Hannibal wrote:
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.
I've found the classic literature on free will to be a bit disappointing and somewhat incoherent, so I prefer to use simple devices and assumptions.
Device: thought experiment involving a machine that makes decisions.
Assumption: fundamentally we are no different from such a machine.
Throughout the literature there is a confusion of what it means to be free and responsible. I believe this is because freedom (in the way the libertarians want it) is an absurd concept. It can only be defined in terms of reactive attitudes, rather than in formal definitions. Freedom for the noncompatibilists seems to be something like this:
- a genuinely free choice
- at time T, the agent has the power to choose either X or Y, and is not bound to one of them
what is often ignored, is the notion of the
basis of such a choice. I do not mean a physical, or substrative, basis - but rather a
decision making basis.
Another way of framing this paradox is by asking the following:
"if we're not bound by determining factors, then what exactly determines the choice?"
If nothing determines the choice, then how can the choice be made? If something determines the choice, then what controls that something? If we want freedom, then the agent has to control that something, by
choosing that something. But is this very choice free? It's a vicious regress into fluffy bullshit.
Chisolm attempts to circumvent this problem by positing the idea of immanent causation (as opposed to transeunt), but as far as I could tell, he never explains what such a thing could mean. Although to be fair, transeunt causation doesn't make much sense either if you really think about it - how does cause really exert its effect?
What people really want to say is that
freedom is the mental mechanism that justifies my anger or love toward someone that wrongs me or rights me
So much for incompatibilism.
Compatibilism seems confused in a different sense. Many cases are built up around the faculty of reason, and will - but I feel the big mistake is in bridging the moral gap. I do not see how a machine can be held responsible for an action that it was bound to perform.
I've also found it interesting that two qualities associated with wise religious figures, or enlightened individuals, is utter humility and infinite forgiveness. Both these attitudes are completely compatible with the notion that free will does not exist...
Here are a few notes I wrote down a couple months ago:
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?