Still with the thief. He still has all of the other inputs into his system beyond just the fact that someone kidnapped his wife. Believing that causality ultimately determines every decision we make doesn't mean that I believe that it's a simple one to one mapping. He knows he can call the police - this isn't an action movie, and he's not the characters Jason Statham plays. If he is the characters Jason Statham plays, well, it doesn't really matter because he's not going to be caught anyway, and I'm left railing against the hypothetical thief that more often matches reality than your car getting stolen by the living embodiment of an action movie hero/anti-hero.
>The circumstances immediately surrounding the car theft are precisely the same, but now an influence further back in the causal chain is presumably responsible. How would you differentiate these two scenarios without free will?
By not believing that one changed input unrelated to all of the others somehow invalidates all of them.
>Free will is necessary to explain why you are morally blameworthy or praiseworthy for your choice of whether to go with your inclinations.
Free will is unnecessary to explain why I am morally blameworthy or praiseworthy for my choice of whether or not to go with my inclinations.
Both are assertions that do not stand alone.
You're evading the question. The point of moral dilemmas is to highlight the qualities that meaningfully affect the outcome. We have here two scenarios, one in which the thief would be held responsible, and one in which he would not. Free will easily distinguishes these two scenarios, and since you claim we don't need free will to make such judgments, let's hear how you distinguish these.
Someone kidnapped my wife so I stole a car is not a valid legal defense, nor would I argue it is a valid moral defense. As I stated from the get go, I would hold the thief responsible in both situations.
That's not the scenario I posed, although perhaps the presentation wasn't clear. So to be perfectly clear so there are no misunderstandings, the thief was told to steal your car or his wife would be executed.
Clearly he's morally culpable for stealing the car in one scenario and not in the other. This distinction can be clearly made using free will. You claim you don't need free will to make this distinction, so I'd like to hear how you do so.
To provide better example - one guy blackmails you to kill me, or he will kill your whole family. You still have a choice.
You make your choice or it's predetermined cause no free will - it doesn't matter.
You are responsible for your choice, and the blackmailer is responsible for the blackmail. You have an excuse why you choose the way you did, and it may be decided to be a good thing to do or evil, depending on the morality of particular person (basically the trolley problem).
With car the responsibility for stealing compared to the responsibility for a murder is negligible, so people focus on the second one. But both are still there, they don't cancel out.
He's causally responsible yes, free will is about assigning moral responsibility. The validity of various reasons for acting immorally is precisely the question that free will addresses.
Moral responsibility seems to me to be the same as the casual responsibility in these cases?
There's the famous "goal does/does not justify means" - if blackmail removed your moral responsibility then it's meaningless because there's nothing to justify. I don't think it's the case.
I think moral responsibility is still there, it's just negligible compared to the alternatives.
And I still don't see how it requires free will (except for the useless definition "anything that learns and can make a choice" - then by definition we have a free will, but that was never in question, why even waste a word on such a concept?).
On one case, only as inevitable intermediary in the chain of causation, in the other as a necessary part of the ultimate, uncaused causation.
These are very different senses of “causally responsible”.
> free will is about assigning moral responsibility.
Only indirectly, in the context of it being assumed axiomatically that having ones will be a necessary uncaused cause of the outcome is required for moral responsibility; it's directly about assigning root cause.
The posters I'm engaging here don't believe in uncaused causation (nor do I), so there's little difference in the causal character of the thief's actions here in either case.
Free will is, by definition, both uncaused and a cause of other actions. If you don't believe in uncaused causation, you don't believe in free will, but you can't discuss the meaning and implication of free will in any meaningful way while ignoring the entirety of it's definition whether or not you believe in free will (or the broader conceptual class of uncaused causes of which free will is a part.)
No it's not. The free will debate is about defining what free will actually means so that we can assign moral responsibility.
The scientific meaning of "free will" as experimenters being able to setup their instruments free from influence of that which they're measuring is not what's being discussed here.
But you don't need free will to do that. You need a system of inputs that result in an output, with that output being the decision. It's still all a matter of causality. We've evolved in such a way that we want to stay alive, and that the vast majority of people value being alive over having a replaceable object. Or, I suppose in this example, their spouse being alive. Our collective morality is the result of that system of inputs.
If you get right down to it, it's a value judgment on life vs. property. Those values are shaped based off of our past.
Clearly some quality leads people to make a distinction between the scenarios I presented. Compatibilism calls this quality the free will of the agent in question. This is not an earth-shattering concept and does not violate any scientific principles, and it matches how people talk and reason about these scenarios.
You keep saying this, but it's simply not true. I've specifically explained how it is a matter of making value judgments based on our past. That's all it is. This same system of judgments also equally explains people's beliefs when it comes to morals as well.
This is not an explanation. In your approach, is the thief morally responsible for their actions in neither case, in one but not the other case, or in both cases? And why?
If they steal a car because someone has a gun to they or their spouse's head: Not responsible
Why: Because the causal chain of events that have gotten us to modern humanity have resulted in our cognitive functions valuing human life over physical objects. These are the inputs to the system. These are all causal, products of evolution, etc, and deterministic. The output, the lack of moral responsibility when it's a matter of a human life, is just as causal and deterministic. Free will is not a requirement to come to these conclusions.
If we had evolved in such a way that we kill and eat our spouses after mating like some other species on Earth, but vehicles were a scarce and irreplaceable resource, our morality would be quite different and the thief would likely be morally responsible in both cases. (For what it's worth, I much prefer that we do not live in such a reality ;))
Our values have little to do with the question of free will. A value system determines what we consider to be good or bad, it does not determine who is responsible for a specific good or bad outcome.
So if the thief is not responsible for stealing the car in the hostage scenario, then I assume that you agree that the hostage taker is responsible. And the reason you reach this conclusion is because you assign moral agency to the thief when he's acting alone, and you acknowledge that he has no moral agency when he's being coerced. In other words, he's acting of his own free will in one circumstance, but not the other.
Simply saying "we value life over property" does not enable you to absolve the thief for his immoral act.
Actually it's a very valid legal defense, and if someone stole a car under such situations, and could prove it (that they were blackmailed etc), they would either have been let go, or given a much smaller sentence.
>* As I stated from the get go, I would hold the thief responsible in both situations.*
That's bizarro though. No judge would do that.
Circumstances change the moral evaluation of actions, it doesn't matter if it was a blackmail, or a hurricane (which doesn't have a free will) - still people would be more lenient on the guy that stole a car to save his wife. And the guy still made a choice (or had the illusion of making a choice), just with different circumstances.
And still the existence of free will changes nothing in the situation. If the free will doesn't exist - people can still evaluate what is good and bad using the concept of free will. Some people use the concept of God to define morality after all, and it certainly possible (s)he doesn't exist.
No, people will be just as lenient as their puppet like automatic responses to chains of events created at the Big Bang dictate. All of those being set in stone in advance.
>If the free will doesn't exist - people can still evaluate what is good and bad using the concept of free will.
Evaluate means a process that examines the facts and can come into this or that result. But without free will (in pure determinism) there's no this or that result: just whatever is destined to be. Even the term "evaluation" is bogus, it's just an automatic reflex.
>Some people use the concept of God to define morality after all, and it certainly possible (s)he doesn't exist.
Which would make their morality meaningless. And so would the non-existence of free will.
> No
and then repeat what I said, stressing the fact that people are puppets in this scenario. Yes they are, and it doesn't matter, they will still do the exact same thing as if they weren't puppets. That's the point.
> without free will [...] there's no this or that result: just whatever is destined to be
So what? This line of code evaluates distance between two points and prints "Boom" if it's smaller than 10.0.
if (sqrt((x0-x1)*(x0-x1) + (y0-y1)*(y0-y1)) < 10.0)
printf("Boom");
> Which would make their morality meaningless. And so would the non-existence of free will.
No it wouldn't. Provide arguments if you think otherwise.
You actually do. The very process of assigning "share of responsibility" is precisely the question that depends upon free will. If the thief stole your car only because someone was holding his wife hostage, now where does the responsibility lie? The circumstances immediately surrounding the car theft are precisely the same, but now an influence further back in the causal chain is presumably responsible. How would you differentiate these two scenarios without free will?
> I love my SO. I try to avoid doing things that hurt her, because seeing her hurt fundamentally makes me unhappy. It makes me unhappy enough that it outweighs the personal benefits of whatever decision I was making. [...] Free will is not necessary to explain it.
Free will is necessary to explain why you are morally blameworthy or praiseworthy for your choice of whether to go with your inclinations.