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.
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.