The whole topic abounds with paradox but I am talking about one very specific one.
I put “facts” in scare quotes because, while a lot of people believe them to be true, I don’t. I think determinism is compatible with free will - but that’s neither here nor there; for the purposes of this thread, consider them true.
I’ll go first.
It seems obvious to me, that - if it’s true that we have no free will - our justice system is a mirage. How can we hold people responsible for a crime if they had no part in choosing to commit the crime?
It seems equally obvious that knowledge of this “fact” would not influence our choice to commit crimes - because we have no choice in whether to commit crimes!
We would also have no choice in whether to keep these dangerous facts a secret - because we have no choice, remember!
I am hoping that a strict determinist will show up to point out the error in my thinking.
If this was true they might not have chosen to commit the crime, but they are also incapable of choosing anything. The line of reasoning that would clear them of moral responsibility for their actions would also make simply eliminating them no more controversial than replacing a worn gear.
Yes, but neither do we have any choice whether to hold them responsible.
I imagine that if everybody in society adopted the position of the hard determists, things would probably stay pretty much the same. Criminals might not be held morally responsible for their actions, but it would remain in the best interests of society to remove its more dangerous elements from its midsts. I suspect in the hypothetical world described at the beginning of this thread, we would still execute people, imprison people, and so forth. We just wouldn’t say “shame on you.” I mean, it might be silly to hold you “responsible” for stealing my goat cart because your act of less-than-grand theft had to happen. However, the unfortunate configuration of your brain and all the other factors that led to your stealing my ride would probably cause you to do other acts detrimental to society in the future. Or something like that.
As for morality . . . I’m not exactly sure what that would be in a world without people who believed in free will (that is, a world where people could walk around and honestly believe that they generally “could have done otherwise” in most situations). I suppose there would still be rules and conventions and whatnot . . . it would probably just be recognized that these things were determined to have been imposed upon us and that they would help determine our actions. Or so I suspect.
I’m not a sociologist or philosopher. I am a determinist, though, at least most of the time. What I’m not, admittedly, is an expert in the arguments for or against my position, and some of them confuse me a little. But I suppose it could be no other way.
I think its the worst of both worlds.
Things are not really deterministic at a large scale because of quantum effects at the lower scale.
Free choice is an illusion.
So, you don’t really have any choice, but nobody can really know how things will turn out either.
If the hard determinists are right, it wouldn’t matter what everyone else thinks, because their actions are determined. So there would be no need to fear the “truth” leaking out.
Unless you are not a hard determinist.
That’s a more succinct statement of the problem.
I disagree; in fact our moral and legal codes are predicated on determinism being true; actions and consequences; punishments and rewards; all are very deterministic. They presume that actions will lead to predictable reactions. “Free will” is a meaningless and irrelevant concept, too incoherent to base anything on. Except for “compatibilist free will”, which is really just rebranded determinism.
There’s another layer though. If hard determinism leads to a changed society it will because people accept determinism. That will be the input. If it doesn’t lead to a changed society, then maybe it’s because people didn’t accept it for whatever reason – perhaps the input of people arguing that determinism will lead to a changed society. If you believe in determinism, but you also think society shouldn’t believe in it because it’s dangerous, then it would still make sense to argue against it because that would be one of the inputs and you can’t tell the future. That’s how the pre-determined flowchart in the brain would look like for such a person.
These sort of discussions always remind me when religious people say that if society stopped believing in god the foundation of morality would crumble and we’d all start killing and raping each other. If humans are irrational products of evolution with inborn systems of morality for functioning in their social groups and it is shaped by genetics, conditions in the womb, the haphazard way the brain is put together which isn’t influenced by genetics, and the environment you find yourself in then it doesn’t matter either way because it is nearly impossible to shake the belief in free will. We have no free will to not believe in it because it is one of the main features of being human.
I don’t believe in free will but I live my day to day life as if I and others do and I don’t see how I could otherwise. I don’t think anyone goes about acting as if other people are heartless robot slaves unless said person has severe mental problems.
The whole ideal of a corrective system of justice is to provide an environment which alters the deterministic outcome of an individual’s future thoughts and actions. Even an incarceration system which neglects this is still useful, according to determinism, for preventing further crime.
Morality may be determined, but obviously necessary for society to function. People are still held ‘morally’ responsible as agents without free will, in the sense that their deterministic actions affect the deterministic environment, and it benefits society to control this.
As others have said, in a deterministic system, punishment and reward serve as determinants introduced to influence behavior in the desired way. Here is the philosopher Walter Stace on this topic:
Okay, this was written during the 50s, in the era of corporal punishment. I guess today you would give your kid a time out. But the principle is the same.
If criminals have no choice in whether or not they can commit their crimes, why should we assume judges have any choice in whether or not they can sentence criminals to prison? If the universe is deterministic, both criminals and judges have to carry out their roles.
But if judges have a choice about whether or not to hold criminals responsible for their actions, then criminals must also have a choice about whether or not to commit those actions.
You see this argument often from people who argue for free will but it makes no sense. You just aren’t thinking big enough about the scenario. A more accurate statement would be something more like, “we have no choice in whether to commit crimes given our current psychological state and past experiences”. Obviously living is a society that doesn’t hold people accountable for their actions changes both of those things and so what you thought would happen before is out the window.
It’s in the same league as saying catching a ball won’t stop it from hitting the ground because the ball has a deterministic behavior of falling as far as possible.
It DOES matter what people think, that’s one of the things that determines actions. Determinism doesn’t (necessarily) remove responsibility, it just explains where it comes from. Responsbility might actually require determinism, otherwise actions would not follow from your thoughts.
We would also have no choice in whether or not to continue to prosecute and punish those who had no choice in committing the crimes they committed.
The OP had no choice in whether or not to post the question that started this thread, and you had no choice but to answer as you did.
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Ultimately causal determinism is simply wrong wherever it is interpreted as being incompatible with volition. The problem is not determinism per se but rather the false binary of positing prior causality and choice as incompatible polar opposites. They are two different ways of viewing the same picture. When you look at abstractions in two different ways you can perceive two different things. But (analogy time, if I may) just as light can be viewed & treated as a wave phenomenon and as a particle phenomenon, and waves are not particles and vice versa, yet neither view’s correctness makes the other actually wrong, so it is with determinism and free will.
It is also worth keeping in mind that both models are, in fact, models, they are ways we have adopted to explicate the universe and our experience thereof, they are mental explanatory constructs that, much like any theory does, attempt to clarify for us the meaning of the things that we know, and the relationships between those observables. To paint a picture by connecting the dots. But the subject matter itself, in the case of these two models, is more self-referential than is the case in most theoretical models: to the extent that (and in the sense that) determinism is an accurate model, there exist deterministic reasons for us to harbor both a model of reality called “determinism” and a model of reality called “free will” — as witnessed by the fact that we do so; and to the extent that (and in the sense that) free will is an accurate model, it becomes similarly apparent that we have created and do utilize these two models — because we could, and because we wanted to.
Dennett has gone to some lengths giving a justification for assigning moral responsibility in a situation in which an agent, in any given situation, is incapable of acting differently than he does – though, somewhat confusingly, he considers this a situation in which the agent nevertheless has ‘free will’, his argument being essentially that there’s no meaning to the concept of being able to act differently in the same situation, since there’s no such thing as the (exact) same situation; there are only very similar situations. Consider a golfer missing a putt: he might say something like: “Nine times out of ten, I would have sunk the ball.” However, there isn’t ten times the same situation; there are ten similar situations, in nine of which the golfer might indeed have made the putt. This then is a way to assess the capability of the golfer: anybody making that putt nine times out of ten is a better golfer than somebody only making it four times. Thus, Dennett coins the term evitability to characterise this ability – the ability to evade the undesirable outcome, loosely speaking. To the better golfer, the undesired outcome of missing the putt is more evitable than to the worse one.
Similarly, in a moral context, to a ‘honest’ person, unlawful or immoral acts might be more evitable than to a criminal; and the point of the judicial system is to raise this evitability.
I think where Kevlaw has gone wrong is that he’s equating determinism with fatalism. He seems to think that the idea of determinism would be that someone may be fated to, say, kill his neighbor in the future, and no amount of inputs into his thought process will have an effect on his decision.
But that’s not determinism, which is the idea that the decision his brain makes at any point in time is a function of material things, the structure of the brain and all the inputs ever made into it. If you inject new inputs into the thought process, then the brain will make different decisions than it otherwise would have. In this model, the justice system is supposed to act as an input into that deterministic brain to have an influence on the decision it makes for future actions.
To answer the OP going into deep philosophy, determinism is the notion that the world controls your behavior. (Assuming for the moment that the inside of your head is also part of the world.) That being the case, it should be obvious that if the world were different, then your behavior would be different. That is, if you build a dam across a river it stops flowing downhill, or at least won’t flow the same way.
The presence or absence of laws is such a dam.
Remember, determinism doesn’t remove emotions and thoughts; it just presumes them to be somehow functional. Suppose for a moment you have a deterministic person who doesn’t like pain, but likes apples. (Assume he has no other relevent preferences.) Now, consider two universes:
There is an apple cart, with a man who desires payment, but can do nothing if you just steal the apples.
There is an apple cart, with a man who desires payment, and who will club you to within an inch of your life if you try to steal from him.
In universe 1, the deterministic person’s preferences would cause him to steal apples, because his deterministic brain would algorithmically determine that to be the optimal behavior. He is ‘fated’ to steal; he can act no other way.
But in universe 2, the exact same deterministic person would not steal apples, because, despite the fact that he’s using the same deterministic brain, the different environment would produce a different result. He is ‘fated’ not to steal, because he doesn’t want to endure the consequences.
So clearly systems of justice can still be functional in a deterministic world (unsuprisingly, since they’re functional in ours). As for morality - what is morality? If it’s a list of behaviors that will tend to lead to positive results for onesself and society, then yeah, those would still work too. Why wouldn’t they?
That last post should have started “To answer the OP without going into deep philosophy”. Determinism made me mess up; it’s not my fault!
Clarifying some points:
-I understand the distinction between fatalism and determinism quite well.
-I am not a strict determinist.
-I believe that determism is compatible with free will (I said as much in the OP).
But I don’t think any of that is relevant to my question.
My question is for those people who believe that we do not have free will (I am not one of them). I was prompted by two separate threads (in comments on blogs) where the “no free will” people were claiming that it would be dangerous for society to acknowledge this (because our systes of justice and morality would break down). That belief struck me as wrongheaded.
My understanding is similar to Begbert’s (justice is compatible with determinism) and AHunter’s (free will is compatible with determinism).
I brought my question here because a) SDMB is a little more civilized. b) the other forum had already decided that anyone who didn’t agree with them was an idiot and a dualist. I was hoping to find a civilized “no free will” person here who could answer my question.
It’s hard to have a debate when everyone agrees, I guess. Sorry!