[MD] Moral Responsibility and Free Will

[Steven Peterson]

Hi dmb,

It seems like you may lost sight of what this discussion is about. It
is not really about the proper usage of the word "choice" even though
I think you are wrong in thinking that human choice itself implies
free will. The question is about whether moral responsibility requires
free will. You have asserted that the link is a simple logical
necessity and that I am making some huge blunder in saying that we can
talk about moral responsibility before settling the question of
whether we have free will or not. I have asserted that it is a
separate question, and I used used the Stanford encyclopedia to
explain what I mean (i.e. that free will or free choice is a special
case of will or choice rather than being equivalent to choice.) You
seem to have missed the basic gist of what we were even arguing about
in your analogy to flying.

As one more attempt to show that this link is not a logical necessity
(in addition to Harris quoting Einstein quoting Schopenhauer and the
Stanford encyclopedia), I now offer this from Derek Parfit in "On What
Matters" making the exact same claim that I am making: "For some act
of ours to be wrong, because we ought to have acted differently, it
must be true that we could have acted differently.  But the relevant
sense of ‘could’ is the hypothetical, motivational sense.  And this
sense of ‘could’ is compatible with determinism.  Even if our acts are
causally determined, we could have the kind of freedom morality
requires." To clarify, "...for it to be relevantly true that we could
have acted differently, it need only be true that we would have acted
differently if we had wanted to, and had chosen to do so. We can call
this the hypothetical, motivational sense of ‘could’.  This sense of
‘could’ is compatible with determinism.  You could have helped the
blind man cross the street in the sense that you would have done so if
you had chosen to do so.  It is irrelevant whether, given your actual
desires and other mental states, it was causally inevitable that you
did not choose to act in this way."

At any rate, since Parfit is considered to be the most important moral
philosopher today, I am certainly not defying logic or defying simple
language usage rules or even somewhere out in left field to make the
claim that moral responsibility does not depend on free will.

Regards,
Steve




On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 1:00 PM, david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> dmb said to Steve:
> ...So then the most basic definition - from the first paragraph of Stanford's article - says that free will is a particular sort of capacity to choose. ... The Stanford quote doesn't say anything at all about free will being agency "plus something else". Since my question is about this "something else", the quote does nothing to answer it.
>
>
> Steve replied:
> That something else is some way of defining freedom in this context.  ..What exactly is required above and beyond the fact that we make choices to say that we make _free_ choices is not a settled matter.  ... it _is_ "SOME KIND of capacity to choose." There is no question there. The question is, which kind is the free kind? ...We know that we have the experience of willing certain of our acts. The presence of choices (of willings) is a given. The question is whether choices (or willings) are free or determined. The Stanford article agrees on this point..."The majority view, however, is that we can readily conceive willings that are not free. Indeed, much of the debate about free will centers around whether we human beings have it, yet virtually no one doubts that we will to do this and that." You see? Far from being "wildly incoherent" on the matter, I am rather taking the majority view.
>
>
>
> dmb says:
> I guess you don't understand the question. In any case, I'm sure you didn't answer it.
>
> I mean, of course the debate is about whether or not we have free will. Those who deny it will say our will is not free, that it is determined. If you take the latter view, then people have no choice but to act as they do. But that does NOT address my question.
>
> Let's say the question is about the capacity to fly. As I see it, you'd be saying "well it is SOME KIND of capacity to leave the ground and move through the air. There is no question there. The question is, which kind of flight is the flying kind? We know that we have the experience of seeing birds and bees fly. The presence of these flying things is a given. The question is whether these flying things can fly or not."
>
> Which kind of free will is the free kind? What kind of flight is the flying kind? These questions make no sense. The issue is just about whether there is such a thing. And so I can't make any sense of the idea that free will is this capacity PLUS SOMETHING ELSE. To assert a PARTICULAR version of this capacity is NOT a matter of adding something else to it. It's just a matter of being specific about the nature of that capacity.
>
> Then, if you go back to the flight analogy, you can ask a question that does make sense. You can ask if the apparent capacity to fly is an illusion. If you think it is, then you're making a case against flight. If you think it's not an illusion, you can ask about the PARTICULAR SORT of flight that it might be. Bees, bats, birds, jets and helicopter have different SORTS of flying capacity, for example, whereas domestic turkeys can barely walk, let alone get off the ground. In other words, we can have various PARTICULAR versions of the capacity to fly. We can deny the capacity to fly as an illusion.  But to say that flight is the capacity to fly PLUS SOMETHING ELSE just doesn't make any sense to me. That's what's asking about.
>
> Why does free will have to be free will plus something else? I can't make any sense of that notion. As I've said, it's a weirdly redundant and recursive knot of an idea. It's like saying that vision is the capacity to see plus something else. Sure, we can hear sounds but the question is whether we can hear the sound of the listening? I can't help but think this is just the intellectual equivalent of a freak-show contortionist. I don't see how ideas can be bent like that without tearing a ligament or something.
>
>
> The funny thing is, when it comes to Pirsig's PARTICULAR SORT of free will (freedom), you have nothing but questions. I mean, Pirsig says that one is free to the extent that one follows DQ. At this point you suppose there is a shift FROM free will to the perception of DQ. But it's not a rejection of this capacity so much as a qualification, a specific and particular version of HUMAN freedom, of our free will. Yes, this human capacity is best understood in relation and comparison to the less evolved capacities at other levels but that doesn't mean that your capacity should be reduced to an atom's or equated with an ape's. We can talk about the sort of freedom that humans have without also claiming that freedom for creatures without culture or language. We can talk about what it means for a human being to follow DQ without contradicting the larger framework of the MOQ.