dmb said:
...If we are not free to choose our actions, how can we be held responsible
for those actions? Put another way, how can there be moral responsibility
without some kind of human agency? I'm not asking about SOM or the MOQ. I'm
only asking about the simple logical connection between agency and morality,
regardless of the metaphysical framework.
Steve replied:
I'll let Sam Harris explain...
"The Supreme Court has called free will a “universal and persistent” foundation
for our system of law, distinct from “a deterministic view of human conduct
that is inconsistent with the underlying precepts of our criminal justice
system” (United States v. Grayson, 1978). Any scientific developments that
threatened our notion of free will would seem to put the ethics of punishing
people for their bad behavior in question.
...The great worry is that any honest discussion of the underlying causes of
human behavior seems to erode the notion of moral responsibility. If we view
people as neuronal weather patterns, how can we coherently speak about
morality? And if we remain committed to seeing people as people, some who can
be reasoned with and some who cannot, it seems that we must find some notion of
personal responsibility that fits the facts. ...Happily, we can. What does it
really mean to take responsibility for an action? ...To say that I was
responsible for my behavior is simply to say that what I did was sufficiently
in keeping with my thoughts, intentions, beliefs, and desires to be considered
an extension of them. ... Judgments of responsibility, therefore, depend upon
the overall complexion of one’s mind, not on the metaphysics of mental cause
and effect."
dmb says:
Exactly. If we view people as weather patterns, how can we coherently speak
about morality? Sam is making MY point, Steve. This is the same point made by
Pirsig, the dictionary, Stanford and, apparently, everyone else who's ever
thought seriously about the issue. Even Sam, with his own kind of neurological
determinism, still thinks we need "some notion of personal responsibility".
He's not denying any kind of human agency, just the "metaphysics of mental
cause and effect" or the "causal agent living within the human mind". For
Harris, the brain and mind are the same thing and that's all you need for human
agency. (You can see why Patricia Churchland would call Harris a reductionist
when he suggests, to put it crudely, that brains cause murder: "How can we make
sense of these gradations of moral blame when brains and their background
influences are, in every case, and to exactly the same degree, the real cause
of a woman’s death?")
"What we condemn in another person is the INTENTION to do harm," Sam says and
we can do that "without any recourse to notions of free will. Likewise, degrees
of guilt could be judged, as they are now, by reference to the facts of the
case: the personality of the accused, his prior offenses, his patterns of
association with others, his use of intoxicants, his confessed INTENTIONS with
regard to the victim, etc.
See, Sam has rejected the Cartesian self, "the causal agent living inside the
human mind" but he's not denying that we have intentions and he is fully
acknowledging the fact that moral blameworthiness has everything to do with our
intentions. That definitely counts as some kind of human agency, and Sam is
saying quite explicitly that there are good reasons why the conscious decision
to do another person harm is considered to be particularly blameworthy.
"Because consciousness is, among other things, the context in which our
INTENTIONS become available to us. What we do subsequent to conscious planning
tends to most fully reflect the global properties of our minds—our beliefs,
desires, goals, prejudices, etc."
Our intentions, beliefs, desires and goals? Come on, how is that NOT a
description of human agency or human will?
The challenge is to find a plausible example of moral responsibility without
some kind of human agency. Sam Harris doesn't count as an example because his
view does have some kind of human agency. That means you still have not
answered the question.
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