, "somehow".

Materialism, Freedom & Ethics
Philip Badger constructs a materialist ethical theory, with the help of John Rawls.

All of this [above] is, of course, hugely controversial, and the philosopher David Chalmers for instance has vigorously defended a form of what is called ‘property dualism’, which suggests that while physics has managed to explain all manner of natural phenomena, it will stumble and fail to find a purely physical account of consciousness.

Sooner or later we always get back around to this...dualism. The profoundly problematic mystery of the human brain itself. Where does the material brain end and the murky meanderings of minds rooted existentially out in particular worlds understood in particular ways begin? What we have established here empirically, scientifically and what we encompass in "worlds of words" as sheer speculation philosophically. Then those who just skip all the secular stuff and anchor the objective truth here in God.

Consciousness is, for Chalmers, a unique example of what he calls a ‘strongly emergent property’. In the other corner of this philosophical heavyweight contest stands Daniel Dennett. Dennett’s position is that while consciousness is presently mysterious, the physical sciences will yield its secrets in good time.

See what I mean? And until the physical sciences do in fact resolve the conundrum embedded in a "material mind", it is not likely that "in good time" will include the time that we are still around. Instead, one by one, we will shuffle off this mortal coil utterly oblivious as to what mind actually is going back to where our own fits into the mind-boggling mystery that is existence itself.

Only, of course, that's not how it works at all, is it? Instead, all that is really necessary "here and now" is for each of our minds to believe what it does about minds and brains. In other words, we believe what we do and that is what prompts us to behave as we do. And it is human behavior that precipitates actual consequences. For ourselves and for others.

On the other hand, in a wholly determined universe as some understand it, even our behavior itself is "beyond our control". As, for example, when we dream.

Materialism, Freedom & Ethics
Philip Badger constructs a materialist ethical theory, with the help of John Rawls.

All of this is very interesting, but the important point for us is that even Chalmers does not question that consciousness emerges from the physical brain (he says that it ‘supervenes’ upon it) but only that we can never understand how it does so.

You know what's coming...

I'd ask Chalmers whether the reason he questions or does not question what he does here about free will is because he was never able not to do other than what his brain compelled him to do? Or is he another of what I construe [perhaps erroneously] to be a "free will determinist"?

Though -- click -- we seem to be in sync regarding whatever his answer might be. In other words, that "here and now" neither science nor philosophy is able to explain either the material brain or the "ghost in the machine". Let alone how they may or may not be intertwined.

In our "souls" perhaps?

No matter; the fact that you can radically alter my consciousness by hitting me over the head or drugging me suffices to demonstrate that my mind is, somehow or other, bound up with the operation of my brain.

The Charles Whitman Syndrome. Only he had a brain tumor which propelled -- compelled? -- him to go on a shooting spree resulting in multiple deaths.

And that's got to perturb all of us given that any number of mental afflictions might cause us to do things which "here and now" we might deem to be unthinkable. And that's presuming of course that "somehow" we have acquired free will.

The psycho-somatic self. Almost as scary as the fractured and fragmented self to some of us.

Materialism, Freedom & Ethics
Philip Badger constructs a materialist ethical theory, with the help of John Rawls.

Compatibilism and Responsibility

Compatibilism is the idea that the materialist picture of a cause-and-effect universe can be reconciled with the intuition we have that we are free and responsible for our actions.

Intuition. Yep, that's what any number of "free will determinists" here seem to fall back on. Okay, they agee, their brains are in sync with the laws of matter. But "somehow" deep down inside them is their own rendition of the ghost in the machine. A "soul" implanted by God perhaps. Or maybe, instead, a profoundly problematic manifestation of the universe itself [re pantheism].

They simply shrug off this part...

All of this going back to how the matter we call the human brain was "somehow" able to acquire autonomy when non-living matter "somehow" became living matter "somehow" became conscious matter "somehow" became self-conscious matter.

...and "deduce" autonomy into existence philosophically in a world of words. Well, after first defining it of course.

The reason why many consider this a stretch isn’t hard to understand. If my consciousness is the mere by-product of physical forces, then everything that flows from it is equally a product of those forces. Indeed, the atoms and molecules in my brain are there because of a chain of causes going back to the Big Bang.

And then right around the corner from that is all the other "spooky" stuff that none of us are privy too. Here, free will is grappled with "theoretically".

As for connecting the dots between "in my head" and "out in the world", well, what in particular is in whose head out in what particular world? And then the gap between what science thinks it means to go back to the Big Bang and where the Big Bang itself becomes this enormous leap of faith given among other things, this:

"It turns out that roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the universe." nasa

This position is called ‘hard determinism’, and seems pretty consistent with the ‘atoms and the void’ universe I defend. ‘No minds or spirits’ frequently equates, on this view, with ‘no choice’, but I want to modify that conclusion.

Go ahead, let him modify it. But he's still stuck with being unable to pin down whether or not he was ever able to do so of his own volition.

Materialism, Freedom & Ethics
Philip Badger constructs a materialist ethical theory, with the help of John Rawls.

The most famous philosopher to be sceptical about floaty metaphysical stuff yet also try to maintain a notion of moral responsibility was David Hume. For him, the issue is not whether our actions are caused (they must be, since our actions would be unpredictable otherwise), but the origins of the causal chains involved.

And yet isn't he the one who made that crucial distinction between "cause" and "correlation"? Thus, even to the extent we "somehow" did acquire autonomy -- and this is confirmed unequivocally by brain scientists -- we can never trace that back to an ultimate cause. God or No God.

Unless, of course, we can.

Though in a God world, there is always the possibility that He will reveal Himself.

Broadly, if the causes of our actions are to be found within our own personalities or characters, we can be held responsible for them. This sounds reasonable. If I rob because I am greedy, then my greed is the cause of my actions and I am responsible for them. On the other hand, if I rob someone because you have threatened me with violence if I don’t, then the origin of the causal chain lies outside of me and I am not responsible.

Again however: How broadly? It can only be as broad as the capacity of the human brain itself to know things. And what if we are not actually hard-wired to grasp the most rational understanding of the brain?

And if our personalities and characters are in turn but inherent manifestations of the only possible reality?

Next up: "the passions"...

However, this kind of thinking, which equates freedom with a lack of coercion, flies in the face of what we now know about the origins of what Hume called ‘the passions’ and their role in motivating behaviour. Exploring these issues has, it turns out, profound implications for the role of philosophy in our lives, as well as calling into question the sufficiency of Hume’s conception of freedom as non-coercion.

Human passions -- intense emotional and psychological states -- truly do muddy the waters here. Not unlike connecting the dots between the behaviors we choose and even deeper components of the human brain...the id, drives, instincts, biological imperatives, subconscious and unconscious awareness.

Of course, philosophers seem more intent [to me] on basically sweeping these variables under the rug. Instead, it's more about what we can pin down logically and epistemologically -- if only theoretically -- in the dueling definitions and deductions that are often exchanged here.

And even if we are persuaded -- driven? -- more by our emotions and intuitions than a reasoning mind, emotions and intuition are [to me] no less rooted existentially in dasein.

You can focus in on the right way to think about the morality of capital punishment...or the right way to feel about it.

It's not for nothing [in my view] that some "think up" their own rendition of an "intrinsic self". They "just know" and "just feel" deep down inside that capital punishment is either moral or immoral.

Materialism, Freedom & Ethics
Philip Badger constructs a materialist ethical theory, with the help of John Rawls.

Hume rightly considered that the passions, or in modern terms, our emotions, are essential for understanding human motivation. As he famously put it: “Reason is and only ought to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office but to serve and obey them.”

Okay, but if both our reasons and our emotions are [existentially] the embodiment of dasein out in a particular world historically and culturally [and ever and always evolving and changing], how are we not then stuck there until philosophers or scientists are able to encompass something in the way of a deontological moral philosophy and political agenda?

Instead, we live in a world where there are hundreds and hundreds of hopelessly conflicting One True Paths to Enlightenment, with all the advocates insisting that their own path really is the One True Path.

He was rightly scathing about Kant’s idea that bloodless reason could motivate action. We now know that our emotional responses have their source in the limbic system deep in the brain. Anger and fear reside in our amygdala, while the reward centre of our brains is the ventral striatum.

Claiming knowledge of that is one thing, providing a step-by-step explanation as to how the brain and the mind and "I" are intertwined when we choose, "choose" or "choose" a particular behavior another thing altogether.

There are those who will be rewarded for aborting an unborn baby and those who will be punished for doing so. They all have pretty much the same brain components, however. But the lives they live [their own set of memes] predispose them to go in different directions.

The frontal cortex, just behind your forehead, by contrast, is both the rational instrument by which we work out how to satisfy our desires, and the source of plenty of rationalisations of them.

Psychological defense mechanisms let's call them. That way everyone is able to rationalize, well, anything right?

History to date, for example.

Materialism, Freedom & Ethics
Philip Badger constructs a materialist ethical theory, with the help of John Rawls.

Hume was good at recognising our tendency to go in for such rationalisations, but, I’d suggest, a little too sniffy about the role of reason as a moderator of our urges. I say this because we also know quite a bit about how the ‘impulse control function’ of the frontal cortex can be either nurtured or neutered. Specifically, people with a damaged frontal lobe tend to be very bad at impulse control.

Sometimes the more you think about things like this the queasier you...feel?

Reflect on the many afflictions to the brain that are completely beyond your control. You do things such that never in a million years would you have ever imagined doing them before...simply because the tumor or the chemical and nerological interactions in your brain compel you to. Freedom and ethics and moral responsibility...then?

The combinations can be...mind-boggling?

Damage to the frontal cortex can be the result of head trauma (a good reason not to let children play high impact sports), neglect, abuse, poor diet, or a lack of certain micro-nutrients including lithium, or due to environmental pollution by, amongst other things, lead and nitrous oxides.

Then the "social" consequences...

Not surprisingly, exposure to these things seems correlated with relative poverty. Moreover, social inequality itself may be a major trigger of the production of the stress hormone cortisol, which is the key neurotransmitter for the amygdala and the chemical enemy of serotonin. Serotonin is the ‘fuel’ of the frontal cortex and the impulse control associated with it.

Let's not go there? In particular the "rugged individualist" conservatives. They convince themselves that success and failure revolve entirely around your own efforts. If they are successful they deserve to be. If others are failures they have no one to blame but themselves.

Straight out of "the gilded age", right Agnes?

And all the more mind-boggling still is trying to wrap your head around the belief that nothing any of us do is not beyond our control.

Materialism, Freedom & Ethics
Philip Badger constructs a materialist ethical theory, with the help of John Rawls.

In short, what the development of neuropsychology has done is to extend the causal chain so we don’t have to stop our explanation, as Hume did, with the individual’s personality.

"Neuropsychology is the branch of science that studies the physiological processes of the nervous system and relates them to behavior and cognition, in terms both of their normal function and of the dysfunctional processes associated with brain damage." APA

Over and again the assumption being that one day we might actually grasp where the somatic stops and the psychological begins. Or the other way around? And as soon as we note brain damage we are recognizing "conditions" that are often "beyond our control".

We now know quite a bit about what makes us the way we are, including understanding certain genetic predispositions. This has profound implications for ideas about responsibility and freedom.

However much some think they know "in their head" about moral responsibility and human freedom, it's still not enough to resolve anything. In other words, "for all practical purposes". As for "ideas" about it, those are important, sure. But to the extent the "resolution" revolves around definitions and deductions, not much hasn't already been assumed regarding the human brain here.

Hume’s view of freedom as lack of coercion was too simple. We can say that, to the extent that a person has a fully functional frontal cortex, they have good impulse control and so are responsible for their actions. This is the materialistic compatibilism I referred to at the start of the article.

Hume's view of freedom. My view of Hume's view of freedom. Your view of my view of Hume's view of freedom. Okay, but what if the frontal cortex of all human brains are no less an inherent manifestation of the only possible reality? Hume said and we say only that which we were never able not to say. About materialistic compatibilism...about everything.

Including this...

My frontal cortex is, largely, the reason that the flash of anger I feel when you rear-end my car doesn’t turn into a physical assault upon you. If I lack such frontal cortex function, I may well pose a danger to others and this may justify intervention to prevent me causing them harm. It does not, however, justify retribution being visited upon me for any supposedly ‘willful’ wickedness, as my action is now beyond my willful control.

Everything is justified in a wholly determined universe because everything is fated, destined. To harm or not to harm is not really the question at all in a world where to harm or to not harm others is entirely scripted by nature itself.

Materialism, Freedom & Ethics
Philip Badger constructs a materialist ethical theory, with the help of John Rawls.

A Positive Conception of Political & Social Liberty

The tendency to equate freedom with a lack of coercion has a long history and some complex motivations.

Okay, but what if this history of complex motivation is in and of itself just another inherent/necessary manifestation of the only possible reality? Again, back to "external coercions" and "internal components" of the compatibilist frame of mind. Someone puts a gun to Mary's head and tells her to abort Jane or he'll pull the trigger. Meanwhile the internal interactions in her brain -- chemical, neurological -- "somehow" allow her to embody something in the vicinity of autonomy?

John Stuart Mill, who was much influenced by Hume’s compatibilism, explicitly states at the beginning of his famous 1859 essay On Liberty that it is not going to deal with issues pertaining to the “so-called liberty of the will” but instead with civil or social liberty.

Right. As though civil and social liberties are not themselves dependent on the extent to our "will" either is or is not autonomous.

Meanwhile, back up into the intellectual clouds "analysis"...

He tells us this as a point of clarification, but as scholars such as John Skorupski have suggested, Mill’s occasional nods to paternalism in terms of state intervention belie his claims to see liberty in purely negative terms (that is, as non-coercion). Specifically, he acknowledges that certain social goods, such as education and free debate, are prerequisites for the growth and development of the individual “according to the inward forces which make them a living thing.” He even goes so far as to suggest that the state should fund such education for those who can’t afford it, although he worries about the state limiting what might be learnt in school. This is one reason why Mill is sometimes held to be at the crossroads between ‘classical’ or ‘negative’ liberalism, and its ‘progressive’ or ‘positive’ successor.

It seems predicated on the assumption that the author and Skorupski and Mill and Hume were/are in possession of free will when discussing and debating free will.

And, sure, maybe they [and we] are. But arguing one way or the other is not the same as demonstrating it one way or the other.

And then, even in assuming free will, the distinction between what we choose to think, feel, say and do in the either/or world, with a minimal of communication breakdowns, and the manner in which communication often breaks down in regard to conflicting value judgments.

Materialism, Freedom & Ethics
Philip Badger constructs a materialist ethical theory, with the help of John Rawls.

Other philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), have an even more tortured relationship with the positive/negative liberty divide. Kant famously defended the death penalty on the grounds that in not executing the murderer we fail to treat him as a properly free agent who is fully responsible for his actions.

Unless, of course, he was never able not to defend it. And some are compelled to insist that there are "no tortured relationships with the positive/negative liberty divide" in a wholly determined universe. Or, rather, any that we perceive other than as just another inherent manifestation of the only possible reality.

Animals might act out of automatic responses and ‘passions’, but human beings have the capacity for rational reflection, and their will is the origin of their actions. But Kant’s morality was based on the dualist rejection of materialism in favour of the claim that the human will acts from outside the physical (‘phenomenal’) world.

And how does he demonstrate this? In a "world of words" of course. Also [compelled or not] he brings it all back eventually to God. His own rendition of soul to soul.

Nevertheless, some philosophers, such as Isaiah Berlin, worried that Kant had opened up space for a corrosive idea. If the part of us that’s governed by physical causes is, as Kant suggested, our animal passions, it follows that reason, and so free moral decision-making, involves the part that isn’t.

Again, the part where Kant "somehow" connects the dots here between mere mortals and "God [as] outside of humanity's full experience, perception or grasp." What's crucial however is that free will itself is derived from God. And then "somehow" reconciled with His omniscience.

Yet equating freedom with reason opens up the possibility of saying that some people are more rational and hence more capable of exercising freedom than others.

Objectivism let's call it. And then, as they say, the rest is history. One or another rendition of Orwell's, "who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." Though even this involves a leap of faith to free will.

To wit...

If I decide you are less rational than me, it might lead me to treat you with mercy; but it might lead me to treat you as a lesser being. For Berlin, who had personally seen the horrors of the supposedly ‘rational society’ that emerged from the Russian Revolution, this was the road to ‘personal re-education’ by way of the Gulag.

So, autonomously or otherwise, tap me on the shoulder when that changes.

Materialism, Freedom & Ethics
Philip Badger constructs a materialist ethical theory, with the help of John Rawls.

Rawls, Freedom & The Public Good

I certainly think that some choices in our lives are quite beyond the legitimate reach of the law or of state action to curtail them. To Mill, these choices are our ‘private’ or ‘self-regarding’ ones. The big questions here relate to which kinds of choice should qualify for this category, and what justification we might find for leaving some things off the list.

On the other hand, let's not forget this article pertains to the main focus of the current issue: "Freewill versus Determinism".

Thus, as some determinists themselves are compelled to argue, all "choices in our lives are quite beyond the legitimate reach of the law or of state action to curtail them". Choices become legitimate as soon as they are chosen. Either by the individual or the state. All categories are necessarily subsumed in the only possible reality.

From my own rooted existentially in dasein frame of mind, it is the compatibilists who accept determinism...except that "somehow" there are these "internal components" embedded in their own brains that allow them to believe in what "I" construe to be "free will determinism". Only I suggest further that this frame of mind in and of itself is no less entirely compelled by their brains.

Unless of course I'm wrong. Not only that but given free will I have the capacity to change my mind given new experiences, new relationships and access to new information and knowledge.

And, as well, John Rawls is no exception.

Thus, all of this...

The philosopher who helps us most with this is, arguably, John Rawls. In his 1971 book A Theory of Justice, Rawls sets up a dynamic struggle between abstract principle and what Hume and Adam Smith called our ‘moral sentiments’, in order to help us decide which principles we might reasonably agree to be constitutive of a just society. Not surprisingly, Rawls picks a version of what he calls ‘the liberty principle’ as being of primary importance to a just society.

...is no less a reflection of the only possible reality. Well, given the only possible reality of course.

Rawls does not argue, as the utilitarian Mill did, that liberty is good because it leads to good consequences – although it might incidentally do so. Instead, in a Kantian manner, he claims that as rational beings we are bound to claim a certain amount of liberty for ourselves, and justifies this by arguing that, as rational beings, we are capable of self-government.

We'll need a context of course. And, perhaps, the philosophically correct definition of liberty? A meaning that all rational [and thus virtuous] men and women are obligated to embrace?

However, on pain of contradiction, we have to grant the same liberties to all who share the same capacity for rational choice.

Conflicting goods let's call them.

Spinoza & Other Determinists
Myint Zan compares different ways of denying free will.

The following sentences appear in a letter written by the great Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677):

“Further conceive, I beg, that a stone while continuing in motion should be capable of thinking and knowing, that is endeavouring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of his own endeavour and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and it would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined”. (Letter to G.H. Schaller, October 1674).

First, I digress.

There are those among us who do believe that stones -- that everything? -- acquire consciousness.

Now, how on Earth would they go about demonstrating this?

In the interim, even if the stone has acquired consciousness, it may well be that an awareness of itself as being completely free is in turn no less an illusion. And its desires, much like our own, are no less an inherent manifestation of Schopenhauer's own conjecture here.

Then this part: stones and morality?

These three sentences in Spinoza’s letter determine (pun intended) that he was a philosophical determinist. Without distorting Spinoza’s message, we could rephrase it this way: “If a stone in motion were to have human-level consciousness, then the stone, like some humans, including philosophers, would think that it is moving out of its own volition and free will, although it isn’t."

How then does this not suggest Spinoza's own assessment in and of itself isn't just another inherent component of the only possible reality? Would Spinoza acknowledge this in turn? While, as with all the rest of us, acknowledging that the acknowledgment itself is "somehow" embedded in this:

All of this going back to how the matter we call the human brain was "somehow" able to acquire autonomy when non-living matter "somehow" became living matter "somehow" became conscious matter "somehow" became self-conscious matter.