On Fri, 30 Mar 2001, Dan Minette wrote:
> Sorry about the time it took to respond, but I've been very busy, and the
> response is not just a 5 minute job.
No problemo.
> Oh, I don't think free will can be proven metaphysically. I'm just saying
> that without free will, ethical discussions are pointless. People will do
> what they are forced to do, and that's about it.
Again, I think we need to make sure that we don't conflate two issues.
Issue one: where do ethical standards come from. Issue two: what should
ethical standards be or, rather, what are the "correct" ethical standards
and why.
One: An explanation of how ethical standards evolved in human society may
be closely linked with the existence of a belief or meme of free will, but
such an explanation need not depend upon the positing of free will as an
established fact. In other words, one can argue that a belief in free
will, as a grounds for personal responsibility, evolved as part of the
cultural evolution of ethical rules *without* arguing that free will is a
fact.
Two: I read you as arguing that for ethical standards to exist as such
(outside mere cultural norms) we must assume, even if we can't prove it,
that freedom of the will is a fact. Moreover, in order for society to
survive it must have ethical structures to which people will adhere, and
without a common belief in freedom of the will, those ethical structures
cannot be maintained.
Since I can't pretend to end the debate about whether or not free will
exists at all, for the sake of argument I'm arguing this, that even if
free will does exist, that doesn't prove that ethical standards, or
concepts of good and bad, or good and evil, have any meaning outside of
direct and subjective human experience conditioned by all the usual
morally relativistic issues of egotism, power, politics, survival,
identity, etc.
> To me, this is the crux of the matter. Are we really forced to do what we
> do by circumstances and genes or are we able to struggle to overcome those
> limitations.
But the crux of that question is, in turn, "Even if we are able to
anticipate undesirable consequences of our tendencies and thereby work to
overcome them, and succeed, is that success a product of a) freedom of the
will, or b) a process of self-overcoming made possible by a
self-aware, self-correcting conscious system that, despite it's
self-correcting nature, is still predetermined?" And is there any
identifiable difference between those two states of being?
>
> Right, but I think that it would be hard to imagine the freedom of Sartre
> if, using his terminology, people would be found to be things in themselves
> instead of things for themselves: or being instead of nothingness.
But talking this way, we (or Sartre) take what appears to be an
intermediate state between freedom and mechanism, being "things for
themselves," and squeeze it into a hoary binary opposition of being and
nothingness. As a way of explaining why we are as we are (as opposed to
arguing about how we should behave) I'm dissatisfied by the idea of being
forced to choose between these two polar extremes. Experience seems to
suggest that there's something of both involved in being what we are.
>
> If my viewpoint is right, that would be as meaningful a question as which
> slit the photon went through. Everything we see, through introspection or
> empirical observations is simply a partial understanding.
Perhaps...but I'm inclined to think that positing a noumenal reality in
response to this partial understanding has the effect of bracketing a
mechanistic--or trans-mechanistic--cause outside of what can be observed,
thus harming the concept of freedom rather then helping it. Freedom
requires an absence of causation, not a causal (or possibly causal, for
who can define the noumenon?) state once-removed from observational
possibility.
>
> My arguments for free will would be to list all the conclusions that one
> would have to accept by accepting the "no free will, all actions are
> determined by biology and environment." Indeed, just about every person
> that
> I've seen argue the other way seems to hide from the consequences of their
> own beliefs. Even B.F. Skinner in "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" slips back
> into talking about things as good or bad, or OK.
>
> I think that one would need to accept the concept of meaning as arbitrary.
Not arbitrary--merely non-transcendent. Concepts of good and evil, and
concepts of dignity that depend upon concepts of good and evil, all depend
upon one or another theory of there being a transcendent scale of
morality.
Concepts of good and bad and happiness and unhappiness, however, can all
refer merely to our needs and experiences as being of mortal, even
determined, flesh.
For example, one can regard the language of ethics as evolution's way of
creating self-regulating societies of self-aware beings. What determines
the longevity of an ethical system, then, is that it helps people survive
and perpetuate the ethical language. A robust ethical language will make
a society sufficiently fierce and self-righteous that it's not overwhelmed
by other societies, but it will also sufficiently secure the happiness
and satisfaction of its members that the society doesn't destroy itself by
neglecting the physical (and psychological as an extension of the
physical) welfare of its constituent parts.
Concepts of good and evil may be used as transcendent referents by the
ethical language because they are good at making people behave, but
experience teaches us that people are almost always willing to skirt
around concepts of good and evil in order to satisfy the more mundane
categories of good and bad, namely: do we have enough to eat? Enough
freedom to exercise our desires in gratifying ways? Enough stature to
influence the tribe's behavior for my benefit, etc. Utterly
self-referential standards of good and bad, in other words, for self-aware
beings.
And whether we have freedom or not, if we have language then we will have
to be able to talk about the relative merits of how we do things in a
general sense: i.e., whether or not they are good or bad for us, even if
only as biological beings.
I'm happy to grant that one can't derive ethical standards from
behaviorism, but to do so is idiocy anyway, like trying to derive ethics
from Newtonian physics. A behaviorist should simply be prepared to
acknowledge that ethical systems are just another product of behavior.
That wouldn't stop the behaviorist, however, from arguing that ethical
systems are extremely useful products of behavior from an evolutionary
standpoint and that, as an individual who is also part of society, one is
better off adhereing to some kind of standard more often than not; and
moreover, that it is natural for us to do so.
>
> OK, take it out of the theological arena. Assume there is no free will.
> Then consciousness is a useless byproduct of biology, right? It doesn't
> matter that we are aware, because the chemistry would work the exact same
> way if we weren't.
No, consciousness would then be a very *useful* byproduct of biology
(assuming it doesn't lead us to destroy ourselves in the future).
Chemistry would create consciousness as a way of working in a more
organized, future-heeding way than by pure instinct. The self-aware
consciousness of human beings would then be the next phase of development
up from the higher mammals, who have very complex instincts, plus maybe
limited self-awareness, plus learned behaviors.
>
> Well, the arguments about human dignity do go back at least 2500 years.
> Indeed, if you compare Gilgamesh and Genesis, you will see vastly different
> views on the dignity of human beings. In the former, humans are the
> accidental byproduct of a war between the gods. In the latter, humans are
> made in the image and likeness of God.
> From the latter source, all humans have dignity outside of their social
> standing.
Concepts of dignity can be defined and redefined, I'll grant: but do they
necessarily follow from a concept of freedom of the will? I don't believe
so. You have to go beyond mere freedom and embrace either social or
transcendental concepts of human quality and link the idea of dignity to
those concepts. If you can explain the origins of those concepts in terms
of the physical evolution of culture and language, which it seems likely
that we can do, then one can explain the experience of human dignity
without resorting to the transcendental.
> Indeed, that's part of the reason that a group of people who had
> only 25000 people living in their homeland, which was the size of Galveston,
> could have formed the basis for the viewpoints of 2 billion or so people.
I'd argue that your conclusion is conjecture at best: the success of
Judeo-Christian-Muslim forms of monotheism could just as easily be
explained by the power of the meme which says, "My god gives me the right
to subjugate, convert, or destroy you unbelievers on the grounds of
transcendentally justified aggression in addition to the more mundane
reasons of securing land and resources and security and egotism; and in
addition, the right to organize and dominate society along arbitrary
lines which to question is to blaspheme. Join us and you can share this
feeling of power and privilege; oppose us and die." In other words, this
success might well be the product of proselytism, not concepts of human
dignity themselves.
I'm willing to grant that selling a concept of human dignity is a part of
proselytism, but then it's a also a part of commercial advertising and
political indoctrination, regardless of the overal moral tone of the
message.
>
> Why stop at animals? Why are we any better than rocks or glaciers? What
> makes humans more special than any other collection of atoms? Why is it
> worse to kill a human than to melt a block of ice?
Ice cubes don't kill back. Or, one could turn things around and say that
acknowledging that humans *aren't* any better than rocks is the act of
humility that makes moral behavior possible...judging the quality of one's
actions as part of a larger system of needs rather than as justified by
the priority of personal human desire. This raises the nasty possibility
of treating people as means (like rocks) rather than as ends, but guess
what: we do that anyway, and for the most part our most vaunted moral
systems permit it (especially if it's for the greater glory of God).
> Except the argument of A-> B, C, D, E, F...ZZZ and then discussing the
> consequences of accepting or rejecting the resultant theorems. I fully
> accept that morality, freedom, and God must be taken on faith. My
> arguments are that these faiths do not require rejecting the results of
> scientific research, etc.
I'm happy to agree with that last part, especially since one can always
take on faith that the results of science must serve God's greater plan.
But I would argue in response that neither is one required to take God,
freedom, or any particular moral system on faith in order to concoct rules
for governing individual and social behavior in a way that promotes
personal welfare and the general good (non-transcendentally construed).
>
> Well, for one, it means that the shining examples of wonderful and heroic
> human behavior are not just illusions. People who made sacrifices for
> others actually did it of their own free will, they were not forced to do
> it. I can actually love or be loved, in the truest deepest sense of the
> word. The possibility of meaning exists.
Fine: but one can always argue that these behaviors are shining,
wonderful, and heroic not because they conform to a transcendental law but
because they serve real human physical and psychological needs, and thus
we have evolved to produce shining and heroic deeds from time to time.
That we may praise such deeds in transcendental terms is a happenstance of
cultural evolution, not evidence of a divine standard at work.
> >Does freedom, by itself, confer dignity?
>
> Well, it certainly offers the possibility of actions that are better than
> simply chemistry in action. I'm thinking of statements like "No greater
> love has any man than to lay down his life for his friends." A free person
> has the potential to do something that wonderful. If one is simply forced
> to die, then he does not do the laying down, it is done to him.
Here is a great mystery. When we portray people making the decision of
self-sacrifice, we often portray that decision with language that goes
something like this: "Of course I don't want to die, but I have to do it.
It's the only decent thing. My fellows/family/country/God depend upon
me." In other words, the continued survival of my gene pool and
culture-identity depends upon my personal sacrifice.
Is that decision, that reasoning, free, or is it forced? (Or is it
somehow both?) Is Christ in Gethsemane really free to choose to disobey
God? The mythology suggests yes, but human psychology suggests that Jesus
really does feel he has no choice but to do God's will.
> I'd argue that a being with that potential for good has an inherent dignity
> that cannot be taken away, even by the improper use of that freedom.
Or a potential for evil...for dignity to exist on your terms, then the
potential for both must exist, of course. I'm still inclined to argue
that this use of the word dignity is an egalitarian extension of what is
properly speaking a more narrowly defined term. I can imagine a case
where a wino or drug addict, the sort of person who stumbles around
begging for spare change and peeing on his own shoes, realizes that in
fact he did not have any dignity before he got himself cleaned up and
sober; and that after doing so, after he starts to make decisions that can
be called "good" in the ordinary sense of being healthy for oneself and
one's neighbors, the erstwhile addict can then say that he has achieved
and established dignity which before he simply did not possess.
Dignity comes from acting a certain way, in this case, and not merely from
being free to act in a certain way or not.
>
> Well, if we are predestined, we can't help it if we behave poorly or well.
> If it is well established and fully agreed upon that we don't have choices,
> then I would expect human behavior to deteriorate...no one is really to
> blame for bad behavior.
Except: people who establish rules for behavior and follow them, calling
some things good and others bad, will survive, and those who pretend that
actions have no consequences won't.
> >And hey, maybe it makes sense to adopt a no-worries (that is, no worries
> about
> > sin or hell or the rapture or what the neighbors think) attitude. We
> > do worry about a lot of silly crap, after all.
>
> How far does the "no worries" thing go?. No worries about whether one's
> actions are right or wrong, because one is out of control. I remember when
> this was discussed on sci.physics someone noted that most people who argue
> that they have no control over their actions are not arguing that they
> should have no credit for their wonderful actions. Even back in West Side
> Story, the argument was "we're really not to blame" for what we do.
Well, it would make sense to worry about consequences, since that's how we
survive. One might do some good by ceasing to worry too much about
transcendental consequences, though.
> But, paralleling the second foundation, does the fact that we know about our
> actions not being free change our reaction enough, so that the system
> developed by evolution stops working?
Hard to say. It's possible that the conventional language of freedom may
never map well on to the scientific descriptions we develop regarding
brain-function, consciousness, and decision-making, and we'll always be
left with a certain degree of indeterminacy in our knowledge of
ourselves. It seems to me that "not mechanistically determined" might not
be the same as "having transcendental freedom of the will" or some such.
Marvin Long
Austin, Texas
Don't be frightened. Adrenaline will just make your blood taste funny.
