Free Will Zombies Should Be Punished

Great Debates
1

Preface
This thread was inspired by a sub-discussion within the Free Will - Does it exist? thread.

For the purposes of this thread, “free will” refers to what I think of as compatibilist free will: the experience of feeling like we could have done other than we did. This is not an argument for or against the existence of libertarian free will: the actual ability to have done otherwise. The assumption here is that libertarian free will does not exist.

Suppose a friend asks to borrow $100 from you. You might weigh various factors: How good of a friend is this? How likely is it I’ll be repaid? Or is that important? Why does the friend need this money? What will be the impact on my financial situation? But there is a feeling that you are free to decide on either course. We feel, even if the analysis of the factors points to one direction, we could go in the other. After we’ve loaned the money or not, we feel as though it was possible to have done otherwise. This is the “free will” we experience.

Free Will Zombies
A free will zombie (or fw-zombie) is a person just like you or me except they do not experience this feeling of free will. Obviously this is a riff on the philosophical zombie (or p-zombie) concept. However, unlike a p-zombie, an fw-zombie does have the same degree of consciousness, awareness, emotion, intention, imagination, intelligence, and failings as we do. They just lack the free will experience. They would be otherwise indistinguishable from us.

Actually, just to make this thought experiment a little easier, let’s say that fw-zombies do have an extra degree of awareness. They can, if asked, tell you exactly the factors that went into their decision, what weights each factor was given and what the final score was for each option they considered.

Fred
If an fw-zombie, let’s call him Fred, was presented with a friend’s request to borrow money, he’d take just as long to decide as you or I. Along the way, Fred could tell you which way he was leaning as the various factors were gathered and evaluated. He makes his calculation and acts upon it. He has no sense of being able to do otherwise. Doing otherwise would be a completely nonsensical concept to Fred. He is, however, just as emotional about his decision. He may doubt his calculations or that he didn’t consider all the factors he could have. He has the same idea as us of what the world would look like if the calculation had gone the other way. But Fred has absolutely no sense that he could have done other than what the calculations dictated.

Murder!
Like you and me, Fred and all the other fw-zombies are opposed to murder. Fred knows murder is illegal and feels it is immoral just like anyone else. He’s fully aware of the death penalty for murder (in his jurisdiction) and that’s given a very large weight in his calculations. He wants to live and be unfettered in doing whatever his calculations drive him to do. This too is given a very large weight in his calculations.

Unfortunately, as is too often the case with non-zombie people, Fred succumbs to some dire circumstances. One day he’s hit with an idea that he should murder Vic. The reasons could be money, jealousy, hatred, who knows – the same reasons anyone else might commit murder – it’s not really important. Fred adds up all the pros and cons that occur to him at that moment and the answer comes out murder. Fred has acquired the intention to kill and he does, in fact, then go on to murder Vic.

Fred might later doubt his calculations. He might worry that he didn’t consider everything he might have. But to the question of “Given the same circumstances, would you do it again?” Fred is remorseless. “Of course I would do it again, that’s what the answer was” Fred would cry.

Should we Punish Fred?
If a tree fell on your car and I asked you if the tree should be punished, you’d look at me like I was crazy. We don’t punish the tree because trees have no free will. It didn’t choose to damage the car. The tree couldn’t have done otherwise and neither could Fred.

Since we’ve already eliminated libertarian free will, no murderer could actually have done otherwise and certainly not Fred. Is Fred’s total lack of an “I could have done otherwise” experience reason enough to not punish him? I claim it is not. Fred should be punished.

A punishment that is not enforced is not a deterrent. Punishments that are enforced are not always a sufficient deterrent but they’re much better than nothing (for both fw-zombie and non-zombie alike). The feeling of being able to have done otherwise is not relevant. We can create conditions that tend to produce the outcomes we desire. It does not matter that our compatibilist version of free will, though a real experience, is just an illusion of libertarian free will.

It is in this sense that I [post=9538489]asked[/post] “Is punishing a person really all that different from leveeing a river that floods?”

2

And that’s the answer. If there is a difference at all between fw-zombies and those with fw, it would be that we should punish the fw-zombies even more, because they don’t really count any more than we would put down an aggressive dog.

I believe that in actuality, there is a continuum of self-awareness from said dogs upwards to higher birds and primates and then to humans, but whether we call this “free will” is a semantic argument. I also think that we should severely punish those who transgress ethics, even sometimes more harshly than the transgression. I do not want to see this enacted in the real world, however, because of the high likelihood of false positives.

3

Yeah, I have wondered about this idea when arguing with staunch materialist/atheists.

4

This is funny; I published an article several years ago arguing that a community that abandoned the notion of free will would end up indistinguishable from one that didn’t, because they would be forced (for consequentialist reasons) to adopt a whole set of practices entirely analogous to blaming, punishing, holding responsible, absolving from responsibility, etc. I’d link to the paper, but that would be tantamount to announcing my identity to the internet, so I guess I won’t.

But one point is significant to the more general debate over punishment and free will: what reason would we have for not punishing the fw zombie? If you are a determinist, then you admit that incentives/disincentives will alter the behavior of people, and so punishing and rewarding them can alter behavior. So there are consequentialist reasons for punishing and rewarding. The only argument against doing so is a moral argument–it is unfair to hold people responsible when they are fw zombies. But this argument cuts both ways–if they can’t be held responsible for what they do, neither can we be held responsible for punishing them!

5

I’m not sure about the staunch part, but I guess I fall into the materialist/atheist camp. I would say Fred should be punished. I’m not crazy about the term “punishment” because it has connotations of some kind of moral retribution based on an abstract but absolute standard of right and wrong. I think the legal system should be based on more pragmatic principles.

You’ve said that Fred weighed several factors before deciding to commit his crime. One of those factors may have been the possibility of a legal penalty. Remove that penalty, and you’ve given him one less reason not to commit the crime.

On the other hand, I don’t think deterrence is as big a factor in homicide as some people think. In a crime of passion, the criminal likely isn’t thinking much about the consequences. And the kind of psychopath who would coldly and methodically plan to kill someone else quite possibly thinks they’re going to get away with it or doesn’t fear punishment. In that case, putting them away protects society from future crimes.

6

If a tree fell on my car and you asked me if the tree should be punished, I’d look at you like you were crazy, but only because my definition of ‘punisment’ only includes actions that are not calibrated to improve the situation at hand. The tree has already fallen, and it’s damage is already done. Punishing it would be like punishing a dead man.

Now, let’s take another situation. Suppose you have a garage door that has this mechanical quirk in its functioning that causes it to close when something crosses the “something’s in the way” sensor, rather than the opposite. Then suppose that I drove through that, and it guillotined my car. If you looked at me and said, “Hmm, my garage door’s misbehaving, do you think we should try and make it shape up?”, I would not only not think you’re crazy, I’d think you stating the obvious. The thing’s behavior is bad, so we need to do something to alter its behavior. Which is the whole* purpose of punishment.

So, yeah, it makes total sense to “punish” fw-zombies; the goal is to correct their behavior so they don’t cause similar problems in the future. Naturally the “punishment” is tailored to the subject and the situation; your average person can’t be corrected by replacing a malfunctioning widgit, so we use indirect methods like chewing out, deprivation, and incarceration, but it’s the same idea in principle.

*There actually is one other reason to punish somebody - to make ourselves feel better via the venting of emotions. And in that, punishing the tree by kicking it, cursing at it, or flailing at it wildly with a chainsaw all make perfect rational sense.)

7

I’m not completely sure how consistent this world is, but I’d have to say that he deserves the punishment. FOA, in my opinion, the purpose of punishment isn’t as a deterent (though it may or may not have a deterent effect), instead, it is as a sort of moral, human-enforced concept of karma; that is, it is not justice unless and unjust act has been rectified.

That said, obviously, the only way I can see this sort of world being logically consistent is if the punishment is ALWAYS carried out, otherwise no one is punishable, and laws are meaningless, which completely changes the weighting formula, such that I couldn’t see anybody paying any heed to the laws.

IOW, considering that the punishment, or expectation of punishment was likely part of the calculation, one would have to logically conclude that the punishment MUST be performed, otherwise the risk will go down, and more murders will be commited.

8

That seems harsh given that…an fw-zombie does have the same degree of consciousness, awareness, emotion, intention, imagination, intelligence, and failings as we do.andLike you and me, Fred and all the other fw-zombies are opposed to murder. Fred knows murder is illegal and feels it is immoral just like anyone else. He’s fully aware of the death penalty for murder (in his jurisdiction) and that’s given a very large weight in his calculations. He wants to live and be unfettered in doing whatever his calculations drive him to do. This too is given a very large weight in his calculations.

9

I think we’re pretty much in agreement. The word punishment does seem to cover a variety of notions. I think Fred’s case is a good guidepost in focusing on a most useful meaning.

10

It is the view of punishment as something other than deterrent that strikes me as inconsistent in a reality without libertarian free will.

11

Forgot to add…

I’m not sure way you’ve capitalized ALWAYS. If one in every ten murders went unpunished would there be no deterrent at all? How about one in every thousand, million, or billion murders. Isn’t there still some deterrent effect even with imperfect enforcement?

12

Exactly. What is being done is, in effect, removing the idea of who is responsible? and replacing it with what should we do about it? The word responsibility might still be a handy shorthand but it loses its undeserved “objective” status.

13

I’d like to read that if you ever get the chance to anonymize it or copy portions here.

14

In many respects, it is identical. Leveeing a river presupposes causation: it presupposes you can introduce some causal factor that will alter the behavior of the river. And so punishing a person presupposes causal determinism, that you can introduce some factor that will alter the behavior of the person in a predictable way. The philosopher Walter Stace makes the same point about punishment in his book Religion and the Modern Mind.

15

This scares me, that you consider fw-zombies something to kill with impunity, since very likely the only difference between a FW-zombie and you and I is that he’s more aware of his mental workings. The reason we don’t defend ourselves with similar arguments to the fw-zombie’s is merely that we’re ignorant of our own determinism, not that we don’t have it. The way I see it, is if he doesn’t ‘count’, neither do I.

You put a dog down because it can’t be taught. The zombie is as smart as we are.

And this scares me because it makes justice into vengeance.

16

While I don’t agree with punishing a fw-zombie any more than anyone else… I do agree that they should be punished.

The future imagined deterrence adds to the calculation and the fw-zombie will arrive at a sometimes different decision as their calculation of pros and cons (odds) will shift.

As stated in one of these threads… a tree can’t learn. A zombie can.

17

I would argue actually that a person with this ability must be a FW zombie.

I agree with you that the idea of punishment is certainly just as silly for Fred as it would be for the tree, absent the deterrence factor. A FW zombie can’t act any other way, and they know it, so it would be cruel and unusual punishment on top of that.

Yes. Because deterrence remains.

Imagine that Fred lives in a world that has no punishment for crimes. When he goes to make that decision to kill, that’s one less factor on the con side. That he might be caught and punished (if he cares about that) might be the one point that stops him. Obviously we want that factor to exist for him, and thus it makes sense to create it. Thus we have justification for punishing people other than Fred, and Fred himself when we need to deter others or in the future.

It’s worth keeping in mind that though Fred knows the factors, he only knows them from his perspective. And the mind is pretty damn good at keeping us from remembering bad things exactly - we can’t remember pain to the true extent that it occurred, and for good reason. Though Fred has all the ideas of punishment in his mind, they probably don’t match up to reality in their unpleasantness. We need punishment as an active deterrence because without reinforcement Fred (and non-FW-zombies) will think “Well, you know, prison wouldn’t be so bad”.

18

We have two pairings of action and result. One is the establishment of a penalty for murder/fewer murders. The other is the establishment of levees/fewer floods. I think you’re too caught up on the mechanisms in the middle being different. Regardless, free will is clearly irrelevant in both cases. The river for obvious reasons, and murderers as demonstrated by Fred.

I should point out that Fred, and his ilk, do not process more factors than you or I would. Neither do they weigh them significantly differently than we do. I only meant that they are conscious of all the factors that they have where some of ours may be subconscious. Fw-zombies do not have perfect knowledge of the Universe and their perception and memory are subject to the same quirks as ours. They are simply us minus the experience of feeling we could have done otherwise. The reporting plus probably isn’t necessary for my main point so maybe it can be omitted for the time being.

19

Fair dos, PC.

Well, I would say the difference lies in that the leveeing is a pretty good analogy for lifetime imprisonment; it doesn’t deter things from occurring again, it just halts their ability to do it again. Curbing opportunity rather than want to do it. But other rivers can’t look on and think “Oh, shit, better not flood or i’ll get levee’d”. And being leveed isn’t a “bad” thing for rivers; should the waters drain and the levee get removed, it’ll just flood the next year. Once Fred is released, though, he knows what will happen in the future and the thought of the deterrent is enough that we curb his wanting to kill, rather than needing to curb his ability to.

20

I don’t see the levee as analogous to lifetime imprisonment at all. When a river isn’t flooding the levee has no effect on the river’s usual behavior. A long-lived levee is more analogous to the penalty for murder remaining long-lived on the books. (And like penalties, levees are not absolute barriers. They are merely factors that can be overcome by larger, opposing factors.) With every potential of the undesired behaviors, the penalty and levee are there to alter that behavior. A potential murderer foreseeing the punishment is different from a physical waterproof barrier but they’re both just middle mechanisms in the concept of controlling behavior.

I think S&I may have expressed the larger idea more clearly in post [post=9541618]#14[/post] than I have in my attempts.