Yuck... You have made me a compatiblist. I have fought Daniel Dennet's position...and you just made me one...:(
---
Assuming determinism is true, the individual still must act as if it weren't. All actions must flow as if you had degrees of free will that acted or not, and the consequence of that act/inaction must be reviewed in the context and limits of what is understood/expected about the individual.
Social policy does allow the use of "determinism" (in limited fashion)...
I would say, we can hold people 'responsible', but not in the same sense. We'd say they are responsible in the way a faulty girder might be 'responsible' for a bridge collapse. Their 'programming' allowed them to behave in a way we wouldn't consider a reasonable course of action.
Everything is determined, simply by the laws of physics. Every effect has a cause, every cause has an effect. So no free will; so what is the solution in the second case: NECESSITY. Liberty requires Necessity; This is David Hume, read on more on Wikipedia.
Suppose I have a unique philosophical system under which a defendant's blomp-ness is a prerequisite for criminal punishment. Blomp-ness is a concept that only makes sense in my system. I would not be able to say to to non believers in my system that they can't justify criminal punishment because they don't have a concept of blomp-ness, because the need for such a concept is itself a part of the system they reject. Instead, I should ask them how they justify punishment in THEIR system.
@Cadfan17 My final sentence should be changed. It should instead read, "Instead, I should ask them how they think about punishment in THEIR system." The word "justify" presumes too much.
Without free will, not only do we have no control over past events ( Jen is not responsible for John's death ) but we also have no control over future events as well ( Jen is punished anyway ).
Punishment of crime changes the way a would be criminal sees the situation - so less crimes are committed. The perception of prosecution plays a part in the deterministic process.
1st, excellent to see a video from you. 2nd, keep in mind that premeditation is not a necessary condition for a homicide to be murder. "Malice aforethought" is the mens rea for murder and that can manifest itself in ways that have nothing to do with premeditation. 3d, I know you realize that your argument / puzzle presents the same problems for the notion that a god--oh, let's say the *Christian* god, just for instance ;-) --has predestined events. 4th, determinism, if it were true, does...
...(or at least could) cast doubt on the premises of our legal system's liability rules (both criminal and civil). 5th, that rather obvious fact acknowledged, even if determinism were true and demolished our legal system's current liability rules, it seems to me society could use a self-defense argument to justify, e.g., putting people in prison who commit certain acts. 6th and finally, I just finished teaching criminal law and, among other things, my students were WAY interested in causation.
well, i feel that without the notion of free will, the justification for foreseeability is bankrupt, making the distinctions between recklessness and negligence pointless (if my actions proceed without regard for what I am conscious of, what does it matter?). i think ultimately the biggest problem is that every criminal would be in effect held strictly liable. i think the law serves to deter and to punish proportionately, and that depends upon traditional notions of responsibility.
yep, that's true - gross recklessness, felony murder (a policy which I find repulsive), and others can also get murder. if i hadn't lazily added that statement as an after-thought, i would've said it better. heheh yeahh, the concept of God's pre-destining things is just as much a conflict for pre-destinationists as it is for any determinist who wants to believe in responsibility. i'm currently exploring the possibilities of distinguishing foreknowledge/pre-destination.
@legodesi "i think ultimately the biggest problem is that every criminal would be in effect held strictly liable. i think the law serves to deter and to punish proportionately, and that depends upon traditional notions of responsibility."
I agree.
Of course, none of this goes to whether determinism is true or not--as you know. Though it can tell us quite a bit about whether we want it to be true or not.
right, i agee that this video doesn't constitute by any stretch a proof of indeterminism.
Felony Murder: I think it's unjust if I'm sent to jail for life for murder if in the process of stealing a trophy from another football team, someone in my group accidentally dies, or causes the death of someone else. the policy seems to target teenagers, as well. teenagers don't appreciate the nature of their conduct as adults do, and they're still malleable in terms of their pursuits, so...
so... society should give them a second chance. i don't think in general, felony murder serves any of the traditional purposes of punishment, like retribution or deterrence (how do you deter an accident?) or rehabilitation (you could rehabilitate criminals without a life-sentence). i agree with the reasoning that the severer the punishment, the greater the attached stigma, and thus the greater necessity for a mens rea. what do you think?
First of all: even if determinism is true the illusion of free will is so uncanny that it is indistnguishable from "real" free will. A belief of determinism shouldn't affect our actions in any way. You could equate it to deism. It holds no real world implications.
@volbla As for the problem, the purpose of punishment is to make the criminal understand that his/her actions are not acceptable. If Jen is prone to throwing cacti at people it should be made clear to her that that is dangerous and she is not allowed to do it. But if she is a bad throw she is not herself a danger to other people. The danger in this case was the freeloading spider, something which is not Jen's fault.
This is a mind numbingly easy problem to solve from a utilitarian standpoint. The objective reality of free will is irrelevant. If we punish people for negative foreseeable consequences which they subjectively control, then there will be fewer bad outcomes.
IOW
So what if humans are robots. If you want less killing, press the button on the robot that causes less killing (threaten punishment). Justice matters in terms of long term consequences everything else is sophistry and immoral.
@legodesi We do it all the time and always have out of necessity. It is not preferable to actually finding the guilty because the long term consequences of that are worse. It undermines the credibility of the justice system and hurts its deterrence value because some people always know that the innocent are innocent, and the guilty become emboldened by getting away with crime. Nevertheless a faulty justice system is usually better than none, type 1 and type 2 errors both have innocent victims.
i find that the concept of justice is undermined by that very possibility, mikalchik. first, your suggestion is false because it's easy to blame someone and fabricate evidence to that effect. deterrence does not require that you punish people for the crimes they committed. it only requires that you make society aware that crime will be punished - through whatever means necessary. deterrence needs retribution to remain a humane theory of punishment.
@legodesi I think that is a naive oversimplification. Framing just one person leaves the guilty knowing his guilt unpunished, the framers knowing the guilty is unpunished, the innocent person and allies knowing unfair punishment. If this is done on a regular basis you need a whole system of framing involving a society wide cadre. What do you think this does to deterrence? Even if, these facts never make it to the general public (doubtful) you have already produced a system ripe for abuse.
As far as "undermining the concept of justice" that is naive platonism. Justice is important, not the concept of justice. Justice has no meaning outside society. If there was one person in the universe, could there be any crime or justice? I am interested in real justice, and no stance is just if it promotes the harm of the innocent. Claiming that no one should be punished if the world is deterministic is not just for that very reason. Justice is a means to the end of a good society.
Have you read "Elbow Room" or "Freedom Evolves" by Dennett yet? If you haven't yet, I highly recommend both. He addresses a lot of your points from a compatibilist perspective.
He claims that the libertarian sense of "could have done otherwise" is not required for moral responsibility. He thinks that all that is required is if the agent possesses a capacity to be moved by reasons for action.
Also, your notion of "forseeability" sounds almost identical to his notion of "evitability."
As a hard incompatibilist, I don't think people blamed, nor do I think others more worthy than others due to their actions. Imprisonment should only be used to protect others and to rehabilitate the offender. Punishment should only be used to deter further illegal or dangerous actions. There is no such thing as "responsibility". A person can act ethical, or act unethical, but utimately there is no ethical responsibility after the fact.
this seems to be the best articulation of the responses i've got thus far: the deterrence response. while i disagree with your last point about ethics surviving the demise of responsibility, i will try to limit my response to the given topic, when i get a chance to.
An ethic (how I am using it) is just a conscious alignment with a moral. A moral is just a determination of what is good or positive compared to what is bad or negative. Free will is not needed for someone to consciously align with a moral (to act ethical).
Having ethical responsibility is different than acting ethically, and it is incorrect to conflate these two things.
FYI - I am in the process of writing a book regarding the lack of free will. :)
"Free will is not needed for someone to consciously align with a moral (to act ethical)."
that premise is most difficult to accept. if determinism is true, all i could have done is what the effluence of antecedent sufficient conditions led me to do. if you concede that "consciously align[ing] with a moral" implies the choice to do either the right thing, or the wrong thing, at a given time, then in my mind, this means indeterminism. oh snap, are you a pro. philosopher?
Antecedent sufficient conditions is entirely compatible with concluding a moral and consciously aligning with such moral. Determinism does not imply an unconscious action. Consciousness is part of the causal chain of events.
"implies the choice to do either the right thing, or the wrong thing, "
That is not the implication. The only implication is that those causal elections (right thing/wrong thing) are factored in to the causal equation for the only possible outcome.
Also, I am an incompatibilist. This means I think free will impossible in a causally deterministic universe, as well as an indeterministic universe (one where acausal events are allowed in). You are correct about acausal events being needed to have A OR B be possible outcomes, but such events are even more of a detriment as they can neither be free nor willed. At least with causality you have willfulness (without any freedom).
this steers us into a different debate that i didn't expect (or foresee) my video would steer us to. i think, given the conjunction of physicalism and determinism, consciousness is completely causally inert. for by virtue of what properties does my thought about X lead to action? Is it by virtue of its content, or by virtue of physical properties like mass, force, and the like? this may be the fork in our disagreement
I don’t see physicalism and determinism only leading to inert systems. A running computer program is hardly inert. It works based on physical properties (mass,force, etc), as well as the specific configuration, and a specific temporal run through. You do not see a video game playing if you look directly at a harddrives material properties while it plays. Same with consciousness.
Also, though I am a materialist, I do not see physicalism as a requirement of causal determinism or the lack of free will. The only requirement is logic, regardless if it is a physicalistic consideration, or some more non-physical notion that leads to consciousness. There are only two (logically) possible states for any event. Either the event is causal or it is acausal, both incompatible with free will.
i think this depends on whether you can allign intentional properties of thoughts with physical properties of neurons. I think that the best physicalist theory on the market hasn't done that - it hasn't integrated the content of thought into the causal relations between physical stuff that on the basic level is non-teleological and non-intentional.
I don't think this matters. Thought is an event, an an event can only happen either A) causally or B) acausally. Again, the issue is not necessarily a physicalistic one, but rather one of logic.
That being said, and though I don't think it is necessary to show the physical property of neurons with intentional properties of thought to show the logic, I think that there is much evidence that neurons and such thoughts go hand and hand.
for all their effects? meaning, even if those effects are unforeseeable, and they could not have been prevented by the actor, they should be punished? (just to clarify, not at all to criticize your answer)
So... is your point that the law tends to assume free will? I'll grant as much for the sake of argument. How does what the law assumes have the slightest bearing on whether what the law assumes is a true state of affairs?
"slightest bearing on whether what the law assumes is a true state of affairs?"
If you hold that it is true that some people are truly responsible for their behavior, then if my argument is sound, libertarian free will is true. If you nonetheless hold that determinism is true, then libertarian free will is a necessary fiction to uphold justice/law in a state. i take it that some of us believe on some level that there is truth to the concept of responsibility.
More precisely, granting your entire argument, free will (not *necessarily* *LIBERTARIAN* free will) would be a necessary fiction to uphold SOME PRESENT NOTIONS of justice/law, which it'd be begging the question to assume are necessarily correct or optimal. Not only does this have nothing to do with whether our legal system is just; again, it has no relevance to the question of whether what the law assumes is a true state of affairs.
i understand libertarianism as the view that one could have chosen something other than what he did do, given roughly the same circumstances. how do you understand it?
"SOME PRESENT NOTIONS" - what's your point? as i perfectly pointed out, i was referring to our legal system, notions held in our western culture.
"it has no relevance to..."
obviously, my video isn't an attempt to prove what is true, so don't criticize it for not doing what it never set out to do.
I'm a determanist (a german one so sorry for my somewhat plain english)
I would say responsability doesn't matter
Case1) If Jen isn't judged here the cases of "ups i accidently threw sth. heavy on someone an killed him" would increase -> more dead people (which is i think bad so she should be judged)
Case2)If Jen isn't judged here the cases of "ups i acendently threw sth. heavy on someone, missed him but then a spider bit him so he died anyway." probably wouldn't increase->no judging fcksinlimit
Excellent video and really good points. Although I think a determinist might say that you would pick up the cactus if the cactus was thrown at you because it was in your gut reaction. I could be wrong on this (I'm obviously not a determinist) so I would like to see how a determinist would respond to your puzzle.
Yuck... You have made me a compatiblist. I have fought Daniel Dennet's position...and you just made me one...:(
---
Assuming determinism is true, the individual still must act as if it weren't. All actions must flow as if you had degrees of free will that acted or not, and the consequence of that act/inaction must be reviewed in the context and limits of what is understood/expected about the individual.
Social policy does allow the use of "determinism" (in limited fashion)...
MyContext 10 months ago
I would say, we can hold people 'responsible', but not in the same sense. We'd say they are responsible in the way a faulty girder might be 'responsible' for a bridge collapse. Their 'programming' allowed them to behave in a way we wouldn't consider a reasonable course of action.
Haengma 1 year ago
Everything is determined, simply by the laws of physics. Every effect has a cause, every cause has an effect. So no free will; so what is the solution in the second case: NECESSITY. Liberty requires Necessity; This is David Hume, read on more on Wikipedia.
SseBb 1 year ago
good explanation
college12003 1 year ago
Suppose I have a unique philosophical system under which a defendant's blomp-ness is a prerequisite for criminal punishment. Blomp-ness is a concept that only makes sense in my system. I would not be able to say to to non believers in my system that they can't justify criminal punishment because they don't have a concept of blomp-ness, because the need for such a concept is itself a part of the system they reject. Instead, I should ask them how they justify punishment in THEIR system.
Cadfan17 1 year ago
@Cadfan17 My final sentence should be changed. It should instead read, "Instead, I should ask them how they think about punishment in THEIR system." The word "justify" presumes too much.
Cadfan17 1 year ago
Without free will, not only do we have no control over past events ( Jen is not responsible for John's death ) but we also have no control over future events as well ( Jen is punished anyway ).
ObserversEyes 1 year ago
Punishment of crime changes the way a would be criminal sees the situation - so less crimes are committed. The perception of prosecution plays a part in the deterministic process.
piprod01 1 year ago
1st, excellent to see a video from you. 2nd, keep in mind that premeditation is not a necessary condition for a homicide to be murder. "Malice aforethought" is the mens rea for murder and that can manifest itself in ways that have nothing to do with premeditation. 3d, I know you realize that your argument / puzzle presents the same problems for the notion that a god--oh, let's say the *Christian* god, just for instance ;-) --has predestined events. 4th, determinism, if it were true, does...
ProfMTH 1 year ago
...(or at least could) cast doubt on the premises of our legal system's liability rules (both criminal and civil). 5th, that rather obvious fact acknowledged, even if determinism were true and demolished our legal system's current liability rules, it seems to me society could use a self-defense argument to justify, e.g., putting people in prison who commit certain acts. 6th and finally, I just finished teaching criminal law and, among other things, my students were WAY interested in causation.
ProfMTH 1 year ago
@ProfMTH
well, i feel that without the notion of free will, the justification for foreseeability is bankrupt, making the distinctions between recklessness and negligence pointless (if my actions proceed without regard for what I am conscious of, what does it matter?). i think ultimately the biggest problem is that every criminal would be in effect held strictly liable. i think the law serves to deter and to punish proportionately, and that depends upon traditional notions of responsibility.
legodesi 1 year ago
@ProfMTH
yep, that's true - gross recklessness, felony murder (a policy which I find repulsive), and others can also get murder. if i hadn't lazily added that statement as an after-thought, i would've said it better. heheh yeahh, the concept of God's pre-destining things is just as much a conflict for pre-destinationists as it is for any determinist who wants to believe in responsibility. i'm currently exploring the possibilities of distinguishing foreknowledge/pre-destination.
legodesi 1 year ago
@legodesi "i think ultimately the biggest problem is that every criminal would be in effect held strictly liable. i think the law serves to deter and to punish proportionately, and that depends upon traditional notions of responsibility."
I agree.
Of course, none of this goes to whether determinism is true or not--as you know. Though it can tell us quite a bit about whether we want it to be true or not.
What bothers you about felony murder?
ProfMTH 1 year ago
(con't) @legodesi "distinguishing foreknowledge/pre-destination"
I'd be very interested in seeing your effort on this.
ProfMTH 1 year ago
@ProfMTH
yeah, hope you'll be impressed with my mental gymnastics (attempt at self-deprecating humor)
legodesi 1 year ago
@ProfMTH
right, i agee that this video doesn't constitute by any stretch a proof of indeterminism.
Felony Murder: I think it's unjust if I'm sent to jail for life for murder if in the process of stealing a trophy from another football team, someone in my group accidentally dies, or causes the death of someone else. the policy seems to target teenagers, as well. teenagers don't appreciate the nature of their conduct as adults do, and they're still malleable in terms of their pursuits, so...
legodesi 1 year ago
@legodesi
so... society should give them a second chance. i don't think in general, felony murder serves any of the traditional purposes of punishment, like retribution or deterrence (how do you deter an accident?) or rehabilitation (you could rehabilitate criminals without a life-sentence). i agree with the reasoning that the severer the punishment, the greater the attached stigma, and thus the greater necessity for a mens rea. what do you think?
legodesi 1 year ago
What legodesi made a video. Fantastic!
WayOfTheBastard 1 year ago
First of all: even if determinism is true the illusion of free will is so uncanny that it is indistnguishable from "real" free will. A belief of determinism shouldn't affect our actions in any way. You could equate it to deism. It holds no real world implications.
(cont)
volbla 1 year ago
@volbla As for the problem, the purpose of punishment is to make the criminal understand that his/her actions are not acceptable. If Jen is prone to throwing cacti at people it should be made clear to her that that is dangerous and she is not allowed to do it. But if she is a bad throw she is not herself a danger to other people. The danger in this case was the freeloading spider, something which is not Jen's fault.
volbla 1 year ago
This is a mind numbingly easy problem to solve from a utilitarian standpoint. The objective reality of free will is irrelevant. If we punish people for negative foreseeable consequences which they subjectively control, then there will be fewer bad outcomes.
IOW
So what if humans are robots. If you want less killing, press the button on the robot that causes less killing (threaten punishment). Justice matters in terms of long term consequences everything else is sophistry and immoral.
michalchik 1 year ago
@michalchik
"Justice matters in terms of long term consequences everything else is sophistry and immoral."
So it's permissible to punish innocent people, if on the long term, it ends in less violence?
legodesi 1 year ago
@legodesi We do it all the time and always have out of necessity. It is not preferable to actually finding the guilty because the long term consequences of that are worse. It undermines the credibility of the justice system and hurts its deterrence value because some people always know that the innocent are innocent, and the guilty become emboldened by getting away with crime. Nevertheless a faulty justice system is usually better than none, type 1 and type 2 errors both have innocent victims.
michalchik 1 year ago
@michalchik
i find that the concept of justice is undermined by that very possibility, mikalchik. first, your suggestion is false because it's easy to blame someone and fabricate evidence to that effect. deterrence does not require that you punish people for the crimes they committed. it only requires that you make society aware that crime will be punished - through whatever means necessary. deterrence needs retribution to remain a humane theory of punishment.
legodesi 1 year ago
@legodesi I think that is a naive oversimplification. Framing just one person leaves the guilty knowing his guilt unpunished, the framers knowing the guilty is unpunished, the innocent person and allies knowing unfair punishment. If this is done on a regular basis you need a whole system of framing involving a society wide cadre. What do you think this does to deterrence? Even if, these facts never make it to the general public (doubtful) you have already produced a system ripe for abuse.
michalchik 1 year ago
As far as "undermining the concept of justice" that is naive platonism. Justice is important, not the concept of justice. Justice has no meaning outside society. If there was one person in the universe, could there be any crime or justice? I am interested in real justice, and no stance is just if it promotes the harm of the innocent. Claiming that no one should be punished if the world is deterministic is not just for that very reason. Justice is a means to the end of a good society.
michalchik 1 year ago
yaaaay!
pulelovesme 1 year ago
Yay! Legodesi is back. :) :) :)
Too bad Google bastardized the comments section. :p
jcrebel18 1 year ago
@jcrebel18
haha glad someone's missed meh!
legodesi 1 year ago
Have you read "Elbow Room" or "Freedom Evolves" by Dennett yet? If you haven't yet, I highly recommend both. He addresses a lot of your points from a compatibilist perspective.
He claims that the libertarian sense of "could have done otherwise" is not required for moral responsibility. He thinks that all that is required is if the agent possesses a capacity to be moved by reasons for action.
Also, your notion of "forseeability" sounds almost identical to his notion of "evitability."
LennyBound 1 year ago
Here is Daniel Dennett's lecture on "Free Will":
watch?v=aKLAbWFCh1E"
zarkoff45 1 year ago
As a hard incompatibilist, I don't think people blamed, nor do I think others more worthy than others due to their actions. Imprisonment should only be used to protect others and to rehabilitate the offender. Punishment should only be used to deter further illegal or dangerous actions. There is no such thing as "responsibility". A person can act ethical, or act unethical, but utimately there is no ethical responsibility after the fact.
trick0171 1 year ago
i meant *** I don't think people should be blamed
trick0171 1 year ago
@trick0171
this seems to be the best articulation of the responses i've got thus far: the deterrence response. while i disagree with your last point about ethics surviving the demise of responsibility, i will try to limit my response to the given topic, when i get a chance to.
legodesi 1 year ago
@legodesi
An ethic (how I am using it) is just a conscious alignment with a moral. A moral is just a determination of what is good or positive compared to what is bad or negative. Free will is not needed for someone to consciously align with a moral (to act ethical).
Having ethical responsibility is different than acting ethically, and it is incorrect to conflate these two things.
FYI - I am in the process of writing a book regarding the lack of free will. :)
trick0171 1 year ago
@trick0171
"Free will is not needed for someone to consciously align with a moral (to act ethical)."
that premise is most difficult to accept. if determinism is true, all i could have done is what the effluence of antecedent sufficient conditions led me to do. if you concede that "consciously align[ing] with a moral" implies the choice to do either the right thing, or the wrong thing, at a given time, then in my mind, this means indeterminism. oh snap, are you a pro. philosopher?
legodesi 1 year ago
@legodesi
Antecedent sufficient conditions is entirely compatible with concluding a moral and consciously aligning with such moral. Determinism does not imply an unconscious action. Consciousness is part of the causal chain of events.
"implies the choice to do either the right thing, or the wrong thing, "
That is not the implication. The only implication is that those causal elections (right thing/wrong thing) are factored in to the causal equation for the only possible outcome.
(MORE 1)
trick0171 1 year ago
Also, I am an incompatibilist. This means I think free will impossible in a causally deterministic universe, as well as an indeterministic universe (one where acausal events are allowed in). You are correct about acausal events being needed to have A OR B be possible outcomes, but such events are even more of a detriment as they can neither be free nor willed. At least with causality you have willfulness (without any freedom).
(END 2)
trick0171 1 year ago
@trick0171
this steers us into a different debate that i didn't expect (or foresee) my video would steer us to. i think, given the conjunction of physicalism and determinism, consciousness is completely causally inert. for by virtue of what properties does my thought about X lead to action? Is it by virtue of its content, or by virtue of physical properties like mass, force, and the like? this may be the fork in our disagreement
legodesi 1 year ago
@legodesi
I don’t see physicalism and determinism only leading to inert systems. A running computer program is hardly inert. It works based on physical properties (mass,force, etc), as well as the specific configuration, and a specific temporal run through. You do not see a video game playing if you look directly at a harddrives material properties while it plays. Same with consciousness.
(MORE 1)
trick0171 1 year ago
It is a causal play through of a specific configuration (including input, output, memory, feedback loops, etc.) through time.
Let me know If I am misunderstanding you. :)
(MORE 2)
trick0171 1 year ago
Also, though I am a materialist, I do not see physicalism as a requirement of causal determinism or the lack of free will. The only requirement is logic, regardless if it is a physicalistic consideration, or some more non-physical notion that leads to consciousness. There are only two (logically) possible states for any event. Either the event is causal or it is acausal, both incompatible with free will.
(END 3)
trick0171 1 year ago
@trick0171
i think this depends on whether you can allign intentional properties of thoughts with physical properties of neurons. I think that the best physicalist theory on the market hasn't done that - it hasn't integrated the content of thought into the causal relations between physical stuff that on the basic level is non-teleological and non-intentional.
legodesi 1 year ago
@legodesi
I don't think this matters. Thought is an event, an an event can only happen either A) causally or B) acausally. Again, the issue is not necessarily a physicalistic one, but rather one of logic.
That being said, and though I don't think it is necessary to show the physical property of neurons with intentional properties of thought to show the logic, I think that there is much evidence that neurons and such thoughts go hand and hand.
trick0171 1 year ago
made response to this but I can't post it as a video response to this video for some reason, its on my channel if your interested
manutdfan4321 1 year ago
Given determinism and that we do hold people responsible, we have no choice but to hold people responsible.
hilbert54 1 year ago
@hilbert54
for all their effects? meaning, even if those effects are unforeseeable, and they could not have been prevented by the actor, they should be punished? (just to clarify, not at all to criticize your answer)
legodesi 1 year ago
@legodesi
Sorry, that was a bit glib.
You're saying it appears we act as if people have freewill. I agree.
I would sanction Jen for throwing the cactus with or without the spider and whether it hit me or not, but not for the actions of the spider.
For me it is a reflection of my own cognition, I guess the law is some sort of consensus.
I am aware of the danger of throwing the cactus, but not of the presence of the spider. cont
hilbert54 1 year ago
@hilbert54
cont
Without Jen I can avoid the danger of flying cacti, but not hidden, deadly spiders.
But she acts as she does and I feel as I do, freewill or not.
hilbert54 1 year ago
So... is your point that the law tends to assume free will? I'll grant as much for the sake of argument. How does what the law assumes have the slightest bearing on whether what the law assumes is a true state of affairs?
Vic92084 1 year ago
@Vic92084
"slightest bearing on whether what the law assumes is a true state of affairs?"
If you hold that it is true that some people are truly responsible for their behavior, then if my argument is sound, libertarian free will is true. If you nonetheless hold that determinism is true, then libertarian free will is a necessary fiction to uphold justice/law in a state. i take it that some of us believe on some level that there is truth to the concept of responsibility.
legodesi 1 year ago
@legodesi
More precisely, granting your entire argument, free will (not *necessarily* *LIBERTARIAN* free will) would be a necessary fiction to uphold SOME PRESENT NOTIONS of justice/law, which it'd be begging the question to assume are necessarily correct or optimal. Not only does this have nothing to do with whether our legal system is just; again, it has no relevance to the question of whether what the law assumes is a true state of affairs.
Vic92084 1 year ago
@Vic92084
i understand libertarianism as the view that one could have chosen something other than what he did do, given roughly the same circumstances. how do you understand it?
"SOME PRESENT NOTIONS" - what's your point? as i perfectly pointed out, i was referring to our legal system, notions held in our western culture.
"it has no relevance to..."
obviously, my video isn't an attempt to prove what is true, so don't criticize it for not doing what it never set out to do.
legodesi 1 year ago
I'm a determanist (a german one so sorry for my somewhat plain english)
I would say responsability doesn't matter
Case1) If Jen isn't judged here the cases of "ups i accidently threw sth. heavy on someone an killed him" would increase -> more dead people (which is i think bad so she should be judged)
Case2)If Jen isn't judged here the cases of "ups i acendently threw sth. heavy on someone, missed him but then a spider bit him so he died anyway." probably wouldn't increase->no judging fcksinlimit
miregalobsoleshongib 1 year ago
ahh yes, life is back to normal.
tgeorge95 1 year ago
glad to see you're back
AbusiveAntitheist 1 year ago
@AbusiveAntitheist
thanks!
legodesi 1 year ago
Alrighty, my reply will be far too long for a text comment, so video response coming at ya soon-ish! :)
AtheistInTheHat 1 year ago
@AtheistInTheHat
cool!
legodesi 1 year ago
@AtheistInTheHat when you do reply you may want to message me to let me know, since then my gmail will notify me.
legodesi 1 year ago
Excellent video and really good points. Although I think a determinist might say that you would pick up the cactus if the cactus was thrown at you because it was in your gut reaction. I could be wrong on this (I'm obviously not a determinist) so I would like to see how a determinist would respond to your puzzle.
thunderbolt94 1 year ago
This conversation seems so familiar....
LJonYT 1 year ago
@LJonYT
=D I wanted to mention you in the scenarios, but I felt that would be over-doing it. heheh
legodesi 1 year ago