Hi dmb,
> Steve said to Craig: > I don't think he [Parfit] was trying to establish all the requirements of > moral responsibility. He was just saying that even under determinism, we > would still have enough _freedom_ for moral responsibility. We "could have > acted differently if we had wanted to" even if "what we wanted to" is is > understood to be causally determined. ... > > > dmb says: > Under determinism we have NO freedom. So how could "no freedom" count as > enough freedom? Steve: Under determinism we still do what we want to do, and since we do it we must be _free_ to do it. We are free to do what we want. We just aren't free to want what we don't want as a matter of will. dmb: > If the dictionary is right about the meaning of "determinism", then your > claim is pure nonsense. > > determinism |diˈtərməˌnizəm|noun Philosophy the doctrine that all events, > including human action, are ultimately determined by causes external to the > will. Some philosophers have taken determinism to imply that individual human > beings have no free will and cannot be held morally responsible for their > actions. Steve: The dictionary is certainly right that "some" philosophers hold determinism as incompatible with freedom and moral responsibility. The problem for your notion that there is a simple logical impossibility here is that clearly some philosophers _don't_, and it isn't just wacky fringe philosophers who are compatiblists. Suck rock star mainstream philosophers as Parfit and Dennett are compatiblists. For them, the opposite of determinism (nothing is determined by _anything_) is complete randomness. As for the dictionary characterizing the issue as that of causes being either internal or external to the will...if that is the what is meant by the free will-determinism issue then the MOQ can support _neither_ side of that old SOM debate. In fact, all talk of "the will" in the MOQ is just a figure of speech about what is internal to the "individual" (itself just another figure of speech). Dan Dennett: Determinism is not a problem. What you want is freedom, and freedom and determinism are entirely compatible. In fact, we have more freedom if determinism is true than if it isn't. ...Because if determinism is true, then there's less randomness. There's less unpredictability. To have freedom, you need the capacity to make reliable judgments about what's going to happen next, so you can base your action on it. Imagine that you've got to cross a field and there's lightning about. If it's deterministic, then there's some hope of knowing when the lightning's going to strike. You can get information in advance, and then you can time your run. That's much better than having to rely on a completely random process. If it's random, you're at the mercy of it. A more telling example is when people worry about genetic determinism, which they completely don't understand. If the effect of our genes on our likely history of disease were chaotic, let alone random, that would mean that there'd be nothing we could do about it. Nothing. It would be like Russian roulette. You would just sit and wait. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
