Steven Carr

Again , your are denying that your criteria are what people use to assign moral responsibility.

It is strange of you to argue my case for me.

People do not assign moral responsibility by asking 'could he have possibly done something else'.

Steven Carr

Steven Carr:
No, the meaning people use everyday to assign moral responsibility is 'conceivably have done otherwise'.
They conceive what a morally good person would have done and compare that action with the action that they are judging.

KIP
That is a naked assertion for which you provide no argument. I deny that people imply only this weaker claim and instead assert that people imply the stronger claim that people mean "possibly have done otherwise".

To support my claim I do provide an argument. People do believe they are robots. You cannot apply your weak compatibilist definitions to the majority of people. Compatibilism is a minority opinion. If you asked the average person whether or not:

1. you are mechanical
2. you are robotic
3. your actions are determined by physics

The person would answer emphatically "NO!". If you do not believe me, ask people.


CARR (now)
I must admit to being confused.

You write 'People do believe that they are robots'.

And you also say that the average person would emphatically answer no to the question 'Are you robotic?'

As I pointed out in my example of blowing up my mother, people do not assign moral responsibility by asking 'Could that person have done differently?'.

I gave an example of a person who could not have done differently, and every jury in the land would convict, because that person did not ever *intend* to do differently.

The fact that the intention would have failed does not remove the moral responsibility , no matter how much you claim that there is no responsibility if you cannot do otherwise.

Gurdur

No.

Steven Carr, I wonder if you could possibly please answer my own points in this thread too.

Steven Carr

GURDUR
Under most present legal systems, extreme youth and insanity are grounds not to hold someone morally responsible for their actions --- and there's also "diminished responsibility", a mitigating ground to take into consideration when sentencing.

CARR
Why do we say 'diminished responsibility' in this case?

If an insane person stabs me in the heart, should we hold him morally responsible, as he had the free will to choose to stab me in the lungs or stomach instead?

Suppose you believe in free will and you hold the absurd, ridiculous view that determinism removes moral responsibility because people 'could not have done otherwise'.

This person seemed to have a perfectly free choice of whether to stab me in the heart or kidneys, and if you say that free will means moral responsibility , and you think this person was not morally responsible, then you are forced to say he had no free will about where to stab me.

After all if he could have done otherwise than stab me in the heart, then he had free will, by every definition of free will Christians have ever put forward.

So you are led to the ridiculous position that there are mental illnesses which cause people to stab others in the heart, but prevent them from stabbing people in the kidneys. Ludicrous!

Of course, on a compatibilist ground, there are none of these ridiculous conclusions. He stabbed me in the heart rather than the kidneys for a cause (perhaps just that he felt I was more vulnerable there), so his free will choice was perfectly determined, and we do not hold him morally responsible because society feels that , on the average, holding lunatics responsible for their actions is not a deterrent to other lunatics.


GURDUR
Furthermore, if you want to adhere so faithfully to the extreme determinist position, there's no point or need to hold people morally accountable for crimes; for example, you can simply "medicalize" crime instead.

CARR
This is not a bad idea, if it can be done. Of course, we can still hold people negligent for crimes committed while they were out of their mind.

If I deliberately take drugs knowing their sideeffects....


GURDUR quotes somebody
The possibility of punishment deters crime because people are influenced by this threat.

GURDUR
Wrong. Several studies seem to show that it is the (self-estimated) possibility of detection and apprehension that deters crimes, not more severe punishments per se.

CARR
Aren't the possibility of detection and the possibility of punishment very similar things?

GUDRUN
Many, if not the majority, of murders in say present-day Great Britain are committed by the nearest-and-theoretically-dearest of the victim; IOW, people often murder the one-and-only person they simply cannot bear to live with one day longer. They do not usually go on to commit other murders

CARR
I wonder how many spice (what is the correct plural of spouse) would be murdered if the partner knew there would never be a sanction.

Bill

I will admit that it IS anthropocentric. Please note that we are dealing with a moral judgment here, and moral judgments are (at this juncture) strictly limited to human beings. Thus, moral judgments themselves are also anthropocentric.

All of morality is a human invention. I argue that moral facts DID NOT EXIST until such time as humanity formed a moral code and, at the same time, created moral facts that were strictly relevant to the HUMAN MORAL CODE. That being true, no moral argument can fail to be anything but anthropocentric! The distinction applies so long as humanity as a whole forms a considered judgment that thus and so type of entity does not rate elevation to the status of "human" and is thus either an "animal" or an "artifact." The current human moral code holds that human lives are more important than are animal lives, and animal lives are more important than either artifacts or casual human enjoyment (but NOT valid human needs, for which we sacrifice animal lives by the millions each day).

If either Neanderthals or Homo Erectus actually existed alive today, would humanity perceive them as being human? Or would they be perceived as merely an advanced form of primate? Until that question is answered, you cannot even formulate the argument as to whether or not they are deserving of treatment as some sort of "pre-humans" (something like the Australian aborigines are treated). If these beings did not have advanced symbolic thinking (a la Deacon's book, <a href="http://www.secweb.org/bookstore/bookdetail.asp?BookID=625" target="_blank">The Symbolic Species</a>), then scientists would argue that they had ape-like mentality and thus were not really different from the apes we do have around us today.

We cannot today answer the question about our own forebearers because we cannot now know what their true mental capabilities might have been.

=====

As for an "intelligent" robot, even Asimov perceived that humanity would not quickly accept such an entity as being "human" and he built that fact into his "robot" novels.

Data is more than a robot, though. Data is an android. An android is a mechanism that is constructed out of human tissue plus mechanical parts (remember when Data had sex with that girl?). Still, I don't see the day arriving any time soon when any artifact would be elevated to full human status.

=====

Morality is something that exists by common consent. When the majority of Americans consented to slavery in the South, we had slavery in the South. When the majority of Americans came to withdraw that moral consent, slavery was abolished (and a civil war was fought for this and many other reasons).

Prior to the 20th century, genocide was one of the instrumentalities of warfare. When the attacker deemed it to be in the best interests of his (or her) side, the conquored people(s) were all wiped out. Certainly the Turks a century ago didn't think that they were committing any moral wrong when they were committing genocide against the Armenian people.

But World War II marked a sea change in public opinion around the world, and now no nation that tolerates genocide would be viewed as being "civilized," and at least in theory, any leader who orders genocide to be committed will (eventually) be brought to justice. At least, this is what our currently agreed moral code calls for.

=====

The lesson is not that morality is relative to individual cultures (as true moral relativists like to argue), but rather that morality is relative to the currently evolved state of human morality.

(Note that, in the Old Testament, <a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/bill_schultz/criminal-god.html" target="_blank">the Christian God orders genocide to be committed against numerous enemies of the Jews</a>. So much for the moral absolutes of the Holy Bible! This only illustrates that all morality is relevant to some entirely HUMAN and relatively current standard of moral behavior.)

=====

Extra-Terrestial intelligent beings are not a case which has yet come up, so (yet again) we are speculating here.

In all of the cases that you raise, what would be perceived as the moral course of action would depend upon what the current evolutionary state of human morality was. At the present point in time, none of the four things that you mention would be granted moral equivalence to humans. There would be numerous reasons. I've outlined some of them, above.

How things will EVENTUALLY work out for human morality, of course, depends entirely upon the course of future human evolution (both biologically and mentally).

== Bill

Kip

I am arguing from the assumption (a very popular assumption) that:

1. We only hold people morally responsible if that person had the power to commit an action other than the action condemned

I am not arguing from the popular assuption:

2. People have the power to commit an action other than the action condemned

Both of these are popular ideas but I am only assuming the first. I am arguing from the moral philosophy of libertarians but I am not arguing libertarianism or indeterminism. I am a determinist.

You may say "you argue 1 but not 2, therefore you are inconsistent". But I do not appeal to the masses as an authority. I am only assuming 1, with which I agree, for the sake of the argument. You may take or leave that premise. If you do not accept 1, then my argument is lost on you and I cannot imagine proving that 1 is true.

Kip

Who cares what criteria "people" use to assign moral responsibility? Are we simply going to appeal to the masses to settle moral disputes? Would you do that in the Spanish Inquisition or 18th century slave states?

Bill

Kip:

Let me inject my $0.02 worth on the issue of moral responsibility.

Moral facts are an invention of human intellect. Human intellect invented morality as a survival mechanism. Human beings survive better (as a whole) if we all adhere to some form of common moral values.

Individual cultures obviously layer on their own moral codes on top of those moral facts which are agreed (between cultures) to apply to everybody. This is why the whole business of moral absolutism versus moral relativism is irresolvable, because it is really stratified layers that progress from the absolute necessities of human morality (along the lines of "thou shalt not murder") and on through the entirely optional moral codes of human civility (what sorts of behaviors we expect "polite people" to exhibit).

The competition between human cultures naturally leads to the evolution of morality within ALL of the competing cultures. In a way, this proceeds along the lines of Hegel's Dialectic (thesis, antithesis, and synthesis).

I do not know of any human culture which does not recognize the wrongness of one group member killing another group member (how different cultures treat non-members does vary widely), nor am I aware of any human culture which does not recognize the right of self-defense in circumstances when any group member is threatened with violence. These sorts of moral values seem to lie at the most basic levels of human intellect.

Each cultural group holds everyone within its control to be responsible for obeying the agreed moral code for that group. Ignorance of the moral code is only sometimes an excuse. And all humans are presumed to be aware of certain basic moral requirements (again, such as "thou shalt not murder"). To plead ignorance of those basic moral requirements generally requires acceptable proof of insanity.

With all this in mind, I would personally formulate the requirements for moral responsibility thusly: <ol type="1">[*]Determinism is a prerequisite, much as tronvillain has suggested. We perceive our world as operating upon a "cause-and-effect" basis. Thus, we assign legal responsibility to each person for the harm that they cause. Mere negligence is the basis of more lawsuits than anything else. All of those negligence lawsuits are predicated upon the idea that each person is responsible for all of the "reasonably foreseeable" effects that they cause, either by their action(s) or by their failure(s) to act.[*]Choice is also a prerequisite. Again, in the negligence context, the plaintiff seeking compensation for damages must show that the defendant had a choice, and that a "reasonable person" would have chosen to do (or not do) something other than what the defendant chose to do, and that BUT FOR that erroneous choice made by the defendant, the plaintiff was injured.[*]No excuse is the third componant. This got phrased in your recent exchange with tronvillain as "an understanding of human motivation and decision making" but in the fuller text of what you are discussing it becomes obvious that the real question being asked is "did this person have a legally cognizable excuse for their erroneous choice?"[/list=a]I've studied a bit of the law, and the law is really the embodiment and codification of the more serious portions of our entire system of human moral values. (Things doing with things like politeness do not rise to the level of a legal action, but criminal and civil offenses do.) The law is very complex, and I have not had an opportunity to consult one of my old legal texts before writing this. But I believe it is a fair summary of how the overall system of legal responsibility works. (See, for instance, <a href="http://www.manymedia.com/law/notes/torts-neg.html" target="_blank">Judi's Torts Class Notes</a> which touches on, and expands, most of what I've discussed, above.)

== Bill

tronvillain

Yes, that was essentially what I was trying to get across. The third point, "no excuse" or human motivation and decision making is important in assigning moral responsibility because we only expect other human to conform to our moral system. After all, the actions of a tiger are determined, and a tiger may very well make choices, but its motivations and decision making processes are so different from ours we do not hold it morally responsible if it kills and eats someone. Oh, we may kill it or relocate it to prevent further incidents, but we do not hold it morally responsible.

Kip:
If they had other options to choose from, then they could have chosen otherwise, and it would be unreasonable of them to say that they could not have chosen otherwise. However, this does not mean that they think if the tape was wound back exactly over and over that they would ever make a different choice - while they could have chosen otherwise, they do not believe they would have chosen otherwise for no reason whatsoever.

owleye

Kip...

Many of us have lost sight of the origin of our mechanistic, deterministic world. The debate centered around Newton's first law of motion, which has it that a body at rest remains at rest and a body in motion remains in motion at a constant speed unless acted on by an external force. At the time the only external force that could affect bodies was gravity. Leibniz held onto the idea of an "active force" (vis viva) which acts in his monadic realm and serves as the source of an object's own actions. Leibniz, of course, recognized that Newton's laws implied a completely determined universe in a physical sense (the outcome of a determinination of the best of all possible universes chosen by God). However, living forces, and other inner forces, at the time, seemed to make some sense for forces other than gravitational.

If such a mechanistic world is true, it is not possible for a body to be self-propelled, unless that is, we decide that it is legitimate to included "self" in a thermodynamic sense. Though energy from the outside is needed, it is not unreasonable to say that a motor car is self-propelling as long as it has the means of propulsion on board and that it is given a supply of energy to draw from. Thermodynamics, of course, requires some relaxation of the hold of determinism, and many of us feel quite comfortable with saying that the micro-world determines the macro-world in both a deterministic and a statistical sense, without contradicting ourselves.

However, this propression ought not to stop with thermodynamics, but we should proceed to determine the laws of biological motion in which organisms can be said to be self-propelling. I don't believe this has been accomplished, at least to the extent that the field of biological locomotion is quantititative, as far as I'm aware. As can be seen, though, self-propulsion, biologically, is a huge accomplishment, and it seems that when we come to fully understand it, determinism will have to be relaxed even further.

With respect to the higher primates, it is not only motion, but thoughts and feelings that can be brought under control by the agent, based on a highly complex neuro-network that we are not even close to getting a handle on. suspect much of the current speculation dealing with physical systems is not close to being on the right track.

owleye