Hacker News Reader

Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

You're missing the last step that closes the loop: in order for society to exist and function, moral blame is essential. Therefore some notion of moral responsibility for breaking the law must be imposed, so we invent some quasi-free will notion that's compatible with determinism in order to do this.

But how do you know this quasi-free will notion isn't exactly what people really mean by free will. In fact, that appears to be the case:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274892120_Why_Compa...

View on HN

>You're missing the last step that closes the loop: in order for society to exist and function, moral blame is essential. Therefore some notion of moral responsibility for breaking the law must be imposed, so we invent some quasi-free will notion that's compatible with determinism in order to do this.

If your argument that it is necessary for the public to believe in free will (because of the negative consequences if they don't), regardless of whether or not it actually exists, then that's different. I thought you were arguing that free will must necessarily exist because of those consequences. I apologise and withdraw.

> I thought you were arguing that free will must necessarily exist because of those consequences.

I'm saying that this is exactly what most people really mean by free will [1], and that people like you who claim that free will doesn't exist are making a mistake in assuming free will is something that it isn't. Typically, you're arguing against a theistic conception of free will with "souls" and whatnot, but that's just one (incoherent) conception of free will and not the whole debate.

"Free will" is ultimately some notion of control over one's actions that grounds moral responsibility: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/

If you acknowledge that being able to designate who is responsible for some undesirable outcome is a necessary condition for being able to remedy it, then you are acknowledging some notion of moral blame.

If you further accept that people's actions can be described counterfactually by their thoughts, feelings and beliefs, then that implies some sort of control over those actions.

Therefore we have control + moral responsibility, and that's free will (in Compatibilism).

If this seems kind of familiar, it should! Compatibilism was first formulated from our notions of free will from law. Notice how if you remove the control requirement (say they had a tumour driving some behaviour, or they're insane), a person is no longer acting of their own free will and so are not responsible for their actions.

This is what I meant by free will being inevitable. No society can exist without blame for breaking the law. You might define the terms to avoid terms like "blame" and "free will", as hard determinists try to do, but the ultimate function will be the exact same.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274892120_Why_Compa...

> people like you who claim that free will doesn't exist

Where did I claim that free will doesn't exist?

You're right, mixed you up with another poster in this thread, sorry!

No problem!

I find the 'control' part of this iffy. People's actions are caused by their thoughts, feelings and beliefs, but their thoughts, feelings and beliefs are themselves caused by various other things. This is why I think the root question is whether you could have chosen differently. If you could only have ever made one choice, how much control do you really have?

The fact that moral responsibility requires the assumption that people have control doesn't mean people do have control. It just means that people who like moral responsibility (including myself!) have an inconvenient reality to contend with. It means we have to find some way to run a society morally despite the shaky grounding on which we find ourselves.

I would find the compatibilist argument more convincing if it simply said, here are some beliefs that would benefit us if we assumed they were true, rather than saying they are true. We can define free will as 'the assumption that is needed to make moral responsibility work,' and we can even make that assumption in order to have a practical, working framework for moral responsibility, but it still doesn't prove the assumption is true.

> I find the 'control' part of this iffy. People's actions are caused by their thoughts, feelings and beliefs, but their thoughts, feelings and beliefs are themselves caused by various other things.

That trips most people up, but it goes right back to our first discussion about cars also being "not real". If I say to a coworker, "I got in my car and drove to work", and they reply with, "Well that's impossible, because cars don't exist, nor do day jobs", that's kind of nonsense right, because there I am at work, standing in front of my coworker with my car in my parking spot. It's a category error, and it's the same error made when people say that a choice wasn't really ours because it's dictated by the movements of particles.

The fact that thoughts, feelings and beliefs may be caused by deterministic underlying physics is actually irrelevant, which is why Compatibilism is compatible with determinism. What matters is that thoughts, feelings and beliefs counterfactually dictate your choices, and so, by changing thoughts, feelings and beliefs via moral feedback, you change behaviour.

Moral blame is that feedback. The type of control that's needed is simply not the type of control that you're assuming it must be. This is the mistake incompatibilists make as well: they assume the type of control needed has certain logical properties, but these properties have been shown to be flawed.

Now what consequences follow from blame is a completely separate question (of justice), and I mention this because it trips a lot of people up: they assume blame entails punishment, and given they cannot justify punishment when some things are simply beyond one's control, they want to do away with blame itself. But that's unnecessary, because blame by itself doesn't immediately entail retributive justice with punishment, there are plenty of other forms of justice that would serve equally well.

If I’m understanding you correctly, for purposes of free will and moral responsibility, the details underlying the ‘control’ people have don’t matter—all that matters is that they change their behavior in response to feedback that what they did was wrong. In order to give that feedback, we need to take for granted the ‘they did’ part of the sentence. Is that a fair summary?

If so, I think I agree. But it makes me feel like we’re talking about different things. I think we may just have a namespace collision over the phrase “free will” (which I think is part of your whole point).

I guess my question is, if your main concern is being able to assign moral blame, defined as saying someone did something and that thing was right or wrong, why does that require free will? Without it you can still say people do things (in the car sense) and make value judgments about them. Why define free will this way, instead of in the straightforward sense of choice?

> In order to give that feedback, we need to take for granted the ‘they did’ part of the sentence. Is that a fair summary?

"They deliberately did/felt justified doing", but yes that's essentially it, modulo the considerations I discuss below.

> I think we may just have a namespace collision over the phrase “free will” (which I think is part of your whole point).

This is part of what makes the debate so frustrating and confusing for many, because we have religious "free will" with souls and whatnot, we have philosophical "free will" for ethics and moral responsibility, we have scientific "free will" for experimenters (free will theorem), and all of them overlap in some ways, but not in all ways, which leads to considerable confusion.

Incompatibilists think "free will" in all of the above contexts mean exactly the same thing, ie. theistic free will and experimental free will and philosophical free will all mean some sort of freedom from antecedent causes, and that this is necessary for moral responsibility. This is why you'll see scientists and science fans claim we don't have free will, because the nuance between the above contexts is lost.

> Without free will you can still say people did things (in the car sense) and make value judgments about them. Why define free will this way, instead of in the straightforward sense of choice?

Because not every choice is freely made, or an expression of their will. Some people are coerced into making choices, some people have cognitive impairments and so are not capable of making free or willed choices (insanity, dementia, etc.), some people are not of sufficient age for them to understand the choice they're making, and so on. How do we package up all these considerations into a term of art that describes when a person of sound mind and body makes choice freely? Free will.

Compatibilism emerged from the notion of free will in law. Consider all the conditions for legal culpability, and I think you'll begin to see how nuanced this is, and how these considerations are deeply entrenched in how people approach moral reasoning.

This is just mumbo jumbo, because you are not providing any alternative medium for exercise of control than deterministic cause and effect, and so what you are describing is just a veneer.

There is no choice in that case, and so no meaningful exercise of will.

Only if you presuppose "will" to mean "non-determinstic choice", in which case you should justify why that's relevant for moral responsibility.

I've asserted that deterministic choice is perfectly compatible with responsibility, and that our moral and legal reasoning is compatible with this conception.

I do presuppose will to mean something nondeterministic, yes, or the term serves no purpose.

And what you describe empirically doesn't match my experiences. People tend to get strongly morally conflicted when faced with the prospect of determinism because they don't see eg punishment as compatible with a view of the world where people don't have agency over choices.

'Deterministic choice' is not a choice for the person - it is just cause and effect. There is nothing free about it, and no will involved.

The very idea gets people incredibly worked up when you drill down into it.

> I do presuppose will to mean something nondeterministic, yes, or the term serves no purpose.

It serves the purpose of labelling a process of deliberation over a set of choices. Whether that deliberation is deterministic or not is a red herring.

> People tend to get strongly morally conflicted when faced with the prospect of determinism because they don't see eg punishment as compatible with a view of the world where people don't have agency over choices.

So? People struggle to explain how lightning works. The vikings would have gotten quite worked up if you claimed Thor didn't cause thunder. Why does this have any impact on the natural facts of lightning?

It does not imply any sort of control in any meaningful way.

For you to have "control" you would need to be able to produce different decisions from the same starting point, or there is no control - just determinism.

And those differences needs to not just be purely random, or there again is no control.

There then needs to be some mechanism that makes that choice. If you can not derive that from cause and effect of interactions of the physical aspects of the brain, then that is dualism. But that does not resolve the free-will issue:

That just means that there is an unknown decision mechanism, that needs to be subjected to the same question of how it makes the decision in a way that is not deterministic, and not random, yet produces outcomes that differ when re-run with the same state.

Free will basically would require some third distinct category between determinism and randomness, that infuses some sort of agency into a process (and that is not just a combination of the two, but qualitatively different).

I've yet to see someone come up with a description of this "something" that is not just entirely obfuscation.

> For you to have "control" you would need to be able to produce different decisions from the same starting point, or there is no control - just determinism.

The principle of alternate possibilities was debunked by the Frankfurt cases back in the 60s. An unrestricted ability to do otherwise is simply not relevant to moral responsibility.

I've elaborated on why the control I describe is sufficient below:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23478747

I read that comment and it makes no sense unless you accept a compatibilist definition. But to me a compatibilist definition of free will is meaningless - it is just veneer over determinism.

I assume by "determinism", you mean "hard determinism". Here are just two distinctions among many:

1 . Compatibilists don't assert that determinism is true, they assert that determinism doesn't matter. Which means if the world is non-deterministic, Compatibilism still applies. This is not true of hard determinism.

2. Hard determinists have no way to assign blame in a way that disallows morally repugnant conclusions. If someone punches you in the face unprovoked, how does a hard determinist argue that the unprovoked attacker is the person requiring rehabilitation? Why shouldn't the law be changed to allow unprovoked face punches? Why shouldn't you be rehabilitated to learn to duck faster? There is no moral blame, so anything is permissible.

If someone provides a viable definition that does not devolve to a veneer over hard determinism, I'd consider it. You haven't and neither have anyone else.

To #2 the reason to continue mostly as before is because it is what we intuitively feel is fair and that minimises harm. The idea you need to blame someone to do this is a typic religious argument against atheists - we do not need blame to have a feeling for what we consider right and wrong. A belief in determinism shifts those feelings.

It's very simple to reconcile - the only change is that punishment for the sake of punishment rather than to minimise harm is not justified if people have no agency.

To a lot of people that is a belief they come to anyway without a belief in determinism, because of the number of moral systems that includes forgiveness as a central concept.

Consider the prison system in Norway vs US for example. Norways prison system was awful up to the 60s where a reform movement won support for a focus on rehabilitation over punishment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com