[MD] Freewill

[david buchanan]

dmb said:
 ...If we are not free to choose our actions, how can we be held responsible for those actions? Put another way, how can there be moral responsibility without some kind of human agency? I'm not asking about SOM or the MOQ. I'm only asking about the simple logical connection between agency and morality, regardless of the metaphysical framework.


Steve replied:
I'll let Sam Harris explain...
"The Supreme Court has called free will a “universal and persistent” foundation for our system of law, distinct from “a deterministic view of human conduct that is inconsistent with the underlying precepts of our criminal justice system” (United States v. Grayson, 1978). Any scientific developments that threatened our notion of free will would seem to put the ethics of punishing people for their bad behavior in question.
...The great worry is that any honest discussion of the underlying causes of human behavior seems to erode the notion of moral responsibility. If we view people as neuronal weather patterns, how can we coherently speak about morality? And if we remain committed to seeing people as people, some who can be reasoned with and some who cannot, it seems that we must find some notion of personal responsibility that fits the facts.  ...Happily, we can. What does it really mean to take responsibility for an action?  ...To say that I was responsible for my behavior is simply to say that what I did was sufficiently in keeping with my thoughts, intentions, beliefs, and desires to be considered an extension of them. ... Judgments of responsibility, therefore, depend upon the overall complexion of one’s mind, not on the metaphysics of mental cause and effect."


dmb says:
Exactly. If we view people as weather patterns, how can we coherently speak about morality? Sam is making MY point, Steve. This is the same point made by Pirsig, the dictionary, Stanford and, apparently, everyone else who's ever thought seriously about the issue. Even Sam, with his own kind of neurological determinism, still thinks we need "some notion of personal responsibility". He's not denying any kind of human agency, just the "metaphysics of mental cause and effect" or the "causal agent living within the human mind". For Harris, the brain and mind are the same thing and that's all you need for human agency. (You can see why Patricia Churchland would call Harris a reductionist when he suggests, to put it crudely, that brains cause murder: "How can we make sense of these gradations of moral blame when brains and their background influences are, in every case, and to exactly the same degree, the real cause of a woman’s death?") 

"What we condemn in another person is the INTENTION to do harm," Sam says and we can do that "without any recourse to notions of free will. Likewise, degrees of guilt could be judged, as they are now, by reference to the facts of the case: the personality of the accused, his prior offenses, his patterns of association with others, his use of intoxicants, his confessed INTENTIONS with regard to the victim, etc. 

See, Sam has rejected the Cartesian self, "the causal agent living inside the human mind" but he's not denying that we have intentions and he is fully acknowledging the fact that moral blameworthiness has everything to do with our intentions. That definitely counts as some kind of human agency, and Sam is saying quite explicitly that there are good reasons why the conscious decision to do another person harm is considered to be particularly blameworthy. "Because consciousness is, among other things, the context in which our INTENTIONS become available to us. What we do subsequent to conscious planning tends to most fully reflect the global properties of our minds—our beliefs, desires, goals, prejudices, etc."

Our intentions, beliefs, desires and goals? Come on, how is that NOT a description of human agency or human will? 

The challenge is to find a plausible example of moral responsibility without some kind of human agency. Sam Harris doesn't count as an example because his view does have some kind of human agency. That means you still have not answered the question.