Comment by adjkant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adjkant | Hacker News Reader

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I suspect we are in agreement, but I would argue that is because the conception of morality you are using happens to be compatible with the resulting morals that I believe arise from determinism here.

You skipped the more relevant application in this case though - not the treatment of criminals, but, to get a bit minority report here, the treatment of pre-criminals. Given their lack of responsibility and control of their being, how do you design a society that treats them fairly? What is fair? How much effort does morality dictate we owe to their happiness?

The lack of moral responsibility doesn't change the real world effects or causal responsibility, you're right there. However, these questions get very different answers based on if the world has formalized free will or not.

Essentially, if you accept determinism, society becomes a configuration optimization game. The questions of what we optimize for are also highly impacted by free will/determinism.

> you don't need to invoke a lack of free will to justify humane treatment of criminals.

There are absolutely many ways to get here, I'm simply pointing out determinism also leads to it as a data point that determinism can lead to moralities that pass the sanity check. Many, including the author if this piece, write off or get very worried about that issue.

Your mention of Minority Report evoked an image in my mind. A sort of thought experiment.

Imagine you run the government along with law enforcement. Say that one day someone on Hacker News announced that they figured out how to predict a person’s future behavior with a resolution of about one day, simply by running some terminal command along with that person’s social media profiles.

As the authority, it becomes imperative for you to use this information. The choice becomes: are people still at fault for their future crimes even if they never commit them? If they are morally bad, then you are justified in executing some people for future crimes, if you believe that they are not responsible for crimes uncommitted, then you might take a more humane approach.

A person, P, will commit crime X at place Y at time Z. So you pour resources into changing Y and Z for future crimes, because you realize that outcomes are a product of P, X, Y and Z. In this equation, it makes no sense to speak of “punishing” the environment, of a time on the clock being “bad”. In exactly the same way, it no longer makes sense that a person is “bad”. What makes sense is: change, influence, separate, nudge the variables to get the outcome you want.

This is an exaggerated version of what happens to an individual once they accept hard determinism. They realize that people can’t be morally at fault because they are simply a small part of the equation, an equation that includes all moments that preceded it.

Personally, to me, this information is liberating. I feel I have more control now because each event is comprised of an equation. Humans are not black boxes, and neither is my mind. There is some semblance of logic to the system, no matter how obscure or opaque it may be, which means there is some possibility for me to influence the world to move toward a more desirable state.

I hope this thought makes some sense to you considering your deeper dives into determinism. I would love to read your writing!

> This is an exaggerated version of what happens to an individual once they accept hard determinism. They realize that people can’t be morally at fault because they are simply a small part of the equation, an equation that includes all moments that preceded it.

Well said, and this is exactly the underpinning of how I approach the world frankly.

Here's something to think on. Say you accept all this. Now consider anger. Is it ever justified to be angry at someone given all this, ever? I think when you stop and begin to understand and at least imagine all the things that happened to them to lead them to this moment to do the thing that is frustrating you, it becomes clear you can only be frustrated, but never angry. The next question becomes then how do you approach any sort of conflict that would arise from that anger.

People don't believe me when I say this without knowing me in person for a good deal of time, but I can't remember being angry since I started down this path of ideas around my junior year of high school. Anger more or less becomes existential frustration followed by a desire to figure out the causes and solutions to the situation.

> Personally, to me, this information is liberating. I feel I have more control now because each event is comprised of an equation. Humans are not black boxes, and neither is my mind. There is some semblance of logic to the system, no matter how obscure or opaque it may be, which means there is some possibility for me to influence the world to move toward a more desirable state.

+1 here too. As I said in some other threads, a configuration optimization problem.

> I would love to read your writing!

Wow, thank you! I have some academic stuff and have been formulating it into some more article/short book style stuff privately but had no intention of publishing. You're not the first person to say this now though, so I might just reconsider how/when I publish!

> I would argue that is because the conception of morality you are using happens to be compatible with the resulting morals that I believe arise from determinism here.

Indeed, we are coincidentally in agreement from a values perspective since my argument with respect to determinism could remain unchanged even if I e.g. favored a retributive system of justice.

> Given their lack of responsibility and control of their being, how do you design a society that treats them fairly

Any possible conception of fairness exists entirely with respect to the material circumstances of reality in the moment, the ethereal weight of determinism is not detectable on the scales of justice.

To put it another way, if we lived in a universe capable of libertarian free will, it would not follow logically that we should then amplify the needless suffering of criminals.

Imagine two criminals living in such a universe, both having committed identical crimes under identical circumstances, but only one is capable of libertarian free will... what changes? The deterministic criminal didn't choose to want to commit the crime, but he still wanted to commit the crime by following the same reasoning that the free criminal willed himself into, in every observable aspect of reality their motivations are equally damning. This is further compounded by the fact that both victims are equally harmed regardless of which criminal committed the crime. From the victim's perspective, two equally harmful acts should merit the same consequences, one victim does not suffer less because the crime was committed deterministiclly.

>The questions of what we optimize for are also highly impacted by free will/determinism.

How so?

Criminal court doesn't really use the concept of responsibility, it assigns punishment based solely on who did the crime. And the concept of crime itself is provided by lawmaker, not by human's judgement.

> Criminal court doesn't really use the concept of responsibility, it assigns punishment based solely on who did the crime.

Saying someone "did the crime" is just another way of saying that they are responsible for the crime.

> the concept of crime itself is provided by lawmaker, not by human's judgement.

What? The entire point of the judicial system is to interpret the law with respect to human judgement.

> Any possible conception of fairness exists entirely with respect to the material circumstances of reality in the moment, the ethereal weight of determinism is not detectable on the scales of justice.

You've just made another coincidental compatibility here, so I'm curious - how did you arrive at only valuing material circumstances? For me, that is explicitly derived from following determinism into meta-ethics which then follows into a consequentialist physicalist view.

> To put it another way, if we lived in a universe capable of libertarian free will, it would not follow logically that we should then amplify the needless suffering of criminals.

That's a different argument. Something else has to underpin that, and I would again be curious what that is, and if that also shares compatibility.

> The questions of what we optimize for are also highly impacted by free will/determinism. > How so?

I'm still formulating this fully, but essentially it follows from determinism that objective ethics essentially don't exist (I go with error theory here), which then passes off all of practical ethical meaning to the physical state of the universe in relation to what all beings care about, which I suspect is the step that ends up causing much of the coincidence. So for morality, things that humans (and other beings, but we'll set them aside for now) care about are ethics. I tend to focus on happiness, empathy, and fairness, but there's of course a lot more there. Generally, it means moral psychology actually informs ethics quite a bit.

Since I suspect this isn't going to change anything you specifically believe given the compatibility seen elsewhere, let me highlight some specific ethical views that immediately come under intense pressure from those conclusions:

- basically all deontology (Immanuel Kant and others)

- virtue ethics are then limited to admitting to being a practical compromise at best (originally Aristotle but virtue ethics has been on the rise in many modern debates, and this could 100% shape those)

- even many forms of consequentialism make arguments to optimize for a singular thing or one somewhat removed from humans. This highlights the optimization function is not on a single or even a few variables given that humans don't have a single psychological focus. Or maybe we do and we should be spending more of our time in ethics doing psychological research. But all of this derives originally from that conclusion on determinism.

Basically, even a small difference in underpinning can still lead to different focuses and conclusions down the chain of course.

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