[MD] Moral Responsibility and Free Will

[david buchanan]

dmb said to Steve:
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 replied:
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.


dmb says:
As I see it, you are dismissing a very powerful criticism as some kind of fallacy, as some kind of name-calling. If you really believe that, then you do not understand the nature of this criticism. You are using the voice of a determinist and a reductionist to talk about moral responsibility and free will. That would be wildly inappropriate and needlessly confusing even if we weren't supposed to be talking about the MOQ's version of free will. I'm saying that your approach is needlessly confused and weirdly tone-deaf. I mean, Parfit's point is predicated on causal determinism. How in the world do you figure that could even be relevant to the MOQ? You did the same thing with the Sam Harris quotes. His neurological determinism just doesn't fit. Einstein was not a MOQer either. Dropping these names isn't really relevant to any discussion of the MOQ's reformulation and so invoking them is just an argument from authority, but badly played. You've been pounding square pegs into round holes all along the way. We're still arguing about what the term "free will" means, for christ's sake! Long story short, you've been trying to get at the MOQ by adopting the position it rejects at the very starts. That's just bad and wrong and confusing and Parfit is just one more dose of tone-deaf, upside-down nonsense.  


Steve said to dmb:
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. I still have no idea what _you_ mean by "could have."  ..,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"?



dmb says:

I smell the workings of analytic philosophy here and it doesn't just cut against the grain of the MOQ, it's a head-on collision, a real train-wreck. (Don't mistake my colorful language for a lack of substance.) You asked a very fundamental question - basically, to what extent do we follow DQ - and I have dished up several detailed answers to that question. If you had paid attention to those answers, you'd probably realize how ridiculous it is to be asking about free will in terms of past conditionals. It's almost literally a matter of framing an empirical question in terms of metaphysical pre-requisites. The radical empiricist simply wouldn't answer the question of free will in that way. DQ is aesthetic, not conceptual or metaphysical. That's why freedom entails perception, which is what YOU asked about. 

Did you ever say a single thing about those answers to YOUR question. It seems to me that you ask questions but do not listen to the answer. At the same time, I have to ask the same basic question many times before I get an answer. You can call me names and otherwise dismiss my complaints and criticisms but it's all on the record. It's all in the archives. If any fair observer read through this long exchange with an eye toward determining which one of us was being a "dick", I have no doubt as to who would win that contest.