For many people, the idea of free will is bound up with the notion of “could have done otherwise”. By their lights, if only one future is possible for a person — that is, if the person cannot do otherwise — then free will is an illusion.
Philosopher Christian List — author of the recent book Why Free Will is Real — proposes an interesting species of free will based on the claim that while physics may be deterministic, behaviors at the agent level are not. Agents can do otherwise, according to List, and this is enough to ground free will even if physics is deterministic.
I think List is mistaken, but I’ll save my criticisms for the comment thread.
Readers can find List’s argument in this paper:
Free Will, Determinism, and the Possibility of Doing Otherwise
See you in the comment thread.
phoodoo,
Big claims require bigger evidence than my “i tucked in my shirt on purpose.” You’ve got a creation of the universe story, i’ve got a clothing malfunction. You think they’re equivalent. Lotsa luck convincing others.
walto,
Psychopathy is a specific mental disorder.
Thinking that you’re a duck on Wednesdays is delusional thinking, not psychopathy.
Your claim is that chemicals can write poetry and sing. Mine is just that all we see was created by something powerful.
I think your claim is infinitely more in need of evidence.
phoodoo,
Evidence for an event that fits the definition of choosing is evidence that a choice has taken place, just as evidence for an event that fits the definition of throwing is evidence that a throw has taken place.
Oh, please. Do you seriously want to argue that someone throwing a ball isn’t evidence that they’ve thrown a ball, and that someone choosing isn’t evidence that they’ve chosen?
keiths,
Ok doc. One more distinction you likely find crucial in this context. I make the issues pretty much the same, as many courts do. I’ve seen a legislative discussion about how to handle a case involving somebody who’s strangling someone but thinks he’s shaking a tree. Does he want to do what he’s doing? Depends on how you describe what he’s doing. There simply aren’t clear answers when we get into situations both of delusion and personality disorders. Why should it be simple?
walto,
The case I’ve described is not a borderline or fuzzy case. It involves a psychopath who passes your moral responsibility test with flying colors.
It’s clear that your criterion needs modification, because it gives a strong positive in a case where you are reluctant to assign moral responsibility.
walto,
That’s psychosis, not psychopathy.
ETA: From Scholarpedia:
Again, fine for the standard cases. Doubtless won’t work in various occlusion cases either.
What’s YOUR criterion for moral responsibility?
keiths,
Then why are you so afraid to answer my simple question?
You don’t understand it?
keiths,
I know. And, as i said, it also causes trouble for standard cases. Any wild divergence from normal mentality can blow up ordinary judgments of moral responsibility, doc. Hundreds of years of case law on it.
How is this unclear as a court case? Clearly, for us (the judge and the rest), the “someone” is strangling a person. For himself, he is shaking a tree. A nutcase gets judged based on his nutcaseness. Just like the rest of us, nutcases also want to do things, but in this particular case he was imagining he was doing something else than what he was really doing. Nothing unclear here.
Erik,
I have no idea what you’re saying here. Do you send him to prison for life or not?
walto,
The very fact that you balk at the answer given by your criterion shows that your criterion doesn’t work. It gives the wrong answer. You need to modify it.
walto,
I’ve been giving my criteria throughout the thread. I also applied them to this specific case:
phoodoo,
Don’t kid yourself. You asked for evidence and I gave it.
Now the onus is on you. Do you seriously want to argue that someone throwing a ball isn’t evidence that they’ve thrown a ball, and that someone choosing isn’t evidence that they’ve chosen?
walto,
Re the tree-shaking guy, there was no criminal intent. He didn’t decide to kill anyone, and he didn’t decide to do something that he knew could kill someone.
If his nutcaseness gets verified, he will be sent to a secured looney bin. If his nutcaseness does not get verified, he will be imprisoned. Locked up either way.
I have no idea what you have been reading. Your cited case is not interesting either legally or intellectually on the topic of free will. It is well-established and clear-cut in the current state of civilisation.
keiths,
I take you don’t care that this doesn’t capture what most people mean by “morally responsible” It’s just a homonym.
walto, to phoodoo:
He’s also got an “immaterial souls moving bodies around” story. Good luck to him in explaining how that supposedly works.
keiths,
But maybe he wanted to put his hands around that thing and shake it lifeless. Just depends on how you care to describe it. Do you have to want to kill a person to be proximately responsible for killing a person? Maybe you shot to wound.
Hmm, I read back a bit about your views about “morally responsible”. They go as follows:
A lot to unpack here. First, you seem to think that morality is not coherent. There’s a deep problem right here, as far as “most people” are concerned.
Erik,
That doesn’t answer. Suppose there’s a death penalty for murder. Is he a murderer or not?
walto,
It isn’t just a homonym. People really do believe that mental conditions should influence our assignment of moral responsibility.
keiths,
My point exactly. You can’t handle those intuitions with “proximate responsibilty.”
walto, to Erik:
No, because there’s no criminal intent — no mens rea.
keiths,
I agree, and that’s true whether or not there’s “proximate responsibity” That’s not nearly fine-grained enough to capture all the (likely incoherent) aspects of moral responsibility.
walto,
Bingo. You’ve diagnosed your own problem.
You’ve told us that in your scheme, all moral responsibility is proximate moral responsibility. You’ve also told us that proximate moral responsibility can’t handle the required moral intuitions.
It follows that your scheme is insufficient.
How to fix it? Introduce the concept of ultimate moral responsibility.
Huh?
walto, quoting me:
Interesting that you would just happen to cut off my quote at that particular spot.
Here’s the full quote:
walto,
Then he was trying to kill a tree, not a person. No mens rea for murder.
I covered that here:
Your quote gives logical definition of supervenience mapping at any time t. It says nothing of metaphysics: that is, which dynamics is real.
List illustrates and Butterfield proves mathematically that supervenience is logically consistent with the dynamics of microstate physics being deterministic and the dynamics of macrostate psychology being indeterministic,
NRP allows List to treat macrostates as metaphysically independent of the physics microstates they supervene on . Under NRP, macrostates and their dynamics have an equal claim to realism to the corresponding microstate claim.
NOA allows List to claim that each science dictates what is real in its domain. His concept of free will demands that psychology be the relevant science. He says psychology is indeterministic and will likely remain so.
Hence psychological state dynamics are indeterministic in reality, regardless of the dynamics of the microstates.
As best I can see, your claim that the definition leads to the negation of the conclusion involves the hidden premise that NRP is false and so the dynamics of the microstates dictates the metaphysics of the dynamics of the macrostates (under supervenience). Denying NRP is perfectly respectable. But List does not.
That is what you are missing.
If we assume that our best current science is the starting point for evaluating whether reality is deterministic (Hi Neil!), then I agree we don’t want to use 17th century (or even 20th century) science.
Current science says non-equilibrium statistical mechanics explains dissipative structures. Probabilities are involved, but these may very well be epistemic and so not important to the nature of reality.
Whether the probabilities are epistemic depends on your interpretation of the QM underlying the statistics of Stat mech. Of the three most popular interpretations of QM that a realistic about quantum entities, namely Many Worlds, Bohmiam, and GRW-style collapse, I think only the collapse theories say the probabilities are in the world, and not just in our limited knowledge.
What is often missed in these discussions is that the determinism of the equations of fundamental physics is time symmetric. So that determinism says nothing about causation. But if we want to discuss will, then causation is the key, not the determinism of fundamental physics.
(I don’t think ‘autopoietic’ is a scientific concept, so I omitted it from my reply).
If you admit there is good and bad reasoning, then I take it that you agree that there are norms, like avoiding logical contradiction. Heumler is ensuring his argument is part of your causal history so that you conclude believing determinism is bad reasoning in order to comply with the norms.
Of course, nothing can force you to comply with the norms. That problem of motivation applies regardless of the truth of determinism. The best one can do is appeal to the practical utility of avoiding contradiction.
So what matters for should is whether or not one has complied with the norms of good and bad. Blame is not needed.
Of course, assessing whether or not one has complied itself involves reasoning. But to discuss that issue would be to digress, or at least to regress. Besides, some tortoise has already addressed it.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationality-instrumental/#RelCarPar
I have to admit that I have very little idea what either keiths (Did his Yes mean No?), Bruce, or Erik are getting at with their last few posts. In particular, I don’t know what keiths means by “moral responsibility,” what Bruce (does he agree with Huemer?) was getting at with his posts on norms, or whether Erik thinks the crazy person is a murderer. It’s not a very useful conversation.
That’s why we should do so IF WE CAN.
Keiths, am i supposed to take from your last response that on your view nobody is morally responsible for an action unless they’re ultimately responsible for it?
Erik, what are you saying?
No, I don’t agree with Huemer. But I don’t see that the problem is in begging the question in 1. It might be, but I don’t see it.
If you allow that our reasoning practices are norm-guided, and you are a determinist as part of your compatibilism, then it seems to me that you do think we can be norm guided. Just choose to follow the norm as per your view of compatibilist free will.
I did mention that I did not like the first premise because I think the epistemic should is that we should believe what is justified, not what is true. [Editted] since all we can assess is our justification practices (eg by how they contribute to meeting our epistemic goals, which would include truth, as Huemer says). I know he replies to that Objection in 3, but I don’t have the interest in trying to work through my concerns.
In any event, I will leave it at that, as I agree that it is not that useful a conversation. Time to take another holiday from TSZ, I think.
It apparently works just as easy as your choices evidence works. Just move immaterial souls, and that is your evidence. Why get caught up in the details you don’t like, isn’t that what you are preaching?
What is evidence for freedom of choice-just chose. See how simple things are in keith world.
I think this falls into the same category as his refusing to answer if not choosing is also a choice.
Its inconvenient to answer questions that destroy your argument.
I’ve about had it with this thread too. (Probably should have left after “Psychopathy and Psychopathology aren’t synonyms”: that was a beaut.) But I’ll leave you with this to think about. There is a perfectly fine norm, whether determinism is true or not, according to which at the question of “Is p or not-p true?” the response is “Yes”. Get anything that doesn’t mean that, the reasoning will have been bad. But, as I agree with nearly everybody that “ought implies can” I understand that my (epistemic) duty to “follow that norm” holds only if I am able to do so. There are no duties without capabilities–norm or no norm. So 1 is true only if we add, “if we can” at the end. Doing so doesn’t blow up the norm, it accepts that there are oughts only where there are cans. If we start by making oughts available in EVERY CASE, we are, obviously, begging the question against determinism, since that limits what we are able to do.
So if you want to see where Huemer goes off the rails, what you need to do is look carefully at his explications of “begging the question.” They can’t be right, but it would take some time and trouble to show it. There’s a lot of literature on petitio principii.
Ciao.
I should have added that I don’t know what the hell you’re saying either. It’s amazing to what extent this thread has devolved.
walto,
In order to determine, in a world with no assumptions about objective morality or a God, if people are ultimately responsible for their choices to do what we call evil, we first must show that it is actually possible to make a choice, right? Surely you can at least agree with that, right?
Now, you have already said that its enough that you believe that you make choices all the time-you don’t really need any more evidence than that (although for a God you apparently need much more evidence).
So as we continue to search for this elusive proof that people are actually free to make choices (even the people who are just bags of chemcials which Keiths like to call a system), Keiths offers up the test, just ask someone if they want chocolate or vanilla ice cream, if they choose one, then apparently that means people are free to do as they wish. So since people are free to do as they wish, according to keiths amazingly robust test, I guess they must always bear the moral responsibility of their actions, even when we have no idea what morals are.
But Keiths test is useless, because he can’t even answer how we disprove someone can make a choice. Its a given that they can, and if we test and they make no choice, that still doesn’t mean that people can’t make a choice-so the only result is they can.
If you can’t understand the silliness of that, oh well.
I actually haven’t said anything about choices in this entire thread, except Choose/Shmooze. Also, i’m very skeptical about the concept of “ultimate responsibility” which I’ve called gobbledygook. So if you’d actually read my comments here I don’t think you’d be quite so sure that “surely, I can at least agree” with your first paragraph.
And as i read it now, attempting to fathom the meanings you’re assigning to the terms in it, my initial sense is to say No, I don’t agree.
But, like Bruce, í’m tired of this thread and will now bid you a fond adieu.
That’s your choice.
🙂
That’s helpful to me — thanks! I probably do need to think a bit about whether I’m committed to metaphysical probabilities or just epistemic ones, and what that might require on the QM side.
That’s a really nice observation — I see that reading Israel has influenced you! One might take that idea a step further and say that the very idea of “determinism” is a conflation of fundamental physics and causation, if one thinks of determinism in terms of causal chains determined by the laws of physics.
Touche. I’m rather partial to it and it plays an important role in my thinking about the metaphysics of life but I grant that it’s status as a scientific concept is controversial.
Same here.
Bruce,
No, and this is crucial: Non-reductive physicalism does not negate the supervenience mapping. The mapping is intact; NRP just says that the higher level doesn’t reduce to the level upon which it supervenes.
As explained above, my argument holds even if NRP is true. The supervenience mapping, together with a fixed sequence of physical states, guarantees a fixed sequence of agential states.
Bruce,
That’s merely epistemic indeterminism, due solely to a lack of knowledge concerning the exact physical state. List mistakes it for genuine indeterminism.
In reality, both the physical states and the agential states are proceeding through fixed sequences. Even List’s toy model demonstrates this.
For true indeterminism to hold at the agential level, the system would have to be in two or more physical states simultaneously. That contradicts List’s assumption that there is one and only one physical state at any given time t.
phoodoo,
To check whether an instance of X has occurred, you look at the definition of X and compare it to what has actually happened.
To check whether an instance of throwing has occurred, you look at the definition of throwing and compare it to what has actually happened.
To check whether an instance of choosing has occurred, you look at the definition of choosing and compare it to what has actually happened.
And then, if you’re phoodoo, you proceed to fight the dictionary.