tronvillain

Kip:
I only deny the first premise if it uses the word "possible" in the same sense as the second premise. Since when I use the first premise it does not use the word "possible" in the same sense as the second premise, I say that your conclusion does not follow. It is really the same either way.

Robots are simply not human enough to be held morally responsible - all existing computers and robots lack anything resembling human motivations and decision making processes.

Well, perhaps we are simply arguing semantics then.

bd-from-kg

Kip:

You say:

Your “formalization” of your own argument is accurate enough, but your so-called formalization of mine is a caricature. I do not argue that any idea that is unpopular is false, and my argument that P1 (as you interpret it) is false has nothing to do with its lack of popularity. I argue rather that it is completely absurd. I mentioned the fact that it is also unpopular only in response to your[ repeated claims to the contrary.

In fact, you’re the one who has repeatedly cited popular opinion to support your position. Throughout this thread you have insisted that your interpretation of P1 must be the “correct” one because it’s supposedly most people’s interpretation. For example:

On the other hand, whenever anyone else disputes such claims you immediately cry “ad populum” and point out that “what most people think” is not an argument.

You can’t have it both ways. Either what most people think is relevant or it isn’t. If it isn’t, why do you continue to waste our time talking about it? You seem to think that popular opinion is a good argument if it supports your position but is irrelevant if it’s opposed to it.

To repeat, I don’t think popular opinion is relevant, but since it’s the only reason you’ve offered for why we should take your interpretation of P1 seriously, and seems to be a major reason why you consider it valid, it does seem worth mentioning to you that you’re wrong about how most people interpret it.

By the way, your citing of the opinions of Christians to show that your interpretation of P1 agrees with most people’s is particularly wrongheaded. Christians do not believe that this is the correct interpretation. The proof of this is simple. Christians believe that Jesus had free will, and that He is worthy of admiration and praise, yet they believe that there was always zero probability that He would ever actually commit a sin. Similarly, they say that God the Father has free will – in particular, that He is free to sin - but that His perfect benevolence makes it certain that He never will sin. So any Christian who says that free will is incompatible with being certain to choose right over wrong is contradicting his own professed beliefs.

Amazingly, after dismissing my claim that most people do not interpret “possible” in P1 the way you do as irrelevant, you then devote almost the entire remainder of your post to disputing it!

Since your entire argument is based on a total misconception of my argument, there is no point in answering it in detail. For example, I couldn’t care less whether “most people” would be “deceived” by my argument. The question is whether it is sound, not whether some people would misinterpret it.

In any case, you misunderstood my examples so completely that it’s clear that you have no idea what my argument was.

In the first place, I do not assume determinism. On the contrary, I implicitly assume (for the sake of argument) that determinism is false to consider what our reaction would be to an isolated instance where a person was sure to make one choice rather than another. Unlike you, I think that such a case is perfectly realistic even if the universe is not deterministic. But it seems odd that you would object to the examples on the grounds that they are “impossible,” since you said earlier:

So even if you think that it is impossible in this world for a human being to be certain to act one way rather than another at a particular moment, under specific circumstances, you still have to deal with the question of what the appropriate reaction would be to such an act in a world where it is possible.

And your claim that such a person would be a “moral robot” is absurd. Take my first example, Smith. The argument doesn’t really depend on his being “perfectly virtuous,” but only on the fact that at this particular moment, under these specific conditions he is certain to choose to return the wallet. This could be the result of a combination of factors:

(1) He long ago set out to improve his character as much as possible, and after many, many years he has succeeded in attaining an unusually high degree of honestly, integrity, etc.

(2) He is accustomed to being honored and respected for his sterling character, being praised and rewarded in innumerable intangible ways, being selected for positions of trust, and being considered above suspicion in circumstances where a person of lesser virtue would be accused of serious wrongdoing.

(3) He has no particular need of more money than he already has because of his frugal habits, his industry and foresight, etc.

I submit that there is nothing implausible about such a person being certain to return the wallet even in this world, and there surely cannot be any difficulty in imagining such a thing in a world somewhat (but not radically) different from ours. Such a person, far from being “robotic,” would be perfectly human. He would be acting from normal, familiar motives. The only difference if any between him and people you and I are familiar with is that, at that particular moment, these factors were strong enough to make it certain that he would act as he did.

Now. Do you really think it plausible to refuse to praise or honor Smith for returning the wallet under these conditions on the grounds that he “couldn’t have done otherwise”? To me this seems completely irrational. I can’t think of a single argument in favor of this notion, and innumerable arguments against it.

You say that “The masses believe that everyone has a choice,” but I think it’s obvious that you’ve misinterpreted what it means to have a choice. Perhaps this can be better illustrated by another example. Suzy is offered a choice between a strawberry milkshake and a chocolate malt. Now as it happens, Suzy loves strawberry milkshakes and absolutely detests chocolate malts. So she chooses the strawberry milkshake. In fact, it doesn’t take a huge imagination to suppose that (on this particular day at least) she was absolutely certain to choose the strawberry. Now, does that mean that she didn’t “really” have a choice? Of course not! She could have chosen the malt, but she didn’t because she preferred the strawberry milkshake. To say that someone doesn’t “really” have a choice between two things because she has a definite preference for one of them is just ridiculous.

The fact is that when people say that they have a choice, they do not mean that there is some “cosmic uncertainty” regarding which choice they will make. There is no contradiction between saying “I had a choice between buying an Accord and a Civic” and saying “I chose the Accord because ..” followed by a list of the factors that caused you to choose the Accord. Yet to say that these factors caused you to choose the Accord is to say that your choice was determined by these factors. Why would anyone want to think that, even after he had considered all the pros and cons and had developed a definite preference for the Accord, it was still possible (i.e., there was still a nonzero chance) that he would end up buying the Civic? Suppose that your friend Joe were about to leave for the dealership to buy a car and you asked him what kind he was going to get, and imagine that he replied, “Well. I’ve spent months making up my mind, but by now I’m sure the Accord is the right car for me. That’s the one I want to buy, and the one I intend to buy. But I have to believe that there’s a chance that I’ll buy the Civic instead when I get there, because otherwise I’d be forced to believe that I don’t have free will!” What would you make of this? Wouldn’t you think that Joe had lost his mind? Why would he want it to be true that he might end up buying the car he doesn’t want or intend to buy? How would his freedom be enhanced if it were true? Don’t people really want to have the freedom to do what they want and intend to do rather than living in uncertainty about what they’re actually going to do right up to the moment that they do it, for the sake of having “free will”?

At this point let’s consider two of your (rather confused) statements about this:

You seem to be blind to the fact that all of the phrases you use in this context – “X has the power to do Y”, “ X could do Y,” “It’s possible for X to do Y”- involve the same ambiguity. As I just noted, few people (and no rational ones) even want to “have the power” to choose a different option in a great many circumstances if “having the power[/i] means that there is a nonzero probability that they would choose that option. what they want is to “have the power” to make the choice that they prefer. If I happened to find myself with a loaded gun in my hand and my wife and children nearby, I want there to be (and I believe that, at least almost always, there would in fact be) an absolutely zero probability that I would use the gun to blow all of their brains out. On the other hand, I would deny that I am therefore not free to choose to do so; it’s just that I would certainly freely choose not to. These are two very different things, but you insist on treating them as the same thing.

As to the second paragraph: if the tape were rolled back on this scene, I once again could choose to kill my family, but I certainly would once again choose not to. It seems completely obvious to me that there is no contradiction between these statements.

Finally, you say that you have no idea how to justify P1. I say that this demonstrates your confusion. If you don’t understand why it’s true, how can you know in what sense it’s true? Actually it’s possible to justify P1 from “first principles,” and in the course of doing so it becomes clear what the appropriate meaning of “possible” is in this context. But this will have to wait for yet another day.

[ August 30, 2002: Message edited by: bd-from-kg ]</p>

Kip

bd:

Thank for that (rather long) reply. Despite the length I feel that your reply was quite coherent and you raised some excellent issues which I would like to address. You are very good at using my own words against me!

First, in hindsight I do see how I misrepresented your argument. I formalized your argument as the following:

p1b. If p1 is not popular, p1 is false.
p2b. The idea that we should not hold people responsible for actions, because these people are perfectly moral or immoral and therefore have no real choice (according to p1), is not popular.
----------------
c1b. p1 is false (and therefore c1 is unproven)

However, I realize that this is more accurate (please correct me again if I am wrong):

p1b. If p1 entails absurd conclusions, p1 is false.
p2b. The idea that we should not hold people responsible for actions, because these people are perfectly moral or immoral and therefore have no real choice (according to p1), is absurd.
----------------
c1b. p1 is false (and therefore c1 is unproven)

Allow me, however, to explain to you how I came to misrepresent your argument. I was arguing against the following statements in particular:

and:

You identify my inconsistency regarding "ad populum" arguments:

You are right I cannot have it both ways. I hereby drop all references to popular opinion about my first premise. The only reason I mentioned human convention is to explain, not to logically justify, why I had included p1 as a premise. If you deny me p1 I do not pretend to be able to prove that p1 is true and different moral claims are false. So, at this point, there is nothing more to say but I will address the other issues you raise.

All you have shown is that Christians (and this is no surprise) are remarkably inconsistent about their beliefs and often contradict themselves. You have not shown that p1 misrepresents the beliefs of Christians.

Fair enough. Allow me to address your argument (properly stated). The eventual question your argument asks is this:

My answer is the same as before, but from my perspective instead of the masses. Instead of thinking that you have granted too much determinism, I fear that have granted too little. Indeed, I cannot comprehend "degrees of determinism" and think that your argument is ultimately incoherent. You seem to "switch on" determinism at your whim as if imagining these worlds is as simple as rearranging the words you use to describe them. But how would a world exist that is physically determined one moment and physically indetermined the next? I confess that such an idea stretches the ability of my imagination past its limit.

However, if an answer is demanded of me, I would answer NO. My reasoning is that, although the man was physically determined at that moment, your example admits that he freely chose to be the kind of person who would do so mechanically. So I would hold the person responsible for his decision to be that kind of person, and all that that decision entails. Truthfully, however, I deny that any such freedom ever exists.

Now that I have said "NO" you may reply that I have contradicted myself. You would say "he could not have done otherwise at that moment" therefore p1 should exclude him from responsibility, yet you consider him morally responsible. The subtle refutation, however, is that he *could* have done otherwise. To do otherwise, he need only have freely chosen to be a different kind of person. That possibility was available to him and therefore he *could* have done otherwise. I deny part of your second premise, that "The idea that we should not hold people responsible for actions, because these people are perfectly moral or immoral and therefore have no real choice" is according to my p1. Freezing time at that moment does not prevent him from having had the possibility to not commit that action.

I am not saying that. I would not deny that she has free will because she chose the same choice every possible time. That correlation is perfectly possible with metaphysical free will. The person need only "freely chose" the same option every time. I am only saying that the person does not have free will if they do not have the power to chose other than their preference, if they are, in a sense, ruled by their preference (which they did not choose).

For example, I am prefer sex to being shot, but I never chose to prefer sex to being shot. I never sat down, a blank slate, and said "yeah, I chose to prefer sex to being shot". I have ALWAYS preferred pleasure to pain and never chose to do. In a sense, I am RULED by that preference.

People most certainly do think that. They certainly do not believe the denial of your claim, which is "that there is some "cosmic certainty" regarding which choice they will make." People do not believe they are robots ruled by fate or the laws of physics. Most people do not admit pschological determinism is true. The future is "unwritten".

There are many reasons. Because such a belief is empowering. Because the thought of being mechanical or robotic is offensive. Because if a person does not possess that power, it is illogical to blame that person, who is only defective or bad, but blame is a cherished deterrent.

1. Your use of the statistical language is misleading. Free will (the incoherent doctrine that I think is false) is perfectly compatible with a zero possibility. The agent need only "freely choose" some possibility 100% of the time. This is the issue that St. Augustine raised in discussing God's freedom and omniscience. Of course, HOW the person "freely wills" the action is never explained, but that does not stop libertarians and Christians from giving that answers.
2. Once again, you have only shown that people are inconsistent about their beliefs. You have not shown that people would deny that they possess the power to not commit any given action. There is no need to remind me of these arguments, I am already a determinist and agree with you! But to convince "people" that they do not have free will, you would need to present this argument to "people" and not me. Even after doing that, I doubt that most people would feel secure enough to agree with you. People cherish their free will and hate the idea of being robotic.

I completely agree with that there is no contradiction between these two statements (if you are a libertarian). I have said the same thing several times in this post. Much depends, however, upon how you define the word "could". I personally deny that you or I "could" do anything differently than we have done, although we can surely "conceive" of having done differently.

If you can establish p1 I invite you to do so. I do not know how to establish p1 upon "first principles" because for me p1 IS a first principle.

[ August 30, 2002: Message edited by: Kip ]</p>

bd-from-kg

Kip:

At this point I’m baffled as to what your point is, or what you think the relationship is between determinism and free will.

First, let’s stick with the most precise version of your argument as I gave it earlier:

(1) We only hold a person morally responsible if that person could have possibly not committed the immoral action.
(2) According to determinism, a person only has one possible ... response to any situation.

This is preferable to formulations of the first premise that involve phrases like “has the power”, because no such phrase occurs in the second premise, so it is hard to see how the two could then be validly combined to obtain a conclusion. And the second premise cannot be modified in a corresponding way, because determinism has nothing to say about whether anyone ever “has the power” to do anything.

Determinism is the theory that whatever happens was certain to happen. Or in other words, that given the exact state of affairs at one moment, one particular state of affairs has 100% probability (and consequently all other states of affairs have zero probability) of existing at any given subsequent moment. That’s all that it says.

Given this, I can’t imagine how my “statistical language” could be “misleading”. Since the original point was what determinism entails with respect to free will, and since determinism is a theory about probabilities (it says that any given event, such as a choice, has a probability of either zero or one), it’s hard to see how we can talk about the subject at all without using “statistical language”.

Now the only thing that determinism implies regarding human actions is that given the exact state of affairs at the time the choice was made (or at any previous time), one choice had a 100% probability of being made and all others had a zero probability.

Given this background let’s look at some key points in your latest post.

1. Are free will and determinism compatible?

I thought the whole point of this thread was that you believe that free will and determinism are incompatible. But now you seem to be saying the exact opposite. For example:

Presumably you’re not saying merely that the fact that Suzy makes the same choice each time it’s offered does not mean that she does not have free will. Everyone agrees with that! Heck, she may only be given this choice once in her entire life! So assuming that you meant to say something significant, you must mean that she could have free will even if she would make the same choice every time if we could “roll the tape back” to the point where she made the choice and have her choose again. Or equivalently, that if we could recreate the exact same conditions (including the exact same mental state on Suzy’s part) she would certainly make the same choice. But this is exactly what determinism says: that under the exact same conditions she would certainly make the same choice. So you seem to be saying that you would not deny that she has free will if determinism holds.

This interpretation is supported by your later statement:

I agree completely. This is what’s known as “compatibilism”. I’m glad to see that you’ve finally seen the light. Since the only thing that determinism says about human choices is that one choice has 100% probability and all others have zero probability, if zero probability of making any choice but one is “perfectly compatible” with free will, then determinism is compatible with free will.

2. Is the concept of free will logically coherent?

On the other hand, you seem to want to impose an absolutely impossible condition for free will. Thus:

You’re not making any sense here. Of course a person’s choice will be based on what he or she prefers. That’s what “prefers” means. To say that Smith prefers A over B means that given a choice of A or B, Smith will choose A. How can someone have the “power” to do something that is logically impossible? If this is what you mean by “free will”, obviously it doesn’t exist, any more than square circles exist.

Do you really think that what most people mean when they say that they have free will is that they can choose something that they do not prefer over something that they do? I think this is ludicrous. Most people are not idiots or madmen, nor do they have any wish to be.

3. Other stuff

Now a few comments about other points in your post:

This isn’t rocket science, and there is nothing “logically incoherent” about it. The idea is simply that in some (but not all) cases, some (but not all) aspects of the state of things at a later time are determined by the state of things at an earlier time. This is exactly what most people believe to be true of this world. For example, the fact that I am a human being alive today makes it certain that if nature takes its course I will not be alive a thousand years from now. If Johnny appears to be a typical two-year-old today, he will not appear to be a typical two-year-old twenty years from now. Far from being paradoxical, the notion that the world is nondeterministic as a whole, yet deterministic in certain respects is completely natural and familiar. Indeed, to deny that anything about the future is determined by the present is to deny that there is any such thing as causality.

Ruled by it? Do you mean that sometimes you’d like to choose pain rather than pleasure, but that darn preference for pleasure overmasters your desire? Please, let’s try to use words with some semblance of their actual meaning. It doesn’t make sense to say that you are “ruled” by yourself. Or at any rate, it doesn’t make sense to speak of it as though it were a bad thing! Who or what would you rather be “ruled” by? Or is your objection to the fact that your actions are caused by anything at all?

What you really mean is that a preference for pleasure over pain is an integral part of who you are. So what? How can the fact that your choices reflect who you are imply that you don’t have free will? This would seem to be a very strange notion of “free will”. I’d say that an inability to consistently make choices that reflect who you are (perhaps because of the intrusion of some mysterious random factor that makes all of your choices unpredictable) would be the sort of thing that would really subvert or undermine your free will. Yet this is the very thing that the advocates of “libertarian free will” seem to require as a condition of having “true” free will.

As for my example of Smith who was certain to return the wallet and therefore (according to P1) should not be praised for doing so, you say:

This is an important point. I agree that P1 is true in a sense – i.e., if “possible” is interpreted appropriately – and the same problem can arise in this interpretation. A person might not really have a choice (in my sense) at the time he makes the decision, but if he became the person who was certain to make that choice through a series of previous decisions, he is still morally responsible for making it.

Just the same, it seems absurd to say that Smith’s act of honesty is worthy of praise only if he became honest by his own volition. Suppose instead that his honesty is the result of a careful, loving upbringing in which he was consistently encouraged to be honest and dishonesty was consistently treated with total contempt. Would this disqualify him from being deserving of praise? And let’s recall that one of the reasons that he is certain to return the wallet is that he (rightly) expects to be praised, honored and respected (even more than before) for doing so. Do you honestly think that praising his action would not be in order, given that failing to do so may very well induce him to stop acting honestly? But how could it be in order if he weren’t deserving of it? Shall we really say that we should praise such honest acts, but only provided that we are sure that the expectation of such praise was not one of the motives for doing it, and that it won’t motivate future acts of the same kind? Or shall we say that we should praise such acts, but that those who do them aren’t really deserving of praise? Does this make any sense at all? What’s the point of praising certain kinds of acts if not to motivate people to act that way? In the end, isn’t it more reasonable to say that Smith deserves to be praised for his honest act if he did it because it was an honest act and had no ulterior motives? What sense does it make to require more than this?

This is perhaps the most important sentence in your entire post, because it exhibits the total misunderstanding of determinism that makes so many people hostile to it. Determinism does not say that you are “ruled by fate”. Being “ruled by fate” means that the final “outcome” of your life has been “fixed” by some mysterious force beyond your control and that it will happen no matter how you may struggle to avert or change it. (Read Oedipus for a classic illustration.) Determinism has no truck with this sort of nonsense. As for being “ruled” by the laws of physics, this is an extremely misleading image. It suggests that there is some external, irresistible power that is forcing you to act in certain ways. Nothing could be further from the truth. The “laws of physics” are not just operating in the external world; they are operating in you. The laws of physics are what connect your beliefs, attitudes, desires, and actions. To say that you are “controlled” by the laws of physics is to say nothing more than that your beliefs, attitudes, desires, etc. determine what you do. Why should this be regarded with distaste? Would you prefer that your actions not flow from your beliefs, attitudes, desires, etc.? If they didn’t, in what sense would they be your acts? You can’t have it both ways. Either your acts are caused by you (in which case they’re determined) or they aren’t really your acts, and you aren’t responsible for them. Thus, just as tronvillain has tried to explain several times, you have it exactly backwards. You can only be responsible for an act to the extent that you caused it. Strict determinism isn’t actually a necessary condition for moral responsibility, but causality is. You can be morally responsible for your acts just to the extent that you cause them. Thus the less deterministic the world, the less moral responsibility there can be. The best case is strict determinism; the worst case is total chaos - no causality at all.

Toad Master

Assuming the creator did not build into the robot a non-overidable program to committ evil, people should and would blame the robot. How else would the robot learn to be moral?

Our ignorance does not diminish the degree to which we are robotic only in a very vague sense of "robotic." To vague, imo, to draw any valid inference from the non-blamability of robots (such as it may be) to non-blamability of humans.

I was not familiar with the Leopold and Loeb trial. The case sounds to me like a plea for leniency based on the defendents mental illness or deficiency. If so, Clarence Darrow's argument was not, I think, an argument to absolve all human's of blame because we are all determined. If it was, I don't agree with it.

Nevertheless, I guess I should conceed that arguments from determinism can, in some cases, be valid in a court of law.

You yourself, in your opening post, said: "Indeed, I suspect that the reason ideas of moral responsibility, free will, "evil" and "blame" were invented is because these concepts are very successful deterrents."

Yes, and these concepts themselves function as determinants of our behavior.

-Toad Master

[ September 01, 2002: Message edited by: Toad Master ]</p>

K

Toad Master:

Darrow was arguing to absolve all humans from blame because their actions are determined only by the brains they were born with and the world around them.

I think the problem with his reasoning was that he realized the naturalistic foundations of the human mind, but he still held punishment as some enforcement of a divine or absolute morality. He ignored the naturalistic and pragmatic reasons for punishing crimes.

Kip

BD:

I thank you for another strong reply. As I am no longer trying to establish the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) and only addressing whatever points you raise, feel free to end this discussion whenever you like. Indeed, now that so many compatibilists have denied, what I had felt to be so natural, namely PAP, I am afraid that I am in the moral dark. If only you, or someone else, could establish another, competing, system, I could free myself from this moral ambiguity.

To address your post.

Let's not. I would not mind your redefining my own argument, except that you have reintroduced that troublesome word "could", and, as we have seen, compatibilists tend to define in a weaker, more convenient sense than I would do so. So, by abolishing that word we removed semantics from the dispute and I hope we can all agree that that is desireable. None of this need trouble us, however, because I am no longer making this argument! Indeed, how can I, if you deny p1?

I am afraid that I have encountered another "dispute about words". These words are very troublesome. In this case, the word "determinism" is the mischief maker. Apparently, despite my requests to the contrary, you have persisted with your statistical language! Indeed, your particular "determinism", which you repeatedly define, is quite foreign to me:

This determinism is quite foreign to me! Indeed, this suspicious imposter has inserted statistical language and removed all reference to causality. But, as in the case of all such disputes, we can always appeal to the dictionary! So, visiting dictionary dot com, I discover these definitions:

Of these definitions, I prefer the last. In particular, I prefer the references to "causes" and the lack of references to "probability". The problem I have with a definition that only references probability, or "weak determinism", is that such determinism, as I already stated, is perfectly compatible with metaphysical free will. Such correlation (as opposed to causation) is only one effect of determinism and not determinism itself. Indeed, your determinism determines nothing and is merely a label for things that always happen! The libertarian need only "freely will" the same choice 100% of the time (satisfying the weak determinists probability requirement) and yet, that choice is perfectly without constraint (failing to satisfy the strong determinists requirement).

However, all of this talk of definitions is giving me a headache, and if you insist that your definition, rather than mine, is the correct one, that should be of no concern because we now both entirely understand what the other signifies by the word "determinism". I can agree to use your definition and would only need to qualify my future (and past) references to determinism with a reference to causation. For example, the premise of my argument towards lack of moral responsibility would no longer be "Determinism" but "Determinism because of causal necessity".

The answer is yes but for quite subtle reasons. Please allow me to illustrate. We both agree that people's preference is often mistaken. People often prefer passion to justice and people often feel regret. So, consider the hypothetical example in which a man must choose between mutually exclusive options:

A. sleeping with a beautiful women
B. sending his kid to college

Let us also assume that at this moment, the man, because of hormones or passion, prefers to sleep with the women. Let us also assume that immediately after doing so the man feels intense regret. Now, if you were to ask the man "at the moment you chose A instead of B, did you have the power to choose B instead of A?" would the answer "yes" be so unpopular? I agree with you (I am a determinist!) that the idea is incoherent but the incoherence is subtle and the power is more seductive than the sanity. Most people would assert without hesitation, "yes, I had the power to choose B instead of A" and furthermore, it is only because of that possibility that we grant moral responsibility.

Again, human convention is no authority, but if that were so, I think human convention obviously favors the libertarian and not the compatibilist doctrines, for the simple reason that determinism is a minority opinion. If everyone were determinists who recognized (as we do) that the man did not have the power to choose B, that, in a sense he was mechanically behaving according to hormones and such, we no longer speak of "blame", or "sin", or "responsibility", but only of "bad", "illness" and "defective".

No, I assure you that I did not mean that I would like to choose pain over pleasure. How can I when I have never know what it is like to prefer pain to pleasure? Asking me whether or not I would like to prefer pain (rather, things that cause me pain) to pleasure (rather, things that cause me pleasure) is like asking a person who has only seen red whether or not he would like to see blue. Perhaps if I had experienced both preferences I might prefer one preference to the other, but unfortunately I have been denied that experience. All of my thoughts about the matter are tainted by my prejudice towards pleasure.

The fundamental issue here is control. If my pleasure preference controls most of my behavior, but I do not control whether or not I prefer pleasure to pain, then yes, in an obvious sense, that preference rules me. For surely, I do not rule it.

You appeal to the fact that the preference is part of my own constitution. However, when did I ever choose my own constitution? For example, if my pleasure preference (Freud called this the reality principle) determines my behavior, but I never determine my pleasure preference, all of my choices have been chosen for me. When did I ever choose to be Kip? And yet libertarians, the masses, wish to choose themselves at every moment of their lives and to be "masters of their fate". They certainly do not wish for their constitutions and preferences to be chosen for them.

I must say that your references to "praise" is confusing me and I am not so sure if we should withhold all reference to "praise". I had only been concerned with moral responsibility and, if the person's behavior was strictly a function of nurture, rather than "free will", I would deny responsibility but I am not sure that I would withhold praise. Praise and responsibility are not identical and praise can serve quite a differenct function. I repeat that, even without moral responsibility, the use deterrents and rewards would not be irrational and quite welcome. To that extent we should give the praise. But I suspect that you are suggesting that we use praise in a stronger sense.

Please forgive me for troubling you with my "total misunderstanding of determinism". I am quite embarrassed. You say that determinism is not associated with the idea of an "external force" that determines our behavior, but rather that, the laws of physics work even "inside" of us. I understand your meaning.

The problem that you continue to not identify is that if all behavior is a consequence of the laws of physics operating upon our bodies, at some point in history we had no bodies. Before we were born, there was nothing for the laws of physics to operate "inside". Your appeal to our participation within physical determinism cannot help you before we are conceived. And yet, according to (strong) determinism, every behavior of mine is simply a function of this state of the universe before I existed and thus my entire life is the consequence of something in which I did not participate. How can you maintain that we are morally responsible for the consequences of this state of the universe before we were conceived?

All of this emphasizes the fundamental problem that appealing to our participation in choice is worthless if we do not choose who we are. In a sense you ask "your behavior is determined by your preference - what more could you ask?" The answer is that I would ask to choose my preference. If I do not choose my preferences, that my behavior is in according with my preferences in no consolation.

It seems to me that your argument would make anyone happy, whoever they were, so long as the wishes of that person's constitution is satisfied. If the person were inclined to read comic books, he would be happy to read comic books, and if he preferred to run, you would be happy to run, and the person should never be bothered by the fact that he never chose to like running or like comic books (or if he did choose, he chose according to influences that he did not choose, such as the environment or DNA). And yet, you would would hold a person morally responsible for his behavior. If a person had DNA that inclined him towards murder, you would hold him morally responsible for murdering. Similarly, if his parents had endorsed pacificism and sufficiently nurtured him to favor peace instead war, you would hold him morally responsible for his lack of violence. But the murderer never chose his DNA and the pacifist never chose his parents. Indeed, upon inspection, is not all behavior accounted for by such unchosen factors? To a hold people responsible, if all of their life is accounted for by circumstances outside of their control, is to me an the grossest absurdity. I can only explain your position by convincing myself that you are simply abusing language, and "blaming" people who are only ill.

[ September 01, 2002: Message edited by: Kip ]</p>

Steven Carr

No.

What is an 'otherwise determinist' world? This is terminology which is new to me, and doubtless explains why I do not understand it.

Similarly 'psychological determinism'. This is also new to me. What is the difference between 'psychological determinism' and , say, 'gravitational determinism', or 'hormonal determinism'?

Determinism implies looking at the entire state of the universe. As far as I can see, nothing I have ever written implies that we should ignore some causal factors, although it is obvious that some factors are more immediately relevant than others.

bd-from-kg

Kip:

At least we seem to be getting near the heart of the problem. Perhaps we can penetrate to the core by analyzing the logical confusions in your last post.

1. Necessity, probability, and causality

You say:

Well, the first priority is to make sure that the conclusion actually follows from the premises; otherwise the whole exercise is pointless. So far as I can see there is only one version of the premises from which the conclusion follows, which I will now try to state as precisely as possible:

(1) We only hold a person morally responsible for an act if there was a nonzero probability that he would have acted differently than he did.
(2) According to determinism, there was never a nonzero probability that anything would have happened differently than it did.

Of course these premises can be cast into different words, but any halfway plausible statements that yield the desired conclusion will express essentially the same propositions.

For example, I gather that you prefer the following version:

(1') We only hold a person morally responsible for an act if the state of affairs just prior to the decision to do it did not cause him to decide to do it.
(2') According to determinism, the state of affairs just prior to any event causes the event to occur.

I have no problem with this version. But what you don’t seem to understand is that it is logically equivalent to the first one. This confusion is reflected in your “preferred” definition of determinism the doctrine that “all events are inevitable consequences of antecedent sufficient causes”. You imagine this to be different from my definitionof determinism as the doctrine that “there was never a nonzero probability that anything would have happened differently than it did”. But in reality these are just two ways of saying the same thing. Thus if the doctrine that there was never a nonzero probability that anything would have happened differently than it did is compatible with free will, then the doctrine that all events are inevitable consequences of antecedent sufficient causes is also compatible with free will, because they are the same doctrine.

To see this, we can start with your statement that under my definition of determinism (that is (2) above):

But this is patently false. Premise (2) is not just a statement of concrete facts about this world; it also entails a great many counterfactual conditionals. In particular, if Smith chooses to do X rather than Y, it entails that he was certain to choose X; that there was no possibility that he would choose Y instead. Or to put it another, way, if the exact same state of affairs were to occur again, it is certain that Smith would again choose X rather than Y. Let’s examine what this claim means. It certainly does not mean that it is logically impossible for Smith to choose Y under these conditions. So what it must mean is that there is something about the nature of this world which, given the exact state of affairs at the time he made the decision, made it certain that he would choose X.

Now let’s consider what it means to say that A causes B. It certainly does not mean that, given that A has occurred, it is logically impossible that B should fail to occur. So what it must mean is that there is something about the nature of this world such that the fact that A has occurred makes it certain that B will occur.

Thus, if A is the exact state of affairs at the time Smith made his decision and B is the event of his choosing X, then “A caused B” means that the state of affairs just prior to his choosing to do X caused him to choose X, or equivalently, that the state of affairs at that time made it certain that he would choose X. These are not, as you imagine, two different propositions, but merely two different ways of saying the same thing. (And of course the same applies if A is the exact state of affairs at any time prior to his choosing X.)

2. Preference and choice

In response to my statement that people (rational ones at least) do not even want to be able to choose what they do not prefer over what they prefer, you said:

I don’t know, because I don’t know how most people woud interpret “have the power”. But if you ask “Given that at that moment you preferred A to B, was there a nonzero probability that you would have chosen B?” there are only two possibilities: (1) the respondent would answer “no”, or (2) the respondent is unable or unwilling to think rationally. As I pointed out earlier, it is logically impossible that the correct answer could be “yes”. And I‘m not really interested in the opinions of people who spout nonsense.

What you’re really saying is that sometimes (as in this case) we wish in retrospect that we had taken the time to think the matter through before acting, because if we had, we would have preferred (and therefore chosen) a different course of action. This is quite a different thing from wishing that one had in fact preferred to do A yet at the same time chosen to do B. The former type of wish is very reasonable and common; the latter is logically incoherent.

It would seem that you are now arguing that most people would agree with your version of P1 because their thinking is incoherent in a subtle way. That’s possible, but I prefer to assume that people are capable of thinking rationally until I have incontrovertible proof to the contrary. In any case, this isn’t much of an argument for the validity of your version of P1.

At this point you’ve lost me completely.

In the first place, if all you’re talking about is deriving pleasure (or more precisely, happiness) from the things that now cause you pain (or more precisely, misery) and vice-versa, this isn’t really a change in preferences. You’d still prefer happiness to misery; all that would have changed would be the means of getting what you want and avoiding what you don’t. It’s happiness itself that you really want and misery itself that you really want to avoid. So if you really want to talk about changing your preferences, you must talk about preferring misery to happiness.

But it’s easy to show that the question of whether you’d prefer to prefer misery to happiness rather than happiness to misery is meaningless. To see this, let’s compare it, as you did, to the question of whether Tom, who has never seen blue, would prefer blue to red. This question is meaningful because there is a simple procedure for detemining the answer: show him some blue things and then find out which he prefers. But in the case of whether you’d prefer to prefer misery to happiness, how can this be decided? For example, suppose that by some miracle you are granted your wish, and prefer misery to happiness for a day. During that day, if asked to describe what it’s like to have this preference, you’d presumably say something like, “It’s wonderful! I’m doing all the things that cause misery to me at every opportunity, and I’m miserable!” But if asked the same question the next day, you’d presumably say, “It was horrible! I did all the things that cause me misery at every opportunity, and I was miserable!” So now, having experienced having a preference for misery over happiness, what do you make of it? How do you decide objectively whether the characterization of your experience as “wonderful” or “horrible” is correct? If you decide it on the basis of your preference for happiness over misery, you’re letting your actual preference decide the question. If that’s your decision procedure, it’s absurd to suggest that you might prefer to prefer happiness to misery, because using this decision procedure this is logically impossible. But there is no alternative “objective” decision procedure available.

3. Preference and control

It’s nonsensical to say either that your pleasure preference rules you or that you rule it. The term “rule” is meaningless here. You do prefer pleasure, and there’s nothing more to be said.

Consider the following statements:

(A) I am ruled by my pleasure preference
(B) I choose to do things that give me pleasure rather than those that give me pain.

Now these two statements are logically equivalent. But the first gives the false impression that there is some mysterious entity, a “pleasure preference,” that somehow controls my behavior, while the second is easily seen to be simply a description of my behavior. There is no mysterious entity exercising some diabolical “power” over me. It is simply the case that I act in certain ways. This would necessarily be true no matter how I acted. There is no issue of “control” here. Thus (A) is nothing but a misleading, confusing way of saying (B).

4. Moral responsibility and punishment

Your discussion of the relationahip between moral responsibility on the one hand and praise or blame on the other is baffling. You say:

Try as I might, I am unable to make any sense out of this. Saying that someone is “morally responsible” for an act means that he may justly be held responsible for it. And to say that someone may justly be held responsible for an act means that it would be just to reward or punish him for it, as appropriate. If it doesn’t mean that, then what does it mean?

Let’s put it a different way. To say that someone is morally responsible for an act means that he deserves to be rewarded or punished for it (again, as appropriate). So you seem to be saying that sometimes it is morally right to punish someone for an act even though he does not deserve to be punished for it. But how can this be? How can it be right, for example, to execute Smith for killing Jones even though he doesn’t deserve to be executed – or for that matter, to be punished at all? Or are you saying that although executing Smith would be morally wrong, we ought to execute him anyway? Or that even though we ought not to execute him, you nevertheless would approve of executing him? It seems to me that your statements here are completely incoherent. They make a total shambles of moral language by disconnecting it completely from the real world. What’s the point of moral judgments if they are not going to be used to guide our actions?

5. Choice and identity

You say:

Well, of course you didn’t choose your own constitution! It is logically impossible for any being to choose its own constitution. But how in the world do you get from this tautology to the conclusion that “all of my choices have been chosen for me”? Who did the choosing?

A little later you say:

And how is this supposed to work? What you seem to wish is that before you existed, you somehow decided “who you would be”. Don’t you see that this makes no sense at all? And supposing per impossible that you could do this, on what would you base this choice? At this point you would have no preferences, since your preferences are the very thing that you would be choosing. OK, then how to choose? What would motivate one choice rather than another?

And if your behavior were not a consequence of the “laws of physics” you’d be complaining that it is the result of “blind chance”. To put it more precisely, to the extent that your behavior is not determined by natural laws, it is a product of blind chance. Why would it be worse for your actions to be completely determined than for them to be partly random? For example, say that you just saved a drowning child at some risk to your own life. Let’s consider the following possibilities:

(i) Everything that came before this act made it absolutely certain that you would try to save the child.
(ii) Everything that came before determined that there would be a 30% probability that you would try to save the child and a 70% probability that you wouldn’t. It just happened, by pure chance, that the less likely outcome was the one that actually occurred.

If you are not morally responsible for your choice (and therefore deserving of praise) in the first case, how can you be morally responsible in the second? How can it be that the fact that you tried to save the child was in large part a matter of pure dumb luck make you more deserving of praise than if this decision had flowed entirely from your character – from your courage and selflessness?

At this point your argument seems to have been reduced to “I am not morally responsible for my actions because I exist”. In other words, it seems to me that you’re saying that it would be logically impossible for anyone to be morally responsible for his actions, no matter what. This no longer has anything to do with determinism. If you actually have a logically coherent concept of “moral responsibility,” there must be some set of possible facts which would imply that someone, somewhere, sometime is morally responsible for some action. But at this point I can’t imagine any possible circumstances in any possible world in which you would agree that someone is actually morally responsible for an act.
_______________________

Believe me, in spite of my repeated statements that I’m baffled or don’t understand, I actually understand very well where you’re coming from. All of the things you’ve said occurred to me a long time ago, when I was in high school. Your thinking here represents the natural conclusions that a reasonably intelligent, reflective person will naturally arrive at when he first starts to think about these matters. But since then (I’m now retired) I’ve thought about these issues quite a bit, and the position I’ve outlined seems to me to be the best (indeed, in the final analysis the only) logically coherent way of looking at these questions.

[ September 04, 2002: Message edited by: bd-from-kg ]</p>

Kip

BD: I will get back to you soon.

School has started and I do not have as much time as I did earlier.