Oscar Pistorius, the legless super-athlete from South Africa, has been found not guilty of murder in the killing (which he admits) of his partner Reeva Steenkamp. “Murder” apparently involves premeditation in South Africa, and the judge (there wasn’t a jury) said that there was no evidence beyond reasonable doubt of premeditation.
Pistorius was, however, convicted of “culpable homicide,” a crime for which he may or may not serve jail time. He’ll be sentenced in October.
As someone who doesn’t think that Pistorius, or any other criminal, had any choice about their actions, and that the nature of any punishment should be take that determinism into account, I need to think about whether premeditation makes such a huge difference. As I see it (and I know others will disagree), the laws of physics had already determined that Pistorius was going to murder his girlfriend that night. Would his plotting to kill her in advance be much worse than his having decided to do so on the spot? (I don’t believe he didn’t know it was her, although he claims he thought it was a burglar.)
For a determinist, punishment has three rationales: deterrence of others, rehabilitation of the criminal, and protection of society from the criminal. How would each of these be more serious under premeditation?
Punishing premeditation more severely may have a marginal effect on deterrence, for a potential criminal may realize that he/she would, if caught, be sentenced more severely if they were found to have plotted the crime in advance instead of doing it on the spot. Maybe that would stop them from carrying out what they were planning. Indeed, for many crimes you can be jailed for just planning them without having done the deed. But fear of the “premeditation” charge seems unlikely to severely deter criminals who are plotting crimes, since they’re already thinking about it and they are not planning to get caught. And the charge is irrelevant for those committing crimes hatched on the spot.
Rehabilitation of the criminal: is a longer sentence for premeditation going to lead to a better chance for rehabilitation of the criminal? I don’t see how.
Protection of society: This seems to be the most logical rationale for tacking on extra punishment for premeditation, for a criminal who plots crimes well in advance might be a more odious and sociopathic person than one who does a crime on the spur of the moment. That is, I think the chance of recidivism is greater for a criminal whose deeds are premeditated. This could, in principle, be tested.
These are just some tentative thoughts, and I welcome ideas from readers. If you know the law, perhaps you can explain the legal rationale for charging someone with a more serious crime when the same act is shown to be premeditated.
Or we could say that one who does a crime on the spur of the moment may have very poor impulse control and is in greater need of rehabilitation.
As you point out, this is amenable to testing.
This. An immediate crime of passion is most likely an anger management type of issue. Premeditation, on the other hand, speaks to a deeper sociopathy.
It would depend on the circumstances. Man slaughter could be a clumsy reaction to bad circumstances.
Wouldn’t this suggest from a remedial point of view that lack of premeditation might require a longer period of incarceration to assist the individual in developing impulse control or anger management strategies? Does it flip the model on its head?
One additional question I had was the use of “the laws of physics had already determined that Pistorius was going to murder his girlfriend that night”.
Can the use of “had already determined” ever be correct from a determinist point of view? Couldn’t some additional input take place that changes his reaction, even as he’s lunging for her? Can we say something is determined before the instant that it happens, even if it appears to us extremely probable that it will happen?
“Couldn’t some additional input take place that changes his reaction, even as he’s lunging for her?”
Well, no. The additional input would also be determined based on antecedents.
“Can we say something is determined before the instant that it happens, even if it appears to us extremely probable that it will happen?”
You seem to be confusing what “appears to us” with what is determined. In a determined universe, we don’t necessarily know what will happen, only that there is only one outcome possible.
But we don’t live in that sort of universe. Our universe is governed by quantum mechanics, in which many outcomes are possible.
So in fact Reg is correct: we can’t say that an event is determined until it actually happens.
Quantum effects do not happen at the macro level. Any living cell is many orders of magnitude too large.
If you’ve ever listened to the click of a Geiger counter, or seen the flickering of a failing fluorescent tube, or read about the detection of the Higgs boson, then you have witnessed the effects of individual quantum events at the macro level.
Quantum events have effects at all size scales. The distribution of galactic superclusters (and thus the very existence of the Earth) is a consequence of quantum events in the early universe.
Assuming to some degree the transitivity of causation, which is tricky to make work, anyway.
You are correct that quantum factors are random, but it doesn’t add free will. It adds randomness.
I didn’t claim it added free will. I pointed out that to say “the laws of physics had already determined” something is factually incorrect according to our best understanding of physics.
If the goal is to educate people about what determinism actually means, we should try to get the physics right. Talk of predeterminism, “only one outcome is possible”, “it was all decided by the Big Bang”, and so on does not serve that goal.
“I didn’t claim it added free will.”
I didn’t claim you claimed it added free will.
You are right, of course, and longer discussions of the topic (eg Sam Harris) always cover that – the universe is NOT deterministic in the classical sense. And I certainly don’t think that stochastic quantum fluctuations are irrelevant to the brain. How else do you resolve the paradox about how your brain decides that is has enough information to make a decision?
But nobody who argues in favor of “free will” thinks that “free” means “random”. Nobody, except possibly Deepak Chopra, thinks that quantum mechanics saves free will. So “deterministic” in these discussions is just shorthand for “deterministic or stochastic”. We just don’t bother stating the caveat explicitly every time.
and, sub.
Recidivism rates amongst impulse criminals is far higher than among those who commit premeditated crimes. I’ve worked quite a lot with the former and some of them are in and out of prison all the time.
When it comes to violent crime premeditated criminals are comparatively rare – except in crime fiction where criminals are mainly masterminds. The truth is most violent crime is sordid and uninteresting.
Punishment of impulse offenders just doesn’t work. Getting them out of situations where criminal impulse is rewarded – for instance, away from gangs and into work – is more effective. And one of the major barriers to work is a prison sentence.
Behaving as though we have limited control over at least some of our actions seems to serve all three purposes. Otherwise, there’s little sense in talking about it. Though we can’t help talking about it, since we’re determined to do it as evidenced by the fact that we’re doing it.
On that score, premeditation means we had MORE of a choice and were MORE culpable.
sub
But, if you are a determinist, then, if he premeditated the killing, he had no choice but to do so. The premeditation was just as pre-ordained as the murder itself.
Premeditated to me is worse because the murderer was subjected to a host of environmental/societal pressures that should have deflected a normal person from carrying out the act. Someone who kills at the spur of the moment may have been subjected to an unusually intense set of environmental pressures that determined the fatal action. In the later case, other evidence would be needed to determine whether the murderer simply has poor impulse control, and is thus as like to kill again as a premeditated murderer, or whether it truly was an extraordinary (rare) set of environmental circumstances what would have caused many normal people to kill.
With premeditation, the greater time to think should have allowed a normal person to have been exposed to ameliorating environmental pressures (e.g., time, normal social contact) or to involuntarily seek out non-fatal alternatives via thought or conversation.
Nobody is suggesting otherwise. The question is not about whether premeditation reintroduces a “free will” element. Both types of crime are assumed to be fully deterministic.
Obstructing the momentum of the obsessively sadistic seems pragmatic enough for emphasis on premeditation. There can be no such thing as a jury of situational relativists when confronted with the machinations of individuals like Andrew Urdialis or Oba Chandler.
I wouldn’t trust someone who murdered ‘in the heat of passion’ or it’s equivalence any more than I would trust someone who planned a murder.
One could be a narcissist or klutz, the other a devious sociopath or revenge taker for a perceived crime. I think I’d need more details to determine my level of trust.
Continuing this line of questioning, you may also ask how much “innocence” really matters in determining punishments. If it is found that the deterrent effect is maximized when all or most crimes result in punishment, then it shouldn’t matter that the occasional innocent person is punished, so long as that person is widely believed to be guilty. If we believe that criminals don’t “deserve” to be punished, and that punishment is justified mainly by social outcomes, shouldn’t we also believe the converse proposition that innocents don’t “deserve” to be spared punishment?
I think there’s a problem here (as do many compatibilists and libertarians). I don’t think any of us want to allow for the punishment of innocents, but that implies we acknowledge degrees of moral responsibility.
Arguably an innocent person needs to be punished more than a guilty one as the guilty person knows what they did wrong and can therefore learn a lesson.
Executing an innocent person means we don’t have to worry that they’ll seek revenge for the injustice committed against them.
Since the State is as subject to determinism as the individual we shouldn’t really hold it to account for injustice.
In a world where there’s no such thing as choices and responsibility, what does innocence mean? And anyway as long as you exist, there’s going to be some physical causal chain from your mere existence to any event happening, since you contribute to the total state of the universe that deterministically led to the occurrence of the event.
No, many times over.
Your hypothetical society doesn’t punish crime at all. It punishes being accused of a crime. When innocence and guilt have no bearing on legal proceedings, people will universally see all law enforcement agents as enemies, and rightly so.
My “hypothetical society” is exactly what the determinists want: as you said, it doesn’t punish crime at all. Instead it uses persons as instruments for deterrence and prevention. That is literally exactly what the determinists advocate.
That “hypothetical” society is furthermore not so different from the one we have now. We do in fact punish a significant number of innocent people — not enough to be socially destabilizing, but a significant number. We could reduce the number of innocent incarcerations if we raised the standard of proof for criminal proceedings, but with the consequence that more criminals would go free. Therefore we have adopted this exact proposition: it is okay to punish some innocent people in order to realize the punitive goals of deterrence and prevention.
Determinists could take this reasoning one step further: since they reject the concept of dessert, the incarcerated innocents do not deserve to be free, nor do they deserve any compensation if they are exonerated. We might argue that there is some net social harm if exonerated persons are not compensated; but I’m not sure that could even be proven since there are relatively few of them.
desert, not afters.
Hmmm, I suppose you wouldn’t deserve your dessert either, and of course you shouldn’t bother being grateful if you get some.
🙂
Your hypothetical society is a straw society that no determinist wants, either explicitly or implicitly through their views. You’re distorting what determinism actually entails, and drawing conclusions that simply do not follow.
As I explained, in a society where innocence and guilt did not decide the outcome of a criminal proceeding, punishment would have zero deterrent effect. Even the most ruthlessly pragmatic determinist (who doesn’t exist) would recognize that fact and reject the point of view you’re saddling him or her with.
I think the difference is perhaps that the premeditated murderer is seen as more dangerous because he or she is the type of person who plots the demise of others. One that did not plot murder may be less likely to do it again (depending on the circumstances). It would be interesting to see recidivism data to determine if this is so.
Stupid “b” in my name because of my ipad. I swear it makes its own jokes.
Did your ipad do this spontaneously or was it premeditated ?
Ha ha hard to say.
Is that premeditated or premedicated? Maybe the iPad has a virus (cough, cough).
😾
I presume you posted a cute emoticon there. Sadly, my PC running Chrome only shows a square. Does anyone know how I can fix this (other than buying a Mac).
Chrome is not the problem. I use Chrome on my iPhone and PC and I see the cat emoticon (different picture on the 2 devices). It is probably a metter of fonts.
Ant is good at figuring this out. I am using chrome on a Mac and once I couldn’t see them either. It must be that you need to have the emoji font installed as NewEnglandBob suggests.
OK, thanks. Can one of you suggest a safe site for downloading them – I’m always scared of using that type of site.
I don’t even know. Suddenly they just all worked so I suspect they showed up with an OS update.
“because he or she is the type of person who plots the demise of others.” So, should we equally punish those who directly attempt murder, those who conspire with the intent to commit murder, and those who fantasize about murdering real people (like James Holmes and his pre-murder journals)? Should they be punished equally to those who actually complete their premeditated murders? All of these cases are “that type of person,” and they all pose some degree of threat to others. Perhaps by punishing potential murderers we can simultaneously prevent murders from happening, deter people from even thinking about murder, and rehabilitate those with potentially murderous ideas.
Um, no?
The reason I said “the type of person who” is because I’m thinking about determinism and in that space and time with all the variables that is who that person is.
Would it make you feel better if I said, “type of person who plots then executes those plots”? I thought that was implied in the comparison.
Or would you like to strawman the hell out of what I said again?
Diana, I am not attempting to straw man your position. I am arguing that the consequentialist basis for punishment (to which you appear to subscribe) cannot reliably draw a bright line distinction between those who have actually completed criminal acts vs those who show other evidence of potentially completing criminal acts. Clearly you care about the “type of person who plots then executes those plots” because you are concerned about their potential future behavior. Since you are a determinist, you already don’t care about the moral weight of what they may have done in the past, except to the degree that it gives evidence predictive of their potential future behavior. You didn’t say this, but I think you are logically committed to this conclusion unless you can explain how to make a consequentialist distinction between actual criminals and potential ones.
The reason we incarcerate people is to deter behaviour in others or protect others. Depending on the circumstances it is likely that a person premeditation a murder is more dangerous than some schmuck that finds himself in a situation that causes a death. Most likely, the Schmuck isn’t going to do it again unless he is a complete screw up and his sentence would also reflect how dangerous he is to others.
Diana, you are referring to two distinct criteria for punishment: (1) Deterrence (i.e. reducing the likelihood that murders will be committed in the general population), and (2) Prevention (i.e. reducing the likelihood that an individual will commit repeated murders). Given these two criteria, my question is: Shouldn’t you equally punish someone who contemplates or attempts murder, but doesn’t actually succeed in the act? If not, then why should they be given a pass?
I certainly agree that the “schmuck” who haplessly causes a death deserves less punishment. But you determinists don’t think he “deserves” anything either way, because moral responsibility isn’t even a thing. His best hope is that his hypothetical punishment won’t be useful for deterrence (which it could possibly be).
This person is more dangerous to the public. He or she is demonstrably capable of scheming to kill someone. It is most likely that such a person is a dangerous psychopath. There may be mitigating circumstances that would show otherwise that would go into the sentencing. Perhaps the person would go to a psychiatric facility but it is more dangerous for them to be out in the public than the schmuck.
Diana, I think you’ve answered one of my questions, but I want to be sure. I’m not asking about the “schmuck” — I think everyone agrees about the schmuck (but I also think the true schmucks are quite rare). My question is about the difference between those who plan unsuccessful murders vs those who carry them out. It sounds like you would punish them equally, for the goals of deterrence and prevention.
My second question is about where to draw the line for preventive incarceration. If people show signs of deviance that may predict future crime, should the law intervene? Is it okay to monitor them? To incarcerate them? This seems to be allowed under the determinist’s consequentialist justification for punishment.
We currently incarcerate those who are psychiatrically unwell, especially if they are going to harm themselves or others. Plotting a murder is already something that is reportable to police. Thought crime isn’t possible or detectable.
In the US, involuntary commitments are now quite rare, and usually follow a demonstrated pattern of dangerous behavior resulting in hospitalization or arrest. In the past, it was much easier to “check in” a person against their will based on claims of being “psychiatrically unwell,” but this practice has been constrained due to concerns that it infringes individual autonomy.
Anyway… “thought crime” is exactly what you’re talking about when you say that premeditated intent matters, and it’s completely detectable when individuals share their thoughts through speech or writing (as in James Holmes’ journals). Consider these two cases: A man confides in you that he once planned a murder, and (A) killed someone and got away with it; (B) was interrupted at the last instant and didn’t go through with it. Both these cases describe a person who is capable of planning and executing a murder, and might try it again, except the person in case B benefited from pre-determined “moral luck”. If we are only concerned with prevention and deterrence, then we should treat A and B exactly the same, i.e. there is no real difference between one who has killed and one who would kill under the right conditions.
I don’t think you call those things “thought crime”. If you tell your therapist or doctor, that you are going to kill someone, they have an obligation to report that to the authorities who will investigate what you’re up to. You aren’t allowed to plot homicide.
You are allowed to think about or even fantasize about killing people all the time and if you don’t tell anyone what you’re thinking, you probably won’t get caught until you go do it. Of course, premeditation could still be proven if it looks like you set up the whole thing in advance. It still isn’t a thought crime you are being convicted of.
Yes, I agree you’re not allowed to plot a murder, etc. But you are still avoiding my question: would you equally punish both of these cases: the guy who planned it but didn’t follow through; vs the guy who actually did the deed. Is there any moral difference between someone who actually killed and someone who almost killed?
Someone who almost killed would be convicted of attempted homicide. There is a difference because the act didn’t take place and therefore the crime was not as deadly. I’m not avoiding your question – I thought I answered it as you were saying that premeditated murder is “thought crime”. It isn’t.
Diana, you introduced the phrase “thought crime” into the conversation. The subject of our discussion is your original assertion that intent and premeditation (which are states of mind and patterns of thought) are what should motivate stronger punishment, as compared to hypothetical “schmucks” who commit unintentional manslaughter.
My example may or may not technically be considered attempted murder. Usually, to prove attempted murder, it has to be demonstrated that the person took some deliberate action with the intent to murder, so I don’t think my example necessarily qualifies. My question is whether you believe there is any moral difference; this is a question about your moral philosophy.
It may be instructive to consider what happens in real laws, as there are different approaches: in some jurisdictions, the statute of limitations is different for attempted vs completed murders. In other jurisdictions attempted murder is treated equally with murder; so there is not universal agreement on whether they merit equivalent prosecution and punishment.
No, look at the thread. I never said “thought crime”. That was what you decided to characterize premeditation as.
There is no “moral” difference because people are not “morally” responsible. In a determinist universe where free will is an illusion, people should be held responsible for what they did but not “morally” responsible.
However, there is more to it than that. When sentencing someone for a crime you are doing two things: deterring the person and others from committing said crime and protecting the public from that person in cases where that person is a threat to others. The sentence and the assignment of the crime takes both these things into consideration.
Diana, I did look at the thread, the words “thought crime” were first introduced by you. I didn’t “decide” that premeditation is “thought crime” — that’s exactly what meditation is! “planning, forethought, preplanning” — all stuff that happens in the person’s head.
Anyway I think I’ve got an answer from you. The person in case (A) confides in you that he committed murder; I assume you run to the authorities and turn him in. The person in case (B) confides that he intended to commit a murder and would have done it; I assume you run to the authorities and turn him in as well.
Honestly this is confusing.
You say:
We are talking about premeditated murder vs. non-premeditated murder not murder vs. thinking about murder and changing his mind (someone intended to commit murder but didn’t do it – I assume this is what you mean by “would have done it”). No murder has happened and the person doesn’t intend on actually killing anyone now. How would that be a crime? What we try to stop is someone who intends to kill someone is intending to go through with it not someone who has change his mind. Though, if he spoke this way to someone in authority, he would most likely find himself investigated.
Diana, I think we’d better shut this down before it goes to long. I’ll just try and re-summarize my point to see if I can make it more clear. The original post (Coyne’s) is about the distinctions between premeditated crimes vs crimes of passion. You said that premeditation indicates the person is a greater potential threat, and therefore a higher degree of punishment is warranted. My response is that this implies we should punish/rehabilitate people who show evidence of being a threat. In my examples (A) and (B), both pose an equal threat to society based on the stories they tell, and by that standard they should both be incarcerated. The person in (B) didn’t “change his mind”, he was just interrupted and never completed the planned crime. My motivation for this example is to argue that the determinist approach to punishment calls for expansion of punishments for some individuals in some situations. The determinists often talk about compassion and lessening the burden of retributive punishments, but there is a flip side in which our concept of innocence is diluted as well. If nobody “deserves” what they get, then nobody “deserves” to go unpunished.
What I think you are missing is that one doesn’t get off scott free – premeditated and murder are both crimes. The idea of “punishment” is something that I don’t think should be the reason someone is incarcerated. Incarceration should be for deterrence and protection of the rest of society from that individual. Punishment implies that the person had a choice.
The example you gave wasn’t clear that the person was “interrupted” just that he “would have”. If that person was “interrupted” that person is guilty of conspiring to commit murder.
I think these are all about different things. Jerry’s OP is about two types of murder.
You have added conspiracy to commit murder. All are crimes.
There is no “deserves”. There is no “punish”. It is about being responsible, not morally responsible and sentenced in a way to deter further crime and/or protect society. Punishment and “deserve” are for those that believe we have free will and most likely dualistic free will.
“Thoughtcrime” is already taken and the meaning is Orwellian and quite different from what y’all are using it for.
I hate to see a good word subverted.
Unless I’m mistaken, those are two different things. “Conspiracy to commit murder” and “murder” are not the same crime. One would not expect the punishments to be identical, would one?
Yes, did I say something different? I’m having a hard time following the Word Press thread so I can’t tell which part you’re referring to in the long thread.
A WordPress weirdness… I was trying to respond to cjwinstead just upstream.
Oh okay….the whole WordPress thread is nuts.
If we were able to give a complete and total amount of why Pistorius did what he did, we would be unable to blame him as the ultimate author of his actions, any more than you or I could be blamed for sneezing.
This doesn’t mean that we let every killer go. We still have to build walls to contain people whose intentions are bad, even if they have no control over those intentions.
In the case of Pistorius, we don’t know for certain his intentions, but the death of Steenkamp was the culmination of a history of violent, aggressive and reckless behavior. Her family had been worried before that he might harm her, and in general his history shows that his mind has a tendency to produce intentions that were not aligned with the well being of others. The imprisonment of Pistorius can be justified by our knowledge of the misalignment of his intentions with the well-being of society. Either he should be put away for a month or for twenty years is debatable, but prudence should err on the side of safety for society.
In other cases, evidence of premeditation for a crime abounds. Some killers plan their murders in horrific detail. In some cases the planning and the actions planned are so horrific, so orthagonal to the well-being of everyone, that we have no choice but to lock the person away indefinitely.
It might be instructive to draw up a scheme for how criminals should be dealt with, based purely on our best secular understandings of human behavior. Perhaps we already have such a system in the delightfully rational Scandinavian democracies. Their sentences are notoriously light over there. Perhaps someone could enlighten us on their sentencing guidelines.
“This doesn’t mean that we let every killer go. We still have to build walls to contain people whose intentions are bad, even if they have no control over those intentions. ”
Which killers should we “let go”? What about people who murder with claimed good intentions? Like, say, George Zimmerman?
It seems that christians are very interested in the difference between spontaneous and premeditated in the context of “sin”.
For example from a catholic dogma web site:
Mortal sins are premeditated (if even for a brief second), thereby disregarding God’s love and deliberately breaking His law.
It’s like our legal system has been contaminated by the christian concept of sin.
At least in Canada my reading of the criminal law is that it requires contracausal free will, so in a way, yes, Christianity (though not all denominations – Calvinism, say, is out) is required.
In a truly deterministic world, “decided” would a nonsensical term, except as a description of epiphenomena. In other words, for a determinist, there really is no material difference between the two situations, and thus neither could be “worse”.
I don’t agree with this at all. If we model the brain as a determinstic information-processing machine, then “decisions” are the points in time at which inputs are processed to generate output. The “decision” to murder can occur well ahead of the crime (“premeditated”) or just before the crime (“unpremediated”). The fact that decisions are deterministic does not remove this distinction.
Under the deterministic model, we are punishing people based on the type of information-processing algorithms that are present in their brains. Some people’s brains may have information-processing algorthms for which a wide array of possible inputs can generate an output to murder, either immediately or well ahead in the future. Other people’s information-processing algorithms may be such that they could never result in a pre-planned future murder, whatever the inputs, but may sometimes generate output to murder immediately. The former category of people are potential premeditated murderers, the latter are not.
Under (for example) the “protection of society” rationale for punishment, we might decide that people whose brains work in the first way are much “worse”, and should be punished more severely.
Intention makes a lot of difference regardless of whether you believe in a deterministic universe.
If someone deliberately plans and carries out their decision to run somebody down in their car, or someone accidentally skids in the rain in heavy rain one night the resultant dead body might be the same; but you cannot expect society to treat the two drivers the same way. The first is probably dangerous to society and the other is not.
There is more likely to be a blurring of the distinguishing boundaries between culpable and non-culpable homicide if one applied a strict deterministic interpretation to the definitions as they hinge on whether someone can be held responsible for the death of someone else. However, even then determinism shouldn’t be able to make a significant difference if you apply a test of legal consequences for the sake of protection of society. Someone who skids on a wet road at night is probably not a threat to the well-being of society. Someone who habitually breaks the speed limits and then skids causing a similar accident is potentially a future danger to society and probably needs some sort of censure.
Intension is coherent and as suggested above (commment 1) can and should be tested.
Possibly most people may not have wanted to kill someone after the fact. If it is rash and emotionally guided, there would clearly be evidence to suggest that a person did not think rationally at that moment. Knowing, too that the person is capable of murder can be useful for preventing them from doing it again, especially if the person is willing to work on not doing it again.
Someone who skids on a wet road is negligent and potentially could kill anyone. Someone who premeditates murder is a danger only to the person who aggrieved him. So in terms of danger to society, we should lock up the skidder and release the premeditator.
Not necessarily; what if the skidder was sold shit tiers or what if the premeditator enjoys his hobby and is a dangerous psychopath.
Psychopaths naturally should be locked up too. I don’t see why the skidder gets a pass. We should err on the side of safety. If the skidder was careless with his purchase of tires he’s still a danger to society. Nevertheless we may allow some exceptions but the rule still holds in general – lock up people who kill accidentally and set free premeditated murderers.
But we aren’t arguing about getting a pass. We are arguing about which crime is worse or if there should be a difference in sentence. I maintain the plotter is more dangerous but both cases would need to be understood. That is why we have lawyers, judges & juries.
As for psychopaths only the bad ones. There are many high functioning psychopaths that probably successfully hide as assholes.
I was going to agree that someone who premeditates murder is more dangerous, but I’m not so sure on second thoughts. I think a case could be made for some exceptions, at least. If a person has a nasty and violent temper, and frequently gets into heated arguments that lead to abuse, perhaps by sheer frequency of incidents they are more dangerous than some plotters? Conversely, a plotter might be of the rational self-interested sort that has only one occasion to commit murder and then clams up under the harsh threat of punishment or risk of detection.
Yes, I agree someone with anger management issues could be dangerous and that is why the sentencing should reflect that — anger management classes, psychotherapy & if the person becomes very dangerous, incarceration. Most likely someone that dangerous would probably commit crimes worse than manslaughter.
I had the same initial and second thoughts. I’d rather live next door to someone who plans the murder of a single target person for 5 years before committing it than someone who repeatedly goes berserk and randomly kills in a serial fashion. If I’m not the targeted person, one murderer is more dangerous than the other.
Choose:
1) live next door to a doctor who premeditated the murder of his wife; or
2) drive on the highway everyday with somebody who’s a careless driver prone to skidding
You bring to mind a film I saw on Big Think.
“Neuroscientist James Fallon discusses how he came to discover, and how he’s learned to live with, the fact that he’s a borderline psychopath. Fallon is the author of The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain”
Search Big Think, “Discovering One’s Hidden Psychopathy”.
Yes, I read his book, The Psychopath Inside recently and he is indeed a psychopath. He does things like plot revenge on people without even showing that he is angry; this revenge can take years but his rule is that he only gets you back as badly as you got him. He also manipulates people to get his own way and because his amygdala is quieter than non-psychopaths, he puts himself & others at risk.
The reason he isn’t more malicious, he reasons, is his upbringing was a loving one. I got a chuckle about his story of how he blew off colleagues he was supposed to present things with to go to bars only to have his colleagues call him a “sociopath” and a “psychopath”. He figured they were just telling him off but in retrospect, he realized that his colleagues were using the terms “psychopath” and “sociopath” not as a means to express their anger, but accurately & even clinically since they too were brain scientists. He realizes that he should have paid more attention to what they were telling him.
Right at the moment the rellies’ larvae are rampaging around my lounge, leaving a trail of destruction and a toxic slime of half-eaten food scraps behind them while the TV blasts out uniquely annoying Disney jingles. My inner psychopath is contemplating going all Pistorius (that’s like Pissed-Off-ious only more lethal) on their asses and making a plea of Involuntary Pesticide.
I dunno, does sublimating my impulse to out-scream Disney indicate I have a hidden psychopathic streak? Or does everyone do this sort of thing…?
From the video, I see traits like this forming a bell curve in the population. Everyone has some, some have it in higher proportions. Where we each fit on the curve is probably best judged by the people around us.
BTW FWIW, I noticed in the news the other day is a report of a woman who is missing her entire cerebellum, yet she manages with only partial disability. This speaks to the amazing plasticity of the brain we are endowed with. I wouldn’t worry too much if it turned out I had a somewhat atypical brain riding in my head.
One point that seems relevant is that a premeditated murder indicates something very different about the mind of the perpetrator compared to the mind of someone who commits murder in “crime of passion” circumstances. Or at aleast it may.
If nothing else an effective “treatment” protocol for each would almost certainly be different.
For me it’s simple. While determinism is absolutely, incontrovertibly the case, there is simply no way to live meaningfully like that, so we must buy into the fiction that we are not determined. We must distinguish between the time it takes to plan, and thereby rethink, a murder, and the impulse to strike out without thought. Are they functionally equivalent according to the physics and best philosophy? Of course they are. But there’s no good way to operationalize that fact existentially.
And you might as well say that it’s no good arguing against my point because I had no choice but to post it and you had no choice but to respond, tiny fleas to bite’em all the way down through infinitesimal infinitude. It’s frankly pointless. If we don’t live the fiction that is free will, we go mad trying to figure out how to live the truth that is determinism. It’s like “i” in math, the square root of negative one. It’s imaginary, but it’s the only thing that can made sense of many other things that are real.
It’s like “i” in math, the square root of negative one. It’s imaginary, but it’s the only thing that can made sense of many other things that are real.
It’s also like the ‘i’ in ‘I’. Your ‘self’ is as illusory as ‘free will’ by much the same logic. Why worry about being murdered if your ‘self’ is just a neurological delusion?
That’s true, the self is an illusion. Fortunately, I love good fiction.
I struggle with this too. If a person has decided to murder another (can’t do otherwise), the only hope for the intended victim is for new information to be received by the soon-to-be-murderer. That is what CAN make them do otherwise. The presence of 50 bystanders deters the murderer at that moment. If someone said “why do you despise her so? She’s the mother of your children,” could influence the murderer to do otherwise. Couldn’t a random thought about God and attending Sunday School as a youth, and the Golden Rule do the same? The increased punishment for premeditated murder appears to reflect an assumption that there was ample time and opportunity for new information to convince the perpetrator to do otherwise but that they “chose” to ignore it or found it unconvincing. Is it their fault then that no one intervened in their murderous mental process or if they did, failed to make an argument that would influence their actions? Obviously not and it’s a perverse condition upon which to decide guilt.
Brain pathology (e.g. psychopathy) predisposes such individuals to be immune to appeals to their empathy because they are hard-wired to lack it. They are “less culpable” because the logic of compassion cannot convince them to do otherwise through no fault of their own.
Could greater jail time for premeditated murder have been “selected for” because it makes society safer by identifying sociopaths and psychopaths (anti-social and don’t receive “new information” or lack empathy) and removes them from society for longer?
I followed a lot of the trial, including Pistorius’s testimony. His claim was that he thought he was shooting at an intruder in the bathroom; he was defending his girlfriend and home. I rather doubt that he was telling the truth, but IF he was, it’s not a ‘crime of passion’. Surely that does make a difference to how harshly he’ll be dealt with at sentencing.
Right, killing an intruder would not be illegal in S.A.
He fired four shots through the bathroom door using bullets that were specifically designed to cause the maximum damage. He certainly intended to kill *somebody*. That’s murder in my book.
Would we want people walking around who think it’s okay to kill unknown people because they *might* be a threat?
(Personally, I’m sure he knew who it was. If he didn’t at least check the bed to make sure it couldn’t be Reeva in the bathroom then he’s not only homicidal but reckless as well.)
No we wouldn’t want people,walking around doing that, which is why he’s been found guilty of a different charge. You’re speculating about his intentions, and you might be correct, but courts aren’t in the business of speculating. They can only consider the facts (testimony) that are placed before them. There are very good reasons for this.
A quick Google says in S.A. law shooting an intruder is not illegal.
I’ll research this, but I know that the wording of the law is more complicated that your interpretation here. The circumstances are not irrelevant. That’s why there was a trial.
Done. There is no green light to shooting an intruder that is disconnected to the circumstances. The police and courts have wide leeway in determining whether or not the use of force was appropriate, and in this case: the court has spoken. Also you (like Pistorius) conflate ‘knowing there was an intruder in his house’, with “feeling” that there was. These are two different things. In fact, he didn’t know that there was one; couldn’t have, because there was not.
Yes, I was going to make that same point. I would think that, in order to claim that exemption, one would first have to be sure of an intruder. In New Zealand (probably in most countries) there is en excuse for self-defense, but if I blasted the postman through my front door because I thought he might be a gang member about to break in, I doubt I’d get far with that in court.
I think this is just another OJ Simpson case.
but can i still pat myself on the back for not killing anybody if it’s predetermined that i’ll never kill anybody?
You contact your self on the back with either hand or both.
The laws of physics determined he would kill? How long in advance? A micro second? Sure, but 10 minutes or 3 hours in advance? I’ve “made up my mind” to do things minutes or hours in advance and then changed my mind as I thought about it. I think premeditation is a very real thing.
Yes, but premeditation is determined as well. As far as how long in advance things are determined, probably a long time if you take environmental factors into consideration.
Someone who commits a crime of momentary passion could probably be prevented from doing it again simply by keeping closer tabs on them and making further crimes less convenient: preventing them from buying guns, for instance, so the next time they fly into a rage they won’t have one handy.
And releasing someone who commits non-planned murder on parole or probation means an officer can keep tabs on them, make sure they’re attending anger management courses, get tested for drug use, and generally stay out of trouble.
Someone who premeditates their crimes in advance can easily find ways past those simple preventative measures.
Someone who acts on impulse is less likely to learn a lesson than someone who commits a premeditated act. The clue’s in the word ‘impulse’.
Someone who commits a premeditated act has already considered the consequences. The fact they try to cover up their crimes shows they know the consequences.
Most psychopaths act on impulse; they don’t consider the consequences. That’s why most psychopaths already have a history of criminal convictions for petty offences long before they escalate to murder.
I think you have it backwards; what exactly is there for someone who already understands and then disregards the consequences to learn? Why is that person *more* likely to learn from prison than someone who momentarily let his/her passions take over?
“what exactly is there for someone who already understands and then disregards the consequences to learn?”
Such people may need to be locked up for the protection of others rather than for their own education.
Agreed.
There is a joke, which is simply good advice that works for nearly everyone, that if you walk around the block before sending an email (or post to a bl*g) you are likely to find that you can remove or at least mitigate any embarassment and/or regret.
I agree completely with the point about protecting society, but I want to expand on the point about deterrence. It’s not just conscious deterrence. In addition to the person who actually stops and says to himself “Uh oh, best not…,” there will be other people deterred in other, unconscious ways. The same moral intuition that tells us to punish intentional crimes more harshly also tells us not to commit intentional crimes. People sometimes incorporate the judgments of society into their own moral reasoning.
Have you ever met someone who would smoke pot, but only if it was legal? Sometimes that might be attributable to punishment-based deterrence. But sometimes, people just don’t want to be criminals.
Why not put tranquillisers in the water supply to prevent violence in the first place? Adding an extra chemical to an already deterministic process doesn’t really make a moral difference does it?
How about (painless) surgery to eliminate violent impulses?
Sure, it’s located right next to the homunculus.
“right next to the homunculus”.
I’m thinking it resides in the pineal gland.
“Sure as I know anything, I know this – they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people… better. And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin’. I aim to misbehave.” Malcom Reynolds, Serenity
I am going to forget the law problematic, because I don’t get the physics claim:
What is this? Leibniz’s clockwork universe? Or the block universe?
I don’t think we can know this at the present time [sic!], with or without a better theory for time.
I understand the idea that classical systems like the brain are deterministic with or without the fuzziness of deterministic chaos that prevents us from observing classic determinism, it is a philosophic idea that we can’t use. (Except for discussing morality, apparently, fancy that.)
But quantum fluctuations means there is another fuzziness that will make itself known sooner rather than later. At the present we don’t know how far into the future we can predict non-chaotic systems, AFAIK. (Except if you mean only the basic laws of physical systems, which are much easier to predict.)
Cells are stochastic chemistry machines, and my guess is the problems for philosophical “determinism”* starts there.
*Which would be my tentative definition of the idea that classical physically definable determinism is applicable to quantum systems indefinitely. Quantum systems are decidedly mixed, where states but not observable outcomes propagate deterministically in the classical sense.
It isn’t just the physics that bothers me. It is the highly inconsistent way that this particular appeal to the “it’s all in your brain’s molecules” qualifier is applied.
Yesterday, Sam Harris was praised for his incisive post calling out people who refuse to recognise the role Islam plays in the behavior of ISIS and in the thinking of many Muslims about the acceptability of murder for “crimes” like apostasy or blasphemy. Why was Sam praised? The laws of physics had already determined that [Sam] was going to [write that piece]. If a reviewer praises or pans our host’s efforts for his work on WEIT (the book) or the upcoming book (now known to us only as the Albatross) should there be a qualifier that, over the many months of JAC’s efforts, the laws of physics had already determined that [JAC] was going to [write that book]? Will that add or detract from our opinion of the book(s) (or the reviewer)?
This kind of hard determinism combined with even harder reductionism yields an explanation that seems equally applicable to everything people do, and you know what they say about explanations that explain everything.
As a determinist, I suppose that if I were to “praise” Sam for his writing, it would be equivalent to praising an eagle for flying. But I don’t see too much wrong with that.
Maybe it’s a little different from what our intuition tells us “praise” should mean – but we can expect some profound fallout from the realization that the conscious self is an illusion, and that “free will” is a logically incoherent idea.
I’m a determinist. But I take issue with calling “free will” (or just “will” if the word free bothers you) an illusion. When people call consciousness an illusion, but then – when they’re not actually considering that particular issue = behave as if all the other results of brain function: thinking, imagining, creating mathematics or music, etc. are something of at least potential significance it makes the whole claim pretty unconvincing. No one but a hopeless nihlist really thinks that when s/he admires the creators of music or mathematics or literature that they are being silly because all those people just did what physics programmed them to do. Only when considering criminal or antisocial behavior is this disclaimer that the laws of physics had already determined that [fill in blank] was going to [do something reprehensible].
My point is this: that phrase is a catch-all. Everything we do come down to molecules – how could a chemist like myself think otherwise? My reaction to that is, “Tell me something I don’t know.” That knowledge is not a particularly useful way of dealing with realities that only have any significance at length scales 8 orders of magnitude larger.
I think the key to the usefulness of determinism is that it eliminates dualism. So it is really a reaction (correction) to sloppy thinking that dominated the Christian era (loosely speaking).
The fact is that people seem to always behave as if they had free will. Even the ones who are completely convinced of hard determinism. We are probably trapped within this illusion based on the way the brain operates.
Exactly. This is a hypothesis with no predictive power. Determinism is really just another name for fate, a concept debated since ancient times. Like fate, there is no way to test determinism, no way to disprove it. No matter how something unfolds, a fatalist can always argue that it was destined/fated/predetermined to unfold that way. But fate is always a post hoc explanation. You can’t derive any useful predictions from the assumption.
I think you are confusing a physical theory of determinism with philosophical determinism. Nobody is setting themselves up to disprove QM here!
In this context, philosophical determinism is the assertion that the brain is nothing more than a material object that follows the same physical laws as everything else in the universe, and that the traditional notion of “free will” is therefore nonsensical. This really has nothing to do with “fatalism”.
I don’t see any burden of proof on the claim that the brain is NOT an exception to the known laws of physics. And the idea that you would want to derive “useful predictions” from this idea is simply a category error. The purpose of this kind of philosophical enterprise is to derive insight into ethical issues.
It’s not an insight if it’s wrong.
So you believe that the claim that the brain is a material object that follows known physical laws is wrong?
No, I agree that everything follows physical laws, I just don’t agree that it renders free will “nonsensical.” There’s emergent phenomena to consider, chaos theory, and whatnot. I’m against drawing hasty conclusions on too little evidence.
As I said to Golan below, who seems to be in a similar position to you, I don’t think this is a question of evidence.
I challenge you to come up with a careful definition of exactly what you think “free will” means.
If there is no coherent definition of free will, you can make if vanish in a puff of logic.
Atoms and molecules do not “obey” the laws of physics. The so-called “laws of physics” are well established generalizations that have been made on the basis of observation over time. See Carl Hempel -Aspects of Scientific Explanation-.
To speak of laws is to assume that there is a law giver. This is a relic of the Medieval period of European history.
We do not hold infants responsible for their actions, but we do attempt to train them to control their bodily functions. This training works for most. Society rightfully holds adults to a higher standard of responsibility. This is why “Hell’s Angels” and “NAZIS” are considered to be deranged socio-paths. They are deranged.
“To speak of laws is to assume that there is a law giver.”
This deserves no response except to say it is utter crap.
I think johnjfitzgerald is not arguing that there IS a lawgiver, but saying that the language (“laws of nature”) is misleading because it implies a lawgiver.
Thank you Barbara.
That is my position. I think determinism is a quest for causes. It is perhaps a theory of epistemology. Its opposite is indeterminism.
I think we are all shaped by our past and the choices that we make are shaped by that history. Determinism is at the heart of any rational social system. We need prediction to maintain a just social order.
This is why we should support rehabilitation over punishment. We do not need to get rid of police systems, because we do need some protection from the brutalized folks in our communities. But once we have such folks in custody, we should work at rehabilitation for their good and ours.
Finally, let me say that certainty of punishment is better than severity of punishment for a decent social order.
I am in favor of punishing all who murder less than we already do and reorganize our penal system to focus on rehabilitation.
Predetermined murder, however, is empirically worse than murder due to immediate, emotional distress.
Predetermined murder, however, is empirically worse than murder due to immediate, emotional distress.
How are you defining ’empirically’?
I’m also a pretty hard determinist on free will. A statement from Sam Harris really sticks with me from one of his speeches on YouTube. To paraphrase: “If you kill your neighbor after weeks of study, preparation, and discussions with your friends, then that tells us a lot about you as a person.”
The distinctions between premeditation, non-premeditation, and negligence/manslaughter still have relevance. We would expect that each type would vary in whether it can be effectively deterred through a given punishment, the probability and methods of rehabilitation, and the need to protect society from re-offense.
As Dr. Coyne notes, determining the range of possible outcomes and the best possible sentence/treatment to achieve them for each type of offense should be an empirical question. It’s conceivable that the answers might be highly counter-intuitive, too.
In practice, our abilities to accurately determine the best sentence/treatment are likely too coarse to do much beyond studies at the population level.
The primary issue, which Dr. Coyne has discussed before, is that our justice system seems to assume libertarian free will, which means that retribution is a weighty factor in punishment. And while the other three are also often weighed, our system does not seem especially fact-driven when it comes to determining how best to deter, rehabilitate, or protect.
You are still thinking in terms of punishment. Whether it is for ‘deterrence’, ‘rehabilitation’ or ‘protecting society’ for the most part it is counter productive. Prison, in particular, is a factory for producing recidivists.
Crime is essentially a social phenomenon. Restricting the debate to what kinds of punishment is justified – to address crime as an individual act – is still arguing within the libertarian frame of reference.
I think you are misreading my comment. I fully agree that “punishment,” as most if not all societies understand it, is overwhelmingly counter-productive. That is why I mostly used the term “sentence/treatment”, except when referring to deterrence and to our current legal system — both cases where the term “punishment” is more accurate. And I’m very skeptical of the idea that punishment can be an effective deterrent (at least not without resorting to draconian punishments which will likely cause as many or more problems than they solve through deterrence).
I also agree that crime broadly speaking is probably more effectively addressed as a social, economic, or environmental phenomenon, not in response to individual criminal acts.
Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean that society shouldn’t address individual criminal acts. The point is that we should be driven primarily through rehabilitative or self-protective motives, and that also means we should be expending more efforts to determine and then implement the most effective treatment/sentence.
Punishment is a dreadfully inefficient way of managing behavior.
Free will does have one possibly useful definition, and that is the ability to learn. From psychology, we know that behavior shaped by punishment is less adaptive and creative.
What punishment does best is teach ways of avoiding punishment.
Still, it is the last line of defense against predators, after everything else fails. We treat premeditation differently from crime of passion, because one is more susceptible to deterrence when more time is involved. If one has to wait before doing something foolish, One is more likely to calm down or to ponder long term consequences.
None of this is incompatible with determinism. We are merely discussing the behavior of systems that can learn. Which is somewhat more complex than billiard ball determinism.
The ‘last line of defense against predators’ is not punishment but extermination. Historically, it has been quite a popular policy whenever an individual or group possesses the power to carry it out. Punishment makes sense only when power is held by consent of those who could take it away.
But I agree with the rest of your comment.
The laws of physics predetermine all behavior? So no criminals are responsible for their acts, ever? No one is responsible, also, for any actions – good, bad, or even requiring students to pray?
It depends on what you mean by “responsible,” of course. We hold criminals responsible for their acts, but I don’t consider them (or anybody) MORALLY responsible. We’re responsible for our acts only insofar as we did the acts. We did not CHOOSE the acts. That’s the way determinism works.
I think it’s clear that a lot of people are confused about exactly what you mean when you way “we did not choose”. Our brains still use information processing to select between possible available outputs – “possible” in the sense that different brains may select different outputs. This deterministic information processing is still (I think) sensibly called “choosing” or “making decisions”.
I commented on this below in more detail.
I agree with Ralph. Saying that people don’t choose is equivalent to saying that computers don’t calculate. Choosing is the killer app that makes having a brain worthwhile.
And to be 100% clear about what I mean by “choice” or “decision”:
A chess computer “chooses” a move; a human “chooses” to murder someone. There’s no qualitative distinction.
From many comments here and on prior free will articles, it seems that many people think that determinism implies that “choices” and “decisions” are no longer meaningful concepts. I think that’s wrong. Determinism simply debunks the “free will” notion that a choice might, in some poorly specified hypothetical sense, have been different. Free will is an incoherent concept, but determinism does not deny that choices occur at all.
Determinism models our brains as information-processing machines. Given a certain set of information inputs, our brains contain algorithms that generate output. Each time a set of inputs generates and output, that’s a choice.
It’s still perfectly sensible to call this a “choice”, even though, for a specified person, the combination of the inputs and that person’s brain algorithms fully determines the output. The reason that it’s sensible to call it a choice is obvious: for a different brain, the output would be different. Ask two people “What is your favorite color?” Two different answers, both choices are fully deterministic, but they choose differently, . There’s no contradiction between determinism and the notion of choosing, it’s just that choosing is no longer some mysterious self-contradictory process involving “free will”. A choice is just seen as information processing, taking input and generating output.
So, to be clear: under deterministic ethics, the reason that we punish people is because their brains contain different information processing algorithms. Given the same set of future inputs, two brains will produce different outputs. They will, in the future, make different choices.
I find myself agreeing much of this, but I have some questions. First, what generates the sense of self in this view? For instance, you give the example of asking two people “what is your favorite color?” What does the “you” refer to? What is human consciousnesses? Do you believe intelligence agency is distinctly recognizable from other physically determined processes? If so, why and how?
And my second question is this. In the past, I’ve seen Dr. Coyne express the belief that if it were possible to reset everything from a previous point in time, evolution would likely take novel paths. If we could re-run the tape of life, humans might not necessarily evolve, or even anything resembling an intelligent humanoid.
So I’m wondering, in the deterministic view, how long does this plasticity last? If we could rerun the tape of life, how quickly before the two realities diverged? Let’s say two old friends met for coffee and talked for an hour. If we could rewind time back to the moment they greet each other then start it playing again, would they converse about the same things? Would the topics be the same? Is it the same dialogue, beat-for-beat?
It is possible that chaos theory could come into play and some random variable could change something or many things.
Interesting observation about the tape played back. I had this same concern. Aren’t the tape scenario for evolution and determinism contradictory? But I think I understand it. When we speak of re-runnng the tape of life, the original conditions are not thought of as having to be completely identical. The point must be that if we jostle things just a tiny bit to make sure there was some chance that things might proceed down different paths, they would not converge back to the known outcomes because of some evolutionary rule that says there must be animals with 4 legs, and then animals with big brains, etc.
In the context of determinism, we are hypothesizing a return to exact, molecule-for-molecule, restoration of conditions. In which case things would unfold identically ( with some exception for quantum randomness).
The two thought experiments have different purposes and different assumptions.
It’s all in my book.
Exactly. You were determined to come up with that analysis. 😉
Thank you, Ralph. Your post has helped me to a better understanding of this point.
Ralph,
I doubt many determinists would disagree with what you wrote. The problem is that it simply misses the crux of the purported problems associated with the word “choice” within incompatiblism.
Certainly you can describe choice-making in an algorithmic way, and be completely accurate on that level. But the fly in the ointment is that the way people actually USE and MEAN the word “choice” for human choice-making entails some conception of free will, or the ability to “choose alternative actions – to choose or have chosen otherwise.”
My wife’s recommendation for me to take the subway this morning to work rather than take the car (due to bad traffic) is normally understood to be rational insofar as I am capable of taking either action. If I didn’t have a car, her recommendation to “not take the car to work, take the subway instead” would be pointless. Her recommending that I take an alien spaceship to work, or fly by the powers of my mind to work, would be understood as irrational and pointless as well because those are impossible – we normally understand (and rightly so) that it makes no sense to recommend alternative actions, or condemn one alternative vs another, if we haven’t any ability to take that action in the first place. It would be as irrational as reminding each other to operate via the laws of physics – something about which we recognize we have “no real choice.”
It’s this inherent concept of “being able to choose otherwise” that is part of the human sense of “making a choice” and is part of what makes recommending one action over another coherent and rational in the first place. And this is the problem your analysis misses.
The question left unanswered in your analysis was wether your determinism allows for the concept of our “being able to choose otherwise” or “could have chosen otherwise.” If your conception of the word “choice” does not allow for “freedom to choose otherwise” in some substantial sense, then you aren’t using the word as it’s actually used – you’d be re-defining the word (and the criticism of compatibilists is so often that compatilism is re-defining terms!).
And you also end up with the problem of coherence: if you say “you could never in truth have chosen otherwise” for EVERY human action, then you will not make sense whenever you recommend between actions – to say for instance that I should desist from a particular crime, or see the incompatibilist argument as correct, would be equivalent to recommending that I obey the laws of physics: I am held to have no alternative in any case.
This is why it seems I keep seeing incompatibilists, such as Jerry, slipping in words like choice being an “illusion” now and again, and others saying “we have no choice but to pretend we have it.” The concept of “choice” is either consonant with normal everyday use – acknowledge some concept of “freedom to choose otherwise” – or you end up saying human choice is an “illusion” – but then all your recommendations for actions, especially when faced with apparent alternatives, seem to become incoherent: “I’m recommending between two actions, even though you don’t really have alternatives…”
Like recommending I obey the laws of physics.
The compatibilist stance says the way out of this isn’t to give in to “magic free will.” These incoherence problems aren’t arising from a “more realistic look at free will” by incompatibilists: rather they arise from a faulty analysis of the concepts of free will, choice etc made by the incompatibilists.
I believe when you look into why we say “I had a free choice” or “I could have chosen otherwise” it suggests we are not making magic claims, but pragmatic, empirical claims about our abilities under similar circumstances – that do not violate determinism at all.
Yes, in a sense it’s “just semantics”. I agree that for most people, including me, the defintion of the word “choice” intuitively seems to entail the “free will” notion that the outcome could, in some unspecified sense, have been otherwise.
But we need to overturn this completely. It’s not just that free will does not exist in practice. Free will cannot exist IN PRINCIPLE. It’s an incoherent supernatural concept.
I don’t want to coin a new word for “deterministic choosing” whilst reserving “choosing” to mean “intuitive free-will choosing”. If we do that, there’s a risk that people miss the point that we’re trying to make. The point is that the type of free-will choosing that our intuition tells us we have NEVER HAPPENS, EVER, AND COULD NOT HAPPEN EVEN IN PRINCIPLE. We don’t need a word for “free-will choosing”. We need to be getting the message across clear and loud: CHOOSING DOES NOT, EVER, MEAN WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS.
But as for this part,
“then all your recommendations for actions, especially when faced with apparent alternatives, seem to become incoherent: “I’m recommending between two actions, even though you don’t really have alternatives…”
Like recommending I obey the laws of physics.”
No, you’re confusing determinism with fatalism. Why do you think that my advice to somebody about their decision could not, according to the laws of physics, affect their decision?
Ralph,
I’m afraid for other regulars I’ll be repeating what I’ve argued for before….
“Free will cannot exist IN PRINCIPLE. It’s an incoherent supernatural concept.”
That claim is the one under dispute though.
It’s generally the compatibilist position that incompatibilists have missed the boat – that the free will you would be dismissing as “incoherent”…(e.g. contra-causal choice making which is indeed incoherent)…isn’t really the free will that matters in the end, or that largely captures what most people mean by “choice” or “being able to choose otherwise.”
I have argued very often here for instance that if you think when someone says “I can choose between alternatives” or “I could have done otherwise” that they are referencing some impossible “under exactly, precisely the same conditions” then that would be a faulty analysis. What people are generally doing is conceiving their identity, their capabilities, from inferences derived from their experiences OVER TIME and hence any claims about “what I could have done instead” tend to be more abstract, generalized claims about our powers in similar situations.
For instance, if I miss a golf put and say “I could have made that golf put” I don’t mean that “rewinding the universe to that point” would entail me suddenly making the put. What I mean is that, inferring from my many *similar* past experiences of making such puts, I have the capability to make that kind of put. It never makes sense that I’m referencing anything else; I’ve NEVEE been able to rewind the universe and re-live some perfect replica state of affairs, that’s not what my inferences are derived from, so why in the world assume this is what I must be talking about when I say I could have done otherwise?
It’s not the everyday person who is under error here necessarily; the error comes in misunderstanding what we are thinking.
The problem in declaring “we have to let people know Free Will doesn’t exist” is that there is actual TRUTH about human choice making within the everyday concept of choosing/free will, and since most people intuit this anyway, it’s only going to be confusing…and throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
(It’s not that we aren’t prone to error when thinking of our choice-making of course; but
the compatibilist stance is that the general sense of “being able to do otherwise” survives ground up analysis given determinism).
“No, you’re confusing determinism with fatalism. Why do you think that my advice to somebody about their decision could not, according to the laws of physics, affect their decision?”
That’s not what I was arguing at all. Sure your advice can affect other people’s decisions – that’s obvious within the laws of physics and a given. The issue is: is your even GIVING advice COHERENT given the other things you claim on indeterminism?
(BTW, the determinism/fatalism confusion is one of THE major confusions a typical compabitilist wishes to
disabuse in others – see compatibilist Daniel Dennett’s many efforts to explain why determinism does not equal fatalism, for instance).
So what seems to be the contradiction?
It seems that you want to say we don’t really have a “choice” in the way most people think they do when they believe they are choosing between possible alternatives.
But then when you council anyone, give him recommendations for actions, you will be assuming that people DO have a choice. Maybe you say “no I’m not” but then just try to give advice that does not imply one can do otherwise. Good luck with that.
To bring up a concrete example: let’s take your position to everyday use. I’m a doctor
and you don’t see me washing my hands in between treating patients. It would be wise for you to council me to wash my hands, in order to limit the transmission of disease via my hands.
I will ask you: Do REALLY have a choice between washing my hands and not washing my hands? Are both courses of action possible for me?
What will your truthful response be? If you say “No you don’t really have a choice in the sense that alternative actions are really possible” then how in the world would you go on to makes sense of advising me on which action to take? It won’t matter whether the sounds coming from your mouth can affect my actions – that doesn’t address the fundamental incoherence of both claiming “we can never choose otherwise” and then later engaging in advice where you council me to “choose otherwise” (e.g. to wash your hands instead of not washing them).
This is what happens when you have decided that to say “I could do otherwise” must entail the ability to do impossible things like doing a different action under exactly the same circumstances at the same time.
But since that isn’t how people actually think when talking about their choices, that notion is for the most part irrelevant.
But if you realize that when I say “I could have done otherwise” it’s just an inference about the types of things I am able to do in “that kind of circumstance” NOT in some fantastical “rewind the universe to the same condition and time” sense, then problem isn’t there. It’s not an illusion that have a choice in the every day sense of it, because our everyday inferences about choice aren’t built upon a fantastical, impossible sense of choice, but upon everyday empirical inferences that make sense within determinism.
As for being “free” to choose, we can simply observe the way in which “freedom” is typically invoked. We can observe that a dog chained tightly to a tree is not “free” to do many of the things it would want, and which it could do, when unchained. Same with a human being. We can talk about physical constraints to our being able to do as we wish, or whether we are suffering under the coercion of others (e.g. doing what someone else with a gun on us wants us to do, vs what we would rather be doing, etc). These are the everyday understandings of “free” that matter to us. The type of incoherent sense of “free will” and “ability to do otherwise” that you want to decry just isn’t the one that is operational
in most of our reasoning about our choices.
IMO 🙂
” But then when you council anyone, give him recommendations for actions, you will be assuming that people DO have a choice. Maybe you say “no I’m not” but then just try to give advice that does not imply one can do otherwise. ”
Huh? I have NO idea what you are talking about here. If I change the INPUTS to somebody’s brain, then the OUTPUTS will change. Nobody is claiming that “you don’t have a choice” means that the outputs of somebody’s brain are completely refractory to any change in input.
Really, what am I missing here? I’ve read what you’ve written 5 times, and I just don’t get what you think is “incoherent” about that.
As for the other stuff, i.e. Dan Dennett’s compatibilism or something similar…. I just think that’s like using Sophisticated Theology to try to save God.
The kind of “free will” that interests people is precisely the kind of free will that does not exist. When people say “free will means that I could have done otherwise” they do NOT mean “in a different but somewhat similar situation”. They are referring to the “deliberating homunculus” that gives them an illusion of an empowered “self” that somehow seems to make decisions “freely”, and COULD have done something different JUST THEN. They are referring to precisely the thing that does not, in fact, exist.
All main theories of criminal law emphasize the free choice of the criminal to commit the crime. Acts which are otherwise criminal, are not punished if the accused proves that he had not choice but to commit them (for example, for loss of physical control, mental disabilities, coercion etc.)
I cannot tell for certain about South Africa, but in Israel and other countries, retribution is explicitly the main purpose of criminal punishment. This justification obviously presumes free will.
Precisely, and since free will is an illusion, main theories of criminal law need to be radically rethought. Perhaps some aspects of the system should act “as though” free will exists, but I think the ethics of that notion need to be examined carefully.
I think that most people (still?) don’t accept that free will is an illusion.
Until this changes (and I don’t see this happening so fast), politicians, who can make the change you are talking about, have no incentive to move in this direction.
Of course not. Most people, at least in Canada and America, are also dualists who think that a spirit, separate from the mind, runs the show.
I an NOT a dualist. My Homunculus told me so.
👻🍻
Rim shot!
Who told your Homunculus?
You are very clever young man, very clever. But it’s homunculi all the way up.
Don’t be homunculophobic. 😀
Just to be clear, I am not saying that this presumption is necessarily correct (I personally BELIEVE it is, but I must admit that I am unable to justify this with any objectively valid argument), but only that it is a key factor in the reasoning of criminal law in many countries.
I take issue again with your position on free will. Any number of times each day we make decisions, and each time we can feel the way our internal systems have come out as to that decision: we will or will not do something. Yet in each instance we can reverse the decision, ultimately deciding to do the opposite.
Try it next time you have some ice cream: will you or will you not have that last mouthful? Your innards will make the decision for you, BUT you can reverse it as a matter of will. If this isn’t free will, will someone please enlighten me as to what is?
“will you or will you not have that last mouthful?”
How many times can you reverse yourself as a matter of will. Say you decide “no”. Then change it again to “yes”. and back an forth until you end up with one or the other. There is no difference between a choice and a reversal. Each one is dictated by prior events in brain and environment.
Certainly, it feels like something we call “me” is sitting behind our eyes looking out at the world and making the decisions in a detached sort of way. But, the “me” is not detached. It IS the brain whose manipulations are chemical and electrical and together with all outside forces, determine which way you will ultimately go.
Yup, I think that illusion of detached “me” that can somehow “freely deliberate” is incredibly strong. That’s why, when Jerry represents determinism as meaning that “we do not have a choice”, some people misunderstand. They still cling to the notion of their detached “me” freely deliberating, and imagine that determinists are somehow claiming that the homunculus is somehow constrained about what it can do. “But it was ME who decided whether I should eat ice cream, nobody forced me!”
Of course that’s not what determinism means at all. Our brains certainly do make choices, in the functional sense of processing information inputs to select among available courses of action, it’s just that “choosing” is not at all what our intuition tells us it is. Our brains are material objects that obey the laws of physics, so the information processing in our brains (aka our choices) follow a deterministic process. Given a specified set of inputs, the choice outputs generated by the algorithms in our brains can (in principle) be predicted. The choices are not “free”.
The realization that “free will” is a logically incoherent concept goes hand in hand with realizing that the detached deliberating homunculus “me” is an illusion. Our brains generate the illusion of a conscious “self”, and the flawed intuition of “free will” seems to be closely tied to that.
While I largely agree, I have a couple of quibbles.
I think you may not be giving our intuition enough credit here. When we say we’re going to “sleep on” or “chew over” a decision or “digest” some advice, that (in my opinion) reflects an intuition that decisions don’t just come to us out of nowhere, but are the result of a (largely unconscious) mental calculation. In what sense is that intuition wrong?
That depends on what you mean by “predicted”. If you mean that running the same algorithm on the same input will give the same answer, then sure.
But if you mean there’s some shortcut to getting the same answer without actually running the algorithm, then no, our decisions are not (even in principle) predictable in that sense. Determinism is not an excuse for abdicating decision-making responsibility; if you want to know the answer, you have to do the calculation.
The flawed intuition is the one that tells us that our conscious self somehow “freely deliberates” and makes decisions. There’s evidence that we make decisions well before we are consciously aware of them.
The fact that it’s so difficult to convince most people that free will doesn’t exist, even though it’s a logically incoherent idea, suggests that our intuition about our decision making is both strong and completely wrong. And not by chance, I suspect. It’s part of our brains’ efforts to convince us that the conscious self is real.
The very strong sense of deliberating that everybody feels is what makes it so hard to accept that there’s no free will.
If I was really consistent, I guess that determinism, in the sense it’s used here, would be my inevitable conclusion, but I
oops. Not sure how this happened.
Can this be deleted?
I thought it was pretty funny. Like God cut you off or something: “puny human! How date you consider you don’t have free will!”
The very strong sense of deliberating that everybody feels is what makes it so hard to accept that there’s no free will.
If I was really consistent, I guess that determinism, in the sense it’s used here, would be my inevitable conclusion, but I am unable to relieve myself of this sense and I am convinced that free will is real.
I am really open to the possibility of determinism, but think that an extremely strong evidence will be required to convince me that my strong experience of choosing is just an illusion.
But we do deliberate. We think hard about many of the decisions in our lives, and consciously visualize the consequences of one choice or another to see how we feel about them. This conscious deliberation is not an illusion; it’s an actual mental process (and therefore a physical process, and therefore deterministic) that plays a real causal role in deciding the outcome.
Now it may be that the final tipping point one way or the other occurs during unconscious processing and only later bubbles up to consciousness. But that doesn’t negate the role of the conscious deliberation that preceded it.
Nor, I claim, does it violate our intuition, which is perfectly comfortable with the idea that “I slept on it and woke up knowing what I wanted to do.”
If you are “convinced that free will is real”, then I challenge you to define exactly what you mean by free will.
Do you mean the idea that you can vacillate and keep changing your mind many times until you finally eventually… make a decision? How does making a decision slowly rather than quickly magically introduce “freedom”?
Or is your idea that if you repeated history, with all external factors and your mental state completely identical, that you might reach a different decision? How could that happen? Either your thought processes are based on reasoning, in which case you would surely always make the same decision; or there are random elements, a mental coin-flip. Is a coin-flip “freedom”?
Keep thinking through the possibilities, and I think that you will ultimately realize that there is no coherent definition of free will. It’s not an idea that needs to be proven wrong through evidence. It’s not a coherent idea at all. It’s simply meaningless.
For my part, yes, by “free will” I mean something like “I can vacillate and keep changing my mind many times until I finally, eventually make a decision.”
However, I don’t understand your follow-up question.
It doesn’t, obviously. The “freedom” resides in the act of making the decision. If “I” can deliberate and change my mind, then “I” have free will. How does that not follow?
The internal diallog where you “change your mind” several times before finally making a decision is just part of the decision making process that ALL follows the laws of physics.
Although you have an illusion that you “could have done otherwise”, in fact you did not. So What does it really mean to say you “could have done otherwise”? If conditions were slightly different? Well, sure, but that’s just a different decision – also determined by the laws of physics. How about if conditions were completely identical, but some random component (perhaps a quantum fluctuation) generated a different output? Well, sure, but a different output due to random chance isn’t free will either.
Free will means nothing coherent. Given the specific conditions – the information inputs to your brain, and the information processing algorithms present in your brain – both the vacillation (the appearance of changing your mind before the final decision) and the ultimate output from your brain were all determined solely by the laws of physics.
I am not suggesting that free will somehow happens in some “spiritual” world and does not obey the law of physics.
But the strong sense of actually making decisions, in the sense of being able to do otherwise, as you put it, means to me that this process is neither deterministic nor random.
How this is possible I don’t know, so I guess that we are missing something.
What you are missing, I think, is the fact that your sense of having made a decision, and could have decided otherwise, is a pure illusion. Why would you think that because you feel that you made a decision, you really did? You also feel that there is a homunculus “I” inside your head–all of us do–but that is an illusion to, a product of diffuse brain activity.
I have already recognized the possibility of free will being an illusion in my first or second post here. I am fully aware that our senses are sometimes misleading. Just as we can see things in different way from what they actually are, as recently demonstrated by several examples on this blog, this can happen with the sense of free will.
But to be convinced that this is the case with free will, I will need an extremely strong evidence and I haven’t seen one yet.
I just finished reading “Consciousness and the Brain; Deciphering how the brain codes our thoughts” by Stanislas Dehaene. It shows how much of out processing is uncouncious and very fast (<0.5 second) and our conscious processing is very slow and connects the various regions of the brain in a feedback network controlled by the prefrontal cortex ( and a few other regions).
You can show someone something subliminally and they deny seeing it consciously but answer questions about it correctly.
I’m currently reading Christof Koch’s book Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist which talks a bit about the same thing in parts as well. Consciousness is a strange thing & I hope scientists figure it all out in my lifetime!
“we are missing something”
I don’t agree. There’s no mystery here.
You seem to accept my reasoning, but you (like everyone else) have an incredibly strong intuition about this, and it’s difficult to accept that such a strong intuition could be wrong.
I accept, in principle, that it can be wrong. I just need a strong evidence to refute it, and I haven’t seen it.
As for the missing part, we know so little about how the brain works, that we miss an awful lot in understanding how we sense free will even if you are right.
Jerry wrote: “What you are missing, I think, is the fact that your sense of having made a decision, and could have decided otherwise, is a pure illusion.”
Which raises the usual concern: this makes any advice or prescriptions for actions incoherent, as prescribing one action over another assumes both are possible in the first place.
If decisions are illusions, and we can never have done, or do otherwise, how will it make sense to council someone to “do A instead of B?”
The answer I keep seeing that “it still makes sense for me to make prescriptions because our prescriptions can affect the behavior of others” does not unfortunately address this question, since bad arguments containing contradictions can influence people’s actions (see: religion) it’s neither here nor there whether the incompatibilist can influence others. He still must explain how both claiming “we could not do otherwise” and “I’m advising you do to otherwise” isn’t a contradiction.
I cannot see how this is a real problem for determinism.
The easy (and reasonable from a deterministic perspective) is that the prescription is part of the input for future decisions (or “decisions”?).
Vaal, I really don’t get your issue with this at all. I think you misunderstand the determinist claim completely. The claim is simply this:
“The brain is a material information processing machine. It follows the laws of physics. Therefore, for a specific decision, external information inputs plus the prevailing state of the brain fully determine the output of the brain.”
Person A advising person B is simply changing the external information inputs for person B.
Ralph,
Look at the part I quoted in bold from Jerry and tell me if you agree with his saying that “I could have decided otherwise” is only an illusion.
If you agree with Jerry’s statement, then the contradictions I’m raising follow.
The idea that decisions come from our brains, that the process is deterministic and that our outputs can influence the input/output of other brains is all obvious – a given – and hence beside the point under contention. The issue of free will tends to revolve around (among other things) whether it makes sense to say it’s true that “I could have taken an alternate course of action.” (And it’s obverse: Presently, it’s true to say I can take alternate actions). Incompatibilists tend to portray the idea that “we could have, or can, do otherwise” as an “illusion.” That has the kind of consequences I’m raising for the type of issues you have to sort out if you take this stance about “could do otherwise” being an illusion.
If Fred says “No straight lines are possible” and then fred says “You ought to draw a straight line” then clearly Fred is being incoherent.
If Fred responds to this contradiction simply with “but my brain and words are obeying the laws of physics when I say this, and what I say can have influence on others” surly you’d notice that Fred’s answer, while true, completely misses the point that his prescription to draw a straight line is in logical tension with his claim that no such action is possible.
Similarly, If the incompatibilist says “You can not choose otherwise – such ‘choice’ does not exist” and then he later prescribes: “You should choose otherwise, do A rather than B” then this is just the same type of contradiction – saying something doesn’t exist, while prescribing you to do it. Replies about brains influencing other brains no more directly addresses this contradiction than Fred’s reply does. How is this not perfectly clear?
The problem is that you confuse the meaning of decision in a world where free will is real that in a deterministic world.
Determinism means that the state of the world at the moment the decision is made, dictates the decision on which the person who make the decision has no control. Prescriptions are merely part of the state of the world when the decision is made.
This is different from what those who believe in free will would say, that the prescription is another factor in a controlled conscious decision making.
I hope this clarifies the issue.
Vaal, you quote Jerry as follows:
“What you are missing, I think, is the fact that your sense of having made a decision, and could have decided otherwise, is a pure illusion.”
Let me be so bold as to paraphrase Jerry. What Jerry’s statement means, is:
“GIVEN THE INPUTS TO YOUR BRAIN AT THE TIME, you could have decided otherwise, and the sense that you were free to do so is an illusion.”
But if the information inputs have been different, of course the decision could have been different.
So why on earth do you think it’s “incoherent” to want to change the information inputs to other peoples brains in order to change their future decisions? In principle, advising somebody to act differently is exactly the same as adjusting a thermostat. If the thermostat is working, it responds (deterministically) to input! If somebody is not dead, changing the input to their brain changes the output.
obviously there’s a typo there *you could NOT have decided otherwise* in my paraphrase of Jerry
Ralph,
You wrote: “What Jerry’s statement means, is:
“GIVEN THE INPUTS TO YOUR BRAIN AT THE TIME, you could have decided otherwise, and the sense that you were free to do so is an illusion.”
Yes, that does come close to what Jerry means: as he has explained several times before, he associates our sense of “choice” and “free will” with the idea that “I could have done otherwise if the tape were rewound to the same point in time, all physical particles and causal chains being in the exact same state.”
And that’s the problem. I disagree that such a depiction accurately captures the sense of “being able to do otherwise” in terms of how people actually reason about their ability to choose.
So railing against it, the idea that we have to overturn this “illusion,” is just railing mostly against a straw man.
For reasons I’ve already explained when people think “I have a choice ahead of me between alternate courses of action” or “I could have done otherwise,” they aren’t inferring these possibilities from the standpoint of being able to defy the cosmos; they are making fairly simple, everyday empirical inferences about the type of powers they have in similar situations. For instance, to say “I worked out with 25 lb dumbbells today but I COULD HAVE used the 30 lb dumbbells” isn’t a claim derived from having magical determinism-thwarting powers, but simply a generalized inference from my previous abilities in similar situations in the gym. I don’t MEAN “I could have chosen to do otherwise at the exact same time and place, with my brain’s neurones in exactly the same choice-making mode!” There is a wiggle-room of difference, for instance the counterfactual “If I had
wanted to” is usually implicit “I could have lifted the 30 lb dumbbells…(If I had wanted to). When I’m playing “21” with my son and he hisses a basketball throw saying “damn, I could have made that shot” and I kid him saying “no you couldn’t” what’s the first thing he does? He says “Oh yeah? Watch!” and he grabs the ball, goes to the same spot and tries the shot again. CLEARLY his everyday claim of “could have done otherwise” isn’t some crazy philosophical incoherent idea of rewiring the universe and doing the same thing; he’s simply talking about an ability he has in a circumstance enough like the one he just experienced, which is why he thinks re-doing the shot would make his point!
This is one example (of many, among other reasons) for why I argue that Jerry’s equating of “choice” and “I could have done otherwise” with “brains magically doing alternative choices at the same time in the same state of the universe” don’t really capture our everyday reasoning about choices. It’s not really the basis for why we think we have real choices and can “do otherwise.” At least, not the basis that is the most typical and important.
But as to the contradiction, again, IF you are going to to conclude that it is always FALSE to conclude “I could have done otherwise” THEN you are going to be in contradiction the next time you advise anyone to “do otherwise.” And saying, in essence “but my (contradiction-ridden) arguments can influence others” is no answer to this problem.
You are wrong.
Free will means being able to act differently in exactly the same situation.
My decisions being predetermined or random is inconsistent with me having a free will.
Ugh, among the typos above:
Should have been:
CLEARLY his everyday claim of “could have done otherwise” isn’t some crazy philosophical incoherent idea of REWINDING the universe and being able to do the same thing
Vaal, you said:
“But as to the contradiction, again, IF you are going to to conclude that it is always FALSE to conclude “I could have done otherwise” THEN you are going to be in contradiction the next time you advise anyone to “do otherwise.” ”
But I do NOT claim that it is always false to conclude “I could have one otherwise”. I only claim you could not have done otherwise under precisely identical circumstances. Different hypothetical input to your brain would have resulted in different output.
Precisely the same logic applies to future decisions not yet made. Since any advice that I give you constitutes part of the input to your brain, it affects the outcome.
You’re manufacturing this “contradiction” out of nothing.
You also seem to be conflating logical contraction (that simply doesn’t exist) with whether you feel that it’s “a good idea” to be giving people advice. And my response is “huh? who the hell cares, we’re talking about much more profound philosophical issues than what constitutes good advice”
Just so. It is interesting that many folks reading this site seem to be unfamiliar with the arguments. As mentioned in by several commentators, they need only ‘search’ (top left) the site to find good posts on the subject.
Golan wrote:
“I cannot see how this is a real problem for determinism.
The easy (and reasonable from a deterministic perspective) is that the prescription is part of the input for future decisions (or “decisions”?).”
Just to be sure: is that in response to my post above yours?
If it is, then your response simply ignored the problem in exactly the way I had just described…and also in this post higher in this thread:
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2014/09/12/why-is-premeditated-murder-worse-than-non-premeditated-murder/#comment-1057216
If I’m saying “THIS claim of yours (“choice is an illusion) seems to contradict THAT action of yours (prescribing choices)” then answering “but my arguments can act as input to influence others” is a complete non-sequitur in resolving that contradiction. All manner of bad arguments that are incoherent upon examination nonetheless become “part of the input for future decisions” for many people. See: religion.
So to answer the question of whether the incompatibilist is in contradiction or not will require going beyond merely “my argument might have influence in the causal chain.” You have to explain why the incompatibilist stance ISN’T in self-contradiction. Otherwise you are just admitting “Any of our arguments can influence people, who cares if we are being coherent or not?”
I’m not sure if this is the point of confusion, but please take a look at my post #27.
If that’s not the problem, then I haven’t a clue what your talking about here. In some sense, I’m pretty sure that you misunderstand what claims determinists are making.
Yes, it was an answer to your post 😉
I am not a determinist and believe that free will is real.
I just disagree with your argument that in a deterministic world, prescriptions would be useless (this is how I understand it. Correct me if I am wrong).
Determinism, as used here, does not mean that every decision we will ever make is independent of future influences (future to now, not to the decisions). Just as you can decide to take that route to work and not another tomorrow morning because you hear about traffic jams on your regular route, your decisions may be influenced (or not) by prescriptions.
Hi Golan,
“I just disagree with your argument that in a deterministic world, prescriptions would be useless (this is how I understand it. Correct me if I am wrong).”
Ah, well there’s the confusion then. You have got me wrong. I’m arguing for compatibilism which I’m sure you know entails that prescriptions (and free will) ARE useful and coherent given a deterministic universe.
So it looks like we agree.
What I’m arguing is that when the incompatibilist starts talking like this: “choice is an illusion” or “the idea that you could have chosen otherwise is false, an illusion” they end up with deep contradictions to unwind.
Compatibilism understands choice and concepts like “I could have done otherwise” as rational ways of thinking WITHIN the context of determinism. Just as most of us understand that concepts like “knowledge” have rational justification within the context of acknowledging the lack of Absolute Certainty in our knowledge.
Cheers,
Determinism, in the sense used here, negates free will, in the sense it’s commonly use.
Either you confuse different meanings of determinism or you mean something else when you say free will.
Golan, you’ve hit the nail on the head.
Vaal & Dan Dennett’s strategy is to redefine free will into something that nobody actually means, and say “don’t panic everyone, we’ve saved free will”.
Ok, obviously I’m massively oversimplifying and Dan Dennett’s one of my favorite people in the whole world. He’s right about ALMOST everything…
Ralph,
“Vaal & Dan Dennett’s strategy is to redefine free will into something that nobody actually means, and say “don’t panic everyone, we’ve saved free will”.”
(putting aside the untruth of that claim for a moment)
But Ralph
When people normally say “I had a choice” they mean they could have done otherwise, but you wish to deny this normal sense of the word while retaining it. You want to use the word choice but not in the sense that anyone has any true alternatives to their actions and never could have done otherwise – negating normal use. So you are just as guilty of “re-defining terms to suit your own needs.”
I have yet to see any incompatibilist directly address this apparent hypocrisy.
“Choose” colloquially has two levels of meaning. One is the simple functional idea of selecting among alternatives; then there’s the deeper sense of “choice” somehow entailing freedom.
That’s why I was worried that Jerry’s framing of matters as “we do not choose” (obviously referring only to the higher “free” part of the definition) was leading to misunderstanding.
We’re still talking about the same phenomenon at a functional level. Unfortunately, there isn’t a synonym that captures only the functional phenomenon of “selecting among alternatives” without colloquially entailing freedom. But there’s nothing sneaky going on – the central and explicit assertion of determinism is that “choosing cannot mean what our intuition tells us it means”. But I don’t think this is redefining words to suit hypocritical deterministic purpose any more than an assertion that “the Earth is not at the centre of the universe” is redefining the word Earth to suit heliocentric purposes.
Vaal,
“If I’m saying “THIS claim of yours (“choice is an illusion) seems to contradict THAT action of yours (prescribing choices)” then answering “but my arguments can act as input to influence others” is a complete non-sequitur in resolving that contradiction.”
Vaal, the problem we’re having here is that I simply don’t see the contradiction that you see. Nor do I see at all why the response that’s been given several times is a “non sequitur”.
Can you explain this apparent “contradiction” that you claim explicitly? What exactly do you think is contradicting what?
Ralph,
“Can you explain this apparent “contradiction” that you claim explicitly? What exactly do you think is contradicting what?”
Whew, it’s hard to think of a way to be more clear about it.
Maybe if I organize it this way:
First lets talk about the normal justifications underlying when we give advice, prescribe or advise actions.
Back to the example of my wife recommending I take the subway instead of the car to work today (due to heavy car traffic, the subway would be faster). Her prescription to take the subway only makes sense on the assumption we actually have a subway service in Toronto to use, right?
If there were no subway, taking the subway would be an impossibility, and her prescription would be irrational, making no sense. Same with our owning a car – we’d have to own one for me to use, to make coherent sense of her advising me AGAINST taking the car. If I didn’t have a car to begin with, her advising me to NOT take the car would make no more sense than her advising me not to break the law of gravity and levitate to work instead. It just makes no sense, in the same say, to advise everyone to “operate under the laws of physics” if no alternative is possible. You don’t advise people to do things that are impossible, and you don’t advise people not to do things that are impossible.
It follows from this that prescriptions for actions only make sense in the context of POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVE ACTIONS. To make SENSE of prescribing an action is to ASSUME it is possible to make an alternative choice of action. Essentially, the old observation that “ought implies can.”
So if you are going to advise someone to take A course of action over B, to make sense you will have to be assuming *some substantial truth* to the idea that either course of action is possible. The logic is time agnostic and applies to past and future. You can’t say “tomorrow you can do either A or B” and then two days later claim “you never could have done B.” That would be a plain contradiction. And further, if the logic didn’t apply forward and backward, you could never extrapolate from past experience to what you can do in the future.
Ok, if you disagree that normal everyday reasoning assumes that prescriptions are made sense of on the assumption of TRUE alternative courses of action, then you’ll have to explain how this is wrong. But presuming you recognize this as an accurate analysis of prescriptive reasoning, you then encounter the issues I’m raising.
If as in incompatibilist you claim on one hand that “alternative courses of action are an illusion, it’s never true we could have done otherwise” then this seems in tension
with the program of prescribing actions. Because prescribing actions as we’ve seen earlier ENTAILS THAT ALTERNATIVE ACTIONS ARE REALLY POSSIBLE in order to even make sense of the prescriptions.
If, when advising me to take the subway over the car you are at the same time denying that both courses of action are in some real sense possible, then you are subverting the VERY LOGIC OF PRESCRIPTIONS THEMSELVES. It makes as much sense as prescribing that I stay on earth for lunch rather than have lunch on the sun. Without real alternatives, a prescription is empty of coherence.
And saying “but…but…my words can influence you” is a non-answer to this problem of coherence, in the same was as a bible lover saying “but my words might influence you” doesn’t address the contradictions in his own overall set of arguments. If a contradiction has been pointed out in two statements, a following statement that “our brains influence one another” is a non-sequitur: it doesn’t directly address the contradiction, the assumptions in tension or being violated, in the argument being dissected.
Is it clearer now, I hope?
(And, again, the compatibilist response to these issues is to start by pointing it we DO have “choice” in a real sense of alternative possibilities. But this “real sense” is not in the sense of “magic contra causal powers.” Rather, it derives from noticing how we actually reason about the world: that in claiming “I could have done otherwise” we are dealing in the same type of generalizations and counterfactual reasoning we employ in ALL OTHER accepted empirical reasoning about reality. Hence it’s nothing to do with re-defining terms or concepts: it’s pointing out the coherence of
how we think about “choice,” normally, with the rest of our empirical reasoning).
I hope this was a better attempt to get my point across. Thanks.
Thanks. Yes, that helped. I’m posting my reply as a new comment below, for better layout.
The threading is doing weird things. I replied to you, and on my browser my reply appeared as comment #40, in the middle of some older stuff. Just don’t want you to think I didn’t bother to reply, after you went to the trouble of writing this.
Ralph,
I replied to your comment #40.
Vaal
But, if not the Big Bang – when?
How long before the event, do determinists say, did the laws of physics make it inevitable that he would kill his girlfriend?
Just a ballpark and it would be useful also if someone could show the reasoning.
Let me give this a try(as an amateur) , since I mentioned the Big Bang early on. As some certified physicist above pointed out, the big bang actually was not at all determined because of quantum uncertainty. If the big bang happened all over again, it would not bring about an identical universe.
Big Bang, as I used it was short hand for since almost forever – a long, long, time ago. At some point quantum effects would have been reduced to negligible (post-inflation?) on the relevant macro scale. At that point the universe starts to act like a precision scattering of billiard balls. (with some small latitude for residual quantum influence) Third planet in the corner pocket!
“How long before the event, do determinists say, did the laws of physics make it inevitable that he would kill his girlfriend?”
At some unknown point after the universe became fully determined. We could say that the shooting became inevitable. To pin down that point in time might require the skills of a theoretical cosmologist with the help of an all knowing deity.
Quantum-mechanical events are happening all the time, and a little thought can propose mechanisms by which this indeterminancy can “trickle up” to the macro world. For example, posting on the Internet requires some quantum behavior of semi-conductors.
Sorry, but this is still not right. The universe never became fully determined; quantum mechanics still rules, and can have effects at arbitrarily large scales.
Let’s imagine, for instance, that Pistorius unknowingly carries a dormant gene for testicular cancer. In its dormant form the gene is harmless, but there’s some small probability at any moment that it could spontaneously (i.e. nondeterministically) mutate into a malignant form. If that mutation had happened, say, five years ago, the course of Pistorius’s life would have been radically altered, and in all probability Steenkamp would be alive today.
Or suppose you played the lottery with numbers from a quantum random number generator. A win would completely change your life — nondeterministically — on a timescale of days.
So in general it’s just not possible to identify, even approximately, a time frame in which quantum uncertainty is irrelevant and events are fully determined. There’s always the slim possibility of some nondeterministic event blowing up to macroscopic proportions and deflecting us from our “determined” trajectory.
(in reply to rickflick at #40)
OK, so the actual (Laplacian?) billiard ball image is not right. There is enough randomness bubbling up to make sure you couldn’t predict much of anything except for the last few days or minutes before an event took place. At that point the chance that a quantum effect would change much of anything would still exist but with vanishingly small probability.
Indeterminism being principally a function of time sounds like a description of Chaos Theory, not so much QM. Some QM effects are magnified massively through time(structure of the universe), but I think that it’s also plausible that nondeterministic QM effects have significant immediate effects on brain activity.
What evidence do you have? Victor Stenger and Lawrence Krauss have stated that is impossible (as have other physicists).
I don’t have any evidence for effects, at most I’d be arguing for plausibility. To a first approximation we don’t how our brains work, so I’m surprised that Krauss et al would rule out quantum effects completely. Can you explain exactly what Stenger & Krauss think is impossible, or link me to something?
I would welcome the links to where Krauss and Stenger have said that neural activity is deterministic in the sense of “exactly one next state”.
I wonder how they can be so sure as to say “impossible”? They are not neuroscientists, nor is there a completed theory of how quantum physics scales from the micro to the macro. But we have evidence of quantum indeterminacy in quite large molecules and so I am wondering how they can be sure that there is always an exact next state of the brain for any given state.
In fact it is a surprise to me that physicists hold that there is such a thing as an exact state of the brain at an exact time.
But I look forward to the links.
This as well as my 44 is a response to Gregory at 43.
Now I have to rethink my view of replaying the tape of life. In that case no special assumption has to be made about things being slightly different at the beginning for there to be a very different outcome. Quantum effects would automatically jostle the atoms and lead, to an entirely different diversity of life.
Philosphical Determinism is not a theory of physics. See my post 34 above. Your question is a category error.
Philosophical Determinism has been around for a long time, and was just not renamed when QM was discovered. As a philosophical term, “determinism” does not exclude non-deterministic physical processes, it just excludes the supernatural. It’s shorthand for “your brain is a material object that obeys the same laws of nature as the rest of the universe.”
(that was a misposted response to Robin’s post 37)
For a determinist, punishment has three rationales: deterrence of others, rehabilitation of the criminal, and protection of society from the criminal. How would each of these be more serious under premeditation?
I don’t think premeditation itself is the determining factor, but the risk of future incidents. Depending on how human psychology works, it might be premeditated murder that either suggests future murders by the murderer or inspires others to commit murder (speaking hypothetically and speculatively, I hasten to add). Conversely, I think in at least a few examples of spontaneous murder might suggest future murders are likely or inspire others. To give an example, if people get off lightly for being “provoked” (say, in a “crime of passion”), then others might commit murder and cite provocation as a way to avoid a harsher sentence.
I’m not convinced there’s an either/or issue at stake here, and I think much of it could be clarified through empirical testing to find out how people respond to such events.
If determinism is true, then I had no choice in making this comment. I just finished reading “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D.Salinger. If determinism is true, I had no choice in reading it and neither had Salinger in writing it. Every word, point and comma would have been pre-determined. Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of the book had no choice in what he did and what he failed to do. He didn’t apply himself at school. If determinism is true it would not have made any difference whether he tried to apply himself or not. He would have failed anyway and his life would have been the same. So, if determinism is true, what is the point in trying?
If determinism is true, Pistorius had no choice in the act of shooting his girlfriend. Was it a crime? What constitutes a crime? Some people shoot other people accidentally. (They clearly have no choice in the matter, even if determinism is not true). A crime is determined by the level of intent. If it is an accident there is no intent. If it happens without pre-meditation, the level of intent is ambiguous, because if you would have had time to think about it you might have acted differently. (Expressing regret makes a difference in the perceived level of intent). If you have thought about it and do it anyway, there is clear intent.
If deteminism is true, taking intent into account is pointless, because they had no choice. Sentencing people as a deterrent is also pointless, because it is impossible to avert things that occur because they are pre-determined. And if determinism is true, everything is pre-determined. So, then we can do away with the justice-system. And with the police, because things will happen anyway and the police cannot prevent things that are pre-determined. And if we decide that determinism is true and do away with the police and the justice-system, we will only do what was already pre-determined for us to do. So, what’s the point in commenting about it? Maybe I don’t believe in determinism. For whom is that to determine?
You don’t understand determinism. Environmental influences can be deterministic factors to (even if those influences were themselves determined). Pavlov’s dogs are one example.
You clearly don’t believe in determinism, but you shouldn’t comment on its consequences until you understand it. I would suggest your reading some of the posts on this site about it.
You must be a metaphysical dualist, thinking that there is a homunculus “you” in your brain that can influence the laws of physics. Sorry, but that’s not on,
You are right about me not understanding determinism. Glancing at the Wikipedia page it becomes clear that it is a vast subject. I knew of theological determinism (predestinationism), which I obviously not believe in as an atheist. The only other meaning of the term that I knew was good old, oldfashioned, Laplacian determinism. As I understand it, this is the sort of determinism some physicists believe in. I was not aware of biological determinism. I will have to study that before I understand it. It would be a good thing, though, if people used different words for different concepts.
Think of determinism as a bunch of variables acting on us at any one time: the experiences you’ve had up until that time, the brain chemistry you’ve inherited from your parents, the way your brain is acting right now, etc. There are so many, they are practically incalculable. Also think of how we are bound, as any other material being, by the laws of physics. Now, given all those variables acting on us, we can only have one outcome at the point in time when we make our decision to do something. There can be only one outcome because we are that person at that time.
In addition to reading posts on this site about free will, as Jerry suggests, I recommend you read Sam Harris’s book Free Will to understand determinism and free will.
It’s Philosophical Determinism that you want to read up on, not “biological” determinism. And see my post number 34 below. The best Wiki page summary is the one for “Free Will”. Just don’t waste too much time on “Compatibilism”!
The basic idea is
“your mind is not supernatural, it’s in your brain, and your brain obeys all the laws of physics (yes, including the non-deterministic laws of physics!)”
from which we conclude
free will = not a coherent concept, does not exist
Premeditated crimes imply a more deliberate act.
I can’t understand how a strict determinist stance can justify either deterrence or rehabilitation. Both concepts implicitly assume that punishment affects future choices and actions — in the case of rehabilitation the choices and actions of the perpetrator, and in the case of deterrence the choices and actions of others. But determinism denies the possibility of choice and requires that all future actions are, well, determined.
That is completely wrong. A future decision can take into account the punishment and it’s repercussions. Different inputs to the choice.
Determinism is not fatalism.
Even the notion of a “decision” is incoherent under determinism. There are no decisions and no choices. Events unfold in a predetermined sequence, and there is no freedom to decide that they do otherwise.
You are conflating determinism and fatalism.
Fatalism is the notion that we are powerless to do anything other than what we actually do. I cannot see how this isn’t implied by determinism.
The only two alternate models of the world that you seem to be considering are
(1) Homunculus with free will
(2) Homunculus bound by fate
How about
(3) NO HOMUNCULUS.
“You” ARE nothing more than the sum of the a bunch of deterministic processes. The outside world influences your mind deterministically, and your decisions influence the world deterministically. I don’t believe that this new vision of what “you” are devalues you, or implies fatalism. Embrace it. I found an elegant quote on the Wiki page for Hard Determinism,
“…humans are not merely the playthings of patterned, natural forces in the universe – but rather we are ourselves examples of those forces”
I’d characterize fatalism differently. To me it means that no matter what we do, the end result will be the same. Fatalism says that our actions (even if “freely” chosen) are powerless to affect larger events in the world.
This is obviously false. Our actions (even if determined) can and do have far-reaching effects. Causality flows through us (determinism), not around us (fatalism).
Calvinism is fatalism. See predestination.
“Causality flows through us (determinism), not around us (fatalism).”
That’s an elegant way of expressing it.
I’m using the definition of fatalism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fatalism/
“Though the word ‘fatalism’ is commonly used to refer to an attitude of resignation in the face of some future event or events which are thought to be inevitable, philosophers usually use the word to refer to the view that we are powerless to do anything other than what we actually do.”
Determinism implies fatalism, according to this definition. I don’t see any way around it.
“we are powerless to do anything other than that we actually do”
This phrasing indicates to me that the author has not grasped the fact that “conscious deliberation” is an illusion. The word “powerless” in this sense implicitly assumes that the concept of free will is valid. The implicit sssumption is that this homunculus COULD in principle have free will and “power”, but IN PRACTICE is constrained by fate.
But there simply IS no homunculus. This notion of “empowerment” vs “powerlessness” in the fatalistic sense describes something magical that is not subject to the laws of physics. Just as “free will” is an incoherent concept, this kind of “power” is also incoherent, unless you believe in the supernatural. So we are “powerless”, but only in a trivial sense that we lack a kind of “power” could not, even in principle, exist. We are not missing out on anything!
Ralph, I’m puzzled by your claim that conscious deliberation is an illusion. You’ve taken the position that choosing is a real thing (if not exactly what we thought it was), so it would seem to follow that deliberation (the process of choosing) is a real thing. And much of that deliberation happens where we can be consciously aware of it. (“If I do this, then that will happen; but if I do that, then this other thing will happen.”) So how is that not “conscious deliberation”?
Perhaps what you mean is that, contrary to our intuition, conscious deliberation does not make decisions. I grant that conscious deliberation is not the whole story of decision-making, but it certainly plays a role, as I’ve argued elsewhere in the thread. What would be the point of having a consciousness that was causally impotent?
Ralph, I didn’t make up the definition of fatalism as “we are powerless to do anything other than that we actually do.” It’s from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. And where do you get this homunculous thing? I’ve never mentioned it, and I don’t think homunculi exist. The whole concept is ridiculous, and I think you’re using it as a straw man. I’m saying that, according to this definition of fatalism, presumably widely accepted in philosophy, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, determinism implies fatalism. If you have a well reasoned argument against that I’ll consider it, but give the homunculous thing a rest.
Yes, I did not express myself well. Of course, deliberation is a real phenomenon. What I meant was that the phenomenon of “deliberation” seems to be intimately related to the process in our brains that generates the illusion of “self” and free will. When we deliberate, it does not “feel” as though we are constrained by anything at all, it feels supernatural, beyond the laws of physics.
I don’t believe in a humunculus or anything supernatural and still believe that there’s free will.
The methods of deterrence & rehabilitation are inputs into your brain like any other environmental input.
I’d like to try clarify a couple of other misconceptions that are evident in several posts above.
(1) Philosophical Determinism is NOT a theory of physics.
Before anyone knew about Quantum Mechanics, “Determinism” was a perfectly respectable PHYSICAL theory. The “colliding billiard ball” model of the universe seemed to suggest that if we know that precise state of every atom in the entire universe at one point in time, then we could (in principle) predict all future events with complete certainty. We now know that the physical world does not operate this way, because of the bizarre principles of Quantum Mechanics (and, to some extent, Chaos Theory).
Now, Philosophical Determinism – which is principally concerned with (the non-existence of) free will, has been around a long time. The name was coined at a time when the physical theory of determinism was still considered a valid model of the universe. When Quantum Mechanics was discovered, nobody bothered to give Philosphical Determinism a new name. However, being a Philosophical Determist does NOT imply that you adhere to an incorrect or incomplete theory of physics that ignores QM. Used as a philosophical term. “Determinism” is just shorthand for “your brain as a material object obeys the same laws of physics as the rest of the universe”. Philosophical Determinism does not exclude non-deterministic physical processes such as QM, it just excludes supernatural processes.
(In reply to Ralph at #34, in case threading doesn’t work)
What you’re describing is what I would call physicalism, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy seems to back me up.
The SEP also says this about determinism as it applies to incompatibilism:
which does sound rather like a (Laplacean) theory of physics.
When the discussion is centered on free will, I’ve never heard the term “Physicalism” used in philosophy. Given some of the misconceptions evident here, it sounds like a better term.
I think what a physicist might call “Laplacian Determinism” is called in philosophy “Nomological Determinism”, but I’m not sure.
Certainly, there are so many kinds of determinism that we need to be clear what we’re talking about. And do I think that I can say with certainty that none of the advocates of “determinism” here are concerned with asserting a physical theory of Laplacian/Nomological Determinism.
In a discussion of free will, I don’t think it matters whether the “correct” interpretation of QM is deterministic or non-deterministic. Everyone agrees that if QM is non-deterministic, it’s random. And nobody who supports a concept of free will thinks that “could have chosen otherwise” means “could have chosen otherwise by flipping a coin”.
So, again, I think I’m justified in saying that when we’re discussing free will, people who are “deterministic” in their view of (the non-existence of) free will, are just using it as shorthand for “brain obeys laws of physics, in which outcomes are determined only by deterministic or random processes, but not supernatural processes”.
Physicalism has two meanings in metaphysics:
(1) A synonym for materialism.
(2) A variety of materialism where only physical properties exist (and not chemical, biological, etc.; a denial of emergence).
(1) is held by the Australian materialists like Armstrong
(2) is, arguably, Quine’s position.
Regardless of determinism and the laws of physics, the more time people have to contemplate an action, the more opportunity they have to overcome instinct and emotion with reason. The more opportunity, the more responsibility. Therefore, in my view, premeditated murder is worse than impulsive murder. Of course, someone who commits an impulsive murder might also be capable of premeditated murder, but they can only be judged on their actual, not speculative, behavior.
Are there in fact people who commit impulsive acts which they would not have committed with more time to think about the consequences to themselves and others? My anecdotal observations indicate there are.
+1
Re your last paragraph, I’ve done impulsive and regrettable things on occasion (and I’m generally a fairly level-headed non-violent sort). I’m sure everyone’s done it. Some more so than others, but I doubt anyone is exempt.
Another misconception
(2) Philosophical Determinism is NOT “Fatalism”.
Several commenters seem to think that if I believe in Philosophical Determinism, and conclude that there is no such thing as free will, then I should just give up trying. Why bother to make any effort, if everything is predetermined? Why “praise” somebody for their efforts and achievements, since they are not really “responsible” for them if everything they do is deterministic.
This is nonsense, just as much as the common assumption of Christians that atheists (a) must have no morals and (b) must be incredibly depressed and constantly struggle for reasons not to just give up and kill themselves.
I think the misconception that determinism implies fatalism stems from a misunderstanding of what determinism really implies about the “homunculus”. We all know about our “homunculus” – the sense that there is a “meta-me” that exists somehow independent of our physical brains, the illusion that “I” somehow “freely deliberate”, and that therefore “my” decisions are in some vague sense “free”, and presumably not bound by physical laws.
Determinism does NOT imply that there is some kind of homunculus that has free will but just cannot exercise it. Determinism means that this homunculus is an illusion, that it does not even exist in the way that we “feel” that it does, this nothing could even IN PRINCIPLE have “free will”, because free will is an incoherent and illogical concept. “You”, in the sense of your intuitive awareness of “self” as a deliberating homunculus with free will DO NOT EXIST. This “deliberation” is an illusion generated by your brain.
Although this is a profound idea, is has almost no practical implications at all for most of my life. So, my decision-making is deterministic. Part of that deterministic decision-making process is the homunculus illusion, the illusion of free will. I don’t know why I evolved that way, but perhaps there are some advantages to making decisions whilst under this illusion. I see no implication whatsover that I should try to “fight the illusion” in my everyday decision-making, or suddenly turn into a fatalist. I just carry on making decisions and functionally interacting with the world just the way I always did, since it seems to work fine. If anything, I now have a greater sense of wonder about what “I” am, now that I realize that my sense of self is something far more subtle than I ever realized, and that this fascinating illusion of “self” evolved somehow through natural processes.
I said “almost” no practical implications. But there is one dramatic and inevitable conclusion from this. The concept of “free will” is foundational in most criminal law. Without free will, criminal law needs to be completely overhauled. Punishment for reasons of (private) retribution or revenge makes no more sense than punishing a lion for killing an antelope.
Getting back to the Oscar Pistorius case itself for just a moment, I read an interesting blog entry a while ago by an American living in South Africa. She said all her American contacts found Pistorius’ “I thought there was a burglar so I reacted with deadly force before I knew what was happening” defense to be ludicrous. (I myself thought it ridiculous.) She reported that it looked a bit different from South Africa.
(She wasn’t arguing that Pistorious’ defense was true; she was just trying to explain context.)
First, she pointed out a general level of fear in society that caused nice, peaceful people to react to strangers with low levels of aggression without even realizing they were doing it.
Then she reported that home invasion burglaries with the entire household murdered are a thing there, rare but common enough that people reasonably consider the possibility. Then they may react with heart-pounding fear and sometimes aggression to the sound of a loose panel of roofing, etc. (Is it paranoia when the fear can be real?) And such a burglary had occurred in Pistorius’ neighborhood.
So Pistorius’ argument, true or quite likely not, was a more reasonable defense than it looks to most Americans.
The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date [Kindle Edition]
Samuel Arbesman (Author)
I may not be on the right thread, but we were, somewhere, speaking of categorizing and I wanted to call readers’ attention to this very interesting book I’m in the middle of. I’m in the middle of a film festival and may not be able to gracefully copy and paste the quote I’m looking for, but the whole book is very good.
Does it matter how long you ponder and plan the death of another, 5 seconds, 5 years, 5 days if the same result is the outcome. One is definitely (say 5 years) more creepy than the other (crime of passion) and for some reason a passion crime seems more natural. Why? is it because we use words like, heat of the moment, blind rage, she saw red, uncontrollable fit, not so with premeditated. WE use words like sneaky, conniving, weasel, dark, deranged and delusional, sick, narcissistic.
An emotional weight is attached and because we are human it is hard to keep it in check and needs to be considered when handing out any time to be served.
One thing for sure, regardless of QM and determinism if Pistorius invites you to stay the night to sleep off your hangover don’t go to the bathroom.
Response to Vaal:
You said:
“if you are going to advise someone to take A course of action over B, to make sense you will have to be assuming *some substantial truth* to the idea that either course of action is possible.”
My response:
Yes I do think either course of action is possible. The course that you choose is, however, fully determined by the inputs to your brain. There is nothing in your brain that’s beyond the laws of physics. The inputs determine the output. If two inputs may occur, then two outputs are possible. You will probably claim that this is not a “real” choice, but I disagree, because I don’t think choice has any other coherent meaning. Input generating output is all that “choice” can ever mean, since free will is a false illusion.
You said:
“The logic is time agnostic and applies to past and future. You can’t say “tomorrow you can do either A or B” and then two days later claim “you never could have done B.” That would be a plain contradiction.”
My (naive) response:
Ok. Tomorrow you can do either A or B. Perhaps we don’t yet know how it will turn out, because we don’t yet have knowledge of all the information that will impinge on your brain before the decision. One set of information will lead you to choose A, a different set of information will lead you choose B. Two days later, after you have made your choice this will still be true. It’s just that one outcome will be the actual outcome that occurred, the other will now be a hypothetical outcome that would have occurred had circumstances been different. Yes that’s deliberately naive, and I know you probably won’t accept it. But again I think that’s only because you think that “free will” is real, and because you think what I have described are not “real” choices.
You said:
“If as in incompatibilist you claim on one hand that “alternative courses of action are an illusion, it’s never true we could have done otherwise” then this seems in tension with the program of prescribing actions. Because prescribing actions as we’ve seen earlier ENTAILS THAT ALTERNATIVE ACTIONS ARE REALLY POSSIBLE in order to even make sense of the prescriptions.”
My response:
I don’t claim that alternative courses of action are an illusion. Different mental inputs will lead to different outputs. Alternative actions ARE REALLY POSSIBLE, and they are achieved by changing the inputs to your brain, for example by prescribing.
***********
I’m being deliberately simplistic above, but I really don’t think that I’m being philosophically naive. I am familiar with the way Dan Dennett talks about this stuff too. However, I think the powerful conclusion of determinism is that free will, as commonly understood, simply does not exist, and I don’t buy into the idea that our agenda should be to distract people from that realization by inventing some “nuanced” modified versions of free will that claims to save it. This just reminds me of Sophisticated Theology. I, for one, embrace the new deterministic overlord that is my being.
I think the “contradiction” that you see only arises only because you want “choose” to mean something other than “process data deterministically”. You want “free will” to mean something, when I think it means nothing. You would like to claim that in the situations where I claim that a choice exists, I am not describing a “real” choice.
But I assert that any other definition of “choice” is supernatural, involves “free will”, and has no coherent meaning. Under my deterministic definition of “choice” as data processing, your contradictions and tensions really are resolved by describing the world in the simplistic way that I have laid out above. You might not like my world, but I do believe that it is internally consistent. It does not lead to the contradictions and incoherence that you claim.
Ralph,
We both agree that our decisions are determined by the physics of our brain. The question is whether the supernatural is invoked when people say “I could do A or B.” I think it’s pretty clear no such contra-causal supernaturalism needs to be, or even IS invoked when we talk about possible actions.
“Yes I do think either course of action is possible..”
and later:
“I don’t claim that alternative courses of action are an illusion. Different mental inputs will lead to different outputs. Alternative actions ARE REALLY POSSIBLE,”
Good, so we agree that to speak of the reality of alternative actions is compatible with determinism. Which is what I’m saying. Therefore there is nothing false, illusory or supernatural when I say “I could choose A or B action” or “I could have chosen A or B action.” That was one of the main points I argued against Jerry’s language in denying *real* alternate actions, calling it an “illusion.”
Now, we might say “ok, so long a WE two understand this language of possible actions in the context of determinism, that’s fine…but people normally thinking about their choices are doing something different: they are thinking spooky, and we really have to stop that!”
But if you think that people deliberating are really doing so on some entirely different spooky basis, I reply: No they are not! They are using regular old empirical reasoning for the most part, compatible with determinism.
When we reason about possible courses of actions, we begin with inferences about our own abilities (drawn over time from our experiences): “I have these abilities to do things…e.g. walk, drive a car, take a plane ride, pay for hotel, etc”
Then we reason about possible courses of action to get what we want. When we do this we use hypothetical/counterfactual reasoning – IF/THEN reasoning:
“IF I DRIVE to New York I”ll save money, but it will take a lot more time. Alternatively, IF I FLY to New York, I’ll save a lot of time for the trip. But it will cost me more money. Now…which outcome better suits what I want?”
Nothing spooky or supernatural is going on there is it? We’ve got desires, certain powers of action, and we are reasoning hypothetically about how those play out given alternating conditions, realizing that only one outcome will happen. When we say another outcome “could have happened” we are engaging in hypothetical thinking – and hypothetical thinking involves truth statements! (E.g. it is true that IF you place liquid water at below zero temperature, it will freeze solid).
It also involves no strange, supernatural claim of being able to do both actions at once at the same time and same state of the universe. In fact the very motivation for deliberating is the acknowledgement that both courses of action are NOT possible at the same time, and that I will only possibly end up choosing ONE of them. So that sense of determinism, only one result is actually possible, is already built into our deliberations, which is WHY we always, and must, use hypothetical IF/THEN reasoning. It’s empirical reasoning about the characteristics we possess, and how those characteristics can play out given subtle (or large) variations in causes and environments – this is exactly the same empirical reasoning used for buying cars, designing cars, doing science etc.
To say “I could drive or I could fly to New York” or “I drove but I could have flown to New York” are simply empirical statements about what we are capable of doing given the choice and similar circumstances.
This is no different from the empirical talk in science: “water can freeze solid, or stay liquid, or evaporate…” The scientist is no more assuming “given EXACTLY the same causal state” as I am when talking about whether I could have flown or driven my car.
The main variable implicitly assumed and juggled around tends to be our desires “IF I’d had the stronger desire to save time I could have flown, but my desire for a cheaper route was stronger, causing me to take that action.” All true, all non-spooky, all compatible with determinism, all reflective of typical reasoning about “what could have been.”
About Free Will: When people normally talk about the freedom to choose, they are invoking this type of talk, along with observations about what type of constraints might be put on doing what we desire to do.
To observe a dog off it’s chain is “free” to do more of the things it wants vs chained is true empirical reasoning. If I’m chained in a basement I say I’m not there “of my own free will” because I don’t want to be there and I would leave IF (notice the hypothetical!) I were not chained up. However, perhaps my being chained up in a basement happens to be something I desired and sought out; if so, then I’m there of my own free will, especially so if I am able to leave as I will. This is normal everyday talk about choices, freedom, free will, and since it is hypothetical by nature (and can be true!) it does not violate determinism.
So, when you first agree that it still makes sense to talk of *real* alternative possibilities even granting determinism, you should be able to see how that type of thinking actually pervades and underlies our deliberations, our choices. And free will is ABOUT our ability to make alternate choices to fulfill our desires.
That’s why when you suddenly leap to “free will, as commonly understood, simply does not exist,” it just doesn’t make sense to me, given how people actually, generally tend to reason about what they could or could not do, and what they are free, or not free to do.
Vaal
(This leaves out the question of consciousness, how much if any of a role it plays in our decision making. That’s also part of the free will discussion but FIRST this separate issue of *possible alternatives* needs to be settled).
The core point of determinism, for which people have false intuition is this:
People think “choice” or “free will” means that they could have done something different in PRECISELY IDENTICAL circumstances. And the key claim of determinism: this is false.
In this deep philosophical sense of “choice”, entailing free will, people do not have a choice. That’s what Jerry means when he says “you do not choose”.
Furthermore, logically, this kind of “free will choice” is an incoherent concept, and could not possibly exist, even in principle.
I made a point, therefore, that we can still use the word “choose” to describe the purely functional sense of “selecting among outcomes”, but emphasizing that choosing is just deterministic information processing, not supernatural “freedom”. So an alternative way to frame the determinist claim is to say:
We choose, but choosing does not entail free will, and therefore choosing does not (and CANNOT, even in principle) mean what you think it means. The internal dialog of deliberation makes us feel that alternate outputs are possible from identical information inputs. But this is a false illusion. The only way that our brains could hypothetically have selected a different choice would have been if the information inputs were different.
I get the impression (although I’m not sure) that you do not actually disagree with any of this. Yet everything that you’ve said above simply obfuscates this startling conclusion.
Most people DO believe in spooky supernatural free will. To suggest that they don’t, because it obviously doesn’t make sense, is disingenuous – it’s the same as the Sophisticated Theology argument.
Offered in proof of the fact that people DO believe in spooky supernatural free will:
Our criminal justice system is founded upon nobody. What proportion of people would agree with the statement:
“After adjusting for our beliefs that misbehaving humans should have greater rights than misbehaving dogs, devising a fair and appropriate criminal justice system for human beings is no different, in principle, from devising a punishment/rehabilition scheme for dogs that misbehave.”
I think most people would disagree. What do you think most people would say is the difference between dogs and human beings?
[the sentence fragment before “What proportion of people…” is a typo]
Ralph,
As I have argued here many times before, if we are talking about whether people have a spooky conception of “free will” or not, we have to keep two things separate:
1. How people actually think when they believe they “have a choice” or “could have done otherwise.” This is a main target of incompatibilists like Jerry (and yourself it seems) – the idea being that the everyday experience of thinking “I can choose between alternatives” or “I could have done otherwise” is false, an illusion, and that people have to be told that.
Vs:
2. The more considered philosophical concerns about “free will.” The difference being this isn’t simply the attempt to understand and describe how we think WHILE under the impression we have a choice. Rather, it’s what happens when you ask someone to think about how “being able to choose otherwise” and how that fits in the wider set of beliefs we may have. This is when people “get philosophical” and try to fit all the pieces together in their world view.
It’s at THIS POINT that, YES, people start making more mistakes. Just like they do with morality. In “philosophical mode” you will find, not unsurprisingly, some (not all!) religious people asserting we have spooky contra-causal souls that can avoid determinism when making decisions. You can even get non-religious people, thinking poorly about how all the pieces fit together, that they have this spooky ability too. BUT…in thinking about “free will,” as in thinking about any other subject, people can start making errors about how they actually
behave, how they actually think, in normal circumstances. Just like how Christians cherry-pick their way through the bible clearly using their own morality as a guide. That is what’s actually happening. But get them to think more philosophically about where their morality comes from and they get INACCURATE and make mistakes: they think, “well, I was getting my morality from God, from the Bible.”
But the fact they may think in one context “my morality is a supernatural gift from God” doesn’t mean they aren’t wrong about how they ACTUALLY think WHEN they are reasoning morally. And when they reason morally they tend to actually judge what to do based on societal moral norms, or based on cost-benefit analysis of suffering etc.
You have to be careful what you are out to disabuse people of. If you want to disabuse the philosophical notion of contra-causal free will, great. But don’t mix that up with disabusing people of their actual everyday experience of choice making, where they aren’t necessarily making that error. And this is what, it seems to me, Jerry and other compatibilists continue to conflate when they say we have to disabuse people of the illusion they purportedly experience during their deliberations and afterwards – that their everyday sense of “I could have chosen otherwise” is false. Or whether the typical invocations of “free will” that people apply to real world examples, invoke this spookiness as well (I argued why it does not).
So, with that in mind, back to specifically whether everyday concepts of “could have done otherwise” and “was free to choose” actually fit your description:
“People think “choice” or “free will” means that they could have done something different in PRECISELY IDENTICAL circumstances. And the key claim of determinism: this is false.”
But I just gave you an argument for why that is an incorrect inference. You didn’t engage the argument. If my description of our use of hypothetical reasoning for our deliberations is accurate, then your claim is false.
“In this deep philosophical sense of “choice”, entailing free will, people do not have a choice. That’s what Jerry means when he says “you do not choose”.”
But if you and Jerry are wrong about that, and the actual reasoning that people use in making their choices isn’t really spooky, then you would be railing at a straw man. People don’t really need to be told their reasoning about choices is false. Or, at least not in the way you are depicting it.
If people actually used incoherent spooky reasoning in deliberating and claims of what they could or could not have done, I’d be with you in decrying it. But I think, generally, we don’t do this. (With some exceptions of course – certainly we suffer bias and misinformation about how our brains may work…but it’s another discussion as to how those impact the free will discussion vs this one about general reasoning on alternative actions).
“Furthermore, logically, this kind of “free will choice” is an incoherent concept, and could not possibly exist, even in principle.”
Right!
But follow through further on that and you should realize that it’s SO incoherent that it can’t possibly form the basis of how we reason about our actions! And that is why it ISN’T the basis for how we reason about our ability to take actions!
Again, if I ask my son if he “could have” made a basketball shot he just missed he’ll say “yes” and demonstrate this by taking the same position and making the shot. This would NOT MAKE SENSE if what he meant by “could have” made the shot only meant “at exactly the same time under exactly the same causes” because that is an inherently IMPOSSIBLE claim to demonstrate, and and IMPOSSIBLE stance from which to reason about what you can or can not do! So it DOES NOT form the basis of his claim that he “could have done otherwise.” Rather, what forms the basis of his claim is his general appraisal of his powers under sets of similar conditions in the past, extrapolated to the similar position he is in now.
Nothing “spooky.”
It therefore makes no sense to rail against the “could have done otherwise”
aspect that underlies free will as being an “illusion.” The thinking isn’t as spooky as you believe it to be.
Cheers,
Vaal
(Sorry, obviously it should have read: “And this is what, it seems to me, Jerry and other INcompatibilists continue to conflate…”
Vaal, you said:
“You have to be careful what you are out to disabuse people of….”
Well, no I don’t. This sounds like you want to protect the ignorant masses from the truth, because they can’t handle the truth!
Ok, your point is that you think that incompatibilist determinists are expressing themselves badly about the scope of the implications of “no spooky supernatural free will”. So let’s talk about the substance of that.
You said:
“If you want to disabuse the philosophical notion of contra-causal free will, great. But don’t mix that up with disabusing people of their actual everyday experience of choice making, where they aren’t necessarily making that error. And this is what, it seems to me, Jerry and other incompatibilists continue to conflate when they say we have to disabuse people of the illusion they purportedly experience during their deliberations and afterwards – that their everyday sense of “I could have chosen otherwise” is false.”
I don’t think any determinist has an agenda to change the way people act, think, or choose day to day. I think the realization that “spooky supernatural free will” is an illusion has NO PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS for 99.9% of the way we live our lives. I and others have pushed back, for example, against the misconception that determinism implies fatalism.
For me personally, what has changed? Perhaps this realization subtly changed how I view myself in reflective moments. I know that my deliberating conscious mind is not in a deep sense the “source” of my decisions, which strengthens my awareness that my consciousness and “self” are illusory passive projections generated by my brain. But, so far as I’m aware, none of this has any impact on how I make decisions day to day.
However, the fact that 99.9% of the time it’s perfectly sensible and appropriate to act “as though” I had free will is precisely the reason that it becomes a huge problem 0.1% of the time. Humans have a strong intuition that spooky supernatural free will is real, and this false intuition is never challenged by everyday life, because it so rarely leads to bad decisions. But the 0.1% of bad decisions are the compelling reason for the deterministic world view to be presented clearly and without the obfuscation that you introduce.
What is the 0.1%*? The criminal justice system, of course. And virtually every discussion of free will centers around criminal justice because this is where it matters, this is where the illusion of “spooky supernatural free will” has led us to make awful and immoral decisions on how to punish people.
[ * Perhaps it’s much more than 0.1% if you include the fact that, without free will, most religion makes no sense. But since there are innumerable OTHER reasons why most religion makes no sense, I think we can set that aside as the primary motivation for asserting that spooky supernatural free will is nonsense.]
Ralph,
“This sounds like you want to protect the ignorant masses from the truth, because they can’t handle the truth!”
I very carefully laid out why that is precisely not what I’m saying. That we have to be careful about about disabusing people of true beliefs by mistake! (Which is exactly what you risk if we are too carelessly saying “there is no free will!” Given the type of everyday choice-making that is assumed in the phrase “free will” you risk people making the incorrect assumption that “Oh, I was wrong when I thought I am able to do otherwise,” which would be a mistake, and I personally think that the way Jerry sometimes phrases things encourages this mistake (a mistake on my view, of course).
“I don’t think any determinist has an agenda to change the way people act,”
But when the incompatibilst says things like “you know when you thought you had a choice, that you could have chosen otherwise…that’s false, just an illusion…” it might alter people’s views, and whether it does or not, my argument is that it’s false to tell people that either way.
“spooky supernatural free will” is an illusion has NO PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS for 99.9% of the way we live our lives.”
I agree with this in one way; in another I think it’s worth disabusing people of the “spooky free will theory” because it tends to be wrapped up in other philosophical mistakes, including morality (and Jerry recognizes this as well).
What I’m objecting to mostly is the manner in which some incompatibilists are approaching the task, where to me the arguments start denying actual truths along with untruths.
And here I think things get confused again:
However, the fact that 99.9% of the time it’s perfectly sensible and appropriate to act “as though” I had free will
But that simply reasserts, on your part, the claim that free will is only “spooky” free will and further that 99.9% of the time you are under this type of delusion.
Yet what I keep arguing is that this is false: if you really look at how you are thinking when you deliberate on a choice, you are not violating determinism – you are thinking via IF/Then reasoning. And if someone kidnapped you and trapped you in their basement, and you were later asked if you had gone to the basement and stayed there on your own free will, you’d understand this to be a question about whether you were free to do as you wanted, or whether your choice to be there had been forced upon you, giving you no alternative. And none of that either is “spooky” talk. This, again, is why I say we have to keep being really precise about what we are talking about.
About the impact of the free will discussion on criminal punishment: I agree it plays a role in what some people think a criminal “deserves” and why (though it is very elastic). Certain contra-causal free will theories that can, it seems, diminish the empathy we might show toward a criminal (insofar as one ignores the importance of what might have caused the criminal’s actions, and the role of simple good fortune to some degree in our not being in his shoes.)
So I guess it boils down to who I think is making the most coherent case about what free will is or not, and to me the compabilists make the most coherent case.
I think we are probably done anyway (and we seem to agree on a lot). I do appreciate your thoughtful replies!
You said:
“And if someone kidnapped you and trapped you in their basement, and you were later asked if you had gone to the basement and stayed there on your own free will, you’d understand this to be a question about whether you were free to do as you wanted, or whether your choice to be there had been forced upon you, giving you no alternative. And none of that either is “spooky” talk. This, again, is why I say we have to keep being really precise about what we are talking about.”
Do you seriously believe that anyone engaged in a philosophical discussion of free will mistakenly understands us to be taking about “physical constraint” or “coercion”?
You may disagree, but I honestly think everyone fully understands what we mean by free will. We do not need to qualify it with constant caveats that we’re not talking about being chained in a dungeon, and we’re not talking about making similar decisions in somewhat similar circumstances. It means, very clearly:
“Could I have hypothetically chosen differently in PRECISELY IDENTICAL circumstances, with PRECISELY IDENTICAL information?”
Intuition says yes. Determinism says no.
We certainly need to think extremely carefully about what this really does imply, because it’s such a profound and counterintuitive idea. But before we do that, we need to be certain that the false intuition is completely and convincingly demolished before we can “rebuild”.
I don’t think you don’t help that process by suggesting that what we are (or should be) talking about when we talk about free will is some trivial and philosophically uninteresting form of freedom.
I realize that the casual reader may often misunderstand what Jerry or other incompatibilists claim. It takes some hard thinking to understand it. Most people take a long time to accept that “spooky, supernatural” free will does not exist, if they ever do. But I think your approach obfuscates matters far more, and distracts people from the profound central claim.
You said:
“But that simply reasserts, on your part, the claim that free will is only “spooky” free will and further that 99.9% of the time you are under this type of delusion.”
Nonsense. Our just brains work the way that they work 100% of the time. If I assert that we should “demolishing the illusion of free will”, obviously that’s not supposed to be a direct blueprint for a decision-making algorithm to replace the way our brain actually functions. That would be preposterous.
The agenda is, of course, to change the way people think about they way they think. Because, for a small number of decisions, their meta-analysis of their decision making feeds back into the decisions themselves.
The point is, a false belief that my decisions are attributable to free will, when fed back into the decision-making process itself, makes absolutely no difference 99.9% of the time. But it makes a huge difference for a small number of decisions, notably our views on criminal justice, because criminal justice depends on understanding how all of us make decisions.
“The question is whether the supernatural is invoked when people say “I could do A or B.” I think it’s pretty clear no such contra-causal supernaturalism needs to be, or even IS invoked when we talk about possible actions.”
This, then, is the point upon which we completely disagree. People may not be AWARE of the fact that they are invoking supernaturalism in their beliefs about “free will” and “choice”. But they clearly are. Otherwise, our criminal justice system would look completely different.
Incidentally I agree with Jerry Coyne on the rationale for a system of justice, but I think it is unhelpful, to say the least, to tie things like deterrence, rehabilitation and protection of society to a particular metaphysical belief.
It unnecessarily gives opponents of this approach another stick with which to beat it.
It dumps a very unhelpful red herring in the debate.
Why Evolution is True: (Sept12 2014)
Premeditation is too wide a term: there will be different degrees of anti-social results from:
(1) a carefully planned murder which is performed in the expectation of *some* sort of personal advantage for the murderer.
(2) a carefully planned serial killing.
(3) a a carefully planned political assassination by a group.
(4) a deliberate compassionate mercy killing.
These are all “premeditated” but not equally immoral/illegal behaviour nor deserving the same treatment.
OP: “the laws of physics had ALREADY DETERMINED that Pistorius WAS GOING to murder his girlfriend that night.” (my caps.)
I have a problem here: the way this is expressed. To me, it somewhat implies that he was a victim of the *real* cause of this event, i.e. “the laws of physics”, thus transferring all blame to an unimpeachable scapegoat.
Re-phrased, I would readily agree: “this event was an inevitable sequential consequence of the laws of physics”, which, although not changing the meaning significantly, puts a different nuance on the statement.
In my opinion ‘determination by the laws of physics’ does not preclude culpability for human actions. It is not only a question of what chain of events led up to an action but its result and also what are, or thought likely to be, any ensuing results.
A further point: Pistorius has enjoyed world-wide admiration for his prowess as an exceptional athlete: this has brought him admiration, fame and fortune. Yet in exactly the same way “the laws of physics” also “had already” determined that he “was going” to be a champion blade-runner.
Is it not a case of a double-standard that all culpability should be absolved for anti-social action when there is acclaim and reward for his success on the track?
I have already answered your questions in the many posts on free will on this website. Culpability and praise serve social ends and can be held under determinism. Search for “free will” in the search box.
JAC:(sept.17th 10.42) “Culpability and praise serve social ends and can be held under determinism.”
Agreed. I also am a Consequentialist with regard to ethics and a Naturalist (leaning towards Physicalism), believe that all behaviour is subject to the laws of physics and that no-cause, libertarian Freewill is delusion. Though our brains are so complex, so ALIVE and so FEEL to be in control, the final output (and thence all our behaviour) is Determined.
[Defining “behaviour” as an animal’s bodily activity which is the result of its brain activity consequent on sensory input.]
Then how come I write this? Am I forced to do it? Certainly, nothing tells me, “Stop!”
So here I sit trying to communicate via *my* language with utter freedom to express *my* thoughts as *I* wish. feeling that I carefully choose my words and construct my sentences, -a very private, self-conscious process. Yet, all the time, finitely restricted by my fluency, my skills in composition, by my energy, brainpower, knowledge and experience, -by my private memory and my access to external public permanent records. And all these limits apply even to a Shakespeare! Perhaps this labour of composition is freely my own choice? I think it is no more a “free” choice than that of the words in this sentence. I do it because I *want* to do it, -it comes out of this complex package which is “me”. Nevertheless, I must accept the responsibility for it because this is MY output, -such as it is.
I do not feel dismayed or demeaned because choice of action, i.e. my behaviour, is always from my own finite set at any particular time. Neither do I see how being Determined affects my actions’ probity, nor does it necessarily and immediately exempt me of direct responsibility for those actions. That I ‘could not have done otherwise’ does not remove nor reduce my agent responsibility and I accept that I may be rewarded or punished, or even excused blame and/or punishment, by the opinions of my fellow humans to “serve percieved social ends”
These categorical statements, my opinions, this *behaviour*, are they right/good or wrong/bad? A matter of consensus or a matter of objective truth, -coming by reasoning about the world?
Every individual, every group and every species is in an implacable and purposeless(?) system of continuous competition for survival and part of this process is selection by fitter behaviour. Thus, simply by ‘rules’ of Evolution, by selection for ‘survival & reproduction’, behaviour is good/right or rejected ditto and is bad/wrong. This concept of morality covers not just conscious behaviour but also innate reflexes, instincts and emotions as evolved ancestrally-acquired, possibly antiquated, behavioural reactions. It can also be used to denote similar evolved behaviour in other, possibly much other, life on Earth: doing this rationalises other animals’ behaviour when they behave intuitively yet seemingly like humans by showing empathy, altruism, etc.
Behaviour (including human both conscious and unconscious) is moral or immoral, using “moral” to mean “advantageous or deleterious to a species own existence”. My argument fails of course unless one accepts this radical view that “moral” behaviour has been a vital tool in the evolutionary process, that moral behaviour is not solely the prerogative of the human species, exists widely in other species and did so long before human brains began to think about it, that it has (at least) much objective grounding.
But, unlike all(?) other life, a human can question “Is my behaviour good/right?” Morality, historically, has close association with supernatural religious codes, also philosophical baggage of transcendence, souls, duality and hubristic beliefs of our fundamental difference from other life. Religions are as Determined as any other behaviour and evolved partly to give us believable (in their time) answers to “What makes is my behaviour good/right?” Whether their Truth was Fallacy or not, at least whilst their God, with His formidable carrot and stick, is sufficiently convincing, the moral principles of (say) The Ten Commandments have been working for millennia. Even a God’s Morality must be founded on reasoning about facts relating to the world to work viably over such a time-scale. I can’t conceive of any human “morally good” action being ultimately deleterious to the human species.
Our ability to cogitate and precisely communicate with ourselves and our fellows by language and arts, causes us, using (contemporaneous) private/public memory banks, to form and enforce societal moral values, precepts, codes and laws, i.e. cultural, rational attempts to presently second-guess what Evolution would have determined e-v-e-n-t-u-a-l-l-y and remorselessly (not retributively!) enforced.
You maintain “No freewill” then no “Intentionality” so “No moral responsibility” yet at the same time you favour differing treatments for “actions that are either good or bad for society.” To me, that means “actions that are either morally good or morally bad for society”.