If you’re not a “Free Willy,” you can skip this, for I have at least one more post this week on the topic. But for crying out loud, let’s hear no protestations that I should stop posting on things that intrigue me. You’re always free to skip posts.
I’m now used to the fact that most readers on this site don’t agree with me that compatibilism (the idea that physical determinism is still compatible with the idea of “free will”) is a largely useless philosophical exercise: an exercise in semantics that accomplishes nothing of substance. That’s fine with me; I’m comfortable in my opinion. But that leaves me with a question for those readers who do endorse compatibilism. The question is this:
What do you think that the efforts of compatibilist philosophers have accomplished? And by “accomplished,” I mean accomplished for both academic scholarship and the welfare of humanity? And how do any social advantages of compatibilism differ from those that inhere in incompatibilism?
Now I can see what incompatibilism has to offer: the explicit dispelling of dualism (something that some compatibilists do, but not often enough), which kicks the props from beneath religion. More important, incompatibilism, by arguing that our decisions are the products of the laws of physics, and are “decisions” over which we have no control, has explicit lessons for how we deal with reward and, especially, punishment. By emphasizing determinism over semantics, I think, incompatibilism leads us naturally to a reconsideration of how we treat social offenders.
Now compatibilists could make the same arguments—for punishment as deterrence, sequestration, and rehabilitation but not retribution, and for a more empathic treatment of offenders—but most of these arguments have come from incompatibilists, who simply dismiss the semantic bafflegab and get on to the determinism. I believe that’s because even though most compatibilists are determinists, their efforts still leave the average person with the idea that we have some kind of real choice about our actions; and this obstructs reform in, say, the criminal justice system.
At any rate, there are many compatibilist readers, and I’d like to hear what advantages, both practical and intellectual, that view has over incompatibilism. Needless to say, I see none, but that is my own opinion.
I bet they do.
I think the reason that there are many compatibilist readers is because on the whole, those who accept determinism tend to be compatibilists. I’ve noticed this among my friends. I am the only incompatibilists so I accept that I hold a minority opinion.
I’m wondering how a person can accept determinism for every other aspect of nature, but somehow think our brains are an exception.
What compatibilists have accomplished is creating a definition of free will that is actually coherent. The libertarian notion of free will is not a coherent concept, so it doesn’t even make sense to say whether we do or don’t have libertarian free will. There is no possible way that the universe could have been which would allow us to say that we have libertarian free will, and thus you are not giving any substantial information about the universe by saying that we don’t have it. On the other hand, it is possible that the universe could have been such that we don’t have compatibilist free will, so the statement that we do have compatibilist free will is a substantial statement about the universe.
You could make ANY definition coherent; I don’t see that as a huge advantage. There are at least a dozen definitions of compatibilist free will, all coherent. Is that good? Or does one of them have to be correct? If not, then what’s the point?
That’s true, you can make any definition coherent, and it is very hard to decide what criteria to use to figure out the “best” definition (although you can take into account things like how useful it is for certain discussions and how closely it matches with most people’s ideas of what the concept should be used for). But it’s at least better than the incompatibilist point of view, which is simply saying that an inchoherent concept is incompatible with determinism, which is a useless statement because incoherent concepts are incompatible with everything. The concept of free will that you are rejecting on the basis of the universe being deterministic is a concept that you could also reject even if the universe wasn’t deterministic, so incompatibilism is not a useful position.
Travis,
Who cares about best definition? What any one should care about is best description of, say human behavior and social structure, what those social systems do to human behavior. If the compatibilist and incompatibilist are in full agreement, then their descriptions should eventually overlap. There may be parts of the discussion where the compatibilist (for some unknown reason) insists on calling a certain segment of that description as the agent’s expression of free will. But then that just becomes an empty terminological fight, and not actually an argument about description. Unless compatibilist and incompatibilist are really disagreeing about the behavioral capacities of humans.
But the question of the best definition of “free will” is really not useful to our best description of the world and humans, and surely all of us really care about the latter and not the former. The compatibilist may claim that given the present societal discourse and connotation of the words, that certain behavioral effect can only be achieved by using the language of free will and robust moral responsibility (because of the present or inherent structure of brain/minds). But that in the end does not require that as we arrive at our best description of humans that we use such language, even if we think that it has societal power that is going to be difficult to duplicate. In that way, our descriptive and prescriptive practices should stay as far apart as possible, for clarity’s sake.
That seems bizarre to me. Are you really trying to say that it doesn’t make sense to state that something that is impossible, but that many people believe in anyway, is incorrect? Or that doing so is not useful? Surly you don’t really mean that?
Your comment is a clear statement of exactly what incompatibilists don’t agree with about the compatibilist point of view.
People believe X.
X is an invalid concept.
Cs redefine X to be a valid concept that is expressly contrary to original X.
Cs tell people who believe original X, yes X is true but our X, not your X (to one degree of clarity or another).
Comps tell ICs this is better than stating X is wrong and no longer using X.
You have not giving any good reason why that is somehow better than just saying “wrong” and no longer using the term.
Saying it is wrong and no longer using the term is a pretty damn normal course of events throughout history.
I am not sure you quite get the issue here. “Compatibilist Free Will” is a mere label for a certain model of a certain phenomenon. Cs and ICs very largely agree on the model (i.e. the model is not a significant issue between them). Using your preferred label, therefore, says nothing more, or less, substantial about the universe. The criticism ICs have is that your label is the same label used for another model, which is incoherent, about a phenomenon which could not possibly exist.
“The criticism ICs have is that your label is the same label used for another model, which is incoherent, about a phenomenon which could not possibly exist.”
That is a valid criticism, and it would carry more force if IC’s just called themselves “anti-free willists” rather than “incompatibilists.” Being an incompatibilist suggests that you think free will could exist if only the universe weren’t deterministic. But the only type of free will that relies on the universe being nondeterministic is the incoherent libertarian free will. An incompatibilist thinks that the fact that the universe is deterministic is a crucial point to be made in the argument against free will, when in fact it is entirely irrelevant. If you want to insist that the only type of free will worth talking about is the incoherent type, then focus on why it’s incoherent rather than on the fact that it is incompatible with determinism. If it were ever discovered that the universe isn’t, in fact, deterministic, would incompatibilists then say “well, I guess free will is possible, as long as some other conditions are met”? If not, then they shouldn’t call themselves incompatibilists. It just confuses the issue.
That is, of course ridiculous. And, I am not an incompatibilist, and least not quite.
Travis wrote: If it were ever discovered that the universe isn’t, in fact, deterministic, would incompatibilists then say “well, I guess free will is possible, as long as some other conditions are met”? If not, then they shouldn’t call themselves incompatibilists.
Me: Yes, it IS true that if we found out that the universe wasn’t entirely deterministic that it might open up an avenue for free will. So far there have been two proposed possibilities: Indeterminism, which we can’t control so it doesn’t allow for free will, and Dualism, which speculates that some non-material force allows us to have free will, which is problematic since we have no evidence for it and even if it did exist it might not be able to give us free will.
You always can define some set of rules with respect of you have free-will.
Even for a stone.
So, you are not giving any substantial information about the universe saying that you have it, unless you define the laws or rules you are free from.
What I do is determined by what I think the consequences will be. I don’t know what is the “I” that projects consequences and weighs them, and I don’t think anyone else does either.
But the only concept of free will that makes any sense at all is one that involves making guesses about the future and acting accordingly. What give us the feeling of personal freedom is uncertainty about the future. It also makes our behavior unpredictable.
So we have the apparent paradox of being fully determined and unpredictable.
Like the weather…
I think feelings of personal freedom are at least partly a consequence of not knowing how we make decisions. Future uncertainty may play a role, but it can’t be the the whole story. It’s not even clear that there is a malleable future. Just because we feel that it must be that way doesn’t make it so. It’s not only the future that is uncertain. We can’t possibly know all the inputs into any decision we make.
Well, I don’t accept determinism, but I suspect that’s because you’re all using a different definition.
To me, “determinism” means that you are almost sure that the entire history of the universe was set in stone from the instant of the big bang. That’s probably not what you all mean, though.
There are too many WEIT web pages on this to point to! But outcomes can be determined yet not predictable. To predict them you would need too much information to make it possible. My argument is that we either have the ‘many universes’ view, in which case all outcomes are possible somewhere, somewhen, but then that means free will is meaningless, or we have ‘one universe’ but as we can never re-run things we can never see multiple outcomes & there can only be one outcome. In that case free will is also meaningless. Perhaps I am poor at explaining this view.
What compatabalism gives ME is the ability to let the issue drop, frankly. “Free will” is a kind of fiction. But we have no way of “living as though determined.” It’s hard to know what that could even mean. So compatabilism allows me to acknowledge the philosophically well-established fact that my actions are NOT freely chosen, while permitting me to enter into an existential narrative in which I am “choosing my own story.” It’s just a neat trick, really, not something I’d plant a flag to defend to the death. But it has gotten me out of the endless tedium of defending raw determinism.
Assumption: ‘Compatibilism’ = that determinism and moral responsibility are compatible.
Academic benefits: The benefit of correctly analyzing the general, commonsense, intuitive, pre-theoretical conception of ‘moral responsibility’ or ‘free will.’
Social benefits: Obviously this is a question for social-scientists, not something we can answer from the armchair. But here’s a hypothesis.
It may be (although I don’t know) that encouraging people to regard themselves as morally responsible will, in turn, make them generally act better. Again, I really have no idea whether this is true. But it’s at least not a crazy hypothesis. One can imagine an incompatibilist determinist deciding that there’s no point in trying to be good, because everything is already decided anyway and they’re not responsible for anything they do.
I do agree, however, that we can achieve various social and political benefits by recognizing that many people are less morally-responsible than they are commonly regarded to be.
The question for society is not philosophical or theological; it is pragmatic and utilitarian.
Societies have always found ways to encourage some kinds of behavior and discourage other kinds. One striking thing is that when you try to form sets of such behaviors, you find a few items belonging to the set of desired behaviors in most societies, and a few items deemed undesirable by most, and lots of items that conflict.
For me, the interesting question, and the one almost never addressed by philosophers or politicians, is how can you best do the encouraging and discouraging. Can the problem even be researched? I don’t think philosophy addresses or even cares about this.
I think it is an important point that societies encourage or discourage behavior. They do this without consideration of free will. What they do is pragmatic or utilitarian.
In 100 years societies, guided hopefully by science, will employ massive social and behavioral controls that coordinate incompatibilist ideas into daily lives, because these ideas work, not because they have anything to do with free will.
Philosophers will stand by and simply make sense of the changes after they happen, not necessarily before they happen.
It’s clear to me that the question, How should we arrange our laws and society?, is fundamentally philosophical, because it’s normative; it contains that “should.” But the question of whether, in practice, a certain law is likely to have a certain effect is a social-science question.
You’re right that philosophers don’t address the latter question, because it doesn’t really have anything to do with philosophy. Again, ethics is normative, about ‘good,’ ‘bad,’ ‘right,’ ‘wrong,’ ‘should,’ and ‘shouldn’t’; social-science is descriptive, about ‘is,’ ‘are,’ ‘will,’ and ‘won’t.’
Social benefits: along these lines, as a parent, having a compatibilist view of free will allows me to have expectations of how another person should (will) act. It may allow me to influence the behavior of my children by providing a clear understanding of my–and society’s–expectations without the need for deterrence and sequestration later (I hope). By the way, I’ve never given the concept of free will much “sophisticated” thought until I started reading the WEIT site regularly.
You could have those same expectations regardless of your beliefs about free will.
And having those expectations is perfectly consistent and, dare I say, compatible, with what incompatibilists have stated about their views or free will, determinism and responsibility.
The incompatibilist worldview does not mean that we are not influenced by outside forces; behavior is still influenced by systems of reward and consequences. The question is whether we have a “choice” in how we respond to those influences, and indeed whether we have a “choice” in whether and how we influence others. Being aware that the “choice” is predetermined doesn’t make reward or consequence less meaningful; if anything it makes it more pure, by taking away the unnecessary secondary emotion of indignation when our influence does not have the desired effect. You still need to modify your approach based on results, and acceptance of reality can only help to make that process more effective.
I know my brain is a wet, messy, amazing computer, governed by all the laws of nature. I also know that I’m not going to develop an ability to do telekinesis because that capability, as popularly imagined, has no analogue in any law of nature. While it may be “possible” that there is an as yet undiscovered means to move objects with the power of my wet, messy, amazing computer (other than me using it to tell someone else to move it), experimenting for ways to do “telekinesis” would be really dumb. This insight suggests it’s better to investigate how the mind works with measurable and verifiable data points than it is to argue about “free will.” It’s clear that something happens in our brains that causes many of us to believe we have “free will,” but the only way to know what that process really is and how and why we come to feel this way is to investigate the brain.
“It’s clear that something happens in our brains that causes many of us to believe we have “free will,”…”
Now that leads me to a question of my own.
Is there a benefit to the appearance of free will, i.e. might it be the result of natural selection? Or is it a by-product of having a big ol’ brain?
It could be a side effect of shit happens.
Yes an interesting question – does it arise much like consciousness does? I suspect it is entangled in our illusion of the self and the self illusion is important to hold our conscious experiences together and allow us to understand what we did yesterday, what we did today, etc.
It often makes me wonder if animals have a sense of self. Some animals show self awareness but do cats and dogs have a sense of self as well? I suspect they do but one that is a bit different from ours – our brains are pretty identical after all.
Sharing genes only goes so far, as an infinitesimally small difference in gene coding produces a overwhelmingly big difference in effects. Similarly, a small increase in our knowledge of how any brain works might answer your question.
While we wait for that study to be completed, I suspect that because animals can’t code experience into symbolic, non-behavioral systems (e.g., language), their sense of self is limited to/by their experiences and repeatable behaviors. Our sense of self is affected by what we’ve experienced and by what we’ve read, heard, or symbolically accumulated. We know that language affects your sense of self and of the world, and we know that language can outlast its creator.
I suspect our sense of free will comes from language. We shout into the void and hope it might outlive us. We create things that aren’t offspring, memes if you like. These children of our minds live in language (or pictures or any symbolic system), and from them we get a sense of agency, authorship, of “will.” An animal has no such hope and therefore does not worry about free will as we do.
Until humans reached our level of sophistication, education, and leisure, there was little advantage to realizing that free will is an illusion. The illusion worked well enough to get us through, and still does. Indeed, the mental effort to perceive the illusion of free will and its ramifications might have been a deleterious distraction for most of our existence. Now, however, we can benefit from it.
I think the value of compatibilism is explaining why fatalism isn’t a productive outlook. If you think libertarian free will is an illusion, but you don’t think fatalism is productive, then what other convenient label do you use for that position?
Why concede that no libertarian free will must necessarily lead to fatalism in the first place? Don’t get me wrong, I can see how that might be the case for some people, perhaps many. But why concede that it is inevitable?
Does it really seem plausible that if the illusion of free will is denied that humanity en masse will descend into a funk of fatalism? In my experience the most fatalistic people I have spent time with were Middle Eastern college students from Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, both christian and muslim. In other words, strongly religious people from places that were not so nice to live.
“Why concede that no libertarian free will must necessarily lead to fatalism in the first place?”
Exactly! Now, what shall we call this position? This stance that, even though thoughts progress according to the laws of physics, it’s still productive to make the best choices we can in our lives?
+1
Good question! I think Jerry should start a contest on that.
My opinion on the compatibilist / incompatibilist battle is that it does basically come down to what the label should be, and I don’t really think that is a big deal either way. I do get irritated sometimes though when the talking past each other or the seemingly willful mischaracterizations, get out of hand.
I agree on that. Much of this debate is semantic, whether the term “free will” has value in a non-theological sense. I’m not particularly attached to the exact phrase, but compatibilist free will does describe something I think having some label for is constructive.
I am not sure if your comment is a deliberate joke or not; or maybe I misunderstand SelfAwarePatterns. But it seems to me their point was that that useful, practical stance already has a name, and that name is “compatibilism”.
Or as I would put it, everybody who considers libertarian/supernatural free will to be wrong or incoherent but does not fall into hopeless fatalism because of that is a compatibilist. Whether they admit it or not, and whether they forbid themselves the use of certain terminology or not, should not really matter if words are supposed to have meanings. But that perhaps goes beyond what SelfAwarePatterns wanted to express.
I don’t understand how you come to that conclusion, except by simply stating that it is so.
My understanding from participating in most of these discussions here is this.
Compatibilist: Free Will is compatible with determinism. Free Will being defined explicitly different from the classical dualist or Libertarian concepts of Free Will. Incompatibilists agree almost entirely with the Compatibilist concept of Free Will as an explanation, but don’t like the label because of historical baggage.
Incompatibilist: Free Will is incompatible with determinism. Free Will being defined as classical dualist and Libertarian concepts of Free Will as typically held by many religious and spiritualist people. Both Cs and ICs agree unreservedly (supposedly) that those concepts of Free Will are invalid.
Some things that seem ridiculous to me.
1) Some Cs penchant for claiming that logically ICs must be hopeless fatalists, and therefore if they are not they are secret Cs. That just doesn’t follow, but I see that it sounds good for the Cs. I can even see that some of Jerry’s specific statements taken by themselves might lead one in that direction. But considering the whole context, that is obviously false to me.
2)Some Cs penchant for claiming that, logically, the ICs argument that Free Will is incompatible with determinism somehow equates to dualism. Again sounds good if you are arguing the C side, but it seems like an abuse of logic to me. The entire meaning of the IC claim is that dualism is not valid.
3) Some ICs penchant for arguing against libertatian free will when arguing with Cs when they should know full well that Cs don’t buy it either. Actually, that one goes both ways.
Getting too long, better stop.
darelle,
Some Cs penchant for claiming that logically ICs must be hopeless fatalists, and therefore if they are not they are secret Cs.
The point is that accepting determinism but still accepting that what we do matters (differently than what a sandstorm does) is what the word compatibilism means. The remaining difference between C and IC is the rejection or not of one or several terms, and I simply disagree on how much baggage some of them supposedly carry.
Some Cs penchant for claiming that, logically, the ICs argument that Free Will is incompatible with determinism somehow equates to dualism.
The problem is that those parts of IC that do not rest on the conflation of C and libertarianism generally rest on arguments such as “I don’t make a decision, my genes/neurons made the decision for me”, often expressed as the variant where “I” am the puppet of my genes or neurons or whatever (both Sam Harris and the host of this site are fond of using these expressions). But think about it: what is “I” in such a sentence?
The only way of making sense of it is by visualising “I” as something that is helplessly riding along in my body as an observer, a model that is indistinguishable from dualism except for the helplessly part. A non-dualist, however, would have to conclude that my genes and neurons are part of me; thus if genes/neurons make the decision for me, I make the decision; thus the incompatibilist claim that I do not make decisions falls apart under non-dualism.
I hope that makes the reasoning clearer, even if you disagree.
Alex SL,
I think you understood me perfectly, and described it well. Thanks!
In your zeal to defeat dualism, your defense of determinism is awkward. For the sake of argument on this comment, please omit reference to defeating dualism, so my point about determinism can stand forth. My position begins with rejecting dualism. Thank you.
Context. Lack of respect for context is the fault in championing absolute determinism. Any examination of Ethics or Politics, which are normative branches of philosophy, brings “choice” into the spotlight. An individual chooses his moral code. A culture chooses its political structure. If you now say, ‘no, those seeming ”choices” are merely the outcome, they are what they had to be, as determined by the sum total of all facts leading up to them, including the sum total of synaptic activity,’ you are avoiding this: the conduct of a human being’s life is driven by volition, and the volition of a sentient being — the self — elects the context.
When I decide what to purchase at the grocery store today, I set an upper and lower limit on the factors that I wish to bring to bear. If I am in deep concern about changing my health, I may wish to drop the limit deep into my (normally) unconscious influences, such as gratification impressions from childhood. Even then, I may not chose to drop it further, for instance to examine the choices made by my ancestors for the last 100,000 years of evolution. I don’t need to for my chosen goal that day. It does not serve my prime drive, my chosen motive for the moment.
This is how we operate. We think and act to survive and thrive — that is our primary default context. To do this, we constantly set the bounds of current moment context. Yes: this leads to being judgmental. We are judging at all times. We are responsible for our lives, so “thank god!” we judge.
When a philosopher speaks of “the examined life” he/she is referring to individuals who challenge received limits, who push them higher and lower, who become conscious choosers with an ever-expanding field of knowledge that informs the choices.
“An individual chooses his moral code.” I think you go off the rails at this point. HOw does this happen? At what age? I did not “choose a moral code.” Are you familiar with the arguments concerning whether children “choose” the religion they are raised in? What can it possibly mean to say that someone “chooses” a moral code? What does it mean when they act against their own “moral code”? You are in a conceptual quagmire when you try to state as a simple premise that people “choose” a moral code.
Once a person reaches the age of autonomy, regardless of the conditioning of parents etc., you are responsible for the content of your beliefs and choices. You have the choice to renounce a received code of ethics. Or, if you do not change your code, you are giving sanction to it be default. Either way, you chose your code of ethics by your rational faculty.
That’s demonstrably not true. Read up on moral behavior in chimps or monkeys for a start. Also, the evolution of morality in humans. And this: “Once a person reaches the age of autonomy, regardless of the conditioning of parents etc., you are responsible for the content of your beliefs and choices.” What age exactly? Is a 17 year old not morally responsible the night before her birthday, but then she is responsible the next morning when she is 18 years old? That makes sense.
WHAT is not true? And please provide the demonstration.
Politically and legally? Yes, age 18 (or whatever) is crude, but necessary. My argument is not about legal responsibility, it is about the individual’s ethics. A human being at some point individuates. This means to become interiorly responsible for one’s beliefs, judgements, morality and acts.
I have changed my mind in this issue. But not because I now have different ideas about determinism. Rather, I think I wasn’t appreciating what compatibilism is really about (or at least what it seems to me it’s about, based on the arguments I’ve heard and read).
It seems to me that compatibilism isn’t about accomplishing anything.
It seems to me that it’s simply about acknowledging different levels of causation, ie, proximate causes, and about recognizing the legitimacy of the language we already use to talk about those proximate causes. I like to get to the bottom of things as much as anybody. I’ll be the first to defend reductionist explanations where appropriate. But I think compatibilism is in large part saying that as an actor increases in complexity, from rock to virus to human, it’s *at least* useful, perhaps necessary, to recognize and have a vocabulary for talking about the differences in causal power between those actors.
Also, I think this argument is better had without use of the term “free will”. How to define “free will” isn’t really where the action in this argument is, it seems to me.
Let me stress that this is all very much “it seems to me”. I make no claim to being right, or even to having gotten the compatibilist position correct. Debate and/or correction is very much welcome.
Makes sense to me.
Most compatibilists are not trying to prove determinism wrong, on the contrary, they typically pronounce their strong support for it. Compatibilists are mostly trying to make sense of traversing daily experiences with limited knowledge.
It’s also about acknowledging different levels of abstraction and making sure not to get confused by recognizing the legitimacy of language at one level doesn’t mean it is legitimate at another level and vice versa.
For example at the level of atoms there is no such thing as wetness. Doesn’t mean that if you pour water on someone and then say their being wet is just an illusion, you are illuminating the situation.
+1
It strikes me (in an off hand way) as similar to acknowledging the difference between saying “all science reduces to physics” and saying “all sciences are redundant with physics”. The first claim is true but does not imply the second claim.
The main advantage of compatibilism is intellectual. It gives us a frame work for thinking about how cats are different from house bricks.
That is, it gives a framework for understanding what we mean by “decision” and “choice” in a deterministic world.
I don’t see any practical or social advantages in it. On those topics we join with the incompatibilists. Afterall, we’re all determinists.
(And much of the difference between us really is just semantics, but those semantics are a useful framework for analysing what we mean by “choice”.
I’ve never seen an incompatibilist analysis of the difference between a “deciding/choosing” behaviour of a cat and the behaviour of a house brick that isn’t essentially compatibilism.)
Or how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
I can understand that some people are entertained by such questions, but I have never found such people to be entertaining.
I didn’t want to subscribe, but had to, for mine own good.
Don’t check the box…don’t check the box…don’t arrgggghhh!
Loved the book, love the blog. But I think you misunderstand the relationship between determinism and free will. If there were no independent reason to believe in determinism as regards human action, we would have to postulate it; for without determinism, our view of ourselves as free, rational agents would collapse. In the jargon of the day, determinism is a feature of the human condition, not a bug.
Consider this little story:
“On November 6, 2012, Joe voted in the U.S. presidential election. The thoughts he turned over as he was about to mark his ballot were as follows: ‘How did the Republican party allow itself to be hijacked by such morons? Dangerous lunatics who—absurdly—get their monetary policy from a tenth-rate 1950s novelist! How did this happen? And Romney is such an asshole! If these guys gain the Whitehouse, there’s no telling how much damage they will cause. Obama isn’t so hot either, but at least he’s not insane!’ Joe marked his ballot for Mitt Romney and went home.”
Wait! What? This story doesn’t make any sense. Why did Joe vote for Romney? Had he sold his vote? Was he overcome by an urge to spite his wicked stepmother, a fanatical Democrat? Did the ghost of Ayn Rand suddenly whisper in his ear? There must be something in the “tape” that the story omits—otherwise, it’s unintelligible.
I would like to draw five morals from this story:
1. Libertarianism is a bad theory, irrespective of whether determinism refutes it.
Suppose the story had ended with Joe’s voting for Obama. Libertarians say that if Joe freely voted for Obama, then it’s because he could have voted for Romney under identical circumstances. In other words, Joe’s freely voting for Obama is explained by the possible truth of the story above. But that’s crazy. How could the possibility of Joe’s having behaved in a way that’s profoundly unintelligible explain his acting freely?
2. Libertarianism seems prima facie plausible only because people focus on the wrong examples.
Many discussions of free will focus on examples in which the actors are indifferent to the outcomes: choosing between flavors of ice cream one likes equally, thinking of a number at random, sitting or standing when either will do, and so forth. When we don’t have a clear preference among the options, we have the feeling that we could go either way, without the “tape” presaging our choice. These are cases when we act on a whim.
Maybe we do believe we have libertarian free will over our whims, and maybe the laws of nature will force us to abandon that belief. But so what? Nobody cares very much about the correct theory of acting on a whim. People want free will when they care about the outcome of their actions—like when they choose at the ballot box between candidates they view as anything but equal. In those cases, libertarianism is a bad theory, as we have seen, so determinism doesn’t undermine our freedom in the cases we care about.
3. Nobody believes in contra-causal possibilities.
You can’t do philosophy by administering surveys. People who claim to believe in contra-causal free will haven’t thought through the consequences. Confront anyone with the story above and he will immediately inquire about the missing bit of the “tape” that explains why Joe voted for Romney. This is because the story as told is plainly impossible. So if Joe had in fact voted for Obama under the circumstances described in the story, nobody thinks—deep down—that he could have voted for Romney without a change in the “tape.”
4. Rational behavior presupposes determinism.
Human actions can often be explained. We generally understand why people do what they do. If the story had ended with Joe voting for Obama, there would be no mystery. You could disagree with Joe’s assessment of the political facts, but you would know why, given his state of mind, he voted for Obama. But if Joe could have voted for Romney under identical circumstances, then you would have no idea why he in fact voted for Obama. The “tape” would have no explanatory power whatsoever. Another way to say this is that if Joe is a rational agent then he must vote for Obama given the “tape.” As I said above, when it comes to human behavior, determinism is a feature, not a bug.
5. The general features of the story apply in a huge variety of circumstances.
Consider this less dramatic example. I think it’s a good representative of a vast number of decisions we make every day. I don’t particularly like chocolate ice cream. I don’t hate it. I can eat it, say to please my hostess at a dinner party. But I never choose it, certainly not if strawberry ice cream is available. Last night I wanted ice cream. The restaurant only had chocolate and strawberry; I chose strawberry. Suppose someone had interrogated me after dinner: “Could you have chosen chocolate instead?” Well, sure, if I liked chocolate I could have. “No, no, I mean without any change in the ‘tape,’ with everything exactly the same up to the moment you ordered.” In that case, the right answer is, “No—if everything leading up to the decision must remain fixed as it was, then choosing chocolate ice cream wasn’t in the cards, and this for the simple but excellent reason that I don’t like it.” Surely my interrogator isn’t entitled to conclude, “Aha, so you admit you didn’t freely choose your ice cream!”
And yet that is exactly what incompatibilists conclude.
If you protest that nobody put a gun to your head or coerced you in any way so you were able to freely choose what you wanted, strawberry, they will say that’s not what real free choice means.
Thank you, Java Man. You have given such an good response that I feel excused from composing one myself.
Thanks. I think the key is 3 above. Perhaps I should have kept my response shorter and focused on that.
Compatibilism’s only possible use is as a placebo, to give people the illusion of free will in case the truth of the illusion of free will demoralizes them. But this is like saying we need to pretend a god exists because some people can’t handle atheism, or to pretend that a divine creation story is true because some people’s vanity can’t handle naturalistic evolution.
Compatibilism is the freedom (lack of obstacles) to exercise your unfree will, it is not free will itself.
Being born is deterministic, correct? Without consciousness, we all still created ourselves without any “free will.” Could this also be our personal arche (referring to the ancient Greek philosopher’s definition) or in other words, our own personal big bang? And if so, I suppose it can continue in a deterministic way from that first deterministic beginning. I’m confusing myself. My head hurts PCC!
What do you think about this out of curiosity?
http://www.dayonepatch.com/index.php?/topic/85062-what-decision-theory-has-to-say-about-free-will/
Written by a friend of mine who’s a computer scientist working in machine learning.
His second premise:
“2) An agent’s will is free if its will is not the consequence of another agent’s will and decision making.”
But your will is not free from the agency of the laws of physics. Your will is not free from the long chain of cause-and-effect that led up to your brain uncontrollably selecting one option over others (often using cost/benefit analysis).
The only way we can control determinism or indeterminism would be with determinism, a chain of cause-and-effect that we can’t break into, except with another chain of cause-and-effect that we can’t break into, etc.
Agent = an intentional being, I.e. something capable of having intentions. The laws of physics is not an agent.
I’m the author of that post; Kevin directed me here so I’ll respond.
I think the premise you probably should have quoted for that remark is the first that says “1) An agent has a will if and only if the agent makes true decisions.” It sounds like you want to claim that the answer to this is no in all cases because action is casually determined by physics. As I argue though, remarking on this property is completely irrelevant to whether an agent makes decisions; a “decision” has a well defined definition differing it from other computational processes and it exists independent of the fact that the system performing the computation is determined by a casual link of physics.
The reason the second premise exists is because while an agent (a1) may make a decision, if their decision was dictated by the decisions of another agent (a0), then this is an important distinction because it means a1’s decisions can actually be reduced to the decisions of another agent. If your decisions can only be reduced to a non-decision making system (e.g, physics) or an agent who did not explicitly decide your decisions, this is a categorically different situation that we should be aware of. Since it also seems align with our normal intuitions of being “free” or not, it seems fair to say a will is free when it’s not reducible to another agent’s decisions.
To answer blog’s question (which is also addressed in that post), while the definition of free will (and will) I’ve proposed has little value as of now and is mostly semantic, it will have significantly more value as intelligent artificial agents become more prevalent, for both cases of having a will (a decision making agent) and being a free will agent (a decision making agent whose decisions are not reducible to the decisions of another decision making agent).
First, we might have intelligent systems in the future that although intelligent (e.g., capable of making models and performing inference) make no decisions and do not have a will. You can consider many of our machine learning systems that we have today to be of this class: they learn things from data, but don’t actually have any values for the world and therefore do not make decisions. Systems without will present no moral obligations despite being intelligent, because you cannot do anything good or bad to them. So recognizing this condition in intelligent systems is important for how we morally reason about them.
Second, lets now consider systems that do make decisions and do have a will. These systems may have moral concern because you can do good and bad things to them (of course other factors may also be important for entailing moral consideration). But now consider (for example) what happens when an agent misbehaves or presents a danger to society. The question of whether it has free will, as I’ve defined, is quite important. If it has free will, appropriate action stops with it. If it does not have free will—if its decisions are reducible to the decisions of another agent—then you also have to consider action against the creator that dictated it to make such decisions. In the future, we may have both artificial free will agents and artificial agents with a will, but not a free one. This is possible because in some cases, I can define an agent’s value system well enough that it always makes decisions that I intend for it to make. However, even now with simple AI it’s very possible to create an artificial agent that makes decisions that I could not anticipate. How you respond to the creator depends on this property. Surely other properties matter as well, but this one isn’t irrelevant just because other properties matter too.
Please keep your answers much shorter in the future; we want comments here, not essays. Thanks.
Okay. It was long partially because I was both answering him and addressing your question in the blog. I’ll handle those separately in the future.
Decision theory depends on predictive knowledge (epistemic). There is no reason to misrepresent incomplete knowledge with free will (ontological; ghost-in-the-machine).
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. You can still have decision making processes with incomplete knowledge (these topics are rather well studied even) and having complete knowledge is *not* a requisite of the proposed definition of free will.
Actually, I think I now know what you were trying to say. You’re trying to say that because the agent doesn’t know what it’s going to do ahead of time, that doesn’t mean it has free will. Is that right?
If so, I don’t think that’s the specific property that maters (although you might argue its a consequence of it). What matters is that a “decision” is well defined as a specific kind of computational process that is different from others. We characterize it differently in philosophy and computer science because it’s a unique problem. Moreover, it also informs how you have to reason over different systems (e.g., single agent decision making versus game theory). If we’re going to ask if something makes decisions, why wouldn’t we use the formal definition that we’re already using? It’s a good definition that describes important differences that affect how we have to reason (and as I’ve argued how we must morally reason).
I still do not understand how decision making is related to free will. I can believe I have free will and make decisions, and I can choose not to believe in free will and make decisions. If I have free will or not makes no difference to me.
For example, if you could show people who favor the death penalty that they have no free will they would not change their retributivist minds. There’s the rub: how do you show people they do not have free will, if you can do that you might find a cure for religion.
Okay, so let me make sure I’m following. You’re saying you agree that the stated definition of “decisions” is appropriate and that humans do make decisions. However, you think that being able to make decisions is either irrelevant to free will or not sufficient to conclude it. Is that correct?
Can you clarify if you think it’s at least necessary? That is, would you agree that if humans did not make decisions that we could conclude that humans do not have free will?
I do agree that it’s not sufficient, but I think the only additional constraint we need to worry about is the second one listed. Presumably, if you agree it’s necessary, but not sufficient, you think we need to include additional constraints. If so, can you clarify what you think those are? We can then go from whether it makes sense to include them or not.
I don’t think retribution requires any discussion about free will at all. Retribution is either an irrational concept for the same reason as the sunk cost fallacy, or an intrinsically malicious value, which means it’s not something that should be considered ethical under what I would consider any sensible definition of ethics; but that’s another topic. Also, since I argue for free will, I wouldn’t be trying to argue that people don’t have it to begin with :p
We make decisions just like computers do. We respond to our environment.
There is no way, for example, to predict what state (p,x) an electron located somewhere inside the sun will have in one minute. We make (important) decisions based on limited knowledge. Decisions appear to be freely made based on limited evidence we weigh to make them. No need to argue for or against free will.
Personally, I think it is fine to argue for free will. The abyss between showing that we do not have it from what we know is so large, that people might as well be told they have free will. It is not going to change anything except maybe make some people feel better, which is foreign to me.
Yes, we make decisions like computers do. Since a decision is defined by the unique *computational* properties of what actually makes something a decision making process versus not, I quite embrace that. So why does remarking on it being similar to computers change anything about the conclusion on free will? If you agree that making decisions is a necessary condition for free will that similarity necessarily goes with the territory.
I think the 2 premises exactly define what compatibilist free will is.
Many atheists who accept Compatibilism do so in the same way that Dawkins proclaims his atheism to not be 100% sure.
Compatibilists are not necessarily making an agnostic wager, they are being open-minded. I contend that free will has about 1/10^40 chance of being possible; same as God.
Unlike proving the existence of God, which seems impossible, placing bounds on free will really does seem like an endeavor that science can tackle. Compatibilists seem more likely to try to uncover these limits than incompatibilist.
But the very definition of compatibilist free will is wrong. It is about the freedom (lack of obstacles) to exercising your unfree will, it is not free will itself.
+1
“But the very definition of compatibilist free will is wrong.”
Well, here we have begging the question again. Since the question of free will arose – to the ancient Greeks and beyond – there have been libertarian, compatibilist conceptions of free will, along with incompatibilist rejections of it.
What “definition” of free will do you claim to be the “right one” and how do you know it?
” It is about the freedom (lack of obstacles) to exercising your unfree will, it is not free will itself.’
Yes, one is “free to do as one wills.” That comports with pretty much any real-world application of “free will.”
What in the world would you mean by “free will itself?” as opposed to this?
I’m pretty sure you have in mind something logically untenable. This has been recognized for a long time, which is why there have been compatibilists ever since people started thinking about free will.
Free Will: A will free from being determined by causes over which we have no control.
1. That is a definition you’ve just offered, but it still begs the question to declare it THE RIGHT definition of free will, since there exist various conceptions of free will.
2. It’s still unclear what unpacking your definition would actually entail. I doubt it entails any tenable proposition.
3. Just a note that on the compatibilist view it’s justifiable to say not only that “I could have chosen otherwise” but also that “I could have WILLED otherwise.” Why?
Because I’m the type of being capable of expressing or experiencing different states of will, different desires. I drove to work today because I willed/desired to do so today. But I could have willed otherwise? How do I know? I’ve had the desire to walk to work and acted upon it in the past; it’s something I’m capable of.
Even further, our will arises not merely out of causes outside of ourselves, but directly from our own cognitive causes, from our own rationality and desires. Many, if not most of the things we end up willing/desiring to do, arise from the combination of previous desires and our deliberations, producing NEW desires, NEW states of things we will.
If I have a desire to avoid the family history of diabetes, that promotes in me the deliberation on how to do so. So now I will toward a new act; investigating how to avoid diabetes. Acting on that new desire, I investigate the issue and find out that exercising each day will aid my desire to avoid diabetes. Well now I have a NEW desire, a new thing-I-will-to-do: now I wish to exercise. And on it goes.
There’s this weird notion that seems to infiltrate the idea of determinism and free will that what we will is determined somehow strictly by outside forces, beyond our own will, desires. Which does not seem the case at all. In fact, you can not make sense of many if not most of the new things people will to do WITHOUT understanding those new states of mind arising from our own deliberations.
“You’re always free to skip posts.”
How can this be?
It’s shorthand for “if the laws of physics have determined that you don’t want to read this, your host will not make you feel bad about it.”
If nobody puts a gun to your head to make you read the post then you may skip it as you will, hence free.
Compatibilism, in my view, is the recognition that humans have a capacity for moral reasoning, and that society has an interest in promoting the appropriate exercise of that capacity. For this reason it’s important to have a theory of human behavior that directly addresses concepts of agency, choice, self-control, moral responsibility, and so on. Compatibilism seeks to provide a coherent, naturalistic grounding for such concepts, whereas incompatibilism (it seems to me) would rather sweep them away in favor of the dubious notion that, since it’s all physics anyway, there’s no functional difference between a premeditated murder and a random act of violence committed by someone with a brain tumor.
As others have said, the main social utility of compatibilism is as an alternative to fatalism, i.e. a form of determinism that explicitly recognizes that our intentions have real consequences in the world outside our heads, and that we can legitimately be held accountable for those consequences.
Presuming all human actions and beliefs are indeed decisions “over which we have no control,” are not we all (including Jerry Coyne and Ken Ham) equally afflicted? Clearly discussing the “truth” or “falsity” of any beliefs or actions we automata undertake in the course of our daily behavior would be a waste of time, as any mind-changing would be merely yet more deterministic outcome of organisms who have no “minds” to change regarding those processes “over which we have no control.” I think there’s something ironically implausible about this position, and hints that somewhere along the line some fauly presumptions have crept in (perhaps dealing with what it means to have self-referential yet partially independent brain systems trying to make sense of its own behavior).
The question is oddly phrased. Our social lives are already loaded with notions of moral responsibility for ourselves and others. Compatibilist accounts serve two objectives: first, they provide descriptive accounts of our implicit notions of free will and moral responsibility. Second, they provide normative recommendations to refine these notions in order to improve logical consistency and coherence between scientific understanding, moral intuitions, and philosophical theories of morality.
Compatibilism is therefore focused on incrementally refining concepts and language that are already integral to our social lives. Incompatibilist determinists recommend discarding these concepts, but that does not seem socially possible or desirable.
Is it even cognitively possible to discard these concepts?
I have a pretty good understanding of how Deep Blue plays chess all the way down to the electrons. Yet, if I am watching a game between Deep Blue and Gary Kasparov the only way I can really think about the game is in terms of Deep Blue’s intentions, motives, strategies, and choices. This crude model is demonstrably incorrect, but it still allows me to process the game I’m watching in some way. I can remind myself now and then of some of the details I know, about it’s tree search algorithms and so on, but since I can’t run those algorithms in my own brain, the running of them is just too complex, my knowledge of these algorithms only helps me a small amount in comprehending the game I’m watching (say, to predict what might happen next).
Similarly, I sort of doubt we can process human behavior, our own or others, without abstracting out a layer of description and terminology that technically is a fiction, but a fiction that captures enough of the underlying regularities to allow us to predict the future well enough to not constantly be surprised by the behavior of people around us.
Maybe I’m not understanding the incompatabilist position. To me it’s feels a bit like physicists telling biologists to hang up their lab coats since biology is “only physics”.
I’d go farther and argue that a description of how Deep Blue plays chess at the level of intentions, motives, strategies, and choices is not just a useful shorthand or a convenient fiction. It’s the only relevant description.
The whole thrust of computer hardware and software design is to isolate high-level logic from low-level implementation detail. As I’m sure you know, a program such as Deep Blue comprises many modules and classes defined by abstract interfaces. The consumer of an interface doesn’t know or care how it’s implemented, so long as the implementation satisfies the abstract interface contract. One can replace modules with different implementations, and the program goes right on working as if nothing had changed.
Similarly, a program written in a portable language doesn’t care what hardware platform it runs on. In principle one could build a mechanical computer out of microscopic gears and ratchets and run an implementation of Deep Blue on it.
So how Deep Blue plays chess is in fact independent of the detailed physics of the platform on which it runs. There are any number of correctness-preserving transforms one can perform on the program and its hardware substrate that result in wildly different patterns of microphysical activity, but that are still instances of Deep Blue playing chess.
It’s misleading, then, to say that “the laws of physics” determine Deep Blue’s moves. We can imagine a parallel universe with different laws of physics, but so long as those laws permit Turing-equivalent computation, it will be possible to build an implementation of Deep Blue that chooses the same moves as our implementation, because it’s the high-level algorithm, not the physics, that does the choosing.
Good point. Thanks.
* let’s hear no protestations that I should stop posting on things that intrigue me *
But you know they cannot do otherwise! ð
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>
Jerry is creating an input that may, or may not, affect their output in a particular way.
Clarity. And accuracy.
The concept of “free will” is a muddled concept — a deepity. One interpretation is true-but-trivial; the other interpretation is extraordinary-but-false. Supernaturalists flip back and forth between these meanings so that they appear to be the same thing: they are not. In this way, they are able to Straw Man the naturalistic determinism view into a caricature of fatalistic robots caught in a causal stream against which they are helpless.
Compatibilism weeds out the libertarian free will bullshit and is a much better description of what it really means when we talk about and think about how and why an agent makes choices.
Clarity and accuracy make it easier to push away supernaturalism and get down to business.
Here is a close analogy: If there is no God, then the universe is pointless and without meaning. There is no good and no evil. Therefore, an atheist who was true to their own beliefs would be a sociopathic nihilist, incapable of love or joy, incapable of praise or blame, and eager for their own annihilation.
Do you disagree? Oh, then you’re a compatibilist.
“Clarity. And accuracy.” Yes, and I would add: consistency.
I am incredibly reluctant to comment on this worked over subject any longer, but since you said it – thanks. I haven’t yet seen JAC or any other incompatibilist explain how they can consistently argue against compatibilist “free” will while holding anything other than a nihilistic attitude about everything else.
The argument that JAC gives for incompatibilism doesn’t make sense unless you are ready to apply it consistently. It seems to go like this: Molecules do their physically-determined thing in your brain, so your brain doesn’t really make decisions because it couldn’t have decided otherwise, given the same initial conditions of the environment and your brain. Or to use the word JAC has used many times, the idea that brains make decisions is an illusion.
But this means that allocation or praise or blame should be withheld from people for everything they do, since the thoughts and intents in their brains can be similarly dismissed as nothing more than an illusions, the results of inevitable chemical reactions. There is no reason to admire Charles Darwin or John Lennon or Albert Einstein or to excoriate Adolph Hitler or Tourqemada – they were, after all, just puppets to their respective chemical compositions and initial conditions whenever they created (or destroyed) anything. And that’s the inconsistency problem with incompatibilists here and elsewhere – when free will is not the subject, incompatibilists are as passionate with praise for people they admire and with condemnation of people they don’t as anyone else. But incompabilists don’t really have any reason to be passionate about anything or anyone, since people can not do anything that chemistry and initial conditions didn’t predetermine.
“And that’s the inconsistency problem with incompatibilists here and elsewhere – when free will is not the subject, incompatibilists are as passionate with praise for people they admire and with condemnation of people they don’t as anyone else.”
I doubt very much that this is universally true. As an incompatibilist I daily strive to praise no one and blame no one, and that includes me. It’s only when I lapse into thinking that I or others could have done otherwise that I fall into the trap of compatibilist/libertarian judgements and their attendant emotions. These passions – pride, hate, etc. – add nothing of any true value, so I avoid them so far as I can. It’s unlikely that I’m the only person who endeavors to live this way.
Darwin’s achievements are no less beautiful than any other of Nature’s artifacts. I would no more praise him for his work than I would praise the Sun for a joyous dusk skyline. As to Hitler, he is no more blameworthy than any other natural disaster.
As you can see, when it comes to naturalism it’s my position that compatibilism is awash with human exceptionalism – baggage reminiscent of religion.
“I daily strive to praise no one and blame no one, and that includes me.”
Well that strikes me as both unreasonable and sad.
As far as being sad, I cant imagine resting praising people, not just my son but others.
It can be a source of such joy and motivation.
On a practical level, we are built to respond to praise and condemnation; they are social tools of change, along with reward and punishment (punishment not having to be retributive).
I suppose this is yet another indication of how incompatibilitism can lead to what I would consider nonsensical conclusions.
Though, perhaps it’s not truly clear to me what you are saying.
” I cant imagine *resisting* praising people,…”
When I said that I strive not to praise or blame I meant to say that I don’t hold people *morally* responsible for their actions. So in a sense I do praise and blame ie. I do acknowledge and respond to their behavior in positive and negative ways, but not with an attitude of desert. “To understand all is to forgive all.”
It’s unclear to me how compatibilists can advocate non-retributive forms of punishment when they believe in free will. If someone could have done otherwise then they deserve to be punished irrespective of the results on their character or future actions.
I agree, but I wasn’t applying “free” will to our purposes, I was trying to make an analogy to something more familiar and obvious. What atheist hasn’t had to deal with the clunky theistic assumption that “purpose” and “meaning” must be imbedded in the supernatural or it’s not real? “What’s the meaning of life? Gee, it looks like you guys can’t have one.” Well, yes … and no. We’re actually philosophically stronger on this issue if we all just focus on the more reasonable level.
So we introduce a clearer, more accurate and consistent “compatibilism” definition in both cases in order to call out the bait ‘n switch. We don’t need a sky hook to rescue us from a problem which isn’t there.
I agree 100% with Jerry on free will and compatibilism. Our brains are organic decision machines whose behavior follows the predictable laws of physics, even if we don’t yet fully understand its structure.
Is this a fair question though? Prison reform and nature-vs-nurture debates are far older than neurology. Both date from a time when when their backers presumably thought we have the free will to go against our innate natures.
Those Quakers who campaigned through the 18th and 19th centuries to turn prisons from revenge to reform also believed that humans possess divine souls as a central tenant of their theology. They certainly would have qualified as compatibilists.
Hmmmm… what are the benefits of compatibilist philosophy for society? Well, I believe a compatibilist philosophy provides a far “less depressive” and more motivating view of reality for adherents. For example, if I achieve some academic, artistic or professional accomplishment through my diligent efforts I can have the great pleasure of feeling these achievements and the possible honours they gain result from MY efforts and MY hard earned skills. Success was not a predestined result achieved by a “robot”. Similarly I can feel that any affection or love that I’m lucky to gain from others comes about thru personally developed qualities and behaviours in myself -gained from others having a conscious choice in their selection…. and that I play a fairly major part in earning such affection, rather than merely benefiting from the rolling out of some cosmic deterministic script. As for morality, I have the pleasure of knowing that I myself play a significant part in creating/learning/selecting any higher standards of behaviour that I try to follow, rather than being wholly externally programmed to adopt them. This gives me more incentive to study moral argument and moral philosophy and “improve myself”. All in all these things are a most pleasant alternative to the incompatiblist world –view in my opinion. At the same time compatibilism allows a complete acceptance of our being in a deterministic world without any necessary religious baggage.
With respect, I don’t think you have fully grasped what determinism entails. Under determinism all your achievements are predestined. You are living out a role ‘scripted’ before your birth. You make a number of points that can only be premised on the idea that you somehow, despite determinism, deserve your achievements and the love you receive from significant others. This is not the lesson of determinism. Compatibilism is an empty well, for this very reason, it teaches its adherents to maintain an attitude of praise and blame to oneself and others not dissimilar to that of religion.
I suggest that determinism runs precisely the sort of danger that harpo alleges compatibilism does. I certainly have not noticed that those who espouse it are any less liable to resort to praise and blame – with respect to, say, (my apologies, Professor CC!) the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, the murderous activities of ISIS,or scientists cooking their books. What, anyway, is wrong with praise and blame? It’s an irreducible part of life whether one is religious or not, as anyone who has brought up children must know. Nobody has, or is able to (or probably ever will be able to), reduce human behaviour to physical laws, laws that are oblivious to the difference between being persuaded by a reasoned and valid argument and being persuaded by some Hitlerian rabble-rousing, and to most other things that make up a human and humane life. The attitude advocated in harpo’s comment renders human life unintelligible. Again, I am reminded of Plato’s ‘guardians’, who know the ‘truth’, and whose truth is power: any easy assumption of ‘we are in the know’ whereas others are not, can ineluctably to a self-righteousness (which I don’t think is wholly absent from harpo’s comment) and self-regard that justifies ‘our’ having power over the ignorant or incorrigible others and dealing with them as determinism supposedly instructs us. I see no reason why such a view should lead to greater leniency in sentencing. (The leniency of sentencing in Norway, for example, has nothing whatsoever to do with a general acceptance of determinism among the Norwegian populace or legal profession.) It might well lead to greater severity, if we regard punishment as a method of deterring others. Who is to work out these condign punishments that will apparently miraculously deter criminals from repeating their crimes, and others from imitating them? Does harpo have any ideas about suitable punishments for particular crimes? One might remark that that editorial writer in Ferguson, Missouri who lost his job after saying that Michael Brown was an animal who deserved to be put down was almost certainly a determinist in his way: to him, black people are naturally criminal – I recall Victorian British attitudes toward the ‘criminal classes’. People like Pat Condell are not much different in their attitudes towards Muslims. As for praise, well, perhaps harpo will be consistent and start advocating for the abolition of all prizes, including the Nobel Prize.
for ‘can ineluctably’ above, please read ‘may well lead to’
I should add that I think that a strict physical determinism is almost certainly true. I think it is largely irrelevant where describing our lives is concerned, or where drawing lessons about punishing or praising people is concerned. There is a point beyond which intellectual purism, however satisfying it may be for those who espouse, becomes pretty silly.
I put in the remark about distinguishing between a reasonable and valid argument and a bit of rabble-rousing because I recall Professor Ceiling Cat writing in one of his posts on determinism that his writing was, in consequence of determinism, merely changing molecules in people’s minds, or changing the configuration of molecules, I cannot remember precisely: of course it is changing such things, but the implication seemed to be that that being the case, there was ultimately no real distinction between the responsible arguments he devises and advances and, let us say, the irresponsible rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh, which also changes molecules or their configuration in people’s minds – though disagreement, or simply being left cold by an argument, would presumably result in a different configuration from agreement. Of course, from the point of view of a universe that proceeds mindlessly and inexorably on its way in accordance with physical laws (what I suppose Thomas Nagel means by ‘the view from nowhere’ – I have not read his book), there is no distinction, but it is important for us that there is, from our point of view, which is not and cannot be that of the universe, such a distinction – and distinctions, too, between truth and falsehood, between genuine knowledge and wishful thinking, between integrity and a lack of it, and between many other things.
I’m sorry for any confusion caused by my use of the terms praise and blame. What I mean to say is that I don’t hold people *morally* responsible or their actions. As to “self-righteousness” I hold that incompatibilist is an antidote for it. Whenever I am correct about something there is a deep sense in which this wasn’t just up to me. There’s nothing *extra* special about me. If I’m right and others are wrong that’s nobody’s fault. Why would I look on anyone with contempt when they could not fail to be who they are. I was very reluctant to stop believing in free will. But the more I pondered it it just wasn’t in me anymore. This process was long and painful by the way. At a certain point I began to realize that my previous belief in free will underwrote much of the negative emotions I was feeling – hatred of self and others, contempt for those of differing views, excessive self-regard and love of my in group, etc. I see incompatibilism as a path to compassion and humility. There isn’t anything special about my achievements or misdemeanors. I’m free to accept myself and others for what we’ve done as opposed to holding myself and others up to a standard of what we *should* be given that we supposedly could have done and been otherwise. I’m sorry if my talk of an “empty well” has given you a less than desirable picture of me. For myself, so many good things have flowed from giving up on free will that that’s just my experience. I’ve been mulling all this over since I last posted and it seems to me that while I still maintain that compatibilism is false, I can imagine that it would soften/lessen feelings of excessive self-love, self-hatred, etc. in some of its adherents. I just think it isn’t true and don’t think I my experiences mentioned above would have subsided to such an extent if I had embraced compatibilism.
Good answer. Thanks.
Though, alas, I think that would not be everybody’s answer. I think one great problem with a too easy and unqualified acceptance of determinism is, as others here have pointed out, that a description of human life (or of Deep Throat’s chess-playing prowess) in terms of physical determinism would render its subject unintelligible.
Also: your ’empty well’ – what strikes me about the arguments based on the assumption that determinism is true is their ultimate vacuousness and negativity. ‘Vacuous’, because one simply cannot speak intelligibly about complex human matters from some imagined nowhere that lies outside humanity and beyond any human concerns; and ‘negative’ because I hear much talk about what seems to be the mechanical application of punitive measures designed to prevent the repetition of undesirable behaviour and recidivism and to deter others from similar behaviour, but virtually nothing about positive political measures intended to bring about a juster and happier society, and, in particular, to eliminate the structural racialism that to an outsider at least seems such an important characteristic of American society. (I am not of course suggesting that racialism, and vicious racialism, does not exist in other societies: I am pointing to its structural importance in American society). Why think in these largely negative terms?
Again, I have lived in East Asia for over 40 years now, and have, I suppose, become to a degree East Asian in my thought and sensibility, and what strikes me about these arguments about free will and determinism, arguments that doubtless Milton’s devils engaged in (see Book II of Paradise Lost), is how parochial they are. I do not think that a Japanese or Chinese person, an heir to Daoist thought who has not been imbued with assumptions about the division between mind and body, or soul and body, would begin to see their point or see why people might get so exercised and emotional over them. Cultural differences do play a part.
For a lot of things that we do in academia the relevance for human welfare is not very direct, or obvious. What doth it benefit humanity to understand how Hawaiian silver swords evolved? I mean, I have some ideas, but I doubt that they are any more obvious to Joe Average than the benefits of figuring out a coherent definition of free will.
Much of philosophy is about clarifying concepts; the advantage here is, as Coel pointed out, that it provides a clearer framework for thinking about issues.
More to the point, however, it does not matter if compatibilism is good for the welfare of humanity if it is simply correct. If, for example, the following sentence:
incompatibilism, by arguing that our decisions are the products of the laws of physics, and are “decisions” over which we have no control, has explicit lessons for how we deal with reward and, especially, punishment.
correctly describes the incompatibilist stance, then that stance is wrong.
It is wrong because it is based on a confused understanding of what “we” is; if “we” is understood in the monist-physicalist sense to be our bodies, then there is no way around the realisation that we make decisions in the same way that a pocket calculator calculates and in the same way that a car drives. We don’t go around correcting each other with “no, you see, it isn’t the calculator that calculates, it is a chip inside it, and also the result was predetermined billions of years ago so no actual calculation takes place” either, instead we are calculation-compatibilists. If, however, “we” is understood to be anything but our bodies, then incompatibilism is a variant of dualism, a position for which there is no need nor evidence.
It is wrong because it tries to define the rather useful and widely used, even in programming, concept of “decision” out of existence, and to define the significant and useful to be recognised difference between a human killing somebody deliberately and an avalanche killing somebody accidentally out of existence. Which intellectual exercise is all the stranger because in practice the incompatibilist still makes that difference as shown by the fact that they don’t throw an avalanche into prison. In other words, incompatibilism is just a semantic trick: a difference should not be called by its traditional name although it is still to be recognised in practice.
Finally, it is wrong because it makes the odd claim that the average compatibilist would have a different position on punishment than the average incompatibilist. From what one can read even on this site, there is no such difference.
So from my perspective, incompatibilism is wrong, dualism is even more obviously wrong, and compatibilism is correct. The question of accomplishments resulting from that insight does not necessarily arise; if no accomplishment arose from recognising the truth of evolution, we would presumably still recognise it.
Telling people they have no control over their actions, i.e., the incompatibilist view, is a) wrong and b) not conducive to a cohesive society. The compatibilist view lacks these problems – that is what it has to offer.
Professor CC spends a lot of time writing (interesting) posts decrying the actions of creationists, for example. If he truly believed all actions are pre-destined and cannot be influenced/controlled there would be no point in doing this (although paradoxically he would not be able to stop).
I have never understood the religious meaning of “free will” – seriously, I don’t know what they mean by it – but reading the coherent definitions of compatibilists at this site has convinced me that I understand what they mean by it. Yes, this means that I think we will someday (if our civilization lasts long enough) be able to design robots who decide and control their own actions and will therefore have (compatibilist) free will, and be responsible for those actions (after having enough schooling and experience to make good decisions, similar to human children). I would guess both incompatibilists and dualists would disagree, for different reasons – thus denying the premises of a lot of the science-fiction stories I have read.
“Telling people they have no control over their actions, i.e., the incompatibilist view”
That’s fatalism, not incompatibilism. At least get your terms right.
“Professor CC spends a lot of time writing (interesting) posts decrying the actions of creationists, for example. If he truly believed all actions are pre-destined and cannot be influenced/controlled there would be no point in doing this (although paradoxically he would not be able to stop).”
Again, with the fatalism confusion. There’s a huge difference.
Determinism states that, if you’re patient enough, you can trace the factors that cause human decision making, and if you know the conditions in advance, you can predict how a person would respond (if not in practice, then in theory). It makes no commitment to the efficacy of persuasion, rhetoric, or other forms of intervention, so it’s nonsense to say it means there’s no point in persuading someone to change their minds. This is especially the case when we aren’t omniscient beings, even if the world was deterministic, so we can’t judge in advance the efficacy of such interventions in a deterministic universe.
Fatalism does commit to a position on the efficacy of persuasion: a pessimistic one. Needless to say, real people are a bit more complicated than that, though.
In any case, the universe doesn’t seem to be deterministic in the traditional sense, given the stochastic nature of quantum phenomena. But even in the parochial conditions we live in, where determinism could plausibly act as a “good enough” model, it isn’t even simple enough to understand, as complex non-linear phenomena – chaos – are harder to understand than a simple billiards-ball-style model would suggest. Nobody said a deterministic system would be easy enough for brains in said system to fully comprehend.
Getting back to the original point, at best, using the word “free will” is like using the word “life”. It’s sometimes a useful and intuitive cognitive shortcut, and the phenomena it describes certainly has its level of explanation akin to how biology has its own concepts distinct from a purely chemical description (e.g. try explaining predator-prey relationships in terms of the chemical make-up of tiger and antelope bodies). But it’s so vague, open to (mis)interpretation, and limited compared with more technical, accurate, and up-to-date information on human brains and minds that I generally avoid it in preference of more exacting alternatives.
I confess that trying to get my head around this does make it hurt but I don’t understand what implications incompatibilism has for criminal justice.
If I understand correctly, the argument is that the criminal had no choice in his or her actions which were just the result of a chain of chemical reactions leading back to the dawn of time and it therefore makes no sense in seeking retribution. But surely it is just as pointless seeking to deter or to rehabilitate for the very same reasons. Despite the pointlessness people will nevertheless seek to rehabilitate/sequestrate/deter/exact revenge according to their political or cultural stripe because they too are driven by chains of reactions stretching back into the deep past…
The only way out of this, to my mind, seems to be to ignore the likely truth of determinism and to live our day to day lives under the pretence that we have free will and that those around us in the rest of society do too. Surely that is what we all do except when we are thinking or arguing about free will?
I accept that I may be missing something here (maybe a lot!)but if someone can point to what it is it might ease the brainache!
I think a useful way to think about it is to think about decision making machines. When they are working they take inputs, compare them somehow, use some built-in rules, and make “decisions”. If you live around a bunch of these machines you might want to influence their behavior. Maybe to get them to stop killing your pets, or digging up your garden, or whatever. If it was tree roots or lava that is killing your pets and ruining your garden there’d be no point in trying to “reason” with it. You’d just have to build a barrier or move or something like that. But a decision making machine could possibly be influenced in other ways, maybe by conveying to it what great machine-smashing capabilities you have and how you plan to employ them the next time you find a machine in your garden. As a result of this input the machines might “choose” not to be in your garden. What is a choice? In a computer a choice is like a scale with a ratchet… when the weight is more one one side, click, it goes one way, else not. It’s all deterministic, of course, but it wasn’t a waste of time to talk to the machine and try to get it’s internal decision ratchet to click into the “don’t go in the garden” side.
This also illuminates why someone who murders someone for a colloquial reason, say to steal their car, is different from someone with brain damage who murders someone for “no apparent reason”. We might talk about the former having a “choice” and the latter not having “a choice”, but what we mean is that the decision making machinery is broken in one of these agents and not the other. In one it’s a waste of time to try to deter the murder by explaining what we do to murderers, because it can’t process this input in the decision making machine way (brain damage). In the other, explaining what we do to murderers might actually change it’s behavior, because the decision making machinery works. And, of course, the machinery can work partially or sometimes and that muddies things as well.
Saying you have a “choice”, then, is like short hand for saying that it’s not a waste of time to try to influence you with talking or other informational inputs.
As a practical matter, I think it’s nearly, if not actually, impossible to talk and reason about human behavior without using the language of “choice”.
“If I understand correctly, the argument is that the criminal had no choice in his or her actions which were just the result of a chain of chemical reactions leading back to the dawn of time and it therefore makes no sense in seeking retribution. But surely it is just as pointless seeking to deter or to rehabilitate for the very same reasons.”
The solution is simple: you don’t understand correctly. Incompatibilism is not the same as some kind of deterministic fatalism. It’s not even the same as determinism: You can be an incompatibilist without being a determinist, since quantum phenomena violate the deterministic assumption that you can predict the movement of phenomena in advance so long as you know the initial conditions. In any case, determinism and incompatibilism make no commitments as to the efficacy of intervention, unlike fatalism, which is pessimistic on that front. Rehabilitation could just as easily be effective in a deterministic universe as not; the only qualification is that, in either case, cause and effect play (some) role and aren’t due to randomness. It doesn’t even require a billiard-balls-style idea of causality: chaos and non-linear, multifactorial webs of complex mathematical functions are technically deterministic, so long as they don’t rely on probabilistic effects. Determinism is less revolutionary than you think.
I think the value of incompatibilism – deterministic or not – is that it forces a consilience between our understanding of human behaviour and nature, and the biological, chemical, and physical understandings that underpin human behaviour and nature. In other words, it forces our ideas of human nature to match the rest of our scientific understanding, the same way a biomechanical understanding of heart anatomy contributes to our understanding of cardiovascular function (and dysfunction). Even the notion that free will is a useful fiction relies on an understanding of how human cognition works – or at least, simply exploits how human cognition works, whether it’s understood or not.
Personally, I think criminal justice and law enforcement is similar to medicine: the goal is to reduce, eradicate, prevent, and mitigate pain and suffering. On that model, the mechanisms of “responsibility” and “punishment” are, respectively, descriptions of causal factors (a virus may be responsible for the disease, for instance, while a single hooligan may be responsible for vandalism), and recommended treatments (medication and diet, and any measure designed to prevent or reduce further vandalism). It has the further advantage of being open to other factors – say, unhygienic habits, pollution, and other people’s behaviour.
I don’t know if that makes me an incompatibilist or a compatibilist, but for the most part, I regard “free will” in a similar way to how I regard “life” – useable, but bland, inexact, vague, and might allow people to unconsciously treat it in the same romantic, unexamined, and intuitive way that religious or libertarian free will is treated by its advocates.
It seems to me that those who are determinist fatalists philosophically don’t seem to speak or act that way day to day…as much as they would will themselves to do so.
This will not be a scientific or philosophical
response. It’s musings only.
1. Everything that has happened in the universe, whether we are aware of it or not, has had a bearing on who and what we are and what we think we know.
2. Cultural and familial inputs also affect what we think we know. I, an American, will have a somewhat different store of potential “knowledges” than a non American, for example.
3. Within the human brain computer that stores all precedents for knowledge,90+/-% of brain functions and cogitations are unconscious, then presented fait accompli to consciousness. We prefer to think that decisions are consciously made, but they are not. We have no ability (at present) to reconstruct or understand all the elements, inputs and cogitations taken by the unconscious to arrive at a so-called conscious decision.
I would think this process is deterministic. Free will applies only at the last if/when we decide what to do with this “knowledge”.
I’m something of a social determinist (and social determinism has been around in various forms since Indian philosophers debated 2500 years ago), but I am also a compatibilist, because I think cognitive dissonance, and other psychic and social events, can lead to a change of mind not pre-programmed. Such moments allow personal improvement; and such moments can occur collectively, and thus allow for social change.
I don’t worry my head over this, though, because most people experience the world as if they had free will, and if they want to believe that, I feel it would be wasting my time arguing otherwise.
And indeed, I wonder about the project of trying to a) convince the majority of Americans to incompatibilism, in order to b)transform the entirety of the American justice/judicial system to a ‘fault-free’ theory of transgressive behavior. Bernie Sanders has as much chance to convert the Koch Bros. to socialism.
I wonder about this too. Plain old-fashioned compassion seems like sufficient reason to reform the justice system, and if that’s not enough to sway law-and-order conservatives, I find it hard to imagine they’ll find an argument based on materialist determinism more convincing.
There have been plenty of excellent answers here, I think.
First, kudos again to you Prof Ceiling Cat for wishing to understand a viewpoint you don’t agree with, and continuing to interact with it. If you end up sticking with incompatibilism you’ve certainly come by it through honest inquiry IMO. I certainly respect your views on the subject of free will, and I don’t think compatibilism is necessarily some slam-dunk position.
What do you think that the efforts of compatibilist philosophers have accomplished?
On a personal note, I’d say that compatibilist philosophers (along with my own meager ruminations) have managed to clear up a fascinating apparent “problem.” It’s allowed me to (I hope) think about the issue of free will coherently. It’s personally, intellectually satisfying in that way.
And by “accomplished,” I mean accomplished for both academic scholarship and the welfare of humanity?
I’m not sure. I guess it depends on what one means by “accomplished” in this question. (You can ask the same questions as to what incompatibilism has accomplished, academically or for the welfare of humanity). Compatibilism seems to have become the most common position within philosophy, so if it’s true, or sound, then I guess that’s an accomplishment.
“Welfare of humanity?” I’m not sure how much has been accomplished at this point by either compatibilism or incompatibiilsm. In both cases we want to disabuse people of nonsensical ideas about human choice-making, associations of dualism, supernaturalism, etc. If compatibilism is ultimately the more coherent position to promulgate, it would seem to have the most potential to persuade people out of dualism.
And how do any social advantages of compatibilism differ from those that inhere in incompatibilism?
Again, to the degree that both incompatibilists and compabilists wish to disabuse people of magic/dualist/libertarian associations with human choice-making, whichever theory is more coherent, less self-contradictory, ought to be in the better position to persuade more people. For me, incompatibilism throws up some apparent prima facie contradictions that are easily seized upon as reasons to reject it, especially by the very folks we are trying to convince. The other problem, IMO, is that incoherencies don’t remain as superficial, are not ultimately explained away – the first-sight impression of contradictions are essentially validated as the incompatibilist becomes more explicit about the theory.
I think one can even see examples of how these liabilities play out in practice. An example could be Sam Harris’ debate with William L. Craig vs moral philosopher Shelly Kagan.
I was squeamish about one aspect of the Harris/Craig debate because I knew Craig would score easy points by leaping on Harris’ incompatibilist – Free Will doesn’t exist – stance. The “ought implies can” concept underlies most of our intuitions and is assumed into most people’s moral reasoning. Craig knew this, pointed out the apparent contradiction in Harris saying “we have no Free Will” while trying to hold on to the concept of morality. I saw tons of theistic commentary from viewers who found Harris’ stance on free will to be an obvious incoherent contradiction. (And not just among theists). It allowed them to easily reject Harris’ arguments.
In contrast to the Harris/Craig debate, if you look at the debate between Craig and Kagan, you’ll see the point where they get to the issue of Free Will and Kagan explains that he’s a compatibilist who believes in Free Will; that there was nothing prima facie incoherent about his talking about choice-making, human responsibility etc. This completely disarmed that line of attack from Craig, disallowing him from flagging convenient-looking contradictions. I think this is at least one of the reasons that led to Kagan’s case being so solid that the consensus has been he whipped Craig’s butt – with many theists agreeing!
This is part of the value of being able to put forth a smooth, coherent position, if you are trying to convince people of your view.
Now, it’s not like compabilism is a walk in the park either. It faces
it’s own apparent contradiction: “What? You are saying BOTH that our choices can be fully determined AND that we are nonetheless free?”
That’s a tough intuition hump to get over to be sure. But, IF compatibilism is ultimately the more coherent depiction of human choice-making and our descriptions of it, as I think it is, then that is one thing in it’s favor in terms of convincing people of that position. Another advantage is that it’s arguing FOR preserving free will – or most of what people “want” of free will.
So, in theory compatibilism ought to be promulgated over incompatibilism, mostly because it is the more coherent theory, both making more sense of our experience and for this reason being more persuasive.
In theory 🙂
“For me, incompatibilism throws up some apparent prima facie contradictions that are easily seized upon as reasons to reject it…”
I’ve think you’ve hit on a truly compelling point here Vaal. All atheists, be they compatibilist or incompatibilist, see the terrible consequences of religious belief… and consider that the more we can convince the religious to discard their present belief system and adopt an enlightened rationality the better our society would be. And most ordinary believers do have their own serious doubts concerning the certainty of their religious beliefs, and can see that their ideas though comforting are not really very rational. And they feel their beliefs are not consistent with their personal EXPERIENCE. When we atheists argue that the idea of life after death is incredibly incoherent, that the religious apologists excuses for the problem of evil are preposterous, that evolution is more sensible than any “creation story” we are making arguments that make personal sense to them. Then comes the incompatibilist slant… AND they have no free will, they are robots…. AND that the “self” is an illusion. These claims go totally against their own “common sense” – their own EXPERIENCE – so in their view the whole “atheist pitch” must be nonsense. We lose any great chance of an improved rational society.
Maybe I grossly misunderstand compatabilism and incompatibilism, but from what I understand of the two positions it seems to me that compatabilism has exactly the advantage over incompatabilism as a way to think about human behavior that biology has over physics as a way to think about evolution. The language of intentions, choice, and so on, turns out to be a working model of human behavior, just as “selection” turns out to be a working model in biology. You can predict what people will do with this model. No one has ever used the laws of physics to predict human behavior even though, of course, it is in principle reducible to the laws of physics.
Is it even possible to talk to other humans for more than a couple of minutes without using language that implies some kind of freedom of choice? “You can skip this article…”, for example.
I don’t think it’s just a matter of creeping dualism, or of a succor to people who need a security blanket against the cold harsh reality of determinism. It just seems to me that we are cognitively only able to describe and predict human behavior with this kind of abstraction.
It may well be that everything is ultimately determined by the laws of physics, but until some genuine way of explaining the behaviour of human beings, and that of at least some other organisms, in those physical terms, is found then simply asserting that the laws of physics show that everything is determined surely does not do very much. It certainly makes no real sense of our behaviour. Professor CC repeats his belief that an acceptance of determinism will permit those who commit crimes to be treated not punitively in a vengeful way, in a way which he thinks is due primarily to belief in ‘free will’ that derives from religion, but punitively in a way that is in the best interests of both perpetrator and society. At the same time he feels, as I recall, that that Harvard (was it?) scientist who faked his experimental results was punished sufficiently so that others might be deterred from doing the same; but surely what did happen and must be happening was sufficient: his past publicised results are mistrusted (so few people will want to use them without re-testing them), and few people in the scientific community will trust him in the future. One doubts he will ever hold an important position again. What further could be added to that situation that could make the punishment more condign and efficacious? And, more generally, what sort of punishments should we be giving people (murderers, rapists, thieves, Wall Street financiers, et al) so that both they and others are properly deterred? Even more generally, why think only in the limited terms of punishment and deterrence? To do so, surely, merely perpetuates the vicious cycle.
Again, is it a religious belief in ‘free will’ that is behind the American obsession with punishing criminals? To an extent, perhaps, but there are surely other factors at stake. The obsession may be stronger in America, but it seems to be very much an Anglo-Saxon thing: according to a Guardian article about the killing of a schoolteacher by a 15-year-old boy, ‘We have about 13,000 men (mostly men) serving life and indeterminate sentences in England and Wales, more than all the other 46 countries in Europe added together.’ I doubt that that is due to the lingering and savage influence of a toothless Anglicanism. In another Guardian article from 2010, the writer compares the approach taken in a small town in Norway to the killing of a small girl by two small boys to the hysteria that broke out over the killing in England of James Bulger. Yes, religion is not so much of a force in Norway any more, but the sensible and sane approach of the Norwegians has little to do with an acceptance of the thesis that everything is determined and there is no free will.
As other commenters have remarked, whether or not a strict physical determinism is true (I think that it almost certainly is, ultimately), it is impossible to make human behaviour intelligible in its terms. It really has rather small relevance to our lives.
should read the Harvard scientist ‘was NOT punished sufficiently…’
Is post-intentionalism compatible with compatibilism?
http://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/2014/11/05/back-to-square-one-toward-a-post-intentional-future/
Let’s see. What is the advantage of abjuring an empirically indiscernible mental event, which was conjectured in intellectual desperation to solve the intractable theistic dilemma of how a righteous, reasonable, and omnipotent creator could justifiably punish his creatures at the end of their lives, with the perfectly sensible everyday concept of doing what you yourself have chosen to do? I dunno, unless the everyday concept allows us to recognize when it might be reasonable to disapprove of or punish someone and when it would be just pointless and cruel.
Oops! I should have said ‘replacing’ instead of ‘abjuring’. I got lost in sentence construction and ended up with nonsense. Blush.