Soft determinism says that even if (and even though) determinism is true, we are still responsible for our actions. What does that mean exactly, that we are responsible for our actions? Moral responsibility seems to have two distinct meanings, and you might answer the question of soft determinism differently depending on which one you mean. One meaning it might have is that, even if determinism is true, our motives cause our actions, therefore actions that attempt to correct our motives in order to change our future actions are warranted. Whatever might be causing me to contemplate committing a cold-blooded murder, if you don't want me committing that cold-blooded murder, then whose motive needs to be modified? Well, mine. So you may want to attach penalties to cold-blooded murder so that have a countervailing motive to whatever my motive for murder might be, and not commit the act. If I do commit the act, then you are going to want to find out who did it, and maybe do something to me that will deter others from doing the same thing. But what if determinism is true, and the fact that I am a murderer and you are a law-abiding citizen is, in the final analysis, the result of factors beyond my control, or yours. If you are trying to correct someone's motives and change their behavior, pushing the question of "responsibility" further back like that doesn't make sense. But what if what you are doing is first and foremost trying to give me what I really deserve, to approximate in human terms what presumably God, if there is one, will be doing at the Final Judgment? Then it seems to me that being concerned about determinism is more plausible, since it seems to be a matter of cosmic luck that I happened to end up on the end of a causal chain that made me a murderer, but made you a law-abiding citizen.
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So people who believe in either soft or hard determinism still think they are responsible for causing something, anything to happen at all even changing other's behavior?
That's just nuts.
Off topic, but Pope Francis apparently supports Black Lives Matter. In his latest encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, paragraph 267, he condemns "extrajudicial or extralegal executions, which are homicides [...] often passed off as clashes with criminals or presented as the unintended consequences of the reasonable, necessary, and proportionate use of force in applying the law."
Victor has a problem understanding how some of us have come to rest in compatibilism. It's as if he feels that a deterministic world leaves no room for moral responsibility. Hence we compatibilists are using the term differently from him. I don't think that's right. Rather, reading this piece, the Tuesday one, and others addressing this issue, I think we have different conceptions of causation and determinism. Instead of a linear chain of dominoes imagine a tree with causation flowing from the leaves down to the trunk, or a river delta with the tide coming in. In this picture there can be no 'ultimate source of my action', no 'final analysis', no 'ultimate moral responsibility'. I am the source of my action and I am responsible for it. The question should be, What kind of deterministic creature am I? Am I the kind of deterministic creature that responds to reward and punishment, or maybe just a good talking to, who needs an adjustment to his moral compass? Or am I the miserable creature the Devil chose for his experiment---the one guaranteed to do evil as much as anyone could be because the Devil has sufficiently atrophied that organ?
Victor,
Morality, responsibility, and law are no problem on determinism.
The universe is, at base, deterministic. But, that occurs at such a fine scale that it is humanly impossible to analyze 10^27 deterministic interaction every (say) femtosecond.
Morality is personal and relative. Our sense of ought is an individual evolved brain process. Certain moral propositions appear somewhat universal because we are all of the same species with mostly the same physiology.
Responsibility is an evolved social construct as well as a personal experience. We feel responsibility and expect responsibility from others as a useful social construct, not because the universe is not deterministic.
Responsibility, rules, and various behavior modification influences are how deterministic mechanisms interact, each to their own benefit. The fact that there is no such thing in the universe as absolute morality or absolute responsibility is irrelevant to the functional usefulness of the social constructs by convention of broadly shared sensibilities of morality and responsibility.
Another way to perhaps gain insight into the fact that there is no self contradiction in deterministic materialism when properly formulated and expressed is to consider a pseudo random number generator.
We all know that a pseudo random number generator is deterministic. But supposing a casino used a very sophisticated and secure pseudo random number generator to replace shuffling such that a sorting machine would deterministically place the cards in the deck according to the output of the pseudo random number generator.
Would your playing strategy change at all? No, not reasonably or effectively. You have no means as an ordinary honest player to differentiate between the cards placed by shuffling as opposed to the cards placed deterministically in the deck.
Above some level of complexity a pseudo random process becomes humanly indistinguishable from a truly random process (if there could be such a thing).
Human beings devise coping mechanisms to function in the case of otherwise overwhelming complexity. Use of statistical or probabilistic methods to deal with highly complex deterministic samples is one such coping mechanism.
Social constructs such as conventional morality, law, and personal responsibility are simply coping mechanism that allow human beings to function as deterministic systems of such vast complexity as to make deterministic analysis humanly impossible.
David,
I think we have different conceptions of causation and determinism. Instead of a linear chain of dominoes imagine a tree with causation flowing from the leaves down to the trunk, or a river delta with the tide coming in. In this picture there can be no 'ultimate source of my action', no 'final analysis', no 'ultimate moral responsibility'.
I'm trying to understand what you are explaining here with your understanding of causation and I'm not getting it.
Are you saying that that your actions are so influenced by factors outside of your control that you are not ultimately responsible for any of your actions?
Hi BM. No, I'm saying that I can't find a place in the causal picture for the distinction between 'ultimate' and (say) 'proximate' responsibility. Yes, I am the product of past events, but those events have given me a functional organ of moral decision making, from which my actions now flow. It's the deterministic operation of said organ that locates and guarantees moral responsibility. Without it, eg in animals, children, Phineas Gage, etc, there is no moral responsibility. If the Devil disables this in me and uses me as a blunt instrument to achieve his ends then the responsibility is wholly with him, not me.
David,
But then the 'functional organ of moral decision making' would be the ultimate source of your responsibility wouldn't it?
And what do you mean by calling it's operation deterministic? Does that mean there are no choices whether the Devil disables it or not?
Phineas Gage had a shooting pain in his head, but it sounds like there were a lot of exaggeration about his condition.
Source, yes, but 'ultimate' I think is redundant (and misleading). It suggests a contrast with 'proximate source'. Is there a proximate source of the Mississippi? A deterministic chess-playing program still makes choices. The determinism guarantees consistency---same choice in same circumstances. Also, an indeterministic decider would risk choosing in opposition to some supreme moral value.
I didn't see that Victor mentioned anything about 'ultimate' or 'proximate' causes of responsibility. I think the question was whether an action could be considered immoral if the actor was not in charge of his 'functional organ of moral decision making'.
A deterministic chess-playing program still makes choices. The determinism guarantees consistency---same choice in same circumstances.
A program makes choices the same way that an adding machine adds numbers or how one looks up a phone number in a phone book. A chess program also is not normally tempted by money, sex or power which is why this is a poor example of how and why humans act the way they do.
Also, an indeterministic decider would risk choosing in opposition to some supreme moral value.
Yes indeed. Which is why I questioned why you consider this organ deterministic. Humans don't act that way do they?
Victor uses the phrases 'the ultimate source of my action' and 'the question of ultimate moral responsibility' in the piece last Tuesday. In the current piece he asks, 'But what if determinism is true, and the fact that I am a murderer and you are a law-abiding citizen is, in the final analysis, the result of factors beyond my control, or yours?' This makes sense on the finite chain picture of causation, but if the tree image stretching further and further back in time to more and more events of less and less significance (essentially the past light cone conception in relativity physics) is a better metaphor, where do we place 'the final analysis'?
I brought up chess-playing programs because your question 'Does that [deterministic operation] mean there are no choices whether the Devil disables it [the decision organ] or not? strongly suggests that your intuition is that a deterministic world leaves no place for choice. It's this intuition that drives anti-compatibilism. In his recent pieces Victor is saying (I think) that determinism rules out desert. But it's obvious to me that the program is making choices. The rules of chess allow many moves at each play and the program makes just one. Likewise, people make choices. At some juncture in their life they compile a list of exclusive options as best they can and select one. I don't see how the nature of the options---succumbing to temptation or not, perhaps---makes a relevant difference to this 'pick a card' scenario. If we look inside the program we can probably see how it came to make some choice. If we could look inside a person in sufficient detail we might also see how he came to make some choice. But this is science fiction. (Raymond Smullyan has a nice short story called An Epistemological Nightmare.) Instead we use 'character traits', rough approximations of people, to understand their decisions. And we are often wrong. And I'm not convinced I understand my own decision making much more than I understand others.
Would you want your decisions to be made indeterministically, maybe by tossing a coin? I wouldn't in general. See also Smullyan, Is God a Taoist?.
This makes sense on the finite chain picture of causation, but if the tree image stretching further and further back in time to more and more events of less and less significance (essentially the past light cone conception in relativity physics) is a better metaphor, where do we place 'the final analysis'?
Certainly 'the final analysis' cannot stretch back further in time than when the human in question began to exist and act in a moral sense. The idea that our actions can be traced back to the Big Bang supposes already that we are not agents that make moral choices and so begs the question.
Likewise, people make choices.
People create programs/machines that do what the creators want them to do. It's not really the program that is making a choice, it's the creator and if the program chooses incorrectly it means the creator made an error and needs to correct the program. People are not normally like that unless they have been through some spooky government mind control torture.
Would you want your decisions to be made indeterministically, maybe by tossing a coin?
Just because one's decision making in not deterministic in your sense does not mean it has to be random. Once again this is begging the question against agency and assuming 'naturalism'.
Victor says, 'But what if determinism is true, and the fact that I am a murderer and you are a law-abiding citizen is, in the final analysis, the result of factors beyond my control, or yours?' It sounds to me as if the analysis intended here is a causal analysis, so it should include my parents, their parents, and so on.
Perhaps the Creator corrects his erroneous creations through the mechanism of reward and punishment? Surely parents, teachers, peers, by administering rewards for good behaviour and punishments for bad are instrumental in forming a moral compass in children so they are more likely to make good choices than bad? It may be spooky---how on Earth does it work?---but it's not torture.
I'm not denying agency. At least, not agency as I understand it. But I do think it's entirely compatible with, yes, a naturalistic determinism.
Victor says, 'But what if determinism is true, and the fact that I am a murderer and you are a law-abiding citizen is, in the final analysis, the result of factors beyond my control, or yours?' It sounds to me as if the analysis intended here is a causal analysis, so it should include my parents, their parents, and so on.
Well sure if determinism is true but that is what is in dispute. Certainly there things about people's condition that they have no control over but most of us also think there are things that we do control.
Perhaps the Creator corrects his erroneous creations through the mechanism of reward and punishment?
Is that an allowable naturalist position?
Surely parents, teachers, peers, by administering rewards for good behaviour and punishments for bad are instrumental in forming a moral compass in children so they are more likely to make good choices than bad? It may be spooky---how on Earth does it work?---but it's not torture.
I admit I've never experienced the UK school system, but I've heard stories ;-)
But it's still probably less successful than MKUltra at programming people.
At least, not agency as I understand it.
Then how is your understanding different that non-compatibalists?
Science, or rather technology, has been very successful by focusing on a part of the universe and ignoring the rest. For instance, in physics, we simplify what actually exists to 'point particles' without friction with a uniform force applied to get general predictions about how things will move. This works well for inanimate objects but not so much for animate objects since animate objects can move themselves without an external 'force' being applied.
Perhaps determinists think that since they were so successful by excluding animate things from their original focus that somehow animate things must also behave the same way as inanimate things, forgetting the reason they had to ignore animate things in the first place was that animate things don't behave the same way as inanimate things.
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