Kip

bd:

Are we approaching the core of the problem? But as of now I am in the moral dark. Whereas before I could argue that moral responsibility is possible according to the Principal of Alternative Possibilities I now do not even have a moral premise to test. In the absense of any established moral claims I feel that presuming the universe is essentially amoral is the only reasonable conclusion. Again, I invite you to establish your moral system (if I recall correctly Tronvillain and Bill wrote embarrassingly contrived and vague requirements for moral responsibility) considering your repeated disappointment with my suggestions.

My experience with compatiblists have given me the impression that the weapon of hard determinists is brutal honesty and the weapon of compatibilists is redefinition. Compatibilists arguments appear to play upon weak definitions of words such as "could" and "possible" and also argue (rather comfortably) that because a person cannot possibly mean this because that never happens he or she surely must mean this instead , namely, the compatibilists' "New Revised Requirements for Moral Responsibility".

The heart of the dispute I think is the two very different conclusions that we draw from this mutual premise:

1. These requirments for moral responsibility can never happen, are impossible, or indeed, quite incoherent in a deterministic universe.

The compatibilist concludes surely there must be other requirements for moral responsibility as if he or she were to rescue his cherished morality throug redefinition. The noncompatibilist draws a very different conclusion. He simply assumes that because these requires are never met that moral responsibility never exists and that the universe is amoral.

So, the dispute turns upon the requirements for moral responsibility. I do not pretend to establish any such requirements, and until someone does, presume that universe is amoral. I invite you to do so, but please remember that whatever you propose will be met with the distinction (which still bothers me) between our behavior towards robots and people.

Now to address your five points:

Necessity, probability, and causality

Your statistical language troubles me and I suspect sophistry. You seem to reach conclusions with the statistical language that you cannot reach without it, and yet you claim the two are logically equivalent:

(2) According to determinism, there was never a nonzero probability that anything would have happened differently than it did.
(2') According to determinism, the state of affairs just prior to any event causes the event to occur.

You go on to argue at length that the two are logically equivalent. However, the two are obviously not equivalent because 2 fails to references causality. You argue that 2 entails causality, however, you previously argued:

So, even when I explicitly mention "freely willing" or the absence of causal restraint, you apply your determinist definition, which supposedly is equivalent to mine. However, mine obviously does not apply because there is no causal constraint. So please stop saying that the two are logically equivalent. If the two are equivalent, please indulge me, and use my definition (the dictionary definition).

Your implied premise, that justifies this apparent contradiction and others, is that determined world are the only possible worlds. Of course I agree with you and I am presenting the case of most libertarians. Because I am no longer arguing anything specific, and because you have yet to do so, this entire dispute is rather silly.

Preference and Choice

Notice how you redefined the question. You may have difficulty with the words "have the power" but most people do not. Would you believe if I said that the answer "yes" is quite popular? Indeed, you may be surprised to discover, the majority of people in this world are not compatibilists, but libertarians!

I was not arguing P1, nor having I been arguing P1 for a while. I was arguing that most people tend to agree with P1, however, as we both agree, that is irrelevant to the establishment of P1, because the masses are no authority. Indeed, as I hope my example shows, most people would say "yes" and do agree with the premise.

I understand your argument is thus:

P. there is no objective procedure for testing whether a man prefer happiness to misery
C. it is meaningless to say that a person may prefer misery to happiness

But the conclusion does not follow from the premise at all. Simply because you cannot know whether or not a person is experiencing the sensations of pleasure or pain does not show that the question is meaningless. For obviously there is the subjective test. The only conclusion that follows is that you, as an outside obverver, must remain agnostic towards the results of the other "test", not that the question is meaningless or that the test is impossible. Your position seems to me quite confused.

Preference and control

Nothing more to be said? Surely whether or not I should be held responsible for preferring objects that give me pleasure to objects that give me pain remains to be said? Of course, to do that, you would need to establish the conditions necessary and sufficient for moral responsibility, and you have yet to do that.

Once again you appeal to the operation of unchosen laws "inside" rather than "outside". I repeat my (in my opinion rather decisive) objection to this appeal:

Choice and identity

According to strict determinism, Nature or no one.

It does not work. It cannot work. I agree with you now that metaphysical free will is impossible and I have always agreed with you. That is the whole point. You repeat this "appeal to the impossibility of satisfying moral requirements" as if that demonstrates that these requirements must be replaced by others. Your argument seems to be:

P1. morality requires the impossible
P2. the impossible never happens
C. there are other requirements for morality

Never do you entertain the possibility that morality simply cannot exist. Your appeal to the impossible demonstrates nothing until you can establish your own moral requirements.

Again you assume the dichotomy between cause and randomness. I agree with you. The PAP would only apply, indeed can only apply, if the world is not determined, but rather unconstrained will may choose behavior. You and I both deny that is possible, but whereas I accept PAP considering conceivable, but impossible, worlds where people do possess that power, you reject PAP. I am, however, no longer even arguing PAP, and do not pretend to be able to establish moral premises.

Yes, if determinism is true, as we both agree, morality is impossible. That is the claim I made in the post that began this thread! I am glad you finally understand. Are you finished criticizing my suggestion for moral requirements? Perhaps you would be so brave as to suggest your own?

bd-from-kg

Kip:

At this point I think it’s more productive to discuss the key questions directly rather than sticking to a statement-response format.

1. On determinism.

(A) Determinism is not necessarily true. There are obviously possible worlds in which it is false. It is also quite possible that this world is not deterministic.

(B) I believe that any logically coherent concept of free will is compatible with determinism.

(C) I believe that libertarian free will (LWF) is logically incoherent, and therefore cannot exist in any possible world, deterministic or not, any more than square circles or married bachelors can. This one will be explained at some length.

2. On causation and probability.

(A) The only meaningful concept of causation, so far as I can see, is something like this:

There are two aspects of the world: its underlying structure (i.e., patterns and regularities that will necessarily be displayed by anything in it) and the things in it (including their configuration at any given moment). To say that A causes B is to say that it is a logically necessary consequence of the underlying structure that whenever an event of type A occurs it will be followed by an event of type B. This does not mean that a “type B” event must necessarily follow a “type A” event in all possible worlds, only that it must do so in any world with the same underlying structure as ours. (This is oversimplified, but it will do for purposes of discussion.)

The reason for the need to assume an “underlying structure” is that the concept of causation unavoidably involves counterfactual conditionals. Thus, an essential part of what “A caused B” asserts is that B would still have occurred even if other things had been different provided that A had still occurred. So far as I can see, this can only be interpreted as a statement about another possible world – one in which other things are different, but A had still occurred. But the statement that A caused B clearly is not asserting that B will occur in any possible world in which A occurs, but only worlds that are “like this one” in some crucial way.

(B) It is very difficult, if not impossible, to define what it means to say that the probability that a given even will occur is p. But again, since any reasonable interpretation of it must involve counterfactual conditionals, it seems appropriate to define it, too, in terms of possible worlds. And again, only certain possible worlds are relevant, namely the ones with the same underlying structure as this one. But here the situation is even worse: we have to assume that it is possible to define some sort of probability density function over the set of relevant possible worlds so that we can say that, if we know that our world lies in a certain subset of the relevant possible worlds, (for example, the ones with the exact same history up to a given moment as this one) the probability that lies in a specified subset of this subset (for example, the ones in which S chooses Y rather than Z) is such-and-such. I’m not at all sure that this program can be carried out, or that there is a unique “natural” or “objectively correct” way to define such a PDF.

But fortunately, we only have to deal here with the special cases where the probability in question is zero or one. And for these cases it appears to be possible to give a straightforward definition:

Event E has probability zero if it does not occur in any possible world with the same underlying structure as ours. It has probability one if it occurs in all possible worlds with the same underlying structure.

More interesting is the question of the meaning of P(B|A) - that is, the probability of a B-type event B given an A-type event A. (Here it is understood that the definition of B may include a restriction on when and where B would have to occur relative to A to “count”.)

With this understanding, we say that P(B|A) = 1 if a “type A” event is always associated with a “type B” in the specified way in every possible world with the same underlying structure as our own, and that it is zero if events of this type are never associated in the specified way.

Now given these understandings, to say that A causes B is logically equivalent to saying that P(B|A) = 1 and that the definition of B includes the restriction that B must follow A temporally.

Again, this is a bit loose, but it seems clear that it can be made rigorous except possibly for the “underlying structure” stuff. But certainly this is the sort of thing that scientists have in mind when they talk about physical laws or causes. And it doesn’t seem to me to make sense to say that something has probability one if there are possible worlds (with the requisite underlying structure) in which it does not occur, or that it has probability zero if there are possible worlds (with the requisite underlying structure) where it does.

It’s clear that with these definitions the statements “there was never a nonzero probability that anything would have happened differently than it did given the state of affairs just prior to it” and “the state of affairs just prior to any event causes the event to occur” are logically equivalent. They both mean that in any possible world with the same underlying structure as ours in which the state of affairs just prior to a given event occurred, the event that occurred in our world also occurred in that world. In particular, there is no possible world with the same underlying structure as ours and with the exact same history up to a point just preceding a given event, in which some other event occurred than the one that occurred in our world. And of course this implies that any such worlds that have the same history up to a given point will have the same history from that point on.

If this isn’t “strong determinism,” I don’t know what is. I don’t see what any reference to “causation” can add to this.

3. On libertarian free will.

Any theory of libertarian free will must assert two things:
<ol type="A">[*]That our actions (at least some of them) could have been different than they were, even given that all of the events leading up to them (ultimately, the entire history of the universe prior to them) were exactly as they were.[*]That in at least some of these cases, we choose to do those actions.[/list=a]
The basic problem with any such theory is that these assertions contradict one another.

To see this, consider what it means to say that I chose to do something. First, it means that the action was not a random, uncaused event. Thus, if (supposing that such a thing is possible) I happen to pull the trigger on a gun as a result of a random quantum event in my brain, it cannot reasonably be said that I chose to pull the trigger. Second, it means that it was not caused by something outside myself. If I run into someone because I’m caught by a sudden gust of air, I did not choose to run into him. Third, it means that the cause is not something inside myself (even inside my brain) over which I have no control. Thus we do not blame victims of Tourette’s syndrome when they use vulgar language in a completely inappropriate context, because we understand that these actions are the result of a physical malfunction in their brains over which they have no control; in other words, they do not choose to do it.

Thus, for an act to qualify as my choice, it cannot be random, it cannot be caused by something outside myself, and it cannot be caused by something inside myself over which I have no control. The only remaining possibility is that it is caused by something inside myself over which I do have control. But what does it mean to say that I have “control” (in the sense needed to make it my choice? Why, it must mean that I willed it to happen. But to will something to happen is to cause it to happen. And as we have seen, to say that A causes B means that given A, B must occur. And isn’t that exactly what we mean when we say that X chose to do Y? Don’t we mean that the act was an effect of some mental event of X’s – that given this mental event (and the fact that, for X, such mental events cause the associated movements of his body in accordance with fixed “laws of nature”) it was inevitable that B would happen? But in that case, the action was caused. It is not true that the action could have been different than it was given all of the events leading up to it. In other words, if (B) is true, (A) is necessarily false.

But, you might say, perhaps when we say that X chose to do Y, we don’t mean that X could have done something other than Y right at the moment he did it, but that the act of choosing to do Y could have been different than it was. But this has the same problem. If the act of choosing to do Y was a random event, it wasn’t really X who did the choosing. In fact, no one did the choosing; it “just happened”. Certainly this is not what the advocates of LFW have in mind. The second alternative is just as bad. If the act of choosing to do Y was the product of a brain malfunction over which X has no control, it cannot reasonably be said that X decided to choose to do Y. So it must have flowed from X – that is, it was a product of something over which X can meaningfully be said to have had control. If not, it wasn’t really X’s decision to choose to do Y. But to say that it was the product of something over which X had control is to say that X caused the decision to choose to do Y. But once again, if follows directly from the meaning of “A caused B” that given all of the events leading up to the decision to choose to do Y, the decision could not have been other than what it was, violating even our modified version of A.

At this point one might feel that we simply haven’t “backed up” far enough in the causal chain – that at some point there could have been an “originating event” OE that ultimately resulted in X’s doing Y, and which really could have been different. But it doesn’t matter how far we back up, or what we conceive the nature of OE to be. No matter what it is, we have the same problem. Either OE was random, or it arose from something inside X over which he had no control, or X caused OE to happen. And only in the latter case can it be meaningfully said that X chose to do Y. But in this case it is not true that OE could have been different. If X caused OE, this means that given the state of things leading up to it, it could not have been different; it was inevitable that OE would occur rather than some other event which might have led to a different action.

The same considerations apply, of course, to the notion of “freely willing” to do something. To say that X willed to do Y means that X caused the “willing event” to occur, which means that this event could not have been otherwise, and so on back through the causal chain leading to this event. If, when we trace this chain backwards, we find that it doesn’t lead back to X (whether because it terminates or because it leads elsewhere), X cannot meaningfully be said to have willed to do Y, and if it does, the originating event (whatever it was) could not have been otherwise.

This is why that the concept of LFW is logically incoherent. And this explains why I consistently ignore “libertarian” interpretations of terms like “freely willing”. My policy is to charitably interpret what people say as making sense whenever it is possible to do so.

You said:

But my argument is that the PAP (as you interpret it) would be invalid in any possible world, including nondeterministic ones. The notion of “unconstrained [i.e., uncaused] will” is logically incoherent – not because everything has a cause, but because anything that is uncaused is not willed. If what you will is not a product of your attitudes, preferences, beliefs, etc., then you cannot properly be said to have willed it. But to say that it is the product of such things is to say that it is caused. The supposed alternative of “I willed it but it was uncaused” does not exist in any possible world, any more than a round square, or a married bachelor.

4. On the existence of morality

You say:

Of course not. Obviously morality exists. You cannot go a day without making moral judgments. We have to decide, as a society, whether Jones should be executed for killing his wife; whether the executives of Enron should be admired for their cleverness, or thrown into prison, or fined, or something else; whether euthanasia is ever justified, and if so when, and when it isn’t, what penalties should be imposed for it. The debates over such questions are inescapably moral debates. It’s nonsense to say, “Yes, I think that Jones should be executed; that some of the Enron executives should go to prison; and that sometimes euthanasia is justified. But please don’t mistake these for moral judgments!” Of course they’re moral judgments. Judgments of this sort are by definition moral judgments; they are what morality is about. To say that they’re not moral judgments is like saying that “I believe that 252 + 983 = 1235” is not a mathematical judgment.

Of course, whether there is an objective standard by which such judgments can be definitively pronounced to be “correct” or “incorrect” is another question.

But what you really seem to be arguing is that there is an objective standard for determining moral responsibility – namely, that no one is ever morally responsible for anything. This standard is completely nutty, but it’s certainly an objective standard.

5. Control, causation, and responsibility

You say:

If I understand you correctly here, your argument is something like this:

(i) I did not choose my own nature (basic preferences, dispositions, etc.)
(ii) Therefore I have no control over the fact that I have this nature.
(iii) Therefore I am not responsible for the consequences of having this nature.
(iv) Therefore I am not responsible for my actions, since they are among the consequences of having this nature.

I understand this thinking. In general, if you are not responsible for X being the case, you are not responsible for the consequences of X being the case. However, this rule is not universally valid. For example, suppose you know that a bridge on your property (built by previous owners) is unsafe, but encourage people (or even just allow people) to drive over it. Eventually it collapses and some people die. According to your principle, since you’re not responsible for the fact that the bridge was unsafe, you’re not responsible for the consequences of the fact that the bridge was unsafe. But of course this is wrong; you are responsible.

One of the most obvious cases in which it is not self-evident (to put it mildly) that the principle is valid is when X represents “my nature” or “my character”. In that case the principle says that that since I am not ultimately responsible for having the nature or character that I do, I am not responsible for the consequences of having it – i.e., for being the kind of person I am, or for actions that result from my being that way. Thus, if I steal money from someone, the principle says that I’m not responsible for the consequences of the fact that I have a strong tendency to steal and no moral scruples to prevent me from doing so.

However, this is the very point at issue: are you responsible in such cases (which according to determinism comprise 100% of all cases)? According to your interpretation of P1 you’re not, but according to a great many people’s (and in the view of the law) you are. So this isn’t really an argument; it’s just a restatement of your interpretation of P1.

6. On moral responsibility

In the end, how one interprets the “possible” in P1 depends on one’s conception of moral responsibility – that is, on what it means to say that one is morally responsible for an act. Once we are clear about that, answers to the other questions fall out naturally. So instead of directly attacking the question of what the proper sense of “possible” is in this context, I’m going to revisit the question of what it means to say that one is morally responsible for something. Unfortunately, the section of my previous post that dealt with this crucial question is the only one that you completely ignored in your reply. So let’s try it again.

Consider the following statements:

<ol type="1">[*]Smith is morally responsible for killing Jones.[*]Smith is answerable for killing Jones.[*]It is just to make Smith answer for killing Jones.[*]It is just to punish Smith for killing Jones.[*]Smith deserves to be punished for killing Jones.[*]Smith should be punished for killing Jones.[*]The effects of punishing Smith for killing Jones are preferable to those of any alternative.[/list=a]

It seems to me that each of these statements logically entails the following one. Moreover, the entailment works in reverse. Thus each of these statements is logically equivalent to the each of the others.

If you disagree with this, please indicate which of the statements you believe does not entail, or is not entailed by, the following one, and why you think so. Until I understand what exactly you think is wrong here, it will be impossible to have a productive discussion about moral responsibility.

If you do agree that these statements are logically equivalent, we can make short work of the final question of what is the proper sense of “possible” in P1. But if you don’t, we’ll probably never agree, because we have radically different conceptions of what it means to morally responsible for an act.

Let me conclude by quoting this paragraph from my last post:

Again, if you would answer these questions, we’ll have taken a huge step toward understanding the source of our disagreement about P1.

[ September 07, 2002: Message edited by: bd-from-kg ]</p>

Kip

1. It is not at all obvious that there are other possible world. Although there are other conceivable worlds.
2. I agree that this world may not be deterministic, but I strongly doubt that. I cannot imagine how the universe would produce random phenomena without referring to some rule and suspect that all randomness is only an expression of human ignorance.

Any logically coherent concept?

I have only been referring to the standard definition of free will, which the dictionary defines quite well:

"The power of making free choices that are unconstrained by external circumstances or by an agency such as fate or divine will."

This definition is also not compatible with determinism. Which concept have you been using? Redefining the problem does not solve it.

I agree and have agreed for several posts now.

That is plenty to digest and I am not sure if I follow all of what you are saying. The dictionary defines a cause as a "producer of an effect" and needs no reference to either probability or other worlds. Also, I do not feel like you have addressed my concern about your "equation" at all.

Using your statistical language introduces the problems of other "possible worlds" and what the probabilities associated with these "worlds" would be. It is not clear how you can meaningfully use this language when we are trapped inside this one world and have no knowledge of other worlds. In particular, the problem seems to be that, in hindsight, you could notice that event B always followed event A, and label this a "cause" even if it were a simple coincidence.

Stop right there. LFW does not imply B at all.

LFW is an ability and makes no claims about actions whatsoever. This is an error I have noticed you repeatedly make throughout this discussion.

The dictionary defines free will as:

"The power of making free choices that are unconstrained by external circumstances or by an agency such as fate or divine will."

Free will is a power, an ability, a capacity. It makes no claims about how we use that capacity. Indeed, according to the definition, a person can have free will can never, given the same situation, do "otherwise". He could make the same choice FOR ETERNITY and still have free will. He could also choose to do the opposite FOR ETERNITY or any mix. That is exactly what "free" will means: no constraint.

But B is exactly that - a constraint. B says that at least sometimes, a persons actions are limited in some way. But that contradicts the definition of free will. So obviously free will cannot entail B. Your demonstration that A and B are not compatible is thus entirely worthless.

Yes, I correct myself. Moralities exist, in the sense that ideas about right and wrong exist. But in the sense that, if a dispute arose, no morality could be established as true and the other as false, none of them are legitimate. That is all I meant.

This example is entirely misleading. You are not responsible for the bridge being unsage, but you are responsible for not telling people that the bridge was unsafe. BOTH of these conditions were necessary for the accident and so you were responsible in that sense. However, we are getting way ahead of ourselves.

I challenge this claim. How can you possibly testify that most people would still hold a person responsible if he did not have possess free will? Again, you imply that everyone else is a determinist and agrees with you. But, I remind you, most people are NOT determinists and compatibilism is a minority opinion.

First, your entire method (of stretching your logic across a long sequence of small alterations) invites mistakes and has all the appearances of sophistry. I read along each step and notice no blatant crime, and yet, find myself at the end with a proposition altogether different than the one I began with. This reminds me of that game where you whisper a sentence from person to person, and when the whisper finally returns to the original person, it is entirely different and nonsensical.

Despite that, I disagree most with the step from 6 to 7:

1. 6 seems to make a stronger claim that 7 does. 7 says that, considering all available options, punishing Smith is the best. But if all of the options are bad, that is not saying much. Indeed, if there are only two options, "killing all human beings" and "punishing Smith", the latter is preferrable. But it does not follow, (or only very awkwardly) that Smith "should" be punished for killing Jones or that any possibility "should" happen, only that that event is the least undesirable. For example, if the human race could only be struck with AIDS, or with cancer, it does not follow that humans "should" have AIDS (or have cancer).

2. The second, and more severe, problem is that 7 references "effects" but 6 only references "should". Moreover, 7 says that the action is only "preferrable", not "moral". Suppose that I am a sick murderer and I prefer to kill punish simply for fun. Does it follow that I should punish Smith? No, morality should be divorced from both effects and preference. An action is moral or immoral whether or not I like it and whether or not I am celebrated or condemned for it.

bd-from-kg

Kip:

My latest reply has gotten so long that I’ve divided it into two parts. This is Part 1.

On determinism.

In this context philosophers use the term “possible worlds” to mean “logically possible worlds”. The point is that a set of propositions is consistent if and only if it has a “model” – i.e., a possible world in which all of the propositions are true. Thus if someone claims that such-and-such must be the case, it is often useful to point out that there are possible worlds in which it is not the case, and therefore it is false that it must be the case.

The notion of possible worlds is even more useful in analyzing the meaning of counterfactual conditionals. It seems to be all but impossible to interpret such statements intelligibly without resorting to the concept of “possible worlds”.

What you can and cannot imagine is irrelevant. Your ability to conceptualize the universe is not a necessary condition for its existence. Since nondeterministic worlds are possible and it is clearly impossible to determine whether this world is deterministic or not by observation, what are your grounds are for “strongly doubting” that it is not?

Yes. Since you agree that LWF is logically incoherent, I’m at a loss as to why or how you would challenge this statement. LWF covers pretty much any conception of free will that is incompatible with determinism. And if all such conceptions are logically incoherent, it follows that all logically coherent conceptions of free will are compatible with determinism.

On the contrary, it is compatible with determinism. In fact, the person who wrote this definition obviously intended to make it clear that it was compatible with determinism. Why do you think he listed the causal factors that would make a choice “unfree” in the sense he had in mind if any causal factors would make it unfree? He clearly intended to include choices that are determined by the agent’s personality, character, desires, etc. as “free”.

2. On causation and probability.

Dictionary definitions are hardly useful guides to such questions. In this context “produce” is just a synonym for “cause”. In fact, the American Heritage dictionary (from which your definition may have come) defines “cause” [as a noun] as “producer of an effect” and [as a verb] as “to be the cause of” – i.e., to be the producer of an effect, or to produce an effect. But when we look up “produce”, the relevant definition is “to cause to occur or exist”. In other words, to “cause” is to “produce” and to “produce” is to “cause”. Isn’t that helpful? Along the same lines, I once had a dictionary that defined “pagan” as “heathen” and “heathen” as “pagan”. The purpose of a dictionary is not to provide an analysis of every word, but to give someone who is unfamiliar with a word an idea of what it means.

If we set out to define or analyze the notion of causality logically, we soon find that it means one thing and one thing only: to say that A causes B means that given A, B must occur. The only possible evidence that events like A cause events like B is that we find that events like A are always followed by events like B. Any further connection between them exists only in our imaginations. And any such connection (of two kinds of events being regularly conjoined in this way) is always regarded as evidence of a causal relationship. Thus from an operational point of view, to say that A causes B means at least this, and only this.

(However, this is not quite as simple as it looks at first sight, because of that crucial word “must”. In other words, when we say that A causes B, we are not saying merely that A is always followed by B, but that it must always be followed by B. The implications of this are discussed a little later.)

I don’t know; I should have thought that showing that two statements are logically equivalent is a sufficient justification for saying that there is no distinction between them – i.e., for “equating” them. My argument might be unsound, but it can hardly be said to have failed to address this question.

As I just explained in my last post, my language isn’t “statistical” in the sense of inherently involving references to probabilities. the “probabilities” of zero and one are special cases; to say that something has probability zero (as I use the term at least) means that it cannot happen and to say that it has probability one means that it must happen. (Moreover, I’ve tried to define as carefully as I can just what I mean by “cannot” and “must” in this context.). And since I’ve also now explained that by “possible I mean “logically possible” it should be clear that we can dispense with any reference to probabilities without affecting the argument in the least. Specifically, consider the following statements:

(2a) According to determinism, for any event E in this world, given what came before it, there was a zero probability that it would not occur (or, it was certain that E would occur).

(2b) According to determinism, for any event E in this world, given what came before it, no event could have occurred instead of E.

(2c) According to determinism, for any event E in this world, for any (logically) possible world with the same underlying structure as this one, if everything that happened in this world prior to E happened in that one, E also occurred in that one.

I use “zero probability,” “certain”, and “could” in a sense such that these statements are logically equivalent; (2c) is just a more complete, explicit statement of (2a) and (2b). (Also, I use the term “zero probability” in such a way that (2) is logically equivalent to both of these.)

It should be clear that any reference to probability (or certainty) can be “translated out” in this fashion.

In any case, what “introduces” the “problems” of other possible worlds is the fact that statements about “causes” (in fact, the concept of causality itself) and about what is “possible” or “necessary” inherently involve counterfactual conditionals (as becomes clear when one tries to analyze them). Counterfactual conditionals are statements about possible worlds. I’m not dragging “possible worlds” into the discussion; they were there from the beginning; they are either lurking in the background or out in the open in any discussion of determinism or free will.

Yes. It seems to be impossible in principle to establish that there is even such a thing as a “cause,” much less that A “caused” B in any specific case. In other words, any statements about a supposed “underlying structure” are not factual; they are explanatory hypotheses or conceptual frameworks. But once you start talking about causes, or determinism, you are committed to the position that counterfactual conditionals are meaningful.

Thus, suppose that you say that there is a causal law to the effect that an event of type A causes an event of type B. Clearly this does not mean merely that in this world events of type A are in fact always followed by events of type B. (After all, it’s possible that only a few type A events ever have occurred or will occur; the mere coincidence that all of them have been, or will be, followed by a type B event does not entail that there is a causal relationship between them.) It means that if an event of type A were to occur (or had occurred) at a given place and time it would be followed (or would have been followed) by an event of type B. But for any place and time where no such event is going to occur or has occurred, this is a counterfactual conditional. Moreover, to say that a particular event caused another event means that there is a causal law of this kind connecting the two events. So if we are going to try to construe or analyze the meaning of statements about causes, we must provide some reasonable interpretation of the meaning of such counterfactual conditionals. I have done so. And my analysis is pretty much the standard, plain-vanilla analysis subscribed to by most philosophers today. If you have some serious criticism of it, I’d be glad to hear it. But if you reject, it, you will need to provide a reasonable alternate interpretation of the meaning of counterfactual conditionals.

3. On libertarian free will.

Once again you’ve lost me completely. How can you possibly imagine that LFW does not assert that we sometimes make choices that could have been different than they were given what came before? This is fundamental to the idea of libertarian free will.

The only possible point that I can see here is that perhaps you are saying that LFW asserts only that we have the ability to make choices that are not determined by what came before, but doesn’t actually assert that anyone ever does make such a choice! But I doubt that there has ever been an advocate of LFW who believed that no one ever actually has made, or ever will make, a free choice, even though we have the ability to do so. So even if it’s true that technically LFW doesn’t entail that anyone ever makes a free choice, this seems to be pointless nitpicking at best.

B says nothing about what the agent would do if presented with the same choice again and again. (This is a meaningless question anyway. No one is ever presented with the exact same choice twice, much less over and over again. If nothing else, conditions are different the “second time around” in at least one crucial way: the agent has faced this choice before, whereas he hadn’t the first time.) It says only that some of the actions that A claims to exist – i.e., actions that are not determined by what came before – are choices. If no such actions were choices, LFW would have no content. For example, if an action were caused by a random quantum event in the brain, no reasonable person would say that it was a choice in any meaningful sense, and therefore that it was an instance of the exercise of LFW. What B says is that some of the actions that are not determined by what came before are not of this kind; that they can meaningfully be regarded as choices rather than as the result of things that “just happened” to the agent.

This is a disappointing reaction to a very carefully composed argument. It took several hours to write those few paragraphs. The idea is (as I said before) that to say that an act is chosen entails that it is caused, which contradicts A. Please give this argument another look. In my opinion it proves definitively that the concept of LFW is logically incoherent.

Keith Russell

Greetings:

I've said this before, but no one seemed to pick up on it.

Some of you folks really are trying to convince others here that there is no such thing as free will.

As if--upon hearing your evidence--they'll change their minds, which (correct me if I'm wrong) would negate your claim that free will does not exist.

Keith.

bd-from-kg

Kip:

Here's my reply to the remainder of your last post.

5. Control, causation, and responsibility

You say:

Note that the second and third steps in my reconstruction of your argument were:

(ii) I have no control over the fact that I have this nature.
(iii) Therefore I am not responsible for the consequences of having this nature.

The principle here seems to be that if I did not cause X, I am not morally responsible for the consequences of (i.e., the things caused by) X. You say that the collapsing bridge is not a valid counterexample, apparently because the death of the people on the bridge was caused not only by the collapse of the bridge (and thus indirectly by the unsafe condition of the bridge) but also by my failure to warn them that the bridge was unsafe. All I can say is that this is a novel and creative use of the term “cause”. By this standard, if my neighbor had an accident caused by the fact that his brakes failed, I caused his death by virtue of the fact that I failed to test his brakes that morning and warn him that they were about to fail. Or in the same spirit, if my subordinate Smith dies when the plane he takes to Seattle crashes, I caused his death by virtue of the fact that I failed to call him at the last minute to order him to go to Atlanta instead. I’m sorry, but to say these deaths are consequences, in a causal sense, of my inaction is ridiculous.

I understand very well that there is a huge difference in moral responsibility in these cases, but there is no significant difference in my role as a causative agent. Obviously I am morally responsible for the death of the people on the collapsing bridge, but that’s the point: the principle by which you get from (ii) to (iii) says that I’m not. And therefore it’s not a valid moral principle.

Amazing. You manage to read “a great many people” as “most people,” then as “everyone”. A great many people live in San Francisco. Oddly enough, it does not follow that most people live in San Francisco, much less that everyone does. Please try to avoid this kind of pointless hyperbole.

Anyway, as you’ve pointed out many times, many people are not consistent in their beliefs. It seems to clear to me that many people believe that:

(1) Some people are certain (at least some of the time) to commit a crime such as stealing an old lady’s purse if it seems clear that they will benefit significantly with no risk.
(2) Such people are morally responsible for such actions.
(3) A person cannot be morally responsible for an action if he could not (in your sense) have done otherwise.

These propositions are logically inconsistent; nevertheless, a great many (probably most) people believe all of them. That’s why Darrow’s argument was so effective. A lot of people don’t realize that (3) is incompatible with (1) and (2) unless you explain it to them at great length.

6. On moral responsibility

Recall that I asked you to explain which of the following statements you do not consider logically equivalent and why:

1. Smith is morally responsible for killing Jones.
2. Smith is answerable for killing Jones.
3. It is just to make Smith answer for killing Jones.
4. It is just to punish Smith for killing Jones.
5. Smith deserves to be punished for killing Jones.
6. Smith should be punished for killing Jones.
7. The effects of punishing Smith for killing Jones are preferable to those of any alternative

You say:

On the contrary, taking small steps and laying each step out for inspection smacks of a careful, responsible argument. I show exactly how I get from point A to point B. This is the first time I’ve ever been criticized, much less accused of intellectual dishonesty, for doing so.

Yes. This is what happens, for example, when one reads Euclid’s proof of the Pythagorean Theorem (and even more so when one reads Godel’s proof of the Incompleteness Theorem). The point of an argument is to take one somewhere that one hasn’t been before – i.e., to bring out non-obvious implications of the premises.

If you record what everyone whispers and write down each of the statements side by side, it is clear how the meaning has changed – how what C said does not imply what D said. If there’s really something wrong with my argument you should be able to do the same: show how one of the statements doesn’t follow from the previous one or the following one. In other words, you should be able to show just where the meaning changes. This kind of blanket rejection amounts to a repudiation of logic itself. You’re coming very close to saying, “The argument is sound, but I reject the conclusion.” You’ll have to do better than that. If you don’t want to take the trouble to actually analyze arguments, you should forget about philosophy and take up something easier.

To be sure, you’ve offered some actual reasons for questioning the step from 6 to 7. But at step 6 we have already reached an equivalence between “Smith is morally responsible for killing Jones” and “Smith should be punished for killing Jones”. So unless you can offer some actual reasons for doubting that the first five steps are valid, you must agree that if anyone should ever be punished for anything, people are sometimes morally responsible for their actions. And you have agreed many times that people should sometimes be punished for their actions. For example:

But elsewhere you recognize that:

I don’t understand why you recognize that we must punish certain kinds of actions to deter people from doing them, yet think it would be a good idea to abolish the “cherished deterrent” of blame. It would seem that it’s all right to put a noose around the murderer’s neck and hang him by the neck until dead, but we mustn’t tell him “that was a bad thing that you did”!

I’m sorry, but I can see no rhyme or reason in this policy. Once you agree that certain actions should be punished, the only remaining question is what punishment is appropriate. In some cases, blaming the person (and nothing stronger) may be the appropriate punishment. Why do you balk at this very mild punishment for minor infractions if you are willing to condone imprisonment for more serious ones?

Still elsewhere you say:

But to set up a system of rewards and punishments for specified kinds of acts is to hold people responsible for their actions. What do you think it means to say that someone is morally responsible, if not that he is subject to such a system (or more precisely, that he should be subject to it)? You seem to think that being “morally responsible” is some sort of mysterious metaphysical concept that can be divorced from any actual operational meaning. Similarly, you seem to think that there is some “stronger sense” in which a person should be blamed than the sense that blaming him has better consequences than not doing so. But what “stronger sense” could there be?

This brings us to your comments about the transition from 6 to 7. I’ll skip the first “problem” you cite, which is trivial and based on elementary confusions, and go to the critical objection:

The last statement seems to be based on the belief that I think that the “rightness” of an action depends on its effects on the agent. I can’t imagine how you could have gotten this impression. Surely you didn’t think that I was claiming that “Smith should be punished” is logically equivalent to “Smith would find the effects of punishing him preferable to the effects of not punishing him?” Obviously by “preferable” consequences I meant preferable on the whole, taking into account the interests of everyone affected, either directly or indirectly, either immediately or in the distant future.

Also, to say that certain effects are “preferable” to others does not necessarily mean that some specific person (whether the agent or the speaker) prefers them. In the context of objective morality, it means that they are intrinsically preferable. What that means exactly need not concern us here. I was careful to use wording that is compatible with most moral theories. You seem to be intent on interpreting it in a subjectivist sense in spite of the fact that it is clearly consistent with an objectivist position.

And now we come to the heart of the matter: the objection that 7 talks only about the consequences of the available choices, not about what’s “right”. Obviously my position is that what’s right is a function of the consequences of the available choices, and on nothing else.

This position is known as consequentialism. It’s a very popular idea, both among moral philosophers and among people in general. In fact, when most people want to argue that it would be right to do A or wrong to do B, the vast majority of the time they appeal to the consequences of the actions in question to justify their positions.

But consequentialism does not rule the field. There is another class of moral theories, known as deontological theories, which hold that the rightness or wrongness of an action depends on its intrinsic nature or character. So far as I can see, the only way to make sense of this idea is to suppose that some actions have a mysterious, mystical property of “ought-to-be-doneness,” and that others have the opposite quality of “ought-not-to-be-doneness,” which can be discerned by contemplating the nature of the acts themselves without reference to their consequences.

It seems obvious to me that the notion of an intrinsic property of “ought-to-be-doneness” is sheer fantasy; a remnant of beliefs in supernatural entities and religious taboos. No one has ever been able to give a remotely plausible account of the nature of this supposed property without appealing to an imaginary deity which has commanded or willed certain kinds of acts and forbidden others, for reasons known only to himself.

So unless you are a theist, I don’t see how you can avoid accepting consequentialism in the end as the only rational foundation of moral judgments. And in that case, your objection to the transition from 6 to 7 disappears.

bd-from-kg

Keith Russell:

Your wish is my command: You’re wrong.

Of course, how you’re wrong depends on what you mean by “free will”. This might well be enough to prove that some compatibilist versions of “free will” exist, but no one believes that these versions don’t exist in the first place, so this isn’t very interesting. For noncompatibilist versions of free will (aka “libertarian” free will, or LFW) it doesn’t, since reading arguments could obviously change your mind in a deterministic world.

Whenever you think that such a simple point refutes a major school of thought in some area of philosophy, you can be pretty sure that you’re missing something. Some of these philosophy boys are pretty sharp cookies. If you've thought of it, they have too.

[ September 10, 2002: Message edited by: bd-from-kg ]</p>

Keith Russell

bd-from-kg said:
"Of course, how you’re wrong depends on what you mean by “free will”. This might well be enough to prove that some compatibilist versions of “free will” exist, but no one believes that these versions don’t exist in the first place, so this isn’t very interesting."

[b]bd, yeah, I know that most--if not all--of the major philosophical questions have already been addressed by 'some pretty sharp cookies'.

I guess my point (other than to make a rather wry joke) was to suggest that perhaps what we are debating isn't whether or not 'free will' exists, but to what--exactly--are we referring when we use the term 'free will'.

It always seems like the argument begins with the schoolyard 'There is too such a thing as free will!', and the obvious response 'No there isn't!' Yet, once everyone calms down, it seems like they agree both parties agree that there exists something which could be called 'free will', but we either aren't sure exactly what it is, or (far more often and likely--and I believe that this is the case here in this thread) we can't agree that 'free will' is the proper term to use to describe it.

Keith.

[ September 10, 2002: Message edited by: Keith Russell ]</p>

K

Keith:

I think we could dispense with the term free will altogether. It really boils down to whether or not someone believes that the output of the brain is reducible to its current state (based on biology and all past experiences) and the current inputs. Or whether one believes there is something else contributing to the decision. I believe the former.

Keith Russell

K:

What do you mean 'reducable to its current state'?

Do you mean that the brain's current state can be 'completely accounted for', given biology and memory?

Keith.