Determinism and Moral Agency

You can still have free will in determinism. You still make a choice, its just that those choices are based on rules/internal laws, they’re not just your whim in a flight of fancy.

As an aside, if there is no free will and we are just machines, then 1) the whole argument is meaningless, we’re just going to be doing what we’re always doing, and 2) morality is just something we are programmed to do (like moral judgments) that help us decide who is danger, who can be rehabilitated (if there is such a thing), and what the punishment should be for each crime.

If free will exists? Then obviously it has a meaning. And we’re pretty much in the same situation as above. Only difference really is the perspective.

I’m not sure if saying “you still make a choice” under determinism really gets at the core issue. Don’t you think the key question is whether you could have made a different choice under the exact same conditions? If the answer is no, then calling that process “free will” seems more like relabeling a process as a category than making a meaningful distinction.

When I say it might just be relabeling, I mean that under determinism a “free will choice” is what the process of prior causes resulting in an action feels like when experienced. Inputs go in, and an output follows. Calling that free will doesn’t seem to add anything unless it implies a different outcome was actually possible under identical conditions.

To.what you said about meaning, I don’t see determinism as making things meaningless. Systems still seek stability even as they are required to change at their most fundamental levels. People take in new information, update, and behave differently/change in order to stabilize (the more complicated the system, the more complicated the definition of "stabilize").Conversations like this are part of that process, shaping what happens next.

And on your last point, I’m not sure I see a strong difference either. If the process is the same under both views and only the perspective changes, then what is free will adding? Isn’t the disagreement really about what counts as acting “on your own”?

Do you think free will requires that you could have done otherwise under the same conditions, or is it enough that the decision comes from your internal processes, even if those are fully determined?

Morality and moral responsibility are concepts relative to concepts relative to the evolution of the organic processing unit...Which is to say, that morality and moral responsibility are made up for a reason....So one assumes that they are necessary, if one assumes that everything is necessary...But of course, there is no way of knowing if everything is necessary...Nonetheless, as an intelligent species we seem compelled to run with it.

And for sure, cause and effect.

Effect and cause?...Nah...Doesn't work, does it?

Are our choices fully determined by prior causes/environment/biology, and if so, how should we define morility/moral responsibility?

Consciousness has causal influence due to its content, not solely because of the physical aspects of its material correlates. A conscious state includes a desire or intention, it includes the ability to envision a future state and establish a strategy for attaining that state, it includes the ability to foresee the consequences of one's decisions, evaluate and choose among alternatives, and then act upon those choices. That makes it more than a purely physical state, it is a conscious state with reference to a future possibility, and no such reference is part of any purely physical state. Such conscious states can have causal effect to bring about further states for the sake of values and purposes, and intents. Values, purposes, and intents are not reducible to the purely physical state of the determinism argument.

If determinism is true, then every choice you make comes from causes you did not choose. Your biology, your environment, and your past experiences shape every decision.

Almost every argument against Free Will presupposes determinism without establishing determinism as a fact. Determinism is not a conclusion of science, on the contrary, it is directly contradicted by our two most successful scientific theories, Quantum Physics and Relativity Theory resoundingly refute the idea of "determinism".

The philosophical doctrine of determinism is nothing more than an archaic and failed concept that is unscientific and completely faith based. Initially it was nothing but a “thought experiment”, and in the two hundred years since, it has never made any credible advance beyond being an abstract theoretical “thought experiment”. By “any credible advance” I mean evidence, evidence that it is something more than a thought experiment, and there has been none whatsoever.

Two centuries ago, what Laplace proposed was, IF reality is completely circumscribed by Newtonian mechanics (and it isn’t), AND the motion of every particle in the universe can in principle be predicted from exact knowledge of its position, momentum, and the forces acting on it (and it can’t), AND everything occurred within a single, universal reference frame where an absolute Euclidean space and an absolute time that passes uniformly (it doesn’t), AND that as such, time and space are autonomous and independent aspects of reality (and they aren’t), THEN “theoretically”, all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by purely physical causes such that, there is one and only one possible effect for a particular cause or set of causes, (there isn’t).

The attempt to deny the self-evident experiential reality of human consciousness and the associated fact that we are morally responsible causal agents is a very extraordinary claim and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the unfounded and completely faith-based belief in determinism doesn’t constitute extraordinary evidence by any stretch of the imagination. It follows that there is no logical or scientific reason to think determinism is true.

If all of those factors were exactly the same, you would make the same choice every time. That means you could not have done otherwise in any real sense.

The strongest argument for the existence of free will is that we all observe it during every conscious moment, it is always a fundamental and significant part of our experiential reality, hence it is self-evident. Consequently, the denial of free will is necessarily a rejection of the very concept of empirical evidence, and the argument against Free Will becomes a rejection without “proof”, which eliminates induction as valid. These two aspects of the approach clearly reject the very basis of science and scientific knowledge, leaving nothing but detached abstractions that have nothing whatsoever to do with the real world. 

Philosophy is concerned with saying something which is true or significant, science with doing something which is effective. Science is about the real world, grounded in perceiving and doing, the argument against Free Will is completely abstract and invalidates both perception and doing, it is a complete rejection of science as valid, and philosophically it amounts to a rejection of the very basis of truth and significance.

In the end, there is no valid basis upon which the rejection of Free Will can be said to be true of reality.

If that is the case, then moral responsibility has to be redefined. Instead of saying people deserve blame or praise, we should focus on outcomes. Punishment should be about preventing harm and shaping behavior, not retribution. The goal becomes managing causes, not judging people as if they created themselves.

On the contrary, “If that is the case”, then there would be no reason to redefine moral responsibility, in fact, there would be no reasoning at all. The very idea of scientific or judicial objectivity, as well as of ever reaching philosophical truth, requires human beings to be free and responsible causal agents. Thus, if we're engaged in this enterprise of learning about truth and distinguishing it from falsehood, we are committed to the idea that human beings have the associated mental freedom to choose among options. Determinism renders a devotion to intellectual integrity meaningless, it renders morality, science, philosophy, truth as meaningless concepts. Reasoning and logic require freedom to choose among alternatives; determinism is just not compatible with objective truth seeking. If all beliefs are predetermined, then there is absolutely no justification for claiming that anything is true.

Do you think free will requires that you could have done otherwise under the same conditions, or is it enough that the decision comes from your internal processes, even if those are fully determined?

It is overly simplistic to define Free Will as the ability to have chosen differently under the same conditions, that is abstract and completely hypothetical. To meaningfully address the topic requires a deeper and more concrete understanding of what Free Will entails.

The real free will debate should be about whether we have the cognitive ability to conceive of future courses of action, deliberate about various reasons for choosing among them, determine our actions on the basis of such deliberation, and control our actions despite the presence of competing desires. If we do have these abilities, and we can exercise these cognitive abilities to act without our actions being unreasonably compromised by external pressure, then we possess free will and human beings are morally responsible causal agents.

Morality and moral responsibility are concepts relative to concepts relative to the evolution of the organic processing unit...Which is to say, that morality and moral responsibility are made up for a reason....So one assumes that they are necessary, if one assumes that everything is necessary...But of course, there is no way of knowing if everything is necessary...Nonetheless, as an intelligent species we seem compelled to run with it.

And for sure, cause and effect.

Effect and cause?...Nah...Doesn't work, does it?

We have been graced with a mind that can grasp the intellectual constructs of relativity and quantum theory and the proper response to possessing minds like ours is to use them. I just don’t think a mind capable of comprehending the counterintuitive world of subatomic physics and the cosmic realms of curved spacetime, should find something like morality as so incomprehensible that we should throw up our hands and declare that we just don’t have any real basis upon which we can figure out what we “ought” to do. That’s just nonsense.

Yes, I agree...Or, I currently tend to run with the idea of Universal purposefulness and therefore the relative purposefulness of an intelligent species "graced" with an organic processing unit...Morality is a concept thereof...Though morality is clearly a fluid concept relative to circumstance and necessity, so therefore not cohesively inherent.

Your choices do not determine the outcome. There are other factors involved independent of your decision.

Well yes, choice is a debateable concept.

Effects are resultant of a cause..."Factors" precede actions.

Absolute spontaneity would be chaotic.

So you are throwing away free choice as a solution?

I doubt free choice.

And a solution to what?

If you doubt free choice. Then the solution doesn’t matter.

Well, if you were offered two plates of poutine which would you choose the larger plate or the smaller one.

In our house, my wife would always have first choice and she would always take the small plate...Is this free choice or a preconditioned inevitability?

That way she gets to keep the car keys.

Nope they're on the shelf,

She can help herself.

You said she keeps it in her hand bag.

In the supermarket.

So it is out of your reach. That works too.

Yep, it's a working system.

She makes it work by getting you to follow her instructions. You are a great follower.

Team work Debs, team work,

Even people who sit on the side bench are part of the team.

Or the passenger seat.

Maybe sometimes the back seat.

That is if you are transporting the team.

Would need a bigger car for that...Our Suzuki can only carry four, but there isn't room for the bobsleigh.

The team spirit is weakened when you are in the car.

No drinking allowed before the match.

How does that effect the score.?

Stops the speed wobble.