bagong

I've enjoyed reading the threads about the PoE and the FWD on this board, but it seems that all of them, for the sake of debate, accept the FWD's premises, specifically:

1. Human beings posess libertarian free will.
2. Libertarian free will is of supreme moral value, so that it justifies (directly through personal choice or indirectly through Original Sin) *all* suffering.

I don't see how these 2 statements are self-evident enough to be accepted as unargued premises. As the "theists tie themselves in knots with Kalaam" thread points out, it is difficult to see what libertarian free will could possibly refer to if we accept the principle of causality. The claim that all moral value ultimately derives from free agency is also contestable: a good case can be made that happiness is inherently good and suffering inherently bad, regardless of how such states were brought about.

So I now invite people who accept these premises (whether theist or not) to demonstrate why a skeptic should do so as well.

Clutch

I don't accept either of these. I doubt that any one thing is of supreme moral value -- especially if that means, is the most important moral feature of every situation. And my commitment to free will is just the following: our pre-theoretic descriptions of volition are mostly correct. But libertarianism (wrt free wiil) is heavily laden with all sorts of philosophical axe-grinding; there is no general need to save libertarianism as part of saving the phenomena.

Darth Dane

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1. Human beings posess libertarian free will.
2. Libertarian free will is of supreme moral value, so that it justifies (directly through personal choice or indirectly through Original Sin) *all* suffering.
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1. We have free will, try to use it!
2. Justifies? To say that anything is justifiable is using your freewill to say so, while others can say teh opposite. Justice it seems is based on what you choose is justice or not.

"God" or the "Godhead" works in the same way.

You have free will to enter a train, but you do not have freewill as to where it will go. The train is limited to the tracks and so on.

Which train/belief system do you want to get on?

Whatever you choose you limit yourself by not doing all the other choices you had before choosing. Once you are on teh train, you usually have to wait to the next station to get off.

If you stop th etrain between stations, then you will not know what the destination is.

Do you choose what thoughts enter you mind?
Do you choose your feelings?
Do you choose to go to work? etc. etc. etc.

If you choose, then you have freewill, if not where does your thougts come from?






DD - Thoughtful Spliff

rainbow walking

Hi Bagong,
Good challenge. Let me see what I can do with it.

First let’s deal with number 2 as I believe you’ve misstated the role of freewill in the FWD here. From my understanding, the theist is not arguing for the role of freewill as a supreme value but only as a necessity in the accomplishment of this god’s purpose for creating man. The theists position is based on the premise that freewill is a NECESSARY tool for that accomplishment. Not that it is of such supreme value that man is so enamored with.

Having said that let’s move on to number 1.


Human beings possess libertarian freewill.


rw: Rather than delve into the philosophostry circle jerk let’s explore the truth value of this statement by setting up an example and then asking a series of true/false questions, the answers hopefully leading us to a rational conclusion about whether freewill is a valid concept for man’s perceived role in the phenomenon of his existence.


THE EXAMPLE:


You are driving home late one night on a deserted strip of highway after having worked double shifts. You’re tired and worried about your personal finances, hence the double shifts. You’re not a religious person but you’ve had the average amount of normative values instilled in you from your youth up.
Suddenly your attention is drawn to a burst of flames about a half mile ahead. As you approach the area you come upon an old pick-up truck, its cab on fire, turned on its side in the ditch. Then you spot a man lying in the road some thirty yards beyond, so you pull over, get out of your vehicle and approach the man, who’s lying face up, arms spread out to each side with a pool of blood growing noticeably around his head. In his right hand he’s clutching a large suitcase. As you bend over the man to assess his condition his eyes open and he begins to speak.


“Please, mister, can you help me? I’m dying, I know it and you know it.” The intensity of the man’s glare and the impact of his words leave you speechless. The man continues, “I need your help mister, my family needs your help. In this suitcase is a quarter million dollars. I’m not a thief but I stole this money from a large corporation. I did it for my wife and kids, you know. I was just so tired of seeing them struggle and suffering because of my stupidity. Please, mister, take the suitcase and hide it in your car. Take ten thousand dollars for yourself and see that my family gets the rest. Please, please, I beg you. Don’t let the police find this money. Don’t let my children’s last memories of their father lead them to believe he’s a bad person, please…” At that point the man’s head falls to the side and you know he’s gone.
Looking around, surveying the scene you realize that some action is required of you at this point. So you:


A. Rush immediately to your car, call 911 on your cell-phone and wait at the scene for help to arrive.


B. Pry the man’s fingers from the handle of the case, put it in the trunk of your car, call 911 to report the accident and then drive away. Getting home you count out ten thousand dollars and take the rest to this man’s wife and children.


C. Same as B above except when you get home you keep all the money taking none to this man’s family.

Now, while it might be an interesting aside to see how everyone would choose, the reason for this example is to test our claims of free moral agency and not our own particular moral depth in this scenario. So I’m going to ask a series of true/false questions directly related to this situation that will hopefully help us reduce the question of free moral agency to its most common denominators.



Question 1: The scenario above represents a fair depiction of the moral choices that have been thrust upon you. (Not intended to be exhaustive in scope of available choices but just to be a fair representation of the most probable.)


True or false


Question 2: The choice you make will ultimately depend on the depth of your own moral training.


True or false


Question 3: The choice you make will ultimately reflect your concerns over your own immediate financial circumstances.



True or false


Question 4: The choice you make will be forced upon you by either question 2 or 3 above such that it’s not really a choice but just a reaction to a particular set of events thrust upon you.



True or false



Question 5: Whatever choice you make, you made because you were morally unable to live with any other.


True or false


Question 6: Whatever choice you make, you made because you were financially unable to make any other.


True or false


Question 7: If you elected either B or C above, your leaving the scene of the accident before help arrives was itself a moral choice.


True or false


Question 8: The choices listed represent moral choices, i.e. choices that may potentially incur sorrowful or happy consequences to yourself or someone else.


True or false


Question 9: Your own personal sense of self worth will hinge on the choice you made.


True or false


Question 10: You seriously considered all three options and felt that you were unrestricted in making these considerations.



True or false


Question 11: After having made your choice you felt that it was the best choice to make under the circumstances.

True or false


Question 12: You could have made any of the three choices above.

True or false


Now let me address several statements you made in your final paragraph.



I don't see how these 2 statements are self-evident enough to be accepted as unargued premises.

rw: Agreed.


As the "theists tie themselves in knots with Kalaam" thread points out, it is difficult to see what libertarian free will could possibly refer to if we accept the principle of causality.

rw: Would depend on how much authority you allow causality in the equation. I would say that causality plays a role in all cases but does that mean it plays the leading role in all cases? Certainly causality leads up to the case where a choice becomes necessary, but does it over-ride all other factors in the final choice made?



The claim that all moral value ultimately derives from free agency is also contestable: a good case can be made that happiness is inherently good and suffering inherently bad, regardless of how such states were brought about.


rw: But can such states be brought about without incurring moral agency?

So I now invite people who accept these premises (whether theist or not) to demonstrate why a skeptic should do so as well.

rw: Thank you for this well articulated challenge. I also encourage anyone who can think of questions apropos to the example I’ve given, to do so, and contribute to our search for truth.

tk

From a skeptic's point of view, a good reason to `accept' these premises is to use them in an argument of reductio ad absurdum. Namely, from these premises, derive a conclusion which is self-contradictory. From the contradiction, it can then be seen that one of the premises must be false.

Actually, free will arguments have been used to justify Christian fundamentalism, Communism, unbridled Capitalism, Anarchism, and possibly a whole lot of other philosophies...

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by bagong :

I wonder how necessary the "libertarian" requirement really is. Suppose I develop a compatibilist account of free will with a specific necessary condition C for an action's freedom. It already looks as if we've got a compatibilist version of free will that's consistent with FWD. God can't reduce evil, allegedly, because that would mean God precluding C.

Our condition C is a bit harder to develop. I would guess it's something like a very strong causal relationship between a distinct agent B's choosing for the decision of agent A to come about, and the decision coming about. Perhaps if B's decision causes the probability of the outcome of A's decision to reach greater than, say, 80%. God's choosing to force people to choose good would push the probability of their decisions way up past 80%, and so C would be violated.

the_cave

But...isn't libertarianism just the same as our pre-theoretic descriptions of volition? I bet if you asked most people of any persuasion what they think free will entails, they'd be pretty absolute in their beliefs; i.e. people are always absolutely free, even though in many situations they are heavily infuenced one way or the other...that is to say, it's always _possible_ to make a choice, even when it isn't likely. Isn't that libertarian free will? I think it is...

I think that there are some phenomena to save with libertarianism, though. If you abolish free will, our justice system is in serious trouble. This isn't just an issue for theists.

bagong

It was dumb of me to start this thread right before some essay deadlines came up; I can't really put as much time into this as I would like at the moment.

Anyway, some quick comments:

DD: I don't deny that we are capable of making choices, I'm asking, given a specific set of circumstances, could we have chosen any course of action other than the one we took? I think of the act of choosing as an appraisal of the expected value (based on an exogenous standard of value) of the various courses of action available to us. We choose the course of action with the highest expected value; to do anything else would be irrational.

If you accept this account of choice, it's hard to see how, given the exact same set of circumstances, you could rationally pick 2 (or more) different courses of action. (The only exception to this would be if 2 or more courses of action had the same expected value to you, in which case you'd be indifferent and select randomly, but a random decision is hardly a free will either.)

RW: Yes, I probably worded it too strongly. I have no background in philosophy so I'm having trouble expressing acurately what I'm trying to say, but my basic point is that the FWD wants us to accept that free agency is in principle more important than eliminating suffering. Although this *may* be true, it is far too controversial to just be thrown in as an unargued premise.

RW: Of course; a sunny day is enjoyable and being struck by lightening is painful eventhough they are caused by impersonal metereological conditions, for example.

TM: Now that you point it out I agree incompatibilism isn't really a requirement for the FWD to work. I guess I put in that extra word because 3 words look smarter than 2! I also don't think compatibilist accounts of freedom are satisfactory. They seem to be based on excluding as legitimate constraints on freedom certain factors for the sole reason of preserving their conclusion that freedom is possible in a determinist world, not because these factors actually have no effect on our decisions.

Cave: Pursuing this discussion would take us far off topic, but I don't think this is necessarily true. Legally enforced punishment could still be justified on utilitarian grounds, for instance.

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by bagong :

Well, yes, compatibilists aren't excluding these factors because they have no effect on our decisions. They certainly do have such effects. But it would be question-begging to say that compatibilist accounts fail because they forget that deterministic factors influence our decisions.

The question the compatibilist asks is whether it makes sense to talk about humans being free, even if their decisions are influenced by outside factors. Compatibilism therefore might seem to amount to something of a redefinition of free will -- instead of free will requiring transworldly identical humans making other decisions, it simply requires something of a lack of external constraints and coercion.

It's hard to list exactly what these considerations ought to be, but I think a legitimate way to try to fix the content of "free will" is to provide some examples. Let D be some decision and S1 and S2 be some persons:

1. If S1 made D because S2 held a gun to S1's head, D was not free.
2. If S1 made D because S2 implanted a mind-control device in S1's head, D was not free.
3. If S1 made D because of pure, random quantum events, D was not free.

These are three cases in which D was not free. But now we've got some room to look for cases in which D might have been free. I think if S1 made D based on some influencing factors, but nothing as strong as threats of force, mind-control devices, or the like, then D has a chance to be free. It's true that when most people pretheoretically think of free decisions, we think that the agent could have made some other decision, but it's also true that when we think of non-free decisions, we usually think of something like coercion or threats.

I guess another way to make an argument for compatibilism is to say that almost everyone has the strong intuition that some of our decisions are free, and the best definition of "free will" that fits both this intuition and the facts about determinism doesn't require "free will" to mean contracausal freedom.

Clutch

cave,

No.And each of those things is true. But none of them entails that our actions are not psycho-physically caused.