Philosopher here. If I may, I would like to make three suggestions.
1. While even many philosophers are unaware of this, there are good arguments that events can be caused without being determined by those causes. I've summarised these arguments here: https://iweb.langara.ca/rjohns/files/2021/06/19_Causation_Determination.pdf The TLDR version is that determination is a logical relation, something like predictability by Laplace's demon, whereas causation is a concrete relation of ontological dependence, i.e. "bringing into existence", and quantum experiments suggest that causation often works indeterministically.
2. Many (e.g. Sapolsky) adopt a physicalist view of nature, according to which the world is conceptually transparent to a being like Laplace's demon. Human beings, for example, are just complex systems composed of fields, particles, etc. that can all be precisely represented in mathematical terms. I agree that, within a physicalist perspective, libertarian free will is nonsense -- as Nietzsche said. But there are good arguments that physicalism cannot account for consciousness or intentionality (i.e. rational understanding) which are both essential for free will. See for example my argument here: https://iweb.langara.ca/rjohns/files/2023/12/Johns_2020_-accepted.pdf
3. If I'm right that intentionality is incompatible with the world being conceptually transparent to Laplace's demon, then a world containing beings like us cannot be deterministic either. When our actions are caused by our beliefs and desires, then Laplace's demon cannot predict them. There is then no need to attribute inconsistent beliefs to "the folk", as you do here.
For a wonderful literary exploration of this topic readers might enjoy Robert Musil's A Man Without Qualities, where the disastrous implications of letting people off the hook in the name of utopian impulses is painfully and ironically explored.
It seems incongruous to me that a magazine so focused on understanding and defending the influence of genes on individuals and groups should insist on individual responsibility. If genes are so influential, why should one be entirely responsible for their outcome? Similarly, if environments (or a mixture of the two) are so influential, why should one be entirely responsible for their outcome? For fear of the consequences, the chaos or the nihilism? Either you're interested in finding out what's true, in which case it doesn't matter what the consequences of that knowledge might be for society in the future, or you're interested in finding knowledge that corresponds to your own values. The article argues for the latter. The "common people" and I would argue the author too, have a strong sense of morality, i.e. a particular sensitivity to disgust and therefore to punishment. I would argue that there are genetic, cultural and socio-economic reasons for this, as well as some biographical and arbitrary ones. If these were different, then the "common people" and the author would have different values. I would have expected a more morally critical approach, especially from people who have been affected by cancel culture, i.e. moralistic groupthink attacks, and who are interested in, or have been researchers in, evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology shows that norms are adaptive, but morality is more adaptive in the sense that it is important for groups and membership and therefore particularly susceptible to cognitive distortions. What meat can I eat? What is holy, what is sacrilegious? Is transgression punished? This may not be entirely arbitrary, and some rules may make more sense than others (who is to judge?), but it has nothing to do with the existence of a true intrinsic moral. Of course there cannot be a world without rewards and punishments, for we (and to a lesser extent all animals) are learners, and norms serve a necessary purpose, but there is no need for free will or retributive punishment to achieve it. It is enough to find a form that increases desirable behaviour and reduces undesirable behaviour, and I see no reason why it should be unnecessary harmful or lethal. I cannot understand why an author who quotes Nietzsche would use good and evil when he could also use right and wrong. One can argue for eliminating any form of violent offender, be it by (lifelong) imprisonment (which is likely to come with a lot of other physical "punishment" by other inmates) or the death penalty, or even excluding or reducing people from society because of their group affiliation (risk groups). This also contradicts moral concepts. Especially Christian ones. What moral concepts are correct or universally valid? What "ordinary people" believe? What religious people believe? What left-wing activists believe? If you want to discuss free will and punishment, please do so on the basis of science, not what feels good or right. Will we find that there is no better way to govern society than prisons or retributive punishment? Go for it. Do we find more practical and humane ways of achieving the same effect? Try. Do we need free will for either question? No.
I very good and clear article about an important subject.
I recently read two authors I like (Bryan Caplan and Michael Huemer) and couldn't make head nor tail of their defense of free will. This did a much better job.
Thanks for an interesting presentation on a controversial subject.
I lean toward a Robert Sapolsky approach. But I believe those who break the law should be incarcerated not as punishment but to avoid further lawlessness and to protect the public. What is the recidivism rate? The concept of punishment presupposes free will.
In defense of determinism, is there any example where a practicing homosexual decided to become a practicing heterosexual? I am, in no way, implying that homosexuality is wrong, sinful, or should be against the law. I am just using it as an example of genetic determinism.
Even wild animal-like humans deserve death penalty if they commit murder to an innocent one because is eugenistic like when we kill plagues of dangerous animals in order to reduce their numbers
We hold animals responsible when they do sufficient harm to humans and we don't think animals have free will, so I don't see how free will is required for moral responsibility. We put down dogs when they bite two times. So it should be with humans.
The Stoics had insights – subject to current refinement but not contradiction. In a word, there are causes internal to the individual and external causes. The analogy is: a cylinder will roll down a slope if pushed, unless oriented perpendicular to the slope. (In current Active Inference, person and environment have a statistical separation partitioning internal and external causes).
In Stoicism, restraint of criminals reduces harm in two ways: protection of the public and protection of the criminal from further self-harm. (So that the criminal – or psychopath – is not a victim of society but a victim of self). There is no blame – though there is restraint – because blame, being emotive, clouds the judgement. Those who are slaves to their emotions, or more childishly, their feelings – notably the woke – are profoundly unfree.
Free will is irrelevant to punishment. And just and efficient punishment can only be a subset of social-libertarian restitution.
Whether people have free will or not, to make them liable for full restitution for their infractions of other people’s liberty (of person or property) will maximally rectify and reduce such undesirable infractions. And if some victims prefer to exercise their property claim to take some of their restitution in the form of retribution, then that is a necessary part of the same efficient process.
1) deterministic processes can lead to randomness: see the cellular automaton specified by Rule 30 (according to Stephen Wolfram's classification)
2) Valentino Braitenberg's "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology" is a delightful thought experiment on the organization of brains & the minds which emerge from them. Also has an aside on free will in it.
Actually the ending of free will in law should lead to life time incarceration or restriction once we find that somebody has a proclivity to something. If we know that a child rapist or potential child rapist has no free will we would lock him up or restrict his movements for life, while all the time assuring him he’s an ok bloke and there’s no blame involved.
Concerning the Nietzsche quote: as _most_ of his books are divided up in relatively short chapters/aphorisms/whatever you wanna call thems, I always recommend people refer to the quote in question by naming the book/chapter/aphorism/whatever you wanna call it, so almost everyone can find the quoted quote in any edition/language/version of the book in question they have :) I'm just saying...
Philosopher here. If I may, I would like to make three suggestions.
1. While even many philosophers are unaware of this, there are good arguments that events can be caused without being determined by those causes. I've summarised these arguments here: https://iweb.langara.ca/rjohns/files/2021/06/19_Causation_Determination.pdf The TLDR version is that determination is a logical relation, something like predictability by Laplace's demon, whereas causation is a concrete relation of ontological dependence, i.e. "bringing into existence", and quantum experiments suggest that causation often works indeterministically.
2. Many (e.g. Sapolsky) adopt a physicalist view of nature, according to which the world is conceptually transparent to a being like Laplace's demon. Human beings, for example, are just complex systems composed of fields, particles, etc. that can all be precisely represented in mathematical terms. I agree that, within a physicalist perspective, libertarian free will is nonsense -- as Nietzsche said. But there are good arguments that physicalism cannot account for consciousness or intentionality (i.e. rational understanding) which are both essential for free will. See for example my argument here: https://iweb.langara.ca/rjohns/files/2023/12/Johns_2020_-accepted.pdf
3. If I'm right that intentionality is incompatible with the world being conceptually transparent to Laplace's demon, then a world containing beings like us cannot be deterministic either. When our actions are caused by our beliefs and desires, then Laplace's demon cannot predict them. There is then no need to attribute inconsistent beliefs to "the folk", as you do here.
For a wonderful literary exploration of this topic readers might enjoy Robert Musil's A Man Without Qualities, where the disastrous implications of letting people off the hook in the name of utopian impulses is painfully and ironically explored.
It seems incongruous to me that a magazine so focused on understanding and defending the influence of genes on individuals and groups should insist on individual responsibility. If genes are so influential, why should one be entirely responsible for their outcome? Similarly, if environments (or a mixture of the two) are so influential, why should one be entirely responsible for their outcome? For fear of the consequences, the chaos or the nihilism? Either you're interested in finding out what's true, in which case it doesn't matter what the consequences of that knowledge might be for society in the future, or you're interested in finding knowledge that corresponds to your own values. The article argues for the latter. The "common people" and I would argue the author too, have a strong sense of morality, i.e. a particular sensitivity to disgust and therefore to punishment. I would argue that there are genetic, cultural and socio-economic reasons for this, as well as some biographical and arbitrary ones. If these were different, then the "common people" and the author would have different values. I would have expected a more morally critical approach, especially from people who have been affected by cancel culture, i.e. moralistic groupthink attacks, and who are interested in, or have been researchers in, evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology shows that norms are adaptive, but morality is more adaptive in the sense that it is important for groups and membership and therefore particularly susceptible to cognitive distortions. What meat can I eat? What is holy, what is sacrilegious? Is transgression punished? This may not be entirely arbitrary, and some rules may make more sense than others (who is to judge?), but it has nothing to do with the existence of a true intrinsic moral. Of course there cannot be a world without rewards and punishments, for we (and to a lesser extent all animals) are learners, and norms serve a necessary purpose, but there is no need for free will or retributive punishment to achieve it. It is enough to find a form that increases desirable behaviour and reduces undesirable behaviour, and I see no reason why it should be unnecessary harmful or lethal. I cannot understand why an author who quotes Nietzsche would use good and evil when he could also use right and wrong. One can argue for eliminating any form of violent offender, be it by (lifelong) imprisonment (which is likely to come with a lot of other physical "punishment" by other inmates) or the death penalty, or even excluding or reducing people from society because of their group affiliation (risk groups). This also contradicts moral concepts. Especially Christian ones. What moral concepts are correct or universally valid? What "ordinary people" believe? What religious people believe? What left-wing activists believe? If you want to discuss free will and punishment, please do so on the basis of science, not what feels good or right. Will we find that there is no better way to govern society than prisons or retributive punishment? Go for it. Do we find more practical and humane ways of achieving the same effect? Try. Do we need free will for either question? No.
I very good and clear article about an important subject.
I recently read two authors I like (Bryan Caplan and Michael Huemer) and couldn't make head nor tail of their defense of free will. This did a much better job.
Thanks for an interesting presentation on a controversial subject.
I lean toward a Robert Sapolsky approach. But I believe those who break the law should be incarcerated not as punishment but to avoid further lawlessness and to protect the public. What is the recidivism rate? The concept of punishment presupposes free will.
In defense of determinism, is there any example where a practicing homosexual decided to become a practicing heterosexual? I am, in no way, implying that homosexuality is wrong, sinful, or should be against the law. I am just using it as an example of genetic determinism.
Even wild animal-like humans deserve death penalty if they commit murder to an innocent one because is eugenistic like when we kill plagues of dangerous animals in order to reduce their numbers
We hold animals responsible when they do sufficient harm to humans and we don't think animals have free will, so I don't see how free will is required for moral responsibility. We put down dogs when they bite two times. So it should be with humans.
The Stoics had insights – subject to current refinement but not contradiction. In a word, there are causes internal to the individual and external causes. The analogy is: a cylinder will roll down a slope if pushed, unless oriented perpendicular to the slope. (In current Active Inference, person and environment have a statistical separation partitioning internal and external causes).
In Stoicism, restraint of criminals reduces harm in two ways: protection of the public and protection of the criminal from further self-harm. (So that the criminal – or psychopath – is not a victim of society but a victim of self). There is no blame – though there is restraint – because blame, being emotive, clouds the judgement. Those who are slaves to their emotions, or more childishly, their feelings – notably the woke – are profoundly unfree.
Free will is irrelevant to punishment. And just and efficient punishment can only be a subset of social-libertarian restitution.
Whether people have free will or not, to make them liable for full restitution for their infractions of other people’s liberty (of person or property) will maximally rectify and reduce such undesirable infractions. And if some victims prefer to exercise their property claim to take some of their restitution in the form of retribution, then that is a necessary part of the same efficient process.
https://jclester.substack.com/p/libertarian-rectification
Two comments:
1) deterministic processes can lead to randomness: see the cellular automaton specified by Rule 30 (according to Stephen Wolfram's classification)
2) Valentino Braitenberg's "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology" is a delightful thought experiment on the organization of brains & the minds which emerge from them. Also has an aside on free will in it.
Actually the ending of free will in law should lead to life time incarceration or restriction once we find that somebody has a proclivity to something. If we know that a child rapist or potential child rapist has no free will we would lock him up or restrict his movements for life, while all the time assuring him he’s an ok bloke and there’s no blame involved.
Concerning the Nietzsche quote: as _most_ of his books are divided up in relatively short chapters/aphorisms/whatever you wanna call thems, I always recommend people refer to the quote in question by naming the book/chapter/aphorism/whatever you wanna call it, so almost everyone can find the quoted quote in any edition/language/version of the book in question they have :) I'm just saying...
Timshel.