[MD] Moral Responsibility and Free Will

[david buchanan]

dmb said:
...As I understand it, if you "could have acted differently", then you have free will. Period. I have no idea why anyone thinks this free will also has to have "something else".

Steve replied:
... "could" suggests a hypothetical situation that you ought to be prepared to explicate.  What do _you_ mean by "could have acted differently"? Could have after differently if what were true?

dmb says:
What, you want the metaphysical conditions of possibility for acting differently? I think that approach is fundamentally opposed to the MOQ's pragmatic and empirical approach. Freedom and constraint refer to the concrete particulars of empirical reality and that's where it means something to act one way instead of another, to do or say one thing instead of another. Possibilities and options are before us all day long and we act, we decide on big things and small. To ask, after the fact, if we really could have made different choices than the one's we felt ourselves making might make for an interesting hypothetical question but one does have to sort of denigrate and de-realize the empirical realities that prompted such speculation in the first place. Parfit might take such things seriously, but he's coming from a very, very different place philosophically. He's a reductionist who thinks individuals are brains and bodies. 



Steve said:
Parfit does explicate what "could have acted differently" can mean. Even if that hypothetical situation is rewinding time under determinism, then "could have acted differently" can still be taken to mean "if we had wanted to." That works even if "what we want" is causally determined. The only problem I thought you could have with that being a sufficient level of freedom on which to base moral responsibility is that "what we want" is also free. .. Freedom to not only will, but freely choose what to will, and freely choose what we choose to will, and so on, and so on. You keep saying that that problem of regress is not an issue for you, but then what exactly is the issue you have with Parfit's explication of "could have acted differently"?


dmb says:

I thought I spelled that out pretty clearly already. It's his slight of hand, his phoney version of "could have" that I do not buy. 

I "could have" acted differently IF I had wanted to.
What I wanted was determined by causality.
Causality could have determined a different want for me.
If my wants were different, I could have acted differently.
This is not a weak basis for moral responsibility. It is no basis at all. It's the kind of thing that gives sophistry a bad name. It constructs a totally vacuous notion of "could have acted differently" wherein this supposed responsibility is really just a matter of being pushed in one way by deterministic forces instead of being pushed another way by the same deterministic forces. Either way, you act according to your wants and your wants are determined. That makes it an entirely meaningless sense of "could have" and there is no freedom anywhere in sight. It's just plain old determinism, reasoning from atoms up to the sphere of human action, as usual. This is the stuff we're suppose to reject from the very start. 

Wiki says;

Parfit uses many examples seemingly inspired by Star Trek and other science fiction, such as the teletransporter, to explore our intuitions about our identity. He is a reductionist, believing that since there is no adequate criterion of personal identity, people do not exist apart from their components. Parfit argues that reality can be fully described impersonally: ....On Parfit's account, individuals are nothing more than brains and bodies, but identity cannot be reduced to either. Parfit concedes that his theories rarely conflict with rival Reductionist theories in everyday life, and that the two are only brought to blows by the introduction of extraordinary examples.  ....