Thomas Metcalf

Taffy Lewis:

I'm not sure I see how this answers Morris' argument, if indeed it's intended to. I agree with him that it's problematic to call God's actions moral if He's not morally free, and that He's not morally free if there are no possible worlds in which He chooses evil. But this is not the point of your paper exactly.

Now, as I read you, you can accept that God is not morally free, but you do not think God should produce humans that are similarly morally bound. If He did, they would not be responsible for their actions, and they would not be independent from God's decrees.

I think the first thing to be said is that libertarian free will really is quite a hard thing to defend. I hope you have a novel approach because I've seen some pretty devastating arguments. Mostly they start out with something like "Either a given decision is uncaused or caused" and go from there.

Somewhat relatedly, I'm not sure God's standing by and letting fetuses and children with a certain moral character develop is importantly different from Him causing certain events to happen around them that will shape their moral characters. I mean, I understand how a person's free choice would (under libertarianism) require more autonomy, but does anyone ever choose whether to be a moral person in general? It seems that God could populate His planet with good humans who still make autonomous decisions; it's just that their moral characters are very special.

I trust your response would be that they're still caused to have that moral character by God, so they're not free. But even if it weren't God, other factors would be influencing their moral development, so it seems you must argue that there's not really any such thing as a moral character, that people make every decision independent of their psychology. Otherwise, God could screw around with their psychology all He wanted and it wouldn't be any different from people's parents mistreating them as kids and causing them to develop antisocial tendencies.

So I think your position can be consistent if you say our choices are independent of any sort of antecedent moral character, but I don't know how defensible this position will be. Most people will intuitively believe that there are such things as moral characters, and that they are formed through one's life experiences. Certainly, we would not be free if every time we were going to do something evil, God reached down and rearranged our brain chemicals so that we didn't, but this doesn't seem different enough from the natural causal histories of the development of our psyches.

Finally, I would be interested to learn why God values our freedom so much. It still seems we'd have significant moral freedom if we failed to torture babies more often than we fail now, but God has not enacted such a natural law.

Taffy Lewis

Thomas Metcalf,

I think it is pretty clear that God's perfect goodness entails that he cannot be morally free in the libertarian sense. But there is a sense of freedom applied to the will that is consistent with necessitation. Compatibilists are well known for insisting that this is a kind of freedom "worth wanting". If that is so, then God's complete freedom in the compatibilist sense would be something good and valuable.

Further, God would possess libertarian free will with regard to his nonmoral choices. For example, most theists believe that God was not necessitated in bringing about the creation of our universe.

I find belief in libertarian free will to be quite reasonable. Belief in this sort of freedom is based upon direct experience . It seems forcefully to me that I often have before me alternative courses of action and that I am responsible for the one which occurs. The statement "Either a given decision is uncaused or caused" is vague. Does 'uncaused' mean 'random'? Does 'caused' means 'brought about by sufficient antecedent conditions'? If so, then the statement is a false dichotomy. Our actions are neither necessitated nor random. If my actions are necessitated then there are no alternatives and if they are random I am not responsible for them.

I doubt proponents of libertarian free will would attribute such a capacity to a fetus or small children.

Further, it does seem to me that I am at least partially responsible for the kind of person that I am.

I'm not aware of any proponents of libertarian free will who believe that our choices are independent of our character. They usually think that our character 'influences' our actions without determining them. Roughly, this means that our present character inclines us towards certain types of choices without necessitating them. In addition, our present choices are supposed to mold our character so that in the future some actions are more 'natural' than others.

Saying that our character is formed through our life's experiences makes it appear that character formation is wholly a matter of what happens to us and not even partially something we bring about. It seems to me that this isn't so.

Dr. Retard

I don't understand why necessary moral perfection rules out freedom. Even if I do the same thing in every possible world, what does that have to do with whether my choice was free? I thought that the freedom of a choice was a matter of the way it's done, as opposed to a matter of its modal status. For instance, "His attempt to kill the Queen wasn't free because there was a machine controlling his brain" looks like ordinary talk about freedom. Is there any ordinary talk about freedom where we need to know an action's modal status before we make the call?

Taffy Lewis

Brain controlling machines are an ordinary part of life in the Czech Republic?

Dr. Retard

Actually, I was thinking about the first Naked Gun movie, which is part of my ordinary life.

Jobar

Consider all the ways our lives are constrained.

We are always subject to the natural force of gravity. We cannot travel through time. We are unable to live longer than a dozen decades or so. We can't choose how intelligent we will be. We are limited in many ways, even the richest and most powerful.

Why should we consider these constraints acceptable to the eyes of God, but the thought of moral restraint imposed with the force of natural law unacceptable? Let's say that God made us able to absorb all the energy we needed from sunlight and soil, like a plant. We would never need kill or injure any other living thing. Say he made us asexual, so that we need never lust. If God wanted evil-free beings who at the same time were free of the 'sins of the flesh', just why was it that he made our flesh to the patterns we experience? Why did he make it so bloody difficult for us to be acceptably good, in the light of his own perfect goodness?

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by Dr. Retard:

"I don't understand why necessary moral perfection rules out freedom. Even if I do the same thing in every possible world, what does that have to do with whether my choice was free?"

This sounds like another good reason to reject libertarian free will. In my experience, libertarian free will always depends upon possible worlds in which S' did something other than transworldly identical person S. As I see it, compatibilist free will (as far as lack of agent coercion, and lack of foreknowledge of one's own choices) would allow for a necessarily morally perfect being to be free.

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by Taffy Lewis:

"Belief in this sort of freedom is based upon direct experience . It seems forcefully to me that I often have before me alternative courses of action and that I am responsible for the one which occurs."

I can accept the second conjunct, but that's compatible with, well, compatibilism. I agree that it seems we have alternative courses of action, but I prefer to state my own compatibilism in a form that speaks to such a feeling, in point (b):

Person S's decision D is free iff (a) D was not coerced by a non-S agent and (b) S was not antecedently aware that D would occur.

We're not aware what our decision will be, so these alternatives are all visible to us.

"Does 'uncaused' mean 'random'? Does 'caused' means 'brought about by sufficient antecedent conditions'?"

Well, for every decision D, it's either 100% determined (necessitated), 0% determined (random), or somewhere in between, right? It seems as if all decisions will be some proportion of the two, and I don't see where there's any room for anything other than antecedent causes or random chance.

"I doubt proponents of libertarian free will would attribute such a capacity to a fetus or small children."

To have a moral character, you mean?

"Further, it does seem to me that I am at least partially responsible for the kind of person that I am."

Yeah, but not infinitely backwards.

"Saying that our character is formed through our life's experiences makes it appear that character formation is wholly a matter of what happens to us and not even partially something we bring about. It seems to me that this isn't so."

Oh, we seem to make choices that influence how our character forms, but it always seems as if exterior causes are prior to when the "I" starts to take control.

Wackyboy

Two cents from the Christian perspective,

One can not speak of God having moral freedom or not having moral freedom. God has total freedom, but morality is defined from His character. That which God does is good. Good is defined and determined by God, thus God can not be evil if evil is the opposite of good.

That's how I see it,

Wackyboy

HRG

Defined by whom ? Not by me.

Again: defined by whom ?

"Morality", "good" and "evil" are human words, hence defined by common human usage. Your redefinition of "good" to mean "what a specific god does" (instead of "what we generally morally approve of") does not correspond to this common usage. I think you should invent a new word for your new definition, in order to prevent confusion.

This hijacking of concepts with a big positive emotional halo ("good", "just" etc.) for their god is a standard rhetoric device of theists. I regard it as the equivalent of selling a home-made brew under a well-established trade name.

Regards,
HRG.

"Man is the measure of all things" (Protagoras)