I don’t understand what that Korsgaard quote is trying to say.
Saying that you shouldn’t do something because it’s preordained whether you do it or not is a very confused way of looking at things.
I didn’t say that. I said that, when making a choice, you shouldn’t consider, in your set of possible worlds, possible worlds in which you can’t make that choice.
It’s certainly not as confused a way of looking at things as choosing to believe that you can’t choose what to believe.
I should have said you shouldn’t try to consider those worlds. If you are in f, then it may be that you will consider such possible worlds; and there’s no shouldness about it.
“But”, you might object, “what should you do if you are a computer program, running in a deterministic language on deterministic hardware?”
The answer is that in that case, you do what you will do. You might adopt the view that you have no free will, and you might be right.
The 2-sentence version of what I’m saying is that, if you don’t believe in free will, you might be making an error that you could have avoided. But if you believe in free will, you can’t be making an error that you could have avoided.
I don’t understand what that Korsgaard quote is trying to say.
In the context of the larger paper, the most charitable way of interpreting her (IMO) is that whether we have free will or not, we have the subjective impression of it, this impression is simply not going anywhere, and so it makes no sense to try to figure out how a lack of free will ought to influence our behavior, because then we’ll just sit around waiting for our lack of free will to pick us up out of our chair and make us water our houseplants and that’s not going to happen.
I said that, when making a choice, you shouldn’t consider, in your set of possible worlds, possible worlds in which you can’t make that choice.
What if we’re in a possible world where we can’t choose not to consider those worlds? ;)
It’s certainly not as confused a way of looking at things as choosing to believe that you can’t choose what to believe.
“Choosing to believe that you can’t choose what to believe” is not a way of looking at things; it’s a possible state of affairs, in which one has a somewhat self-undermining and false belief. Now, believing that one can choose to believe that one cannot choose what to believe is a way of looking at things, and might even be true. There is some evidence that people can choose to believe self-undermining false things, so believing that one could choose to believe a particular self-undermining false thing which happens to have recursive bearing on the choice to believe it isn’t so far out.
I don’t understand what that Korsgaard quote is trying to say.
I didn’t say that. I said that, when making a choice, you shouldn’t consider, in your set of possible worlds, possible worlds in which you can’t make that choice.
It’s certainly not as confused a way of looking at things as choosing to believe that you can’t choose what to believe.
I should have said you shouldn’t try to consider those worlds. If you are in f, then it may be that you will consider such possible worlds; and there’s no shouldness about it.
“But”, you might object, “what should you do if you are a computer program, running in a deterministic language on deterministic hardware?”
The answer is that in that case, you do what you will do. You might adopt the view that you have no free will, and you might be right.
The 2-sentence version of what I’m saying is that, if you don’t believe in free will, you might be making an error that you could have avoided. But if you believe in free will, you can’t be making an error that you could have avoided.
In the context of the larger paper, the most charitable way of interpreting her (IMO) is that whether we have free will or not, we have the subjective impression of it, this impression is simply not going anywhere, and so it makes no sense to try to figure out how a lack of free will ought to influence our behavior, because then we’ll just sit around waiting for our lack of free will to pick us up out of our chair and make us water our houseplants and that’s not going to happen.
What if we’re in a possible world where we can’t choose not to consider those worlds? ;)
“Choosing to believe that you can’t choose what to believe” is not a way of looking at things; it’s a possible state of affairs, in which one has a somewhat self-undermining and false belief. Now, believing that one can choose to believe that one cannot choose what to believe is a way of looking at things, and might even be true. There is some evidence that people can choose to believe self-undermining false things, so believing that one could choose to believe a particular self-undermining false thing which happens to have recursive bearing on the choice to believe it isn’t so far out.