Hacker News Reader

Comment by cthalupa | Hacker News Reader

>Free will is needed to identify who the criminal is in any given situation,

No. Causality is all you need to identify who the criminal is.

Physical stimuli are basically all we need as intelligent beings to come to a conclusion about things we don't like happening to us, and thus ultimately make into moral laws or codified ones. These are the inputs, these are the causes. Then, once enough human beings have had those inputs result in a large enough collective coming to the conclusion that stuff is Bad, we end up with laws.

Then, whenever someone acts in a way that we have determined is Bad, they are the criminal. They do not need to possess free will for the rational thing to do to be to provide punishment for them, because punishing them ultimately changes the inputs used by others to reach decisions. Nothing about this requires free will - it's all just as applicable if you just believe the laws of physics and causality determine every choice we make.

View on HN

> No. Causality is all you need to identify who the criminal is.

Unfortunately not. If your gets car stolen, without free will, you can't assign responsibility to the "thief", because you yourself were a causal factor in your car getting stolen: had you parked somewhere else, your car wouldn't have been stolen. Had society or his parents better supported the "thief", he wouldn't have stolen that car. Had your city placed that street somewhere else, your car wouldn't have been stolen.

To designate the "thief" as the "singular" cause that's relevant, you need free will.

All of those things are true, and I don't need them to be untrue to assign the largest share of responsibility to the thief.

Having laws (and the enforcement of laws) in place is something we believe to be the most effective input in causing the Bad Things to not happen. As such, having them and enforcing them is purely logical. We have decided that having someone "broken" in such a manner that these inputs are not enough to result in them not doing Bad Things need to be removed from the public, and do so.

Let's even step away from laws and assigning moral responsibility there. Let's look at interpersonal relationships.

I love my SO. I try to avoid doing things that hurt her, because seeing her hurt fundamentally makes me unhappy. It makes me unhappy enough that it outweighs the personal benefits of whatever decision I was making. We would all agree that not being shitty to your SO for personal gain is a morally correct choice, but this is still all a matter of causality. Either you have negative stimuli to it from something more direct, such as in my situation, or perhaps just because of social pressure and the desire to conform, but morality still comes into existence from the causal nature of reality. Free will is not necessary to explain it.

>Having laws (and the enforcement of laws) in place is something we believe to be the most effective input in causing the Bad Things to not happen. As such, having them and enforcing them is purely logical.

It's only logical assuming free willing agents making logical choices.

Else, it's only automatic and predetermined, like everything else.

>Either you have negative stimuli to it from something more direct, such as in my situation, or perhaps just because of social pressure and the desire to conform, but morality still comes into existence from the causal nature of reality.

No, it doesn't. Morality (as we understand it) only comes into existence if we assume a causal nature PLUS free agents (not totally bound to that causal nature).

Else, there's no morality to a murder anymore than there's a morality to the formation of Earth. Both are events destined to do by the initial state of the universe in the big bang.

The lack of free will doesn't eliminate consciousness and intelligence. We're veering into deconstructionism here.

Yes, everything is largely deterministic (quantum effects have impact, and may or may not be deterministic, but that impact is still bound by the laws of physics), and the universe will someday reach maximum entropy. On the scale of the universe and its lifespan, morality obviously doesn't exist.

I've been reading some of your responses to various other people, so I'll respond to some of the ideas your arguing in general, rather than just specifically what you've type in this comment.

We'll skip through the causal chain of the universe to get to modern humanity with laws. It may be pre-determined and automatic that we would become such that we dislike the things that we make laws about. But it is still causal that creating these laws prevents some people from doing actions that they otherwise would without repercussions.

The fact that it is predetermined and automatic doesn't change the causality. If anything, it enforces it. You don't remove the cause-effect of everything in the middle of the chain just because the end was known from the start.

>The fact that it is predetermined and automatic doesn't change the causality

It doesn't change the causality (and I concur to that -- as I wrote "both are events destined to do by the initial state of the universe in the big bang"), but it changes the cause of the event. The cause is not someone deciding as a free agent (picking X or Y, or able to go either way), but someone that cannot but do but X, because of events outside their own control and personality.

What I say is that predetermination it removes any personal agency from the creation of the laws and from the people doing less crimes.

>You don't remove the cause-effect of everything in the middle of the chain just because the end was known from the start.

No, but you don't attribute any particular significance to a mere step in the chain, be it moral or whatever, when it was inevitable due to earlier steps.

> No, but you don't attribute any particular significance to a mere step in the chain, be it moral or whatever, when it was inevitable due to earlier steps.

Why? Assuming universe is deterministic we do it all the time.

> All of those things are true, and I don't need them to be untrue to assign the largest share of responsibility to the thief.

You actually do. The very process of assigning "share of responsibility" is precisely the question that depends upon free will. If the thief stole your car only because someone was holding his wife hostage, now where does the responsibility lie? The circumstances immediately surrounding the car theft are precisely the same, but now an influence further back in the causal chain is presumably responsible. How would you differentiate these two scenarios without free will?

> I love my SO. I try to avoid doing things that hurt her, because seeing her hurt fundamentally makes me unhappy. It makes me unhappy enough that it outweighs the personal benefits of whatever decision I was making. [...] Free will is not necessary to explain it.

Free will is necessary to explain why you are morally blameworthy or praiseworthy for your choice of whether to go with your inclinations.

>If the thief stole your car only because someone was holding his wife hostage, now where does the responsibility lie?

Still with the thief. He still has all of the other inputs into his system beyond just the fact that someone kidnapped his wife. Believing that causality ultimately determines every decision we make doesn't mean that I believe that it's a simple one to one mapping. He knows he can call the police - this isn't an action movie, and he's not the characters Jason Statham plays. If he is the characters Jason Statham plays, well, it doesn't really matter because he's not going to be caught anyway, and I'm left railing against the hypothetical thief that more often matches reality than your car getting stolen by the living embodiment of an action movie hero/anti-hero.

>The circumstances immediately surrounding the car theft are precisely the same, but now an influence further back in the causal chain is presumably responsible. How would you differentiate these two scenarios without free will?

By not believing that one changed input unrelated to all of the others somehow invalidates all of them.

>Free will is necessary to explain why you are morally blameworthy or praiseworthy for your choice of whether to go with your inclinations.

Free will is unnecessary to explain why I am morally blameworthy or praiseworthy for my choice of whether or not to go with my inclinations.

Both are assertions that do not stand alone.

> He knows he can call the police - this isn't an action movie, and he's not the characters Jason Statham plays. If he is the characters Jason Statham plays, well, it doesn't really matter because he's not going to be caught anyway, and I'm left railing against the hypothetical thief that more often matches reality than your car getting stolen by the living embodiment of an action movie hero/anti-hero.

You're evading the question. The point of moral dilemmas is to highlight the qualities that meaningfully affect the outcome. We have here two scenarios, one in which the thief would be held responsible, and one in which he would not. Free will easily distinguishes these two scenarios, and since you claim we don't need free will to make such judgments, let's hear how you distinguish these.

>You're evading the question. The point of moral dilemmas is to highlight the qualities that meaningfully affect the outcome. We have here two scenarios, one in which the thief would be held responsible, and one in which he would not. Free will easily distinguishes these two scenarios, and since you claim we don't need free will to make such judgments, let's hear how you distinguish these.

Someone kidnapped my wife so I stole a car is not a valid legal defense, nor would I argue it is a valid moral defense. As I stated from the get go, I would hold the thief responsible in both situations.

> Someone kidnapped my wife so I stole a car is not a valid legal defense

That's not the scenario I posed, although perhaps the presentation wasn't clear. So to be perfectly clear so there are no misunderstandings, the thief was told to steal your car or his wife would be executed.

Clearly he's morally culpable for stealing the car in one scenario and not in the other. This distinction can be clearly made using free will. You claim you don't need free will to make this distinction, so I'd like to hear how you do so.

He is responsible for stealing the car in both situations. He has an excuse in one, but excuse doesn't stop responsibility, and both doesn't require a free will to exist.

To provide better example - one guy blackmails you to kill me, or he will kill your whole family. You still have a choice.

You make your choice or it's predetermined cause no free will - it doesn't matter.

You are responsible for your choice, and the blackmailer is responsible for the blackmail. You have an excuse why you choose the way you did, and it may be decided to be a good thing to do or evil, depending on the morality of particular person (basically the trolley problem).

With car the responsibility for stealing compared to the responsibility for a murder is negligible, so people focus on the second one. But both are still there, they don't cancel out.

> He is responsible for stealing the car in both situations.

He's causally responsible yes, free will is about assigning moral responsibility. The validity of various reasons for acting immorally is precisely the question that free will addresses.

> free will is about assigning moral responsibility

Moral responsibility seems to me to be the same as the casual responsibility in these cases?

There's the famous "goal does/does not justify means" - if blackmail removed your moral responsibility then it's meaningless because there's nothing to justify. I don't think it's the case.

I think moral responsibility is still there, it's just negligible compared to the alternatives.

And I still don't see how it requires free will (except for the useless definition "anything that learns and can make a choice" - then by definition we have a free will, but that was never in question, why even waste a word on such a concept?).

> He's causally responsible yes

On one case, only as inevitable intermediary in the chain of causation, in the other as a necessary part of the ultimate, uncaused causation.

These are very different senses of “causally responsible”.

> free will is about assigning moral responsibility.

Only indirectly, in the context of it being assumed axiomatically that having ones will be a necessary uncaused cause of the outcome is required for moral responsibility; it's directly about assigning root cause.

> These are very different senses of “causally responsible”.

The posters I'm engaging here don't believe in uncaused causation (nor do I), so there's little difference in the causal character of the thief's actions here in either case.

> The posters I'm engaging here don't believe in uncaused causation

Free will is, by definition, both uncaused and a cause of other actions. If you don't believe in uncaused causation, you don't believe in free will, but you can't discuss the meaning and implication of free will in any meaningful way while ignoring the entirety of it's definition whether or not you believe in free will (or the broader conceptual class of uncaused causes of which free will is a part.)

> Free will is, by definition, both uncaused and a cause of other actions.

No it's not. The free will debate is about defining what free will actually means so that we can assign moral responsibility.

The scientific meaning of "free will" as experimenters being able to setup their instruments free from influence of that which they're measuring is not what's being discussed here.

I get your point - where does the distinction lie? At what point does responsibility shift? And I understand that you argue free will is necessary to make that distinction.

But you don't need free will to do that. You need a system of inputs that result in an output, with that output being the decision. It's still all a matter of causality. We've evolved in such a way that we want to stay alive, and that the vast majority of people value being alive over having a replaceable object. Or, I suppose in this example, their spouse being alive. Our collective morality is the result of that system of inputs.

If you get right down to it, it's a value judgment on life vs. property. Those values are shaped based off of our past.

You still haven't answered the question. You can't claim that we don't need free will to address these questions while simultaneously refusing to provide even a single alternative concept or process that could do so equally well.

Clearly some quality leads people to make a distinction between the scenarios I presented. Compatibilism calls this quality the free will of the agent in question. This is not an earth-shattering concept and does not violate any scientific principles, and it matches how people talk and reason about these scenarios.

>You can't claim that we don't need free will to address these questions while simultaneously refusing to provide even a single alternative concept or process that could do so equally well.

You keep saying this, but it's simply not true. I've specifically explained how it is a matter of making value judgments based on our past. That's all it is. This same system of judgments also equally explains people's beliefs when it comes to morals as well.

> I've specifically explained how it is a matter of making value judgments based on our past.

This is not an explanation. In your approach, is the thief morally responsible for their actions in neither case, in one but not the other case, or in both cases? And why?

If they just steal a car: Responsible

If they steal a car because someone has a gun to they or their spouse's head: Not responsible

Why: Because the causal chain of events that have gotten us to modern humanity have resulted in our cognitive functions valuing human life over physical objects. These are the inputs to the system. These are all causal, products of evolution, etc, and deterministic. The output, the lack of moral responsibility when it's a matter of a human life, is just as causal and deterministic. Free will is not a requirement to come to these conclusions.

If we had evolved in such a way that we kill and eat our spouses after mating like some other species on Earth, but vehicles were a scarce and irreplaceable resource, our morality would be quite different and the thief would likely be morally responsible in both cases. (For what it's worth, I much prefer that we do not live in such a reality ;))

> If they just steal a car: Responsible > > If they steal a car because someone has a gun to they or their spouse's head: Not responsible > > Why: Because the causal chain of events that have gotten us to modern humanity have resulted in our cognitive functions valuing human life over physical objects

Our values have little to do with the question of free will. A value system determines what we consider to be good or bad, it does not determine who is responsible for a specific good or bad outcome.

So if the thief is not responsible for stealing the car in the hostage scenario, then I assume that you agree that the hostage taker is responsible. And the reason you reach this conclusion is because you assign moral agency to the thief when he's acting alone, and you acknowledge that he has no moral agency when he's being coerced. In other words, he's acting of his own free will in one circumstance, but not the other.

Simply saying "we value life over property" does not enable you to absolve the thief for his immoral act.

>Someone kidnapped my wife so I stole a car is not a valid legal defense, nor would I argue it is a valid moral defense

Actually it's a very valid legal defense, and if someone stole a car under such situations, and could prove it (that they were blackmailed etc), they would either have been let go, or given a much smaller sentence.

>* As I stated from the get go, I would hold the thief responsible in both situations.*

That's bizarro though. No judge would do that.

> How would you differentiate these two scenarios without free will?

Circumstances change the moral evaluation of actions, it doesn't matter if it was a blackmail, or a hurricane (which doesn't have a free will) - still people would be more lenient on the guy that stole a car to save his wife. And the guy still made a choice (or had the illusion of making a choice), just with different circumstances.

And still the existence of free will changes nothing in the situation. If the free will doesn't exist - people can still evaluate what is good and bad using the concept of free will. Some people use the concept of God to define morality after all, and it certainly possible (s)he doesn't exist.

>still people would be more lenient on the guy that stole a car to save his wife

No, people will be just as lenient as their puppet like automatic responses to chains of events created at the Big Bang dictate. All of those being set in stone in advance.

>If the free will doesn't exist - people can still evaluate what is good and bad using the concept of free will.

Evaluate means a process that examines the facts and can come into this or that result. But without free will (in pure determinism) there's no this or that result: just whatever is destined to be. Even the term "evaluation" is bogus, it's just an automatic reflex.

>Some people use the concept of God to define morality after all, and it certainly possible (s)he doesn't exist.

Which would make their morality meaningless. And so would the non-existence of free will.

You start with

> No

and then repeat what I said, stressing the fact that people are puppets in this scenario. Yes they are, and it doesn't matter, they will still do the exact same thing as if they weren't puppets. That's the point.

> without free will [...] there's no this or that result: just whatever is destined to be

So what? This line of code evaluates distance between two points and prints "Boom" if it's smaller than 10.0.

    if (sqrt((x0-x1)*(x0-x1) + (y0-y1)*(y0-y1)) < 10.0)
        printf("Boom");

Doesn't seem to need a free will to do all of that :)

> Which would make their morality meaningless. And so would the non-existence of free will.

No it wouldn't. Provide arguments if you think otherwise.

It is allowed to park a car, it is not allowed to take somebody else's car.

If it was a place where you can't park, and a police took your car - it would be your fault, not theirs. It doesn't depend on the free will, it just depends on the laws.

And the laws are what they are because of practical concerns and not free will.

Notice that if you left your TV on a parking lot for a week - and accused people who got it of theft - you would be ignored. But with car it's a theft :) It's all about agreed customs that work reasonably well for the socity, not some platonic ideals.

>Unfortunately not. If your gets car stolen, without free will, you can't assign responsibility to the "thief"

Actually you can. Or rather, without free will, you have no say on whether you can or cannot.

If the deterministic chain comes out so, you will assign responsibility to the thief, even if it has no meaning to do so.

> If the deterministic chain comes out so, you will assign responsibility to the thief, even if it has no meaning to do so.

I describe a contrasting scenario further down the thread with the other poster, where the thief is now compelled to steal your car because his wife was taken hostage. Responsibility for stealing your car lies with the thief in one scenario but not the other. How would you make this distinction without free will?

>No. Causality is all you need to identify who the criminal is.

Causality just determines who did something criminal. The word criminal though also invokes a moral judgement (of character) and intent, which presupposes an agent, which presupposes free will.

> which presupposes an agent, which presupposes free will.

In an universe without free will there can still be agents.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com