[MD] Moral Responsibility and Free Will

[Steven Peterson]

Hi dmb,


> 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.

Steve:
Metaphysical? No. I just asked what you mean by "could have acted differently."

dmb:
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.


Steve:
You equated free will with "could have acted differently" and now say
that could have acted differently just means freedom. I still have no
idea what you mean by "could have acted differently." All I know is
that you don't like how Parfit unpacked the phrase.

Again, "could have" implies some condition or conditions. What
conditions are you talking about?

dmb:
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:
It is a fallacy to think that arguments can be rejected simply by
putting a label on someone (or noting that someone else has previously
done such labeling). But you do this a lot anyway.



> 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.

Steve:
I know you don't buy it. I'm was asking, what is your issue with it?
Your answer follows...


dmb:
> 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.


Steve:
You reject Parfit's use of "could have" as meaningless. You also
rejected the notion of "could have" as being free to will what you
will (as offered by Harris quoting Einstein quoting Schopenhauer). I
still have no idea what _you_ mean by "could have." I just have 2
examples of what you don't like.

Again, if you want to say freedom is a sort of "could have," please
recognize that "could" is a conditional term. It is the past
conditional. It puts conditions on the past. What conditions are you
talking about when you say that free will means "could have acted
differently"?

Best,
Steve