There are two items of interest from the excellent book site fivebooks.com, which, as you may know, has a lot of interviews with experts, each of whom recommends five books in their area of interest for the public.
My friend Sophie Roell, an editor at the site, has collected a series of five interviews on the history of Christmas, which she calls “The Christmas story: Christianity’s weakest link.” Her summary of the interviews includes this:
. . . I am completely fascinated by what early Christian historians say about the Christmas story. Was Jesus born in Bethlehem? Highly unlikely. Was he born in December? No mention of any date in the Bible. It may well have been April. Were there three wise men? The Bible doesn’t actually say so — in fact it says almost nothing about these men at all, who could have numbered anything from 2 to (according to one text) several hundred moving together as a small army.
If you enjoy celebrating Christmas (as a Christian, or, in my case, an eclectic pagan ancestor-loving atheist) I really encourage you to have a look at our Christmas interviews which look in a bit more detail at this stuff.The first interview we did was with Brent Landau, an early Christian historian who knows a lot about the ancient texts from this period (get in touch with him if you need something translated from Syriac, an ancient Christian language related to Aramaic which probably won’t feature on Google Translate for a while). His topic was The Real Christmas Story.My colleague, Alec Ash, meanwhile, spoke to Bruce Forbes about Christmas History more generally. One of the books he chose is called 4000 Years of Christmas — so I’ll let you do the maths on exactly how much Christmas has to do with the birth of Jesus Christ…
This, is, I believe Sophie’s first public admission of her atheism, which has been developing over the years.
There is also a very long interview on free will and moral responsibility with Paul Russell, a philosopher from the University of British Columbia. (The interviewer is Nigel Warburton.) When I printed out the interview it was sixteen pages long, but very engaging reading. Russell recommends five books, including Dennett’s Elbow Room, and is critical of nearly all of them. He winds up adhering to a sort of compatibilism based on Greek philosophy, which incorporates both “fate” (determinism), but also moral responsibility. I really don’t get it, but the book summarizing this view is Bernard Williams’s Shame and Necessity.
The book I most want to read among the five is Bruce Waller’s Against Moral Responsibility, which is not only incompatibilist (i.e., he sees no way to harmonize free will and determinism), but also claims, as do I, that this discards the idea of moral responsibility. One thing Russell said when discussing this book struck me as being right on the mark:
But being wrong and being morally responsible are two different things. We want to prevent wrong conduct in the same way that we want to prevent all kinds of other unpleasant things that occur: illness, hurricanes, fires. Ethical behaviour that fails our standards is not something we should be emotionally responding to in a retributive manner. We should aim to understand its roots, its causes, and try to improve things in the future.
“If you can’t really choose—if, as most philosophers admit, your actions at any time are determined by your genes and environment—you are still responsible for what you do, but in what sense are you morally responsible?”
Even if we accept that indetermined quantum fluctuation might affect macroscopic events, such as human behaviour, we can’t still claim moral responsibility. After all if truly random events (partially) determine our behaviour, than we have still no control over our actions.
Riffing off the same quote…I get the feeling that the “moral responsibility” being considered is some sort of Platonic ideal — that there is, Out There™, a Perfectly Ideal Moral Responsibility, and the goal of human morality is to attempt a perfect realization of said ideal.
…and I just don’t see morality in anything approaching those terms at all.
Rather, morality is a strategy for living your life. And the most optimal such strategies, in the aggregate, are ones that build the fabric of civilization as much as they profit you personally in the immediate term.
Viewed from such a perspective, “responsibility” doesn’t make much sense in this type of context when paired with “moral.”
It’s in your own best interests to not rape, murder, pillage, or rape. Whatever short-term benefits you might think to gain will be grossly overwhelmed by the costs society has to pay — and you are inescapably intertwined with society and bear its costs with the rest of us. A crime-free society is far wealthier than a crime-ridden one, and the individuals in such a society much richer as a result.
You could perhaps extrapolate from that that it’s your responsibility to be civil…but only in the same sense that it’s your responsibility to eat well, take care of personal hygiene, get plenty of exercise and good sleep, and the like. Yes, those are all your responsibilities, as is not being antisocial…but what does the addition of the word, “moral,” do but muddy the waters?
Cheers,
b&
What adding moral does, in most contexts, is give you a reason to do something even if it isn’t in your own self-interest to do so. You can indeed define moral to mean “my own self-interest”, but this breaks down immediately, and requires massive patch-ups like you are doing here. After all, you can argue that it is indeed in my own self-interest to ensure that society is not destroyed — this is straight out of Hobbes, BTW, which is a starting point for you to see what’s good and bad about the idea — but as soon as I come across a situation where acting in my own self-interest to hurt others either won’t damage society or will only do it after I’m dead your view means that I ought to do that … and most people reject that as a proper consequence of morality. And insisting that I’d have to act to benefit society even if I calculate that in this particular case I wouldn’t hurt society at all either refutes your own definition or makes me out to be irrational as I don’t properly preserve my own interests.
With rare exception — and said exceptions almost inevitably horridly contrived — the difference between “moral action” and “immoral self-interested action” is that the latter is terribly short-sighted.
If you remember back to when you were a young child, you might remember the thoughts that played through your head at night when you contemplated whether you should get up and use the toilet or just wet the bed. And there were a lot of valid short-term reasons to wet the bed; it was easier, it even felt warm for a few minutes…but the long-term harm quickly overrode whatever short-term advantages you gained.
Adult morality is the same, just with timescales measured in decades and centuries rather than seconds and minutes
Cheers,
b&
It’s those supposedly rare cases that kill your definition, as either you have to accept that in those cases pursuing your own self-interest is what’s moral, or deny your own definition. Contrived or not, it means that your view doesn’t work or at least has problems as a definition, and we don’t know how the world would work if everyone really did accept your view. Most people don’t, because they don’t accept that if you could indeed get away without negative consequences for doing a traditionally immoral act that you should do it.
And here’s one more example of the problem you face:
If I only care about my own self-interest, why do I care about centuries, or often even decades? It seems more contrived to come up with cases where I really should care about those cases than to point out cases where I wouldn’t have to care at all about society.
Perhaps it would help if you could offer one of those exceptions as an example….
b&
The one that always comes to mind here is the vampire from the first episode of the TV series “Angel”. He’s a rich businessman, pays an evil law firm to cover his tracks, and selects victims that he can dominate and that no one will miss. As he says to Angel “We do things a certain way in LA. I keep my name out of the paper and I don’t make waves. And in return I can do anything I want.” As long as he makes sure that no one finds out what he’s doing, society won’t be affected. If he can guarantee that to a high probability, why isn’t it just moral for him to kill and torment the young starlets he hunts?
Another example is this: You find a wallet with $1000 in it. No one sees you with it, and you know that a) if the wallet never turns up, it will be thought to be lost or stolen in general and that b) people do understand that some people steal. Why isn’t the morally right thing, under your definition, to keep the money?
I think a vampire serial killer who can magically escape investigative efforts sufficiently qualifies as “contrived” that it doesn’t warrant serious consideration. I will just note that serial murderers in Western societies don’t tend to run free for many years. While policing is certainly not perfect, in the real world, you’re most emphatically not doing your prospects for a pleasant retirement any favors by being a serial killer.
As for the lost wallet…well, would you rather live in a society where, if you lose your wallet you have a good chance of recovering it again, or one in which you can simply kiss it goodbye? Most would prefer the former; obviously, the only way to live in such a society is if you return lost wallets.
Because not everybody is so civilized, those who are civilized will often offer rewards to help civilize the uncivilized. For example, if you’re some homeless dude who finds that wallet, and you turn it in, the resulting news coverage is all but guaranteed to get you a job that’ll quickly pay you much, much more than a measly $1,000.
Cheers,
b&
Well, first, he doesn’t get away with it because he’s a vampire, but gets away with it because he’s rich and careful, preying only on those who won’t be missed, using his money to hide the deaths and his involvement (ie paying people to provide alibis). That someone could be that rich and well-connected isn’t all that contrived at all, so this is a bit of a dodge. And we don’t know how many people can get away for long periods of time if they had those resources, or might take off if they actually look like they’re getting caught.
The issue, that you dodge, is always this: if they could get away with it, at least long enough that they would benefit more than they would lose if they get caught, why wouldn’t that be the moral thing for them to do?
The issue is that in THIS society, people lose wallets and have them be stolen. Thus, my not returning that one and taking the money gives me an immediate benefit, and no actual detriment as it won’t change how people react to lost wallets at all. So your general answer relies on me being, it seems to me, irrational about my own self-interest, because my not doing that in that specific case won’t have any impact on whether a person who finds my wallet will return it to me, or will respond to rewards I offer for the return of my wallet. I will be pleasantly surprised if someone returns my wallet, money intact, in all cases. Since it has no impact on society at all, nothing will change, why wouldn’t the rational and therefore moral thing, under your view, be to keep the money? What’s the downside to my self-interest? Again, it’s NOT people returning mine to me, because my action won’t impact that at all.
You’ve just described something impossible. With that many people involved in the conspiracy, somebody’s going to go for the reward money sooner rather than later. Or, if he can pay more than the reward money, the IRS is going to start asking uncomfortable questions.
Even Mafia hit men get caught, and they’re the textbook example of what you’re describing.
Again, that’s a false premise. Keeping the wallet has a detrimental effect on society; it creates a general environment in which you’re likely to suffer needlessly and disproportionately for silly mindless mistrakes. And returning the wallet has a beneficial effect on society: it makes other people think it’s the right thing to do and thus increases the chances that others will do the right thing.
Those costs and benefits far outweigh the measly $1,000 in your hypothetical wallet.
Think of it like insurance. Your chances of actually getting paid more from your policy than you pay into it are slim. But most people would agree that you’d be nuts to go without certain types of insurance.
Taxes, too. Some of your tax money helps build roads thousands of miles away that you’ll never even see. But it’s a good investment for you to help pay for those roads because the people who do use them also help to pay for your roads.
That’s what civilization is all about, after all.
Cheers,
b&
You’re nitpicking the example instead of either biting the bullet and saying that if he could get away with it it would be moral or accepting that your definition is flawed. And your nitpicks are invalid because:
1) What reward? This isn’t a serial killer case with national coverage. It’s a group of people who flit in and out of town and drop out of sight all the time. The police have no reason to think that there’s any relation between the crimes, and so no reason to think that it is even a serial killer case, and these are people that no one cares to look for. What reward would be there? And when you are dealing with someone that rich who has bribed people, who do you blab it to, without knowing who has been bribed by that person?
2) Considering that there isn’t likely to be a large reward in the first place, why would the IRS get on his case about taking money from one of his after-tax accounts and spending it while not remembering exactly where?
3) The Mafia are different, because they are running shady businesses, which means that they need to be public in certain ways. The guy here doesn’t. Which also means that if someone ever does start to make rumblings, he can always stop until the heat dies down and people completely forget again.
No, it doesn’t, It simply creates a society where you have to watch out for your wallet because it might disappear — either lost or stolen — and you might not get it back. Which is EXACTLY the society we’re in. Since society won’t change one bit whether I keep or return the wallet, I have no reason to not keep the wallet or the money. Yes, I would like people to return MY wallet, but as long as society thinks that good in general the same amount of people will return my wallet or keep it regardless of what I do in this case, and since I’m not a pickpocket it doesn’t bother me if people — and myself — have to watch our wallets closer so that they don’t get lost or stolen as often. Never having lost or stolen wallets is as good a society as having them all be returned.
No, I’m not dodging the bullet.
I’m pointing out that you have to come up with impossible or extremely implausible horribly contrived scenarios in order for this sort of moral reasoning to even begin to break down — and, as contrived as your scenarios are, they’re not yet at that point. Your scenarios aren’t realistic, at any level. Only by invoking fictional tropes themselves as outré as vampires (vanishing nobodies whom nobody notices) are you even able to give them internal consistency — and they remain inconsistent with reality.
You want to know how hard it is to come up with examples? Rather than serial-killing wealthy vampires, how ’bout real-world dictators and despots? But ask Hitler or Saddam Hussein how well they’re enjoying their retirements.
You clearly have not learned the lesson of the Tragedy of the Commons. Lacking such a basic understanding of sociology, I can now clearly understand why you fail to grasp these equally-basic moral concepts.
And, indeed, the Tragedy of the Commons is, itself, a perfect real-world example of the type of immature short-sighted self-defeating thinking I first analogized with the bed-wetting example.
All I can suggest — and plead — is that you take the time to get up to speed on the basics of the subject before continuing discussion.
Cheers,
b&
Well, consider the 600+ native women missing and still missing in Canada in various places and you start to get an idea of groups of people that, for various reasons, the police don’t concern themselves with to even find out that they HAVE been murdered, let alone who did it:
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/10/04/parliament-hill-protest-aboriginal-women_n_4046142.html
That you could prey on, say, single people living alone who have left their lives behind and have no real contacts for quite a while is nowhere near as contrived as you make it sound.
What’s the shared resource that will be depleted in the wallet case? Again, there is no difference in society whether I keep the wallet or not. No resource is depleted, no commons is hurt. There is no reason for me to not act in my self-interest, because it IS in my self-interest to do that. The worst you could cite is a claim that someone might not return my wallet if I lost it … which, considering the society I’m in, was already the case. Why, then, should I care? My taking this precise action here doesn’t impact society in any way, and even if no one ever returned wallets the worst that would happen would be a) people would be very careful with their wallets, which bothers me not at all and b) if I lost my wallet, I’d consider it gone forever, which is what most people already do now (no one expects to have their wallet returned if they lose it, which is why they always cancel their credit cards immediately if they do). So, again, what common resource is lost in that case?
The problem is entirely that you are trying to reason in the abstract with the “Commons” example, but when you apply that to specific cases your answers start to look like rationalizations that are more contrived than some of the examples you dismiss as contrived.
But can you answer one thing? Put aside how contrived the example would be. Would you consider the vampire case to be right, that if the person really could get away with it without impacting society as a whole that the morally right thing to do would be to take those actions? I’m trying to get an idea of what you’re actually committed to, and by harping on the “contrived” angle you never really say how far you’re willing to go. It’s okay to say “Yes, that case would be morally right, but it would never happen in real life”, but you haven’t ever really said that first part, and that makes me wonder why.
First, I have never claimed perfection in the real world; quite the contrary. I have stated it as a matter of maximizing your odds. The mere fact that there are odds to be maximized means that there will be outliers. That, however, does not change the fact that the odds are not in favor of the outliers.
Second, that you have pointed out the 600 missing Canadians just goes to emphasize my point. They have not gone unnoticed, even if they haven’t received as much attention as they deserve. If, as you suggest (and I find unlikely) they are victims of a serial killer, you can bet that said fact will soon come to light, and the killer will not remain free for long.
Next, I have repeatedly explained the common resources you tragically deplete when you fail to return a person’s wallet. That you have no desire to increase your own chances of recovering misplaced property I find inexplicable, but it at least explain why you have no problem with the immoral option of keeping somebody else’s lost wallet. Again, I strongly urge you to reconsider your position, even though experience tells me that chances are unlikely you’ll do so.
Last, I can no more answer questions about how morally justified vampires with cast-of-thousands serial murder enterprises are if they’re equipped with magical police-evading faery dust than you can answer questions about when you stopped beating your underaged prostitutes. The questions are so absurd and loaded that all that can be done is to dismiss them as meaningless precisely because they are so absurd and loaded.
Cheers,
b&
I suggest no such thing. I suggest that these are 600 people who have gone missing over at least 5 years who have not been found, let alone had their cases solved. Some of them may be victims of various serial killers. Some of them may be just gone away. Some of them may be victims of individual killers. That’s all irrelevant. What matters is to demonstrate that there are a bunch of people whose disappearances may never be solved for various reasons, and that if someone preyed on them they wouldn’t likely be caught — see that odds thing — especially if they were able to hide any evidence that might surface using money and influence.
First, since we don’t agree on what “moral” means, you don’t get to claim that I somehow have no problem with the “immoral” option. I’m arguing that under YOUR view it isn’t immoral, and that keeping the wallet is in fact morally demanded.
Second, as I have repeatedly pointed out in that case, in this world, my keeping the wallet doesn’t impact my odds of having my wallet returned one bit, and that I already act as if my wallet will NOT be returned in those cases. Thus, there seems to be no impact on society or on me if I keep the wallet other than my getting the money. You have failed to demonstrate any ACTUAL loss to me by doing that in this case, only appealing to abstract theories to attempt to claim that it would be better. But surely you would argue that real consequences trump imagined ones, and your consequences are all imagined and not real.
How is it absurd and loaded? The only comment you’ve been able to raise against the example — and you keep retreating to details that we’ve moved past, which is a VERY bad sign — is that the person couldn’t get away with it in real life. My question here was to ask what your moral view would say if someone COULD. This is different than the question you countered with because there’s nothing self-defeating in the question itself. In the question you cite, I cannot simply answer that I never have if that is the case, but there is nothing comparable in the question I asked you; you SHOULD be able to answer that question because you should be able to answer any hypothetical, or else you don’t have a moral code that’s actually rational and allows for moral reasoning. And that’s all I want: if the person could get away with it without impacting society, would it be moral? That you call it absurd and loaded says, to me, far more about you than you realize, as it suggests that you understand that you WOULD have to concede that it is immoral in that case, and that bothers. Otherwise, you’d just take the option I gave you and say “Yes, under my system it would be moral, but since that case simply cannot happen in reality it doesn’t matter”. At which point we could get to the real discussion, which is that to me and to pretty much everyone any moral code that would claim it moral to be a serial killer is not a moral code at all.
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Reblogged this on The Road.
Make two assumptions.
1. We have no free will.
2. We are morally responsible agents.
I believe I have no free will and I have evidence that I am a morally responsible agent.
Or if you like, make the following assumptions.
1. We have free will (compatibilist).
2. We are morally responsible agents.
Just as easy to think or argue that these might be valid. Done, again.
Morality does not come from particles and fields. It is granted to us, by us.
Jerry,
Yes, Waller’s book is right on the money but Dennett the compatibilist of course disagrees. He’s reviewed it, as have I, then we have an exchange on it with final remarks by Waller, all linked at http://www.naturalism.org/reviews.htm
I’m not sure I’d say you can’t really choose just because your actions are determined. Choice making is a real process that brains carry out, just as real as the environmental and genetic factors that ultimately create the person. To say we don’t choose seems to misdescribe the situation, which although deterministic, nevertheless involves a selection process. But I agree that since we’re not ultimate originators, we’re not morally responsible in the sense of deserving non-consequentialist praise or punishment. This should be reflected in our responsibility practices, making us second guess our retributive impulses.
This is a real redefinition of “choice”. What you are describing is that illusion of being able to pick one of several alternatives, when in fact it’s predetermined. It’s like saying that someone tells you that they’ll shoot you if you don’t order the steak instead of the fish. Your “choice” of steak is compelled, and NOBODY would see this as a choice.
Well, when we choose the steak in a restaurant without that external threat, there are still guns forcing us to only one decision: the guns are our neurons that force us to behave in just one way.
If you’ve conditioned a fish to swim up one side of a Y tube because it gets food, and the fish always swims up that side, it of course has no choice, right? Well, we are just like that fish, but we’re conditioned by other factors.
I really dislike the way philosophers redefine words away from what everyone thinks they mean–just so they can say that we have choices and free will. Why is that so important? Isn’t it more accurate to say that “one selects one of several alternatives, but that selection is predetermined.”
Dan has said that the notion of free will must be preserved because society would fall apart without it. That’s why words like “free will” and “choice” get redefined away from their historical meanings. Regardless of what compatibilists say, I think this is an important, if often undisclosed, motivation.
And I still fail to understand why compatibilists engage in their arcane and largely useless angels-on-a-pinhead activity instead of engaging seriously with determinism and then working out its consequences for society. To any rational person, the latter is a far more important task, for there are real social consequences of a deterministic view.
Jerry, I think you know that I’m as anti-compatibilist as they come.
Yet…I see no problem with describing what human brains do as “making choices” for the same reason I have no problem as describing computers in similar situations as “making choices.” Yes, for any given configuration of the machine combined with a particular set of inputs, the end result will always be the same, but I don’t see why the process of carrying out the computations leading to that end result shouldn’t be described as “choosing.”
The word, “choice,” is incredibly useful, and in exactly that way. The sense you’re using it in comes across to me as the dualistic one in which there’s only a choice if some outside, disconnected agent is involved in the process — and so, of course, you conclude that there’s no choice by that definition involved.
But if an autopilot can choose when and how much to fiddle with the airplane’s controls — and I don’t think anybody has any problems using that language (but correct me if I’m worng) — then the pilot certainly makes choices when the autopilot is disengaged.
I’d draw the analogy with other words that the religious have coopted, such as, “love,” and, “evil.” They’re perfectly good and useful words — but, of course, the religious definitions of those terms have no bearing on reality whatsoever.
Cheers,
b&
“Well, when we choose the steak in a restaurant without that external threat, there are still guns forcing us to only one decision: the guns are our neurons that force us to behave in just one way.”
Equating coercion, like a gun to the head, with the operations of my nervous system in service to my own agenda seems to me a mistake. The former thwarts my autonomy, the latter constitutes it. Both are deterministic but the distinction is real and used routinely to distinguish free choices from externally compelled actions. To insist that the notion of contra-causal choice is the only notion of choice out there isn’t empirically supported.
It’s strategically important not to deny compatibilist choice otherwise folks might be led to nihilistic passivity and fatalism in the face of determinism. They might make the mistake of thinking we’re mere puppets at the mercy of external forces, when in fact we play robust causal roles in determining outcomes.
That said, I completely agree with you about the importance of “engaging seriously with determinism and then working out its consequences for society.” Dennett gives short shrift to this project, for which I take him to task in our exchange. The belief in libertarian, contra-causal free will has to be challenged openly and often, and the progressive implications spelled out. But we need to do this without conveying the false impression that we lose power and control, otherwise it’s a much tougher sell.
“It’s strategically important not to deny compatibilist choice otherwise folks might be led to nihilistic passivity and fatalism in the face of determinism.”
I think this position is incredibly condescending. You are basically saying, “the great unwashed masses can’t handle the truth, so we must lie to them for their own good.”
I think the more charitable interpretation would be that if you tell them to toss out the concepts of choice and free will, they’ll likely toss all of them out, including the parts that you think are still valid and reasonable, like responsibility. And it might be hard to explain to them that the things they think you told them aren’t there are, in fact, really there, but just aren’t called what they used to call them.
This example badly conflates two different notions of choice. In the predetermined case, it’s like someone implants a chip in your head that activates in response to the server’s words and just selects “Steak”, while in the latter case we would all concede that, yes, the person makes a choice, but as a compelled choice we can’t hold them morally responsible for it. And yet, even in the latter case, we CAN imagine that they could be held morally responsible for it, because some moral codes DO hold them morally responsible for it. The Stoics, for example. No one has any problem conceding that you really can make a choice there, but we don’t think it reasonable or that any reasonable person will make that choice, even in cases where the person is required to kill someone else. But once they understand that, for the Stoics, one must put being moral ahead of even your own life, then they certainly think the position possible, but think it wrong. They don’t think that it’s contradictory. But when they think about Kant or the Stoics arguing that everything is determined and/or predictable, even when that idea is spelled out most people see that as being contradictory … because in both cases they seem to be arguing that the person should be held responsible for an action that was predetermined and that they therefore had no control over.
That’s why the chip thought experiment is the better one, here, because that’s a case that’s closer to the determinism case: the decision is completely made externally, not just externally influenced. No compatibilist or libertarian about free will will claim that choices can’t be externally influenced; they just deny that they’re externally DETERMINED.
They aren’t. Compatibilists are trying to preserve what the words mean to people, in terms of what’s really important, while acknowledging the physical facts about the universe. As seen above, you’re actually more redefining choice and responsibility than compatibilists are.
As for your phrasing, it doesn’t seem to be more accurate because it immediately runs into the issue of how you can say that we select an alternative when that selection is predetermined. I submit that there is not way you can make that statement make sense without saying the exact same thing that compatibilists are saying, which would end up with your only gripe with compatibilists being that you don’t want to keep the existing terms and want to invent new ways of talking about it, while they want to keep the terms because they think they have use. Thus, you’d likely then be a compatibilist who’s quibbling over terms, not over important philosophical details.
“…there are real social consequences of a deterministic view.” There are real social consequences of a non-deterministic view.
No one (determinist/compatibilist) should stop paying attention to how important and obviously prevalent genetic/behavioral/socio-economic/psychological effects play when forming moral doctrines for society.
Science, regardless of one’s view about determinism, provides solutions to real social problems. Likewise, one does not have to believe in determinism in order to employ features of its consequences to the outcomes of people’s actions. In this sense, knowing what determinism and not believing determinism does not necessarily hinder one’s ability to recognize the important task that there are real social consequences of forming moral codes based on a deterministic approach.
Well, when we choose the steak in a restaurant without that external threat, there are still guns forcing us to only one decision: the guns are our neurons that force us to behave in just one way.
Perhaps it would be helpful to ask oneself the question: who exactly is ‘us’? Well, unless we believe in some magical soul, ‘us’ is the neurons. So what you are saying is that we ‘force’ ourselves to decide on the steak.
I really dislike the way philosophers redefine words away from what everyone thinks they mean–just so they can say that we have choices and free will. Why is that so important? Isn’t it more accurate to say that “one selects one of several alternatives, but that selection is predetermined.”
I am puzzled that you always make the case that the original definition of free will is the magical one. All of the terms like choice or free or will have perfectly clear non-magical definitions are are constantly used by scientists and engineers, for example when discussing how a computer opponent makes a choice in a game.
What is more, people have been discussing these things for thousands of years. Nobody needed modern neuroscience to come up with compatibilism as an escape clause or suchlike because determinism was always one of the options, even 2,500 years ago. Even religious fundies can easily be determinists if they stress the omniscient aspect of their deity instead of caring particularly about the free will defense against the problem of evil.
And I still fail to understand why compatibilists engage in their arcane and largely useless angels-on-a-pinhead activity instead of engaging seriously with determinism and then working out its consequences for society.
Sorry but the latter is precisely what compatibilists do. I would argue that everybody is, in practice, a compatibilist, including you:
We agree that a landslide was as predetermined as a murder. Assuming they both killed the same number of people, how would you punish/treat the landslide and the murderer, the same way or in different ways?
If you put both the murderer and the landslide in jail (or let them both get off free), you are an incompatibilist. If you answer ‘differently’ then you are a compatibilist, because that is the point of compatibilism: despite determinism, there are still differences in agency, responsibility, and ability to make choices between, say, a landslide and a human. That is it. The rest is semantics.
Religious people can be and indeed are determinists: Calvinism.
Jerry C: “I really dislike the way philosophers redefine words away from what everyone thinks they mean–just so they can say that we have choices and free will. “
Most people use the word “choice” in situations when they believe they “really can” take action A or B.
Hence, if you are using the word “choice” while also saying “the alternate action is/was never actually possible ” then it would seem you’d be having to re-define “choice” away from it’s normal use. (And it’s actually compatibilists who use “choice” more in keeping with normal usage).
Or…if you bite the bullet and wish to say that “having a choice” in the way normally
understood is pure illusion – it doesn’t exist….then if you aren’t going to re-define the word and keep it, it looks like you’ll have to throw it away and stop using it.
Then I’d be curious as to what you’d recommend in it’s place. When presented with various options that we seem physically capable of taking, and asked which we desire to take, usually the word “choice” is short hand for this situation. What words would you suggest we always substitute?
Vaal
Also, there is no free will because there is no one doing the choosing as there is no ” I ” , no self. Even Dennett has said there is no one inside watching on a screen in the Cartesian theatre.
Are you seriously saying that *I* do not exist because I have no magical soul inside me? Do you also believe that the sun doesn’t exist because it doesn’t have a genius loci? In other words, either animism is true or all of physical reality is an illusion?
It is arguments like this that make me suspect incompatibilists might really be stealth dualists.
Here is how it works under the paradigm of naturalism: I am my body. If my body chooses something, I am choosing something. This is not rocket science or anything.
I’m reading The Self Ilusion by Bruce Hood at the moment. It is very interesting. There really is no “I”.
Mere assertion does not answer my questions. If I do not exist then how do you explain that I fathered a daughter? Is she also an illusion?
Really you appear to believe that a person has to have a magical soul or they do not exist.
You exist as a biological being but the “I” as one coherent, unified self is an illusion. The brain assembles a host of things into self identity (which can be fooled with by disrupting parts of the brain) or for example by interrupting various systems like the limbic system being tempered by the cortical systems (which of we’ve seen go haywire due to injury so people act impulsively or cannot reason well).
Moreover, the “you” is shaped from what the brain makes up about the nature of reality. It is easy for people to see their outward appearance as the shell for a unified inward self but really the environment (full of others) creates the self. Our brains fill in a lot of blanks.
I don’t know if what I wrote makes it clearer or muddier.
That…and, at a fundamental level, what one labels as an illusion gets iffy. What you’re reading right now, on the computer and in the network are “really” just varying pulses of electromagnetic energy. And, in your brain, they’re “really” just a minor variation on that theme, with electrochemical signals dominating. In a similar fashion, the chair you’re (presumably) sitting on is itself almost entirely empty space, and it’s only the electron shells of the outermost layers of atoms in the chair and your body (and clothing) that you’re feeling.
Once one takes a reductionist perspective at things, it becomes apparent that, in a real sense, everything is illusory…and, thus, illusion is the only reality that there is.
I don’t find it too useful to get hung up on how “real” an “illusion” is. It is useful to analyze the world and identify what’s going on at different layers of understanding and to understand how the one layer transitions into another. But to get upset because this one layer is nothing like the layers above and below it? What does that accomplish? Rather, when trying to understand the “meaning” of a particular layer, stick with explanations from within said layer.
A cup of tea is (generally) best understood in terms of its aroma, warmth, and flavor, not in terms of the hydrologic cycle or Brownian motion — though, of course, it can certainly be an entertaining foil to transition into such subjects.
Similarly, as important as it is to understand the disparate, fragmented, even disjointed nature of the self and cognition, as well as how societal and evolutionary pressures influence behavior…well, the most “meaningful” explanation for why I’m about to go give a certain cat a belly rub is because I love him and it’s chilly in the house and he’s warm and might be feeling the chill, himself.
Cheers,
b&
Diana,
Although I know that we disagree on what to do with the poor term free will, Ben Goren has essentially already given the best answer that I could.
Is it really helpful to say that the ocean is an illusion because it consists of a host of molecules and can be taken apart into individual buckets of water? What good is it to argue that everything except subatomic particles (or waves, or both?) is an illusion?
And again, how can there be an illusion if any being that could HAVE an illusion is an illusion itself, meaning that nothing exists that can have an illusion, meaning that there cannot be any illusions? This is all perfectly incoherent, a line of thought that collapses onto itself once one asks a probing question or two.
Unless you believe in souls, you are your body. Your body exists as much as any other thing, and it is no more an illusion that a car, even if you can take both the body and the car apart into piece that won’t be body or car individually.
(The latter observation is as trivial as irrelevant. It is astonishing how falling prey to the modo ad hoc fallacy is treated as some great novel insight by so many people lately. Indeed one should perhaps link from that Wikipedia article to a few comment threads on WEIT to provide illustrative examples of it being committed IRL.)
Unless you believe in souls, you are your body. Your body chooses, in every meaningful sense of the term, between eating meat and eating something vegetarian, based on the genes and brain chemistry that make that body you as opposed to anybody else. And that means that you make a choice.
That the choice was following some mechanistic, predetermined rules doesn’t matter either. Of course it had to do so, otherwise it would be random and (this is important) thus not a choice. Because rolling dice is not making a choice but the exact opposite.
Your either being deliberately obtuse or you are misunderstand what both Ben and I are saying when your argument rests on this:
That is a straw man. No one is saying that your body doesn’t exist. We are saying the unified self that you think you are does not exist. This is not philosophy but science in how the brain works.
Further by arguing that illusions are silly in this manner:
is another straw man. No one is arguing about the semantics of illusions. We were specifically talking about the “self” as an illusion and that “self” is something shaped by others, how we socialize with others, how we wish to be seen by others and the brain and how the brain works.
What Ben is highlighting is it is interesting and important to understand these things but at the end of the day the self is a strong illusion. It’s necessary for us as a species and knowing it is an illusion doesn’t mean we act differently knowing it (Ben, if this is not what you mean, please correct me).
So, before accusing me of various rhetorical fallacies, you may want to refrain from building straw men from my arguments.
Yeah, I think Diana and I are closer on this one.
Alex, you’ve got my cautions anti-reductionism correct, but the point does also stand that the self is very highly fragmented, much more than most people realize.
So: the “self” is less cohesive, more illusory than most phenomenon, but the fact that it’s illusory doesn’t mean it’s not a useful concept in many circumstances. Also, the fact that it’s an illusion of course doesn’t mean that it’s something else that it isn’t
b&
That is a straw man. No one is saying that your body doesn’t exist. We are saying the unified self that you think you are does not exist. This is not philosophy but science in how the brain works.
It is possible that you are strawmanning me. I do not argue that a magical soul exists, I argue that we are our bodies – the quintessentially naturalist stance. And our bodies exist as unified selves in the same way that the computer I am typing this on exists in a unified sense. And if my body loses an arm, *I* lose an arm. And our mind is the process of the body thinking, and our neurons making a choice is *us* making a choice. How can you possibly deny any of that?
No one is arguing about the semantics of illusions.
Well, I am, because the claim that our selves are illusions is self-refuting under any reasonable meaning of the term. Surely you would see the problem, for example, with discussing creationism with somebody who does not care what the word evolution actually means? If they think that evolution means “something from nothing” then surely some conversation about the meaning of terms would be in order.
Again please, this is a real question: who experiences the illusion that there is a self? Is there any way of answering it apart from with ‘we do’, which necessarily means that there would have to be some unified ‘us’ for the answer to make sense?
So from what I understand, you are defining the self as the biological entity that you are. I’m not arguing that the self exists outside of the physical body but I am arguing that it is formulated from the brain which is part of the physical body.
The concept of an “I” is the identity that the brain fabricates from neurons on up and arranges what appears like the “I” into a coherent narrative as a way to handle the billions of sensory inputs it receives every second. There is no body on the outside, person on the inside. The inside is just more body and the self doesn’t exist.
If the self existed, it would manifest wholly formed within us. Instead this idea of “I” slowly emerges as our brain develops and we gain experiences (self=product of brain and the brain is the product of the brain working with other brains). The self also deteriorates as the brain deteriorates (with illness like dementia, having a stroke, etc.).
The “I” helps ground experiences in a meaningful narrative, otherwise things would be fragmented and the brain could not process data so that we could use that data to make predictions and we have evolved to think of ourselves and others not as a bunch of processes but as individuals.
By the way, if the “I” is an illusion, then who is having that illusion? If there is nobody to have an illusion, then how can it be an illusion? The entire claim is incoherent.
Even if the brain is making choices, and it is, how are we responsible for those actions in the way that we hold people responsible in society.
We acknowledge our lack of free will all the time with terms like, “Why didn’t I think of that?” or “Gee, I’m not sure why I did that.” It’s only when we’re able to create some logical reason(s) as to why we MUST have done what we did that we believe we were responsible for our actions.
But when you get down deep in there, why do you do anything? You didn’t kill someone because it’s wrong to kill. Great answer, right? But why did you follow that moral and others don’t? It’s not enough to say, “They’re immoral and they made a choice.” The fact that your brain understands the rules of society and chooses not to go on killing sprees is not something you have any conscious control over.
The argument I hear all the time is, “Well, they thought about it. REALLY thought about it, consciously. They came to X decision, and they followed through with it.” But your consciousness is only privy to the information that the rest of the brain gives it (or is made up of bits and pieces of the information the rest of the brain has). As far as we know, it’s not the cause of anything, only a partial awareness of what’s going on.
If I’m sleepwalking and I slap you in the face, you probably wouldn’t get mad at me for doing so. How could you? I didn’t know that I was doing it, or why I was doing it. What’s the difference when we’re awake? If ignorance to cause is a reason for an insanity plea to get someone out of being charged with a felony, why would that same ignorance not protect a sane person?
I think I’m rambling a little, but it makes sense when I talk through it in my head.
That was supposed to be a response to Ben Goren in the thread above. Whoops.
I enjoyed Waller’s book a lot when I first read it.
If you are interested in the main argument against moral responsibility, I wrote a two-part summary and analysis of it on my blog when the book came out in 2011:
http://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.ie/2011/11/wallers-argument-against-moral.html
http://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.ie/2011/11/wallers-argument-against-moral_25.html
I have discovered an author who puts the growth of Christianity into a socio-historical context, and the details of the Christ story being true had virtually nothing to do with the growth of the religion. It was more about the social benefits of joining:
Bruce J Malina at amazon
…and co-authoring with Jerome H Neyrey, Portraits of Paul
Gerry and others may be interested to know that there is a long audiovisual discussion about free will and moral responsibility between Gregg Caruso and Bruce Weller over at `Philosopher`s TV` ( http://www.philostv.com )for Dec 16tn.
I’ve never really understood this argument, because it seems to me that the problem that not having free will causes for moral responsibility is not that it attacks the moral part, but that it attacks the RESPONSIBILITY part, so that if we don’t have any semblance of free will and don’t make any kind of meaningful choice then we can’t be held responsible for any of our actions and so from that can’t have moral responsibility (since we’d have to have responsibility first). If you concede that we can still be meaningfully said to make choices and be responsible for our actions, then it’s hard to see what challenge determinism could have for moral responsibility. Especially since both the Stoics and Kant didn’t think that we had any kind of contra-causal free will and yet still put together moral systems and thought that morality still had meaning, so you definitely need to say more about why MORALITY has an issue but RESPONSIBILITY does not. As I said, usually it’s the other way around.
Careful external priming and mitigation of high-risk encounters via controlled environments makes it less likely that a “decision” with dire consequences will emerge. This is how behavior can be altered without resorting to the independent agency implied with personal morality. Because consequences sculpt behavior, legislation becomes akin to a social Ulysses contract. A useful phrase would be situational accountability rather than moral responsibility.
There is no such thing as moral responsibility. Which by the way does not mean that there is no such thing as morality.
Exactly. Morals still serve a purpose. But we should probably reconsider how we deal with those that don’t follow them.
Based on the gospels of Matthew and Luke, we have two different Christmas stories which do a good job of contradicting each other. Mark and John say nothing about the birth of Jeebus.
Basic question, was Jeebus born during the reign of Herod (according to Matthew) who died in 4BCE or during the Census of Quirinius (according to Luke) which took place in 6-7 CE, ten years after the death of Herod.
Why do Matthew and Luke which are based on Mark (the three synoptic gospels) have different versions of the nativity story? Both were written around 80-90 CE. Consensus is that the author of Luke was a Hellenized Jew while the author of Matthew was a Jew but not hellenized. They were probably going after different audiences.
Only the Church gives dates so early for the Gospels, and that’s only to maintain the fiction that they’re eyewitness accounts. The reality is that the authors are clearly so far removed in both time and space from early first century Judea that those dates are laughable.
As second century documents written as religious fiction in the same style as all other religious fiction of the day, the discrepancies with other works of religious fiction and reality aren’t even worthy of comment. It’s only when you try to pretend that they’re not what they so clearly are that you get into trouble.
Cheers,
b&
Isn’t that also the explanation for the differences in Jesus’ geneaology? (But the fact that Jesus even has a geneaology through Joseph is not explained that way)
George, dating for the Gospels is a fiendishly tricky business. The atheist Robin Lane Fox goes with early dates even as he has Jesus dying very late (36 CE). An atheist can make the case for early dates and remain an atheist.
Re: Matthew, his gospel is first referred to in Ignatius’ Letter to the Smyrnaeans around CE 110. 1 Timothy (late first to mid 2nd century), the Pauline forgery, appears to refer to Luke. Incidentally, the earliest fragment of a John papyrus dates to about CE 125; Mark is first referred to by name around CE 125-40.
The problem of course with papyrus is that it decays after 60 or so years and therefore it has to be copied.
Luke of course doesn’t claim to be an eye witness: he is one of 2 evangelists who make a textual assertion that they are historians of a sort. Luke says he is basing his work on the testimony of others. Unlike, say, Herodotus and Thucydides and like all the historical writings in the OT, Luke never indicates how much he trusts a source – there is no sign of sceptical filtering or weighing of the evidence. He thinks he is a historian, but he’s a very poor one.
John’s Gospel does claim to be based on a primary source, the beloved disciple. With an early dating, and a late death of Jesus, it’s just about possible. And the theory supposes both an amanuensis and the rather fascinating friendship of an aged Galilean peasant and a Hellenized philosophical idealist.
Slaínte.
The fundamental problem with early dates for the Gospels is that Mark, presumably the earliest, clearly describes the Fall of Jerusalem and the Temple, an event that happened in 70 CE…but he does so in such a distorted way, including putting amidst people who lived and died decades before, that it can only possibly make sense if he was utterly familiar with the actual history of the region.
Indeed, it suggests that the author wasn’t even born until after the events in question, and grew up quite some distance away. Couple this with the fact that it’s written in Greek by somebody as unfamiliar with Aramaic as he was with Palestinian geography and Judaean politics and history, and any last pretenses that this was anything even vaguely resembling a contemporary eyewitness account completely vanish.
…and that’s long before we get to a literary analysis, including the omniscient third-person perspective and uncritical recounting of events that the narrator couldn’t possibly have witnessed, incessant matter-of-fact descriptions of events that emphatically did not and could not possibly have happened, and so on….
Cheers,
b&
Ben,
I assume you’ve been on the pre-Xmas pop, like me: the syntax of your first paragraph wasn’t your finest moment. No doubt, I’ll follow suit.
Mark’s NT prophetic trope follows on from the OT tradition – the narration of a prediction, prophesy, which came true. The problem with what you are referring to, the fact that not one stone of the Temple would remain standing, is that it’s untrue. The Western Wall remains to this day.
Either the evangelist (and I can’t remember off-hand in which Gospel the story occurs) didn’t know that: or it was widely believed: or it was written before CE 70 when the Temple was largely destroyed. And that is entirely possible. The centrality of the Temple in the 4 Gospels is absolutely explicable, not from the point of view of its destruction in CE 70, but also from Judahite and Judean fetishism for it dating at least back to 622 BCE.
There is another explanation which favours a post- 70 CE authorship. If we look at the OT, there are occasional examples of predictions, prophecies, within a text which did not come true – explicable by the fact that the author just wasn’t paying enough attention to his (and it was ‘his’) own theology and history. Mark might just have been (theologically) and, as it turned out, historically wrong.
Ben, you say that Mark “clearly describes the Fall of Jerusalem and the Temple…but he does so in such a distorted way.” I’m sorry, but that’s not coherent. Besides, Mark plainly does not plainly describe the fall of Jerusalem.
If you want to give extremely late 2nd century dates for the Gospels, then you’re going to have to explain the many references to them in the non-canonical writings of the Church Fathers (CE 96-150). Unless you want to move all their writings forward to us by 100 years or so. That’s a lot of research.
Velikovsky tried roughly the same thing: and Egyptologists wasted 20 or so years refuting him.
Slaínte.
One could say that the western wall is a retaining wall for the temple mount, but not part of the temple itself, which is entirely gone.
Absolutely. It depends how the Jews themselves thought of the Temple. Was it what we would call the holy building itself? Or what is it the entire complex?
We know that foreigners couldn’t enter within the enclosure on pain of death. Paul was accused of, and denied, encouraging precisely that. The early Christians probably thought of the Temple as being the entire huge complex – Jesus thought the money-changers, outside the Temple building but within the walls, were defiling the place.
The ‘Egyptian’, mentioned in Acts and Josephus, wanted to destroy the walls of Jerusalem. Which makes it sound like the walls were viewed as synonymous with the Temple.
Maybe someone else knows.
Slaínte.
Good to see P. R. is still working on this stuff (he’s the one I did a course with on the subject nearly 14 years ago).
The “ignore neuroscience” trend does still distress me: one of the books we studied was all about mechanisms (supposedly) but had not a single brain map or even functional (block) diagram.