If you do NOT believe in some form of compatibilism, you have no expectation that this question changes anything—asking it is just what you do, and responding is just what some of us do, with no motivation-level abstractions to the causality. Likewise, your use of the term “responsible” is meaningless—there’s no way to change any behaviors regarding whether an adult, child, or insane person is punished. There are noises coming out of the judge’s mouth that claim it’s in response to a crime, but really it’s just what is preordained.
In other words, your question assumes some form of reasoning is possible over behaviors.
I also try to reason over behaviors, and it feels a lot like I make decisions. It may or may not be true, and I don’t fully understand the mechanism of branching (in fact, I don’t even start to understand). But if it’s wrong, it doesn’t matter what I believe, and if there IS such a mechanism, then I will experience better outcomes if I take motivation into account.
I mostly agree but partly disagree with one point: even in a fully deterministic world without compatibilism, behaviour can be both predetermined and meaningful responses to previous actions in the world. It’s just not meaningful to say that it could have been different.
It’s also still possible to observe and reason about behaviour in such a world, and test a model about whether or not an agent’s behaviour changed after punishment or not, and form policies and act on the results (it all adds up to normality after all). Strong determinism doesn’t mean nothing changes, it just means that it couldn’t have changed in any other way.
If you do NOT believe in some form of compatibilism, you have no expectation that this question changes anything—asking it is just what you do, and responding is just what some of us do, with no motivation-level abstractions to the causality. Likewise, your use of the term “responsible” is meaningless—there’s no way to change any behaviors regarding whether an adult, child, or insane person is punished. There are noises coming out of the judge’s mouth that claim it’s in response to a crime, but really it’s just what is preordained.
In other words, your question assumes some form of reasoning is possible over behaviors.
I also try to reason over behaviors, and it feels a lot like I make decisions. It may or may not be true, and I don’t fully understand the mechanism of branching (in fact, I don’t even start to understand). But if it’s wrong, it doesn’t matter what I believe, and if there IS such a mechanism, then I will experience better outcomes if I take motivation into account.
I mostly agree but partly disagree with one point: even in a fully deterministic world without compatibilism, behaviour can be both predetermined and meaningful responses to previous actions in the world. It’s just not meaningful to say that it could have been different.
It’s also still possible to observe and reason about behaviour in such a world, and test a model about whether or not an agent’s behaviour changed after punishment or not, and form policies and act on the results (it all adds up to normality after all). Strong determinism doesn’t mean nothing changes, it just means that it couldn’t have changed in any other way.