Morality arguments from theists have always struck me as silly. If there was no god, can your dad really not think of any reason to not murder his neighbor? I can think of SEVERAL good reasons not to go and murder my neighbor. There you go.
The only thing that actually having a belief in god does is simply add one additional reason to a long list of reasons—fear of divine punishment (or conversely, seeking divine reward). ALL the other reasons STILL exist. I’m willing to bet that the divine punishment/reward is actually a very small percentage of the reason the theist chooses to take any particular action.
EVEN IF there was no reason not to murder your neighbor unless god existed and forbade it, your desire to have murdering your neighbor be wrong is hardly evidence that god exists. Concluding from the fact that you want something to be true that it is true is CLASSIC human error.
I tried slapping someone once as part of an argument over free will vs determinism. I thought I’d make the point that if my slapping them was deterministic than they didn’t have much cause to get mad at me for doing it. I couldn’t bring myself to do it! And all that with no belief in god. You don’t need god in order to want it to be wrong to murder your neighbor, I am living proof of that.
I tried slapping someone once as part of an argument over free will vs determinism. I thought I’d make the point that if my slapping them was deterministic than they didn’t have much cause to get mad at me for doing it.
Surely, in a deterministic world, a cause is precisely what they would have?
Surely, in a deterministic world, a cause is precisely what they would have?
Sure they would have a cause. But in a free will world, their cause for blaming would be that it was me who had caused their being slapped. In a deterministic world, their cause for blaming me would be a long sequence of events whose outcome was determined long before my consciousness even existed. In the free will world, the meaning of their words and actions would actually reflect the reality of the situation. In the deterministic world, they would seem to me to be puppets acting out a drama about agents with free-will whos lines they had not written and could not alter.
What do you mean by “free will”? What do you think of Eliezer’s solution to The Problem Of Free Will, which seems satisfactory to me: the past does not reach around the present to cause the future, it causes the future through the present. The decisions that you and I make are part of that chain of causation. The subjective sense of “free will” is just what it feels like to take an action without having knowledge of one’s internal machinery.
If you think that free will is something else, what?
The subjective sense of “free will” is just what it feels like to take an action without having knowledge of one’s internal machinery.
Having knowledge of this internal machinery won’t take away “free will”, and one isn’t usually just surprised with decisions selected by an introspectively inaccessible process that then have to be enacted, there is an option of reflecting on the output of any given opaque decision procedure and choosing something else. The relevant uncertainty is about what you will decide, not about the procedure that will be used to make the decision. If you know what you’ll decide, you have already decided; if you are still deciding, you don’t yet know what you’ll decide, and absent this knowledge, you are free to consider the possibilities.
And a punch on the arm is much easier to overlook than a slap. The point, had I been able to do it, would have been that my determinism-believing arguer had a POWERFUL intuition that I was the cause of his getting slapped, not some long sequence of dominoes falling against each other that started long before I was even conceived.
And a punch on the arm is much easier to overlook than a slap.
But a punch is much harder to overlook than a suppressed action!
The point, had I been able to do it, would have been that my determinism-believing arguer had a POWERFUL intuition that I was the cause of his getting slapped
I agree; a punch would have caused perhaps a less powerful intuition, but it would have caused the intuition you desired nonetheless.
I tried slapping someone once as part of an argument over free will vs determinism. I thought I’d make the point that if my slapping them was deterministic than they didn’t have much cause to get mad at me for doing it.
Does determinism necessarily imply lack of moral responsibility?
No, but try and formulate a deterministic moral responsibility that doesn’t feel wrong.
(Something like “This is Bob. Last year, physics dictated that his wife suffer a series of stab wounds from a knife that happened to be in his hands. Now, through no choice of my own, my body will administer a lethal injection to his body, so that his non-example will prove utterly unconvincing to anybody else who is already fated to murder their significant other and can do nothing about it.”)
Presence of a physical explanation doesn’t interfere with the more relevant decision theoretic explanation. The same fact can have multiple causes/explanations, in particular multiple causes each of which determines what happens. A sense of conflict between such different explanations that are not mutually exclusive is just a mistaken intuition you should get rid of.
That sounds to me like it’s mixing physical and volitional language and coming off weaker than it needs to be as a result. You could, for example, try defending some punitive measure by painting it as a consequence of a set of interpersonal rules (propagating, of course, by deterministic means) which end up producing a world containing less subjective misery than the counterfactual world in which they’d never arisen. Choice, or the lack thereof, needn’t enter into it.
Not that I rule out talking about choices within a deterministic worldview. It’s just that “choice” under that framework means something different than the vague libertarian free will voodoo that the naive view uses.
Sure, but then you effectively accept a world in which we are puppets acting out a play in which the STORY is that we have agency and responsibility and are therfore blamed and loved for our actions, while the author of the story is a mechanistic rube goldberg machine.
To the extent any of us are actually pursuing the truth and pursuing a way to live with other humans that respects the truth, we would want to abandon the drama and come back to stating what we actually believed rather than acting out things that looked like belief in order to achieve a goal.
you effectively accept a world in which we are puppets acting out a play in which the STORY is that we have agency and responsibility and are therfore blamed and loved for our actions
Be careful with words, their implicit connotations don’t necessarily form an argument. The word “story” suggests arbitrariness, imprecision, lack of fundamental import, all in contrast with the strengths of physical description. Yet there is no opposition between these framings, both and many more describe the same situation without mutual contradiction. A circle can be described both as “a bounded curve”, and as a set of pairs of real numbers (x,y) such that (x-a)^2+(y-b)^2=r^2.
The description in terms of physical law, for all its precision, is not shaped in a way usable for performing decision theoretic analysis of a situation. When you have a story that models a situation in terms of players, beliefs and intentions, you can produce useful conclusions and decisions. If you don’t know what to do with an extremely detailed physical description, you produce no conclusions or decisions. This is worse, so you should at least construct a story, and then see if you can do better by taking advantage of the additional data. Realizing that you don’t know how the stories work, or don’t know how to solve the problem on a more fundamental level, does not justify refusal to use the tool that works (and doesn’t commit you to only ever using this one tool).
If determinism removes agency from my consciousness, then it seems to make as much sense to blame me for things I do as it does to blame a tsunami for the things it does. I did believe at the time that determinism implied the actions I was involved with were as much under my control as were the actions of tsunami.
These days I exist in a state of Bayesian uncertainty on these matters.
Morality arguments from theists have always struck me as silly. If there was no god, can your dad really not think of any reason to not murder his neighbor? I can think of SEVERAL good reasons not to go and murder my neighbor. There you go.
The only thing that actually having a belief in god does is simply add one additional reason to a long list of reasons—fear of divine punishment (or conversely, seeking divine reward). ALL the other reasons STILL exist. I’m willing to bet that the divine punishment/reward is actually a very small percentage of the reason the theist chooses to take any particular action.
EVEN IF there was no reason not to murder your neighbor unless god existed and forbade it, your desire to have murdering your neighbor be wrong is hardly evidence that god exists. Concluding from the fact that you want something to be true that it is true is CLASSIC human error.
I tried slapping someone once as part of an argument over free will vs determinism. I thought I’d make the point that if my slapping them was deterministic than they didn’t have much cause to get mad at me for doing it. I couldn’t bring myself to do it! And all that with no belief in god. You don’t need god in order to want it to be wrong to murder your neighbor, I am living proof of that.
Surely, in a deterministic world, a cause is precisely what they would have?
Sure they would have a cause. But in a free will world, their cause for blaming would be that it was me who had caused their being slapped. In a deterministic world, their cause for blaming me would be a long sequence of events whose outcome was determined long before my consciousness even existed. In the free will world, the meaning of their words and actions would actually reflect the reality of the situation. In the deterministic world, they would seem to me to be puppets acting out a drama about agents with free-will whos lines they had not written and could not alter.
What do you mean by “free will”? What do you think of Eliezer’s solution to The Problem Of Free Will, which seems satisfactory to me: the past does not reach around the present to cause the future, it causes the future through the present. The decisions that you and I make are part of that chain of causation. The subjective sense of “free will” is just what it feels like to take an action without having knowledge of one’s internal machinery.
If you think that free will is something else, what?
Having knowledge of this internal machinery won’t take away “free will”, and one isn’t usually just surprised with decisions selected by an introspectively inaccessible process that then have to be enacted, there is an option of reflecting on the output of any given opaque decision procedure and choosing something else. The relevant uncertainty is about what you will decide, not about the procedure that will be used to make the decision. If you know what you’ll decide, you have already decided; if you are still deciding, you don’t yet know what you’ll decide, and absent this knowledge, you are free to consider the possibilities.
FWIW a punch on the arm is much easier than a slap.
And a punch on the arm is much easier to overlook than a slap. The point, had I been able to do it, would have been that my determinism-believing arguer had a POWERFUL intuition that I was the cause of his getting slapped, not some long sequence of dominoes falling against each other that started long before I was even conceived.
But a punch is much harder to overlook than a suppressed action!
I agree; a punch would have caused perhaps a less powerful intuition, but it would have caused the intuition you desired nonetheless.
Does determinism necessarily imply lack of moral responsibility?
No, but try and formulate a deterministic moral responsibility that doesn’t feel wrong.
(Something like “This is Bob. Last year, physics dictated that his wife suffer a series of stab wounds from a knife that happened to be in his hands. Now, through no choice of my own, my body will administer a lethal injection to his body, so that his non-example will prove utterly unconvincing to anybody else who is already fated to murder their significant other and can do nothing about it.”)
Presence of a physical explanation doesn’t interfere with the more relevant decision theoretic explanation. The same fact can have multiple causes/explanations, in particular multiple causes each of which determines what happens. A sense of conflict between such different explanations that are not mutually exclusive is just a mistaken intuition you should get rid of.
That sounds to me like it’s mixing physical and volitional language and coming off weaker than it needs to be as a result. You could, for example, try defending some punitive measure by painting it as a consequence of a set of interpersonal rules (propagating, of course, by deterministic means) which end up producing a world containing less subjective misery than the counterfactual world in which they’d never arisen. Choice, or the lack thereof, needn’t enter into it.
Not that I rule out talking about choices within a deterministic worldview. It’s just that “choice” under that framework means something different than the vague libertarian free will voodoo that the naive view uses.
Sure, but then you effectively accept a world in which we are puppets acting out a play in which the STORY is that we have agency and responsibility and are therfore blamed and loved for our actions, while the author of the story is a mechanistic rube goldberg machine.
To the extent any of us are actually pursuing the truth and pursuing a way to live with other humans that respects the truth, we would want to abandon the drama and come back to stating what we actually believed rather than acting out things that looked like belief in order to achieve a goal.
Be careful with words, their implicit connotations don’t necessarily form an argument. The word “story” suggests arbitrariness, imprecision, lack of fundamental import, all in contrast with the strengths of physical description. Yet there is no opposition between these framings, both and many more describe the same situation without mutual contradiction. A circle can be described both as “a bounded curve”, and as a set of pairs of real numbers (x,y) such that (x-a)^2+(y-b)^2=r^2.
The description in terms of physical law, for all its precision, is not shaped in a way usable for performing decision theoretic analysis of a situation. When you have a story that models a situation in terms of players, beliefs and intentions, you can produce useful conclusions and decisions. If you don’t know what to do with an extremely detailed physical description, you produce no conclusions or decisions. This is worse, so you should at least construct a story, and then see if you can do better by taking advantage of the additional data. Realizing that you don’t know how the stories work, or don’t know how to solve the problem on a more fundamental level, does not justify refusal to use the tool that works (and doesn’t commit you to only ever using this one tool).
If determinism removes agency from my consciousness, then it seems to make as much sense to blame me for things I do as it does to blame a tsunami for the things it does. I did believe at the time that determinism implied the actions I was involved with were as much under my control as were the actions of tsunami.
These days I exist in a state of Bayesian uncertainty on these matters.