[MD] Moral Responsibility and Free Will

[Steven Peterson]

Hi dmb,

On Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 5:07 PM, david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Steve, I conceded the "logical necessity" point about a month ago. You might recall that I quoted from the Oxford Companion to Philosophy.

Steve:
I recall thinking that you conceded something or other about a month
ago, but just one week ago you complained, "Or what if I said that the
notion of moral responsibility is in no way predicated on free will?"
as though I just said the craziest thing you ever heard.

That didn't sound to me like you were conceding the point that moral
responsibility does not depend on free will, but if that is what you
are now saying, fine.


dmb:
> But it still seems to me that you and your man Parfit aren't making any sense. Parfit starts out well. He begins by saying exactly what I've been saying. "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 then he gets way too fancy and seems to say the exact opposite. "Even if our acts are causally determined, we could have the kind of freedom morality requires." This reversal hinges on a very strange notion of what counts as the relevant kind of "could have acted differently". Look at what happens when he says, ".., it need only be true that we would have acted differently if we had wanted to, and had chosen to do so. ..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."
> This "relevant" sense of choosing is the kind wherein it doesn't matter if that choice was inevitably caused!? Nobody uses the word choice like that except philosophers whose theories are way to fanciful. That is just a silly slight of hand and I'm not buying it for a second.

Steve:
Now we seem to have come full circle. This issue goes back to Harris's
quote of Einstein quoting Schopenhauer.

Einstein as quoted by Harris:

"...I feel that I will to light my pipe and I do
it; but how can I connect this up with the idea of freedom? What is
behind the act of willing to light the pipe? Another act of willing?
Schopenhauer once said: Der Mensch kann was er will; er kann aber
nicht wollen was er will (Man can do what he will but he cannot will
what he wills)."

You seem to be now insisting on what you said previously was silly and
what no one means by free will. To have enough freedom for moral
responsibility you seem to be saying that not only must man be free to
do what he wills, he must also be free to be able to will himself to
will whatever he wants to will. Parfit is saying that we don't need to
be able to say that we can will ourselves to will anything we want to
have enough freedom for moral responsibility. All we need to do is be
able to will our choices. Whether or not our motivations for making
these choices are determined by forces beyond our control is an issue
that can be held as separate. "Could have acted differently" means we
would have if we had wanted to. We don't need to insist that could
change what we want as a matter of free will. We don't will ourselves
to have our values, we ARE our values.



dmb:
> But like I said, I already conceded the point AND that's not what I was talking about. The question about your "something else" still stands.

Steve:
All I'm saying is that will is not the same as "free will." There is a
qualifier, "free," that needs to be unpacked for anyone insisting on
the existence of free will to explain what they mean by free will.
That is the something extra or something less. It is the "particular
sort" of willing or choosing rather than simply willing or choosing
that SEP says is what all the fuss has been about over the past couple
thousand years. For you, apparently, it is not merely the freedom of
choosing one thing over another because you wanted to. It also
requires that your wanting to do it was not determined by causal
forces. That is your "something else" on top of will that qualifies as
"free will."

Best,
Steve