I never said you should get angry at the machine, it's pointless.

Why bar quantum indeterminancies in your example? Doesn't this reality creep in?

Eye for an eye is the oldest law out there. Old is always best. Just like grandpa always knows best. If you don't go with eye for an eye you're saying that grandpa isn't best. BUT GRANDPA IS ALWAYS BEST!

Its quite easy to defend. That child's life is forever ruined. She no longer has her innocence and will probably have mental issues for life. To do such a thing to a child of EIGHT YEARS OLD is one step away from a death sentence. You not getting this is whats disturbing and difficult.

Wood chipper.

We have evolved biologically and societally to express anger and feel a sense of injustice, when we are wronged by certain other beings. These beings include other humans. These reactive attitudes have a very important function, but it doesn't mean they are philosophically well grounded.

then perhaps we should never get angry at a human machine.

It is unlikely that the (alleged) indeterminacies of quantum events play any causal role in decision making. More importantly, even if they did, it is hard to see how responsibility is accounted for. If these events are random, then that gives even more support for arguing against responsibility.

Remember, I brought this thought experiment in to qualify the "degrees of responsibility" that you mentioned.

Yes we can hold the machine responsible - similarly to how we can hold a mountain responsible for an avalanche - but our reactive attitudes towards the machine should reflect reality. And they do, which is why we do not get angry and feel that the machine should be punished. The notion of an "eye for an eye" is ludicrous.

We have evolved biologically and societally to express anger and feel a sense of injustice, when we are wronged by certain other beings. These beings include other humans. These reactive attitudes have a very important function, but it doesn't mean they are philosophically well grounded.

Is that based on cumulative data? I'd tend to disagree if you looked at each convict individually.

I'm not sure they stand in need of 'philosophical grounding' to begin with. You've sort of darted through a lot of territory here Jules...it might help if you briefly gave your argument re: why our common sense notions of free-will and responsibility need to be abandoned or at least heavily modified.

The feeling that people sometimes refer to, in the primary defense of their position on free will, is that they use reason to change their behaviour. When they experience this use of reason, it provides for them a sense of relief and control. Relief from commiting an "irrational" behaviour, and control as in a rationally controlled form of behaviour.

Their mistake is in conflating these experiences, which have emotional import, with the notion of a freedom that would have allowed for them to have made the choice to use reason.

The strongest form of compatibilism might be that there is an infinitely recursive reasoning process, whereby we base the choice (of whether to act reasonably) itself on reason.

Another way of putting it, is that if the will is to be the exercise of reason, then free will is the will to will to will ad infinitum.

But a few important things must be said:

Firstly, while this sort of free will is conceivably desirable, its possibility does not necessarily bridge the moral gap. The morality referred to is in the sense that there is a logic to punishment that is distinct from the utility of satisfying (understandable) cravings for revenge or retribution, deterrance/protection, or even rehabilitation. For the question is begged: How are we to be held morally responsible for acquiring that free will. It is conceivable, and indeed empirically secure, that there are agents within our community who do not exercise this sort of free will. That is, they are not riding the enlightened tracks of recursive reason. Now you're either on this track, or off it, and we have to account for the fact that there must be some explanation as to how this manouvere (getting on or off the tracks) was initiated and carried out. We can't relegate it to "will", since we'd never get off the track if we're always functioning in accordance with "reason"; and you'd never get on the track, since if reason was the only way to get onto it, you'd have been using reason in the first place! Therefore you'd have to invoke some other (more suspect) form of the choice-concept in order to allow for this sort of control, if you wanted to justify this logic of punishment.

Secondly, it presupposes that the idea of infinite recursion of reason is a coherent notion. One way of challenging this is to consider the idea that rationality cannot exist independently of a world context. That is, it is reasonable to refrain from punching an innocent, given the world context of our biology and nervous systems - a punch would cause someone innocent to suffer (this is all assuming that we have a moral framework based on empathy or something similar). Or, it is reasonable to spend x amount of money on food items this week based on current economic and physical conditions. One wonders if an infinite analysis of the context, which is required and mirrored by an infinite recursive reasoning process, will ever converge upon an answer. My intuition is that it will not.

Thirdly, and most importantly, even if the above intuition is wrong, it presupposes that our minds are designed in such a fashion that would allow for such recursive functioning. Does the physical implementation of mind allow for such a cognitive explanation?

What's the solution? Spend a boatload of taxpayer money to treat someone's illness after they rape and murder someone? Why? So we can all feel better about ourselves and allow some freakzoid scumbag to suck on the public tit for the rest of the state-sponsored lives? Fuck that.

Where do you get this statistic from? Somebody convicted and sentanced for murder, and then released, is no more likely to commit another crime than anybody else.

what if that person had a bad childhood, or was educated in an unhealthy environment, or had an uncontrollable urge?

An uncontrollable urge denotes a mental shortcoming. By depriving them of the ability to reproduce, future generations are all the more likely to be healthy. Evolution, survival of the fittest, etc.

An uncontrollable urge denotes a mental shortcoming.

Hahahaha! Oh, you WERE kidding, right?

You couldn't be more wrong, take a psychology or anthropology class.

If someone knows that killing a child is wrong, then why did she commit the crime? Probably because of some desire or urge. Perhaps she wanted to get a mercedes and needed the money, so she killed the kid and sold the organs. That urge or desire was not able to be overcome, because of her character. Is she responsible for the nature of her character? Well the nature of her character is partially a result of experiences and decisions she's made in the past. But those events were a function of her previous character, etc.

An uncontrollable urge denotes a mental shortcoming.

They still make the choice to commit the crime, and I do see it as a choice. I think the critical point that must be addressed is that of mental competence. If a person suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, do we really hold that person responsible for violent crimes they commit in the grip of a delusion?
I feel this is different than a violent sex offender that commits murder while fulfilling their desires, so there's no blanket argument that can be applied to all cases of mental illness.

:lol: Couldn't agree more. I'm of the exact same opinion.

I've had chats about this with friends as well, and some of them also think like ryoki and a few others in this thread. It's fucking bullshit that anyone thinks an eye for an eye is wrong. If someone raped, physically hurt or killed someone close to me, then they deserve anything that comes their way. If they happen to be raped in prison by some fat slimy, tattooed convicts, GOOD FUCKING JOB!

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?did=543&scid=45

Conclusion
Twenty years ago this country (the US) embarked on an experiment with new death penalty statutes aimed at correcting the inequities and arbitrariness of the past. There now exists a considerable body of evidence--in the form of statistics, expert opinion, and personal accounts--which clearly indicates that the death penalty remains infected with injustice. Race, economics, local politics, and a host of other factors that have nothing to do with the stated purposes of capital punishment, dictate who is executed and who is spared. While the death penalty may satisfy some people's need for revenge, in practice it remains a lottery in which the American system of justice is the ultimate loser. After twenty years it is fair to conclude, with retired Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, that "the death penalty experiment has failed."

It's a little more complicated than that, puff. edit: QM doesn't rule out all determinism.

I mean all deterministic arguments or positions.

ahh i gotcha. yeah, some would argue that sub atomic events couldn't have an effect on the Newtonian universe but I just don't see how that's so.

Some would then counter that I don't see how it's so, because not all factors are observable and that person could further argue that even though not observable, there are forces which are determining the probablistic stuff i.e. the influence from 7 other dimensions etc.

but what reasons do they have to think that?

We love Rodney's Oysters.

One argument, yes.



Another argument, and a reasonable one. They don't need to believe that the probabilistic stuff is determined on a level we can't observe. They simply need to doubt that it isn't. Remember we don't know, and we may not be able to know whether in some way unbeknownst to us all this which seems probabilistic is determined.