If there’s no free will then we have no choice over anything we do. We “can’t avoid” meting out retribution.
Atheism doesn’t necessarily imply chaos. You can believe in causality without believing in a deity. And you can also believe in causality, without a deity, and also believe in free will.
And more to the OP’s point, if punishment is invalid, so is reward. No reward of money or pride or fame for doing your job well. No reward of love or admiration or heaven for being a good person.
When you open a debate with a philosophical hypothesis requiring a WHOLE LOT of justification and present it as a given, it’s a bit irrational. But, I get it, you requested we treat it as a given for the purpose of the debate. Therefore, it’s rationality is still a matter of perspective. From my perspective, it’s irrational.
You premises exclude not only your conclusion, but the whole debate.
You cannot have good or bad without free will. If you have no choice, everything is ethically the same.
You are basically saying, if we assume that humans cannot make choices, what choice should we make in this situation?
Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to address the OP in full, and won’t any time in the foreseeable future, but would like to point out that the answer to the question depends on which form of determinism one accepts. If one accepts hard determinism, philosophers and ethicists pretty much universally agree the answer is “no,” we can’t defend retribution. (Deterrence is another matter, though tricky.) If one accepts some form of compatibilism, retribution becomes defensible, at least in some cases (when yes and when no depending on the form accepted). I expounded on my own form of compatibilism in this thread from last year, which collects cites to lots of articles and discusses the ethical implications. (I should mention that I didn’t succeed in persuading anyone to my point of view.) In any event, as a practical matter, the reason retribution continues in America is that society as a whole doesn’t accept the hard determinist conception. See this law review article by Michele Cotton (warning, long). In that sense, I have to agree with the posters who have argued it’s the premise, not the inference, which is the worthy subject of debate.
The problem with arguing against free will is that you have about a 0% chance of being meaningfully correct.
Assume we do not have free will.
- If I do not have free will this argument was predetermined.
- If, then I postulate there is free will I cannot be meaningfully “wrong” because “right” and “wrong” have no real meaning in a purely deterministic setting – everything just IS.
Now assume we do have free will. - If I make the choice to argue against free will, then I’m wrong, there is free will, I made a choice.
- Therefore the only correct answer is to say we have freewill.
So basically, if we have no free will, you’re not meaningfully winning any argument because of determinism if you’re “right”, if we do have free will, arguing we don’t just makes you wrong. I prefer to assume we have free will because I like to win arguments.
And since I assume we have free will, that makes your argument rather moot. Or maybe I’m wrong… which makes your argument rather moot because determinism (or randomness, I’m not picky) and whatnot.
First, that assumes that the only choices are “free will” and “determinism”; as opposed to a mix of determinism and randomness. And second, right and wrong certainly still have meaning in a deterministic scenario; it’s in a “free will” scenario they have no meaning. If your actions and thoughts aren’t determined by their previous state, then they have nothing to do with you. In a deterministic scenario, your actions reflect your nature and intentions; not some mystic “free will” that somehow doesn’t respond to anything real.
I was including randomness in determinism, I realized too late that I used determinism to edit it.
And obviously in any case, if there is free will it’s a mix of determinism and free will. Clearly the universe’s previous state plays an influence on the next – that’s observable.
I can’t propose a mechanism for free will, but I can propose a meaning. In any given state, there’s a set of (potentially infinite) successor states. There must be a mechanism which chooses which edge to follow to the next node in the graph. That mechanism is the result of every single choice (including no choice or no conscious process) that happens at that state. This mechanism is dependent on the current state, but not wholly determined by the time you’ve gotten to that state, nor is it randomised (though I grant it may be indistinguishable from randomness).
And I’m sorry, in a philosophical sense, as a value judgment “correct” and "incorrect’ are impossibilities if I can’t choose my argument. As a strictly logical value of [True]/[False] I agree that they have meaning, but you really can’t “win” an argument in the philosophical sense if there’s no free will.
ETA: You can allow for free will alongside randomness AND determinism by stating that it’s a term that affects the numeric distribution taken by the policy function that tells the state-change mechanism which of the next states to go to.
Without free will we are not morally responsible agents.
Without the concept of a higher authority beyond this world, there is no absolute Right nor absolute Wrong (much less situational right and wrong).
Concepts such as “fairness” “moral” and “ethical” are all based upon a presumption of free will.
Concepts such as “punishment” and “retribution” are based upon right and wrong. Without right and wrong they would simply be negative feedback to alter behavior.
You are correct that elimination of free will as an underpinning axiom undermines any plea that a value system and social structure based on it has any special plea that it is more Right.
In short, if there is no free will, nothing is fair, but then again, neither is there any such thing as fairness.
Without free will there is no need for concern about whether or not anything is fair or ethical or moral. The more practical problem is the loss of an Absolute Standard for appeal. If the Strong decide to eat the babies of the Weak, well, that’s nature. Maintaining free will as an underpinning axiom preserves a mechanism to create a better society without the need to appeal to an Absolute Authority for Right and Wrong.
I do not agree.
To what do you appeal as Absolute Right if I want to euthanize defective babies so we have more resources for fixable things, and you don’t?
What if I want to slaughter animals for food carelessly and you think I should be humane or vegetarian?
What if I think one should not eat root vegetables as it kills the plant?
We are just another animal, and any order we superimpose is completely arbitrary. Neither mass consensus within a given culture nor philosophic concepts such as the greatest good suffice to establish absolute Right and Wrong, which are arbitrary concepts.
Note that an appeal to a higher power does not fix this either, since the higher powers to date have been inventions…it’s just that only a higher power can resolve arbitrarily set limits on behavior.
Which is, by the way a classic Stoic dialogue.
Nonsense, on multiple levels. The existence of a “higher authority” is irrelevant to the existence of an “absolute” right or wrong; if the “higher authority” is imposing that standard then it isn’t absolute. If there is an “absolute morality” and some “higher authority”, then that “higher” being is just as subject to that “absolute morality” as everyone else, or it isn’t absolute. Nor does some supposed “higher authority” outside the universe declaring something to be right or wrong make it any more right or wrong than say, me doing the same thing.
As well, since we have no means of actually knowing what any such “higher authority” is or what any such “higher authority” wants, we can’t base our decisions on them. Trying to do so just means that everyone sticks labels like “absolute” or “God’s Will” onto the same old subjective morality.
And then there’s the problem that we likely wouldn’t follow any such “absolute morality” if it even existed and was knowable. Most people would (hopefully) be reluctant to, say, torture their children to death just because some “absolute morality” said so. I notice that people who talk about “absolute morality” like it’s a good thing always assume that it will agree with them. But if it really is absolute, unconnected to human needs and desires then there’s no reason to assume it would resemble anything most people would call morality. It would be like trying to make quantum physics or evolution into a moral code.
No it isn’t. We have mutual self interest and the biological and psychological nature of humanity and other species to base our morality on. It may not be “absolute”, but it isn’t arbitrary, either.
Perhaps you would like to state an Absolute Moral Right or an Absolute Moral Wrong?
I hold the reason higher powers were invented in the first place is the need to appeal beyond our own arbitrary positions. In practice, they are sometimes used to promote altruism and sometimes used to promote narcissism, but the concept owes its existence to a realization that there are no Absolutes without a higher authority.
Your assertion that humans are special is sweet, but naive. We’re just another species…sigh…
Our arbitrary positions may be very useful, but they are entirely arbitrary and I can assure you–in fact it should be easiest to assure you in particular–that the Universe doesn’t give a rats ass. The Big Comet could show up tomorrow and polish us off. That’s how special we are. Hang around and the Sun will polish us off.
There isn’t a blessed reason, other than some arbitrary assertion, that I have an obligation to care about anyone, including myself. As the lion would happily devour the last remaining kudu without moral consideration, I could happily kill or oppress the weak were it not for my own arbitrary standard not to. Appealing to “mutual self interest” or other species might be useful to preserve a species (ours) but has nothing to do with right and wrong in a moral sense at all. As I mentioned, without a higher authority, morality is simply an arbitrary concept, implemented by the most intelligent of species because it helps preserve the species, but invented whole cloth, nevertheless.
For what it’s worth, you are a hair’s width away from C S Lewis’s argument for God: that in all of us there is an innate sense of morality, which by virtue of its transcendence beyond our physical makeup and by virtue of its ubiquity in humans, serves as evidence for a higher power. Good on you, Der Trihs, but I am unpersuaded. One of the reasons your posts amuse me so often is your high sense of indignant morality juxtaposed with your atheism. The two are in absolute contradiction.
That’s not really a logical conclusion. First, you assume that he’s talking about a person, per se, or at least a human sort of person. That’s not what he said, and I don’t know many people who would hold that. More to the point, if this authority was simply beyond us, and beyond our total comprehension, we can’t judge it. It’s not, and never could be, subject to our judgement because we could only judge it by our inferior understanding of what it really good.
I would point out here that in Christianity God is identified as the ultimate good. And Christianity is not the only belief system which is this way. But whether you personalizer it or not is irrelevant: if an absolute right and wrong exist, then it is true egardless fo whom enforces it, or how, or even why.
I would certainly point out that most of humanity, as well as numerous philosophers atheist and otherwise, disagree with you. In fact, pretty much all of philosophy comes down to investigating, udnerstanding, and trying to define what is really true, good, and worthwhile.
Whether it is anything we enjoy is an irrelevant question. If it is good, then we can either accept it or not. But there’s nothing more to be said. If it’s good, then it’s good. We humans may not follow it, but we would have no excuse to pretend we were doing what was really good in not doing so. It would be what was really good by definition, and human opinion would carry no wait.
… Yes. Yes it is arbitrary. In fact, it’s the most ridiculously arbitrary morality even invented. Humanity has never had, and still does not have, mutual self interest, for the very reason that it has no objective self interest. You are assuming that your personal whims and selfish desire for life has any validity. You just put your own beleifs on a pedestal,. and assume they are “rational”. But they are not rational. They are the very definition of irrational, and rather sentimental at that.
And at that, you’ve only done so by ignoring a number of inconvenient facts about human nature you don’t like, including that murder, elmination of rival genetic lineages, tyranny, and a whole host of other problems are in fact just as true as your much-vaunted “mutual self-interest”. I recall you hating the use of armed force. But the use of armed force has a far better pedigree and is far more rational than your mythical notions of cooperation.
And then there’s the fact that this fails to even rise to the level of a pretended morality. This isn’t, and never will be, morality. I would rather trust a man felt that robbing me was quite wrong, than one who claimed he thought it wasn’t in ihis self-interest. If there is a right or wrong, then it does not vary with the whims of men. But self-interest is entirely opinion and perception, and it does change. It is the most changeable thing there is after the weather, and I wouldn’t bet two cents on it. The man who claims he’s not robbin me out of self-interest will turn on me the very moment his self-interest changes, and he’ll work very hard to make sure that it does change, for robbing me is a lot easier than cooperating.
I see I made a small error in my post; to clarify:
“Knowing what any such ‘higher authority’ is” should be “knowing what any such ‘absolute morality’ is”. I don’t believe there is any such thing; and if there is I don’t think we have the ability to know what it is.
Hardly, since we are the ones who are asserting these moral standards and actually care about them in the first place. It’s a humanocentric issue; so for this yes, humans really are “special”.
Which is why it’s called “amoral”, and moral standards don’t apply to what the universe does.
Of course there is. For one, you’d be dead if you didn’t; that’s the kind of argument that tends to be won by the survivors. And people in general want to survive unharmed and prosper; that isn’t arbitrary either, that’s human psychology. And a moral and social system that caters to that desire tends to be more likely to result in them getting what they want; also not arbitrary.
Having a so-called “higher authority” declare such a moral system makes it no less “arbitrary”. If anything it would be more arbitrary since such an entity wouldn’t have our psychology, needs or interests. You are simply taking it as a given that if your god declares something to be moral, that makes it moral. It doesn’t; if a god declares something to be moral, that is no more or less arbitrary than if some random human does so.
No, it serves as evidence that a prevalence of morality is a survival trait. A society composed only of psychopaths would be crippled at best.
This argument is of course internally contradictory. If we can’t morally judge this “higher power”, then we can’t call it “good”, much less an “ultimate good”; that is making a judgement of it.
And frankly, if something acts evil I really don’t care if it has some alleged higher purpose that I can’t understand. Especially since by definition I’ll never be able to know if that’s true or not, and never be able to tell if and when it will turn around and do something awful to me again for some supposed higher purpose.
No. All that does is turn the concept of “good” into something worthless. If “absolute good” does nothing but spread misery and death, and “absolute evil” makes the world better that’s an argument for being evil, not for just shrugging your shoulders and saying “oh well, I have to torture your family to death because it’s an absolute good”.
It’s biology, and it’s anything but arbitrary. I can go anywhere in the world and be nearly certain that any random person I meet will object to me stabbing them or stealing from them. We are all the same species, with the same basic psychology.
I didn’t say they weren’t true; they just don’t serve mutual self interest well.
Given that we all operate as if Free Will exists, the argument that it doesn’t and therefore X* is irrational at best.
- Where X = The supposition of the OP in this case.
Agreed.
Justifications for punishment include specific deterrence (punish to prevent others from committing the crime), rehabilitation (punish to cure them of their criminality, perhaps through education/training), and incapacitation and societal protection (keep them locked up so that they don’t harm others). So we’d still have punishment, but one justification -retribution- would go out the window in theory.
There would also be a possible role for restorative justice and denouncement.
Punishment - Wikipedia
Incidentally, Sam Harris has recently written an 80 page screed on free will and why it doesn’t exist.
A society composed of psychopaths might well be crippled, but that does not mean it’s wrong (in an absolute sense) to be a psychopath. In a lion society, the new male kills the previous boss male and then kills any existing cubs so he can propagate his own genes. He’s not a “psychopath” and he’s not right or wrong, even though his behaviour is a survival trait. Any number of human societies–even primitive ones still extant–have all sorts of behaviours our arbitrary Western standards would define as psychopathic.
Briefly, Der Trihs, you are confusing the concept of “morality” (right and wrong; good and bad; unethical and unethical) with those behaviours we promote to create societal structure and/or preservation of our species.
It is true the we humans are “special” in the sense that we can dope out more complicated strategies, or philosophize about those strategies. It is not true that any given strategy we dope out has greater moral authority simply because we humans doped it out.
Without a Higher Authority, there isn’t any absolute right or wrong and therefore there isnt any morality which carries more weight than any other “morality.” This has always been the dilemma for atheists. A given society might decide to subjugate women, promote slavery, eat weaker humans and kill defective babies. These things might serve our narcissistic genes and perhaps (or not) go against our altruistic genes. But they are not absolute rights and wrongs any more than it’s right or wrong for the new lion taking over a pride to kill the existing lion cubs.
We invent and codify morality/right-and-wrong de novo just as we invent and codify religions de novo.
I remain patiently waiting for you to post a moral absolute without (God help you) appealing to Religion or some other higher authority. 
The concept that humans are a special species set apart somehow from other species and subject to special moral obligations is rooted in religion, which was created precisely because there is no other mechansim by which to create an appeal to Authority when codifying behaviour.