I would add: I feel much worse since losing my “faith” in free will. And I may even be behaving more poorly. At least my language describing my behavior makes me sound like a worse guy, more amoral, more calculating. Of course it just may be my signalling that has gone downhill. It could be we need free will so that we can signal to the other humans that we are willing to drink the same kool-aid they drink, and important thing to know when taking collective action.
At least my language describing my behavior makes me sound like a worse guy, more amoral, more calculating.
This seems like a strange result. Being a ‘worse guy’, ‘calculating’ at least, and ‘being amoral’ if we regard that as a privative term, are all terms we would use only for things we generally treat as having free will. No one talks this way about things we all accept are governed entirely by physical law, like rocks.
Nothing obligates you to describe your behavior to others in language that makes them reluctant to trust you, even if you’re a compatibilist. Admittedly, if you genuinely aren’t trustworthy, then doing so is in others’ best interests, since it causes them not to trust you… but if you’re motivated to act in others’ best interests in the first place, it’s not clear to me in what sense you aren’t trustworthy.
OTOH, if we’re talking about the way you describe yourself to yourself, it may be worth asking whether your “worse-guy” self-description is more or less accurate than the less amoral, less calculating, better guy you previously made yourself sound like.
I would add: I feel much worse since losing my “faith” in free will. And I may even be behaving more poorly. At least my language describing my behavior makes me sound like a worse guy, more amoral, more calculating. Of course it just may be my signalling that has gone downhill. It could be we need free will so that we can signal to the other humans that we are willing to drink the same kool-aid they drink, and important thing to know when taking collective action.
This seems like a strange result. Being a ‘worse guy’, ‘calculating’ at least, and ‘being amoral’ if we regard that as a privative term, are all terms we would use only for things we generally treat as having free will. No one talks this way about things we all accept are governed entirely by physical law, like rocks.
A Christian priest might say that you are in mortal danger of losing your soul.
A Buddhist priest might tell this story.
Nothing obligates you to describe your behavior to others in language that makes them reluctant to trust you, even if you’re a compatibilist. Admittedly, if you genuinely aren’t trustworthy, then doing so is in others’ best interests, since it causes them not to trust you… but if you’re motivated to act in others’ best interests in the first place, it’s not clear to me in what sense you aren’t trustworthy.
OTOH, if we’re talking about the way you describe yourself to yourself, it may be worth asking whether your “worse-guy” self-description is more or less accurate than the less amoral, less calculating, better guy you previously made yourself sound like.