The radical moral implications of luck in human life (2020)
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E.g.
Q. Why do you deserve your money?
A. I work hard.
Q. Why do you work hard?
A. I have a good work ethic.
Q. Why do you have a good work ethic?
A. My parents raised me that way.
Q. Why did you choose for your parents to raise you that way?
A. I didn't.
I'm not suggesting any conclusions here, just stating that if you keeping asking "why", you will always get to ground at something outside your conscious control.
Applying this to my own life, I make good money doing software development. Programming is easy and natural for me. I started programming when I was 12. Why? I thought it was fun. Why did I choose to think it was fun? I didn't consciously choose.
This applies even for things that seem to arise within your own mind. You can't choose which thoughts to have. You might think "sure I can, I'm going to think about elephants right now", and that may be, but when did you choose to choose to think about elephants? When did you choose to choose to choose? You can recurse deep, but eventually you arrive at something outside your conscious control.
We punish people for doing the wrong things, even though they didn't chose to do them, but the act of punishing them makes them less likely to happen. In the same way, we give rewards to people who worked hard even if they didn't "decide" to work hard. Doesn't matter why they decided to work hard, if we just handed out money evenly to everyone, we wouldn't have these hard workers putting the extra effort in.
- People still do things and decide things, they are just not the conscious author of those actions and decisions
- This makes no claims about determinism, the universe could still have e.g. quantum randomness and nothing would change about this statement, as we have no conscious control over that randomness.
- This also makes no claims about the morality of punishment/reward. My statement is an "is" statement, and, as I agree with Hume, you can't go from an "is" statement to an "ought" statement.
Nitpick: that's not what Hume said. He did not say that one cannot derive "ought" from "is", he merely pointed out that philosophers had this curious habit of starting arguments making reasonable factual "is" statements, and suddenly transitioning into "ought" statements as if the factual statements entailed these "oughts", but that this was a non-sequitur without justification.
It's funny when you apply this idea to itself. There may be no path from "is" to "ought", but that doesn't imply we shouldn't make it.
Nothing you have said supports this claim. It's perfectly possible for you, the way you are today, to be largely the result of processes you didn't choose and didn't control, and also for you to do things and decide things that you are the conscious author of.
Consider I give you the task "think of a color". You choose blue. How did you choose blue? Did you consider the color lavender? If there are some colors you considered, how did you choose what to consider? And why wasn't lavender one of them? Did you choose not to consider lavender?
In reality, I give you the task "think of a color" and some thoughts of colors come into your consciousness via some unconscious process.
I think "red, blue, orange, red, oh wait I already thought of red, green, purple, red, why do I keep thinking of red, yellow, hmmmm ok I pick blue I guess."
I wasn't deciding which thoughts were going to come into my conscious view. They just appeared. When I had those thoughts of internal monologue about thinking of red so much, I wasn't choosing to have those thoughts either. I was just observing them as they appeared in consciousness.
When I settled on blue, I knew I wanted to avoid red because I had thought about it so much. But when did I choose to have that want? I didn't. It just appeared.
Perhaps this matches your experience. It doesn't match mine. Some of my thoughts might work like this, but not all of them.
More generally, the fact that none of us get to choose everything about our lives or our mental processes (which as a general claim I agree with, even if I disagree about a specific case as above) does not justify the claim that we choose nothing.
You are simply focusing on particular cases and then making invalid generalizations from them.
Similar remarks apply to "free will". "Free will" is not some magic property that some of our mental acts get endowed with. It is part of the process of our thinking and acting. The fact that we don't and can't freely choose everything about that process does not mean we cannot make choices at all.
Do you believe that the initial state of all the particles in your body (including brain) exists? If so, what leads you to conclude that thinking is anything other than an on-going electro-chemical reaction that we’re just observing the outputs of and concluding that we’re controlling it somehow?
These are not mutually inconsistent options, that's your mistake. Thoughts are some kind of (likely deterministic) information process, and thoughts counterfactually determines downstream actions and thoughts, ie. earlier thoughts determine later thoughts. If I choose to lift my arm, I only lifted my arm because I chose to do so. The fact that I was determined to choose to lift my arm doesn't seem relevant to whether the thought caused my arm to lift.
It is relevant to the moral implications, however. If you agree that the process that led to an action was deterministic, then it's entirely unreasonable to use punishments as vengeance, for example. It may still be morally tolerable to use them for rehabilitative or preventative means, but if you accept that they had no agency in the decisions, then applying more restrictions than the minimum needed to protect society seems to create another victim.
I disagree, punishment could still be justified if it were effective at deterring or altering future behavior, particularly if it were more effective than any other alternative. You can make a straightforward utilitarian calculation for this, for example.
In any case, the matter of justice is separate from the question of free will. Once you have free will, you still require further assumptions to argue for punitive or restorative justice.
My point is exactly to argue that if people could not have acted differently, punishing people for the sake of causing them suffering in retribution rather than for another purpose such as rehabilitation or deterrence is no morally different than enacting the same on someone who had not carried out a crime.
> In any case, the matter of justice is separate from the question of free will. Once you have free will, you still require further assumptions to argue for punitive or restorative justice.
It is partially separate. I agree that if free will (in the non-compatibilist sense) was possible, it does not automatically justify vengeance. But it's linked in that if free will does not exist, then it is meaningless to assign responsibility in any less abstract sense than we might talk of a piece of code being "responsible" for a crash. Someone might be "responsible" in the sense of being the most proximate cause, but given they could not have chosen differently, inflicting harm on them for the choices they could not have made differently is no morally different than inflicting harm on any other random person who only did the only things they could.
To me, then, given I find free will nothing more than an illusion, the near total lack of focus on rehabilitation and minimising harm to prisoners makes our "justice" systems some of the largest organised brutal and immoral criminal enterprises. Most judges have done vastly more immoral harm than anyone they've ever convicted, for example. Of course they could not have chosen differently either, so I don't think punishing them for it would be any better. But changing the system would be (and yes, I do believe that this too is not a free choice, nothing more than cause and effect playing out, giving us an illusion of making decisions we can not make differently)
If it wasn't clear, I was disagreeing that "punishment as vengeance" is the primary motive for punitive justice, while pointing out some grounds typically used to justify it (deterrence mainly). I think reducing punitive justice to vengeance is largely a strawman.
Furthermore, I'll just note that Fankfurt refuted the principle of alternate possibilities decades ago, so I don't find this particular quality you ascribe to free will meaningful.
I read "as" as "for the purpose of". With that reading, "Punishment as vengeance" would be undesirable if people's actions were pre-determined. "Punishment as deterrence" would still be desirable (via whatever mechanism allowed for a deterrence effect to exist in a world where actions were pre-determined).
I did not say it was the primary motive for punitive justice. I said using punishments for vengeance would be unreasonable. And vengeance clearly is a motive in a lot of punishment, or the pushback against treating prisoners nicer or shortening sentences where the evidence shows both works just fine would focus on the evidence rather than the emotions relating to whether prisoners deserve to be treated a certain way.
> Furthermore, I'll just note that Fankfurt refuted the principle of alternate possibilities decades ago, so I don't find this particular quality you ascribe to free will meaningful.
I'm not remotely compelled by the notion that Frankfurts arguments against PAP makes any difference whatsoever here, because the point is that a strict determinism makes the very concept of moral responsibility meaningless, in that if one accepts determinism then no entity had any ability to deliver another outcome, and the person holding the gun had no more control over the outcome than the gun or the bullet.
What then makes the person and not the gun or bullet, or any other entity that was a part of the cause and effect chain more morally responsible?
Moral responsibility to me rests with a minimum the possibility of choice as a starting point, and I reject that there's any evidence to suggest such a possibility exists.
Finding someone responsible in the abstract sense and for the sake of considering whether a deterrent or rehabilitation is necessary for the sake of wider society is fine, with the caveat that many entities and events can have a causal responsibility of various degrees and if we genuinely care about this we'd more often look past the individual that is the proximate sentient cause and to e.g. addressing underlying contributing societal conditions. This, to me, is another piece of evidence that the concern is often vengeance rather than deterrence.
Seeking to assign a moral responsibility for the sake of blame or vengeance, on the other hand, would to me in itself be immoral. Doesn't mean I'm immune to assigning responsibility - we're wired to do so and the illusion of free will is strong and it's hard to see past it.
That too can be chalked up to deterrence. If prison were not unpleasant, why would it be a deterrent? Edit: unpleasantness has limits of course.
> I'm not remotely compelled by the notion that Frankfurts arguments against PAP makes any difference whatsoever here, because the point is that a strict determinism makes the very concept of moral responsibility meaningless, in that if one accepts determinism then no entity had any ability to deliver another outcome, and the person holding the gun had no more control over the outcome than the gun or the bullet.
This isn't the point of the Frankfurt cases. The point was that they are still responsible if they wanted to make that choice, regardless of whether or not they effectively had no other choice in terms of outcomes. That's exactly the case under Compatibilism.
> What then makes the person and not the gun or bullet, or any other entity that was a part of the cause and effect chain more morally responsible?
The simple fact that the person can learn to do better and make a different choice in the same circumstances in the future, where the bullet and the gun cannot. This is why mental competence is a factor in moral responsibility. Systems with minds that process moral content can and should be held morally responsible.
You missed this part:
> where the evidence shows both works just fine
The evidence is clear that prisons can be far nicer without affecting the deterrence.
> This isn't the point of the Frankfurt cases. The point was that they are still responsible if they wanted to make that choice, regardless of whether or not they effectively had no other choice in terms of outcomes. That's exactly the case under Compatibilism.
And I'm saying I don't find this compelling at all. It's an utterly idiotic argument in the face of determinism, because them wanting to make the choice in a deterministic interpretation is itself beyond their ability to control.
> The simple fact that the person can learn to do better and make a different choice in the same circumstances in the future, where the bullet and the gun cannot. This is why mental competence is a factor in moral responsibility. Systems with minds that process moral content can and should be held morally responsible.
In a deterministic interpretation they are learning only in the same way a computer updating a weight in a decision graph or neural network does, so replace the bullet with a program firing a weapon then, which by your description are morally responsible.
But that's irrelevant. There is no "them" beyond the entity that determinism constructed, and the entity that determinism constructed wanted to make that choice, therefore that entity should be held responsible so it learns right from wrong and that it can do better in the future.
It's really hard to understand exactly what the issue is. It seems you agree with all of the following:
1. The entity with a functional mind is the proximate cause of the outcome in a long chain of deterministic causes.
2. The entity's mind contains moral content and so understands the moral ramifications of its choice.
3. The entity wanted to make that choice and was not coerced by another entity.
4. Moral blame for wrongdoing and praise for ethical choices shapes future behaviour of entities.
Yet you somehow disagree that this process of moral feedback matches how humans apply moral responsibility, and so step 3 matches what we've been calling a "freely willed choice".
> In a deterministic interpretation they are learning only in the same way a computer updating a weight in a decision graph or neural network does
Yes.
> so replace the bullet with a program firing a weapon then, which by your description are morally responsible.
If the program is mentally competent just like a human, ie. capable of learning and making decisions considering moral factors like we do, then yes, holding it responsible makes perfect sense. Bullets aren't that.
Exactly what holding a firing program responsible means can be different than how we hold humans responsible, but the process by which we assign responsibility is the same.
Who is the "we" in that sentence, that is not in control?
Of course if you think the rusting bar is conscious, you should probably look at the tapioca a little more closely...
Find me a logically coherent definition of free will that does not reduce it to an illusion, and you could write it up and have a great shot at a nobel prize in physics, maths or both.
You're just imputing a meaning to "free will" which is not how people typically use the term. People don't mean a free choice to be free of antecedent causes, because that would be absurd: you choose to eat when you're hungry, you choose to sleep when you're tired, you choose a job based on what salary you want and work/life balance which are preferences shaped by your experiences, etc.
When people say someone made a choice of their own free will, they mean the choice was not coerced, and so that choice was consistent with their values rather than forced to conform to someone else's values. That is, it's an expression of their "will".
This is the view on free will known as "Compatibilism", because it's compatible with determinism, and it's basically the view we see in the legal system: if you are mentally competent to make a choice, and you were not coerced, you are held responsible for that choice.
And this matches will with how laypeople reason morally: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274892120_Why_Compa...
I'd also strongly content that you're wrong, and that if you actually dig into peoples beliefs about free will deeply enough to ensure they understand what you're suggesting, you will find most people get annoyed, agitated or outright angry at even the notion that they don't imbue outcomes with some magical fairy-dust agency they can't define.
Getting people to superficially agree with compatibilism is easy. Getting people to agree with it once you present them with the logical consequences of it, is not.
At least it's consistently been my experience with this over decades of having this discussion: The exceedingly rare compatibilists I come across tends to be a small subset of the exceedingly few people who read philosophy papers.
EDIT: I'd love to see a survey ask people if they think a purely deterministic process, e.g. a suitable program running on a computer, can ever be said to have free will. If people say "no" to that, they are rejecting a compatibilist definition of free will.
You can see the strong emotions that brings up in play if you look at the discussions over AI art right now, with the number of people angrily rejecting not just the current iteration of such tools, but the very notion that AI can ever be more than deterministic automatons, with the implicit belief in that being that humans are not.
Except that's irrelevant. The fact that a murderer had no "ultimate" control over becoming who he is, is irrelevant to the fact hat he felt justified in committing the murder, and the entity that feels justified in murdering has made an unethical choice, and so that entity requires correction. This is the inescapable question free will addresses: who is responsible for a choice?
And this addresses your claim here:
> This entirely sidesteps the issue, which is that if you employ a compatibilist notion of free will (in other words: a "free" will that is merely an illusion of agency)
So this is not an "illusion of agency", this is exactly the kind of agency people care about: if your thoughts and feelings counterfactually determined your choice free of coercion, and if that choice was wrong, your thoughts and feelings require correction via feedback, which is holding you morally responsible.
> I'd also strongly content that you're wrong, and that if you actually dig into peoples beliefs about free will deeply enough to ensure they understand what you're suggesting, you will find most people get annoyed, agitated or outright angry at even the notion that they don't imbue outcomes with some magical fairy-dust agency they can't define.
You can contend strongly all you like, I cited empirical evidence that was part of a series of studies undertaken over years which tested to see whether people have Compatibilist and incompatibilist intuitions. People agreed strongly with Compatibilism after it was properly explained to them, which is the opposite of what you claim.
> The exceedingly rare compatibilists I come across tends to be a small subset of the exceedingly few people who read philosophy papers.
Well then you're in for a shock, not only from the paper I linked above, but also because a comfortable majority of philosophers who actually read and write philosophy papers for a living are Compatibilists:
https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl
EDIT for your edit:
> I'd love to see a survey ask people if they think a purely deterministic process, e.g. a suitable program running on a computer, can ever be said to have free will. If people say "no" to that, they are rejecting a compatibilist definition of free will.
We already know the answer to this: anthropomorphization is a near universal cognitive bias, by which humans assume a mind behind phenomena, particularly phenomena that exhibits complex behvaiour. This is why people are polite when conversing with chatbots like ChatGPT.
If there's a mind that's responsive to moral feedback as I described above, then it makes perfect sense to hold it responsible, and I am 99.9999% certain this is how most people would treat this question.
That does not give us the answer to what I wrote at all. Yes, people will casually treat computer systems as thinking entities. I wrote my first chatbot that fooled people ~28 years ago or so. It was not a good chatbot: All it took to fool people into long conversations was to continuously pick random responses from a set of only 4-5 or so.
But that does not tell us whether or not they would think that a computer exhibits free will, nor whether they think it ever could. Assuming this cognitive bias equals a belief that is maintained when probed deeper is something I've seen many times when discussing this with compatibilists. It's easy to assume a compatibilist view on free will if you look at surface level indications; people are not consistent, nor do most think carefully through unstated implications. We - me included - will often act as if something has agency and/or is a fully thinking being with a meaningful form "magical" free will even when we know full well the entity in question isn't even an advanced automaton.
Case in point: the trivial chatbot mentioned above. Some people would pour out their life story. Some would get angry at it for repeating itself. Some would tell it they thought it was probably a bot, and still talk to it as if it was a sentient being afterwards. Does that mean they have thought it had agency anyway since they treated it as if it did after "outing" it as a bot? Of course not.
It meant that in that context it met some immediate desire or need of theirs to treat it as if it was another mind they could connect with, because it was a convenient fiction.
Compatibilist free will is a convenient fiction. And so if you were to ask me whether I agree that "free will" as defined by compatibilists exists, I'd say yes. I just don't find it to have any moral implications, and I see it as no more than an illusion and a smokescreen. And so if you were to ask whether I think "free will" exists, I say no. It's an absurd notion. There's nothing "free" about the compatibilist notion of free will.
Failing to account for this ability to buy into a fiction like this on a contextual basis makes any investigation into what people actually think of something like free will entirely meaningless twaddle (and to be clear, most of what I've seen from non-compatibilists in this respect is also meaningless twaddle). Trying to dig into this with short surveys without multiple questions aimed at determining inconsistencies in the answers that signal lack of understanding of implications is a big red flag.
> If there's a mind that's responsive to moral feedback as I described above, then it makes perfect sense to hold it responsible, and I am 99.9999% certain this is how most people would treat this question.
Even if we posit that people would treat it that way, it does not mean it makes perfect sense or is justified. If that what people do believe, it would just tell me that most people are just as immoral, cruel and callous as they consider criminals to be. Personally, if one consider it moral to apply a corrective system to attempt to reduce crime (and I do, at least for crime that actually has victims), then I'd consider it equally moral to apply the same form of corrections to people engaged in that harm against others as part of current "justice" systems. Participating in the oppression of the huge number of people being punished in ways that do not serve a corrective purpose the way prosecutors, judges and police do amounts to horrifying levels of immorality from the point of view that the people they inflict harm on could not have acted differently.
If most people genuinely saw it like this - a matter of correction rather than vengeance -, the justice system would look fundamentally different. If the goal was indeed correction, sentences would follow evidence of risk, and imprisonment would focus on rehabilitation. Every evidence we see of how people act and respond to sentencing show that people see prison as to a large extent punitive, an attitude that is wildly immoral if the "entity in question" could not have chosen differently given the same inputs and the same state.
> So this is not an "illusion of agency", this is exactly the kind of agency people care about
Irrespective of whether or not it is "the kind of agency" people care about, if that is what people care about, then people are using compatibilism to justify to themselves allowing harm to people who had no ability to choose differently. If that is the kind of agency people care about, that does not make it better. It makes people worse for understanding that they are harming people who can't choose differently.
> if that choice was wrong, your thoughts and feelings require correction via feedback, which is holding you morally responsible.
The first part is a utilitarian argument for minimally invasive rehabilitation, not for punishment that does not achieve those goals. The latter part is a smokescreen - if you could not possibly have made a different choice, there's nothing moral about holding you responsible, and punishing you without trying to minimise the impact on you is itself inflicting immoral harm.
This is one of those things that tends to get people very agitated when you dig into this. If you accept a purely materialistic universe, then the current "justice system" is nothing of the sort. You can reasonably argue that correction is necessary, but there's certainly no justice in applying further harm to people who had no ability to choose otherwise.
> You can contend strongly all you like, I cited empirical evidence that was part of a series of studies undertaken over years which tested to see whether people have Compatibilist and incompatibilist intuitions. People agreed strongly with Compatibilism after it was properly explained to them, which is the opposite of what you claim.
I see no evidence of this in the paper you linked to. What these kinds of discussions tends to show me is that you can make all kinds of superficial statements like the ones referenced in the paper, and get people to make seemingly coherent assessments when you give people the "escape clause" that however much you tell them otherwise they think there's some neubulous special thing about humans that give us an ability to decide otherwise, but once you start digging into it people tend to get very upset when you suggest their ability to make decisions is computationally equivalent to a computer (hence my edit, which I realise you might not have seen when you replied to my post above).
> Well then you're in for a shock, not only from the paper I linked above, but also because a comfortable majority of philosophers who actually read and write philosophy papers for a living are Compatibilists
How is that shocking? The proportion of people who read and write philosophy papers are a tiny little proportion of people. I'm totally unsurprised at the number of people who read philosophy papers for a living come to this view - it's hard to reconcile a strongly materialistic view of free will with living in a society that you then necessarily will see as brutally immoral and without any semblance of justice.
So that's a variety of choice that has the effect of conditioning the thought-stream.
(But yes, thoughts just arise. Like sights and sounds. Only our power to arrange them seems special)
When you are focusing on a problem, and then catch yourself distracted daydreaming, when did you choose to direct your attention away from the problem and towards the daydream?
It's not obvious to me at all that I consciously author the choice of where to direct my attention. And even in the cases where I do think "Ok, I am going to think about X", did I author that thought? On down recursively.
Thoughts appear, and I notice them, but I never choose to notice them. It's all quite mysterious.
One phenomenon that you might consider is that when you direct your attention at one thing (be it a thought or whatatever) you become blind to other things. And this blindness is proportional to the intensity of the attention-directing.
https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/reflections_on_...
> The model of decision making I am proposing has the following feature: when we are faced with an important decision, a consideration-generator whose output is to some degree undetermined, produces a series of considerations, some of which may of course be immediately rejected as irrelevant by the agent (consciously or unconsciously). Those considerations that are selected by the agent as having a more than negligible bearing on the decision then figure in a reasoning process, and if the agent is in the main reasonable, those considerations ultimately serve as predictors and explicators of the agent's final decision.
Sam Harris would say that having the "consideration-generator whose output is to some degree undetermined" is exactly what he means when he says we don't have free will. If you can consciously choose from a menu of thoughts, but you don't consciously choose the contents of the menu, is that free will in a meaningful sense?
Furthermore, the act of selecting from the menu of decisions is itself another decision. This is the recursive "choosing to choose" I've referred to in comments in this thread. How do you choose to choose? How do you choose to choose to choose? At some point, the recursion must stop at some unconscious decision.
So what? The fact is that the "free will" you appear to want to talk about does not and cannot exist, whereas the "free will" Dennett is talking about does exist and has important real-world consequences. So, to be blunt, why should I care about your preferred definition? What's the point of going on and on about something that doesn't and can't exist? Who cares?
There's a good footnote in Dennett's paper that speaks to this point:
''I'm writing a book on magic," I explain, and I'm asked, "Real magic?" By real magic people mean miracles, thaumaturgical, and supernatural powers. "No," I answer: "Conjuring tricks, not real magic." Real magic, in other words, refers to the magic that is not real, while the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real magic. (p42S) -Lee Siegel, Net of Magic
I'd rather talk about free will that can actually exist, than complain about free will that doesn't and can't exist.
> If you can consciously choose from a menu of thoughts, but you don't consciously choose the menu, is that free will in a meaningful sense?
It's certainly better than not being able to choose anything--or worse, being forced to suffer the consequences of the bad choices of others.
Dennett makes a comment in one of his books on this topic: "There are very real threats to our freedom, but they are not metaphysical." Telling people that they don't have free will, in real terms, amounts to telling them to suck it up while the evil, predatory people in the world, who know perfectly well that they do have free will and have no compunction about exercising it at others' expense, take all their goodies, instead of choosing to fight back. Sorry, not buying it.
Because it's a poor rhetorical tactic, one used quite often in this and other topics, that confuses the subject rather than adding clarity and mutual understanding. Redefining the subject of a debate in the middle of such a debate is a recipe for talking past one another (which these two have done at length multiple times and never seem to quite understand how much they're talking past one another, or at least never acknowledge it so as to "win" more) rather than coming to a better understanding. Neither one can be wrong or right because neither really acknowledges the other, they're just sort of talking about related (but different) subjects at the same time using the same term in different ways, to the consternation of passer bys who end up joining one camp or the other not realizing they can easily be in both.
> Telling people that they don't have free will, in real terms, amounts to telling them to suck it up while the evil, predatory people in the world, who know perfectly well that they do have free will and have no compunction about exercising it at others' expense, take all their goodies, instead of choosing to fight back.
That's not what it tells them at all, and indeed this is a common point of confusion that could be alleviated without all the talking past one another. A better synthesis would be:
- Acknowledge one does not directly author one's own thoughts (either by way of the vast literature of neuroscience or simply closely observing the nature of thought)
- Acknowledge the vast role of forces outside our direct individual control in our understanding of ourselves and others
- Acknowledge our ignorance of full causation of any given thought or action and the scoping differences of emergent systems
- Acknowledge regardless of the first two and because of the third at an individual and societal level there is very real meaning to responsibility and attribution of action to a locus of control (be that individual or grouping of individuals)
Compatibilism (of which Dennett is a proponent) more or less just says the 4th is actually compatible with the 1st. And that's completely reasonable, but we'd save a lot of time in these debates by taking great pains to acknowledge the difference in scope and context as opposed to arguing which one we want to call "free will."
Except Dennett's use is compatible with how laypeople seem to reason morally [1], and it further agrees with centuries of legal precedent that accounts for free choice, so there is a good justification for defining this as free will.
I also reject the framing that free will already had a definition that Compatibilists are trying to redefine. The whole debate is about what qualities free will has that can make sense of choice and responsibility. This debate didn't start with "free will must have qualities X, Y or it's not free will", it started with discussion about what sorts of control we may have over choices and what this entails about our responsibility, and free will is the descriptor for the kind of choice that entails responsibility.
Compatibilism provides a coherent definition that largely matches how people talk about and reason about this topic, so exactly why should that not settle the debate and require us all to understand that this is free will?
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274892120_Why_Compa...
To me the semantics of what one wants to call free will really don't matter and aren't worth much discussion, yet they seem to be primarily what gets discussed. What matters is clarity and context (context being do you want to talk about how minds and the universe works or do you want to talk about moral or societal responsibility), and trying discuss which one ought to be called free will seems to me to be yak shaving.
I'd agree the debate is actually fairly largely settled for now, as I pointed out in my bullets in the previous reply. There is still much to figure out about neurology and the origin of thought, and about societal cohesion, but the fundamentals there seem pretty solid for as long as we're mostly human. I add that last caveat because I think these concerns actually do start to merge once a mind is capable of fully experiencing and conceptually recognizing causal lines (physical, chemical, or otherwise), which certainly seems to be not in the cards for us biologically and may even be theoretically impossible, but I wouldn't rule out just yet. In such a world with such minds things would look quite a bit different, and there would be much less daylight between every day morality and mechanistic functions underlying the minds a play.
It matters quite a bit I think, because otherwise it's an impediment to communication. Just look around at all the pushback from unnecessary changes to language due to so-called "wokeness". If a term has a coherent conception and is mostly well understood and commonly utilized by people, I don't see the value in trying to change that language.
In this context, Harris is just one in a long line of people leveling this accusation that Compatibilism is changing the definition of free will, where it seems instead that it empirically matches how people actually use this term.
This is not to say that you specifically were making this argument, but it's been implicit (and sometimes explicit) undercurrent in this whole thread.
It sounds like we agree on the problem but disagree on the solution. I would argue most of the impediment to communication on this subject is exactly because people are trying much too hard to brand a certain conceptualization "free will" and trying to delineate different contexts and scenarios far too little. It's absolutely worthwhile to clarify what context one is referring to when using the term. It's absolutely a waste of time to try and assert this context is the only correct context to do so.
In my experience, everyone arguing about brains and the universe is trying to justify something like the Consequence Argument, in which I think my insistence on a Compatibilist definition of free will is justified.
That hasn't been my experience at all, usually I see claims about the brains and universe being made from epistemic grounds, and indeed they are valuable in of themselves even if purely academic. The nature of our reality is worth discovering on its own merit, rather than just discarding in favor of saying that's not what we're really talking about (when indeed some of us are talking about that!).
All the more reason to be clear about context.
Of all possible reasons to argue for compatibalism, I would not choose this.
Historical precedent is often wrong, and often horribly so. This particular issue happens to be one that leaves us mostly in the dark while many of the provably incorrect historical precedents have been addressed by growing scientific knowledge.
As neuroscience progresses and converges with philosophical thoughts on the subject, I think philosophers will have stronger ground to build on. Until then, I’m not looking to historical precedent for answers, on a topic that seems very incompatible with such a source of wisdom.
> Compatibilism provides a coherent definition that largely matches how people talk about and reason about this topic, so exactly why should that not settle the debate and require us all to understand that this is free will?
“Religion and the existence of god provides a coherent framework that largely matches how people talk and reason about existence and morality, so exactly why should that not settle the debate and require us to all understand that this is our origin?”.
This is a sentence that would not have raised very many eyebrows at one time. It seems that you are arguing for compatibilism on the basis that it matches how people currently make sense of our notions of free will?
Accepting “good enough” approximations, especially when examining issues of ethics and morality seems extremely problematic and likely to create blind spots.
Except that's wrong. Theism is not a coherent framework at all, and it doesn't at all explain our origins in a way that's compatible with observation. By contrast, Compabitilism is a coherent framework in which to reason about choice and responsibility, and it agrees with how people intuitively approach this as tested empirically, and it agrees with one of the greatest ethical equalizers we've found: law.
You can crap on the law all you want, but it was the first great step towards social justice that tore down the power of monarchs and divine rule and started the process of treating all people on equal footing. Science has an equally storied history of mistakes, and yet you clearly value its current state, and so I'm saying don't be so dismissive of progress and precedent in law. It too has been shaped deep of philosophical debate among tens of thousands of people over hundreds of years. Don't fail to learn the lessons of the past.
This misses the point, and I'd ask that you reframe how you read my statement as a thought experiment. Saying this is wrong is a claim you can now confidently make within the context of a system of understanding that has advanced far beyond the confines of what religion could explain. The inherent limits of religion necessitated some better explanation.
Prior to the existence of that new understanding, and during the time in which that new understanding was brand new, appeals to "how people talk and reason" were appeals to religion, and the arguments for it perfectly coherent given the tools of thought available at the time. As science introduced new tools, consensus thinking shifted accordingly.
My point is that an argument for compatibilism that appeals to the common vernacular as a primary point of validation is not a very convincing argument.
> You can crap on the law all you want, but it was the first great step towards social justice...
This is a binary mindset, and I'm not crapping on the law - it is both valuable and necessary. Finding issues with certain laws or modes of thinking about law are not an implication that laws are not useful. The point is that laws are just a tool, and are not by themselves an indicator of enlightenment or the best possible solution. We know this to be true by looking at the reform of immoral/unethical laws over time. The underlying frameworks of understanding used to author laws within the legal system are just as important as the legal system itself (see: abortion, slavery, segregation...).
If we only used the good things law has achieved to justify the existence of other laws, gay marriage would still be illegal, most states would still be incarcerating people for smoking weed, and segregation would still be alive and well.
> Science has an equally storied history of mistakes, and yet you clearly value its current state, and so I'm saying don't be so dismissive of progress and precedent in law.
I don't think I'm dismissing any progress or precedent at all. I'm saying we should not use precedent to stop us from making progress. This is something science is better at than some disciplines, but even science remains susceptible to dogma and binary thinking.
> Don't fail to learn the lessons of the past.
As a form of argument about philosophy, this is a problematic conclusion. At a minimum, you would need to explain why some lessons are better to learn than others, and on what basis they are better or worse.
But setting that aside, and in the context of our understanding of the science of human consciousness, why is there any implication at all that exploring the true nature of free will is incompatible with learning from the past?
And then someone says "wait what does this term even mean" and gets piled on with "oh so we're just going to quibble about definitions, are we?"
I really detest this "rebuttal", because it assumes some authoritative definition of free will exists. It does not. The whole point of the free will debate is come to an understanding of what free will actually is, that makes sense of our language and moral reasoning around choice and responsibility.
Guess what? Sam Harris' definition of free will will (incompatibilism) is inconsistent with how most laypeople seem to reason morally, while Dennett's (Compatibilism) is on the money:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274892120_Why_Compa...
While you speak of utility in terms of behaviour, I also question its utility in a philosophical and spiritual sense.
Strict determinism (and according lack of free will) has been around since at least the 1600s in more or less its current form. Though we tend to use computer rather than clockwork metaphors for it these days. Precursor concepts, like fates immutable and determined before birth, are truly ancient ideas. As is the notion of the lottery of birth, that any one of us could have been born as someone else.
Many, maybe most people, for thousands of years, have been familiar with the idea. Many think it to be true. And yet, it doesn't feel true. I experience life under the delusion that I have free will, that I make my choices. Aside from a few Buddhist-inspired types who claim to free themself from this delusion from time to time, everyone suffers from it. (I am not very skeptical of such claims, but they only manage it as a side-effect of the even more unsettling realization that the self, with its thoughts and decisions, does not exist in the first place. That may be true too, but it sure doesn't feel true most of the time.)
What can you actually do with a literally unbelievable truth?
However, the luck we're talking about is not random chance, it is comparable to a set of overlapping games with stacked odds. The result is still a chaotic system, that means it will typically tend to end up in one or more attractor states.
This is how both inheritance and culture work. Going against the culture, physical or mental inheritance, or pushing to a different attractor state requires overcoming a vast amount of inertia. Within and without. And sometimes help too.
Certain initial states have much more leeway in shaping the particular trajectory one would take than others.
And yes, ultimate choice of free will is to roll the dice, try something new or create. Determinism is incompatible with that.
There is a subjective experience of being. We think we have a mind, that acts on the world. Both dualists and monists, of all kinds, experience reality with this feeling, I think. The questions I have are: is this an illusion? Is there a mapping between the subjective being that experiences, the mind on the inside, and the apparent order of events in reality? Would our experienced slice of time and space be different, if we had chosen differently? Could we have?
That's how I understand the problem of free will. It seems to be something no one has really figured out. There's all sorts of conjectures. Christians say something like that, through some divine process the soul which is related to our mind, is linked to our body and we are given the choice to act. Monadic materialists say the mind is part of reality through some physical or metaphysical process, and thus we, as in our minds, do at least effect changes on the world. About as convincing as the Christians, in my mind. We can say the mind itself is sort of an illusion, but that's even more irritating, isn't it? Because it doesn't feel like one, at least to me.
Maybe I misunderstand the problem and the questions are not properly formed.
This is complete BS, given that there are many aspects of quantum physics that still elude our comprehension. Just because we fail at determining its nature, doesn't necessarily mean its nature is indeterministic. Just like how a pseudo random number generator may generate numbers which appear to be random or indeterministic, but instead are actually the results of an entirely deterministic and predictable process.
Does someone deserve a position of responsibility, say a military command, just because life has been unfair to them? What if you give him a command and his bad luck continues? It would doom not only him, but his soldiers as well.
Similarly, why should a fortunate man share his wealth with the less fortunate? If life is just one big casino, would you share your chips with someone in the middle of a losing streak?
It's interesting how most modern attempts to redefine morality, in order to supposedly screw it in the favor of the poor, so often end up resurrecting the ethical systems of times and places, where the poor would fight to the death for the entertainment of the rich.
Hardly. It's just that they can, and it feels good to rule over others, so why shouldn't they? You aren't really a "bad pagan" if you decide to do otherwise. You're just possibly a foolish one. The only "pagan sin" is hubris, thinking that you're more powerful than you are and gaping over too much.
I agree that there's a tendency to recreate all that stuff.
I don't see any reason to believe what you say is wrong. Is there evidence we have free will? It's hard to find in physics. Could i have done differently that what i did? I don't think so. I don't control my thoughts, i don't think them before i think them. I'm not sure how i could do differently.
Even if everything you do was predetermined by the simulation... the simulation is simulating you, so even inside it, you will do what you would have done otherwise.
-Emily
I would say the following argument proves too much: if desire is worthless because it's part of the simulation, and therefore any impression of "free will" is not even free because your ability to express said "free will" was decided upon by the simulation and not yourself... then nothing is worth anything and you have to back up (unless you want to become a nihilist).
-Emily
None of the line of reasoning I'm teasing at requires one to conclude that desire is worthless. Many involuntary appearances in consciousness map directly to causal factors and provide clear evolutionary benefit, e.g. pain is an early warning system that helps us avoid many kinds of death.
Why would nihilism be the natural conclusion here?
Isn't it suspicious if you used to use a desert argument ("we pay this guy because he chose to work hard and so deserves it"), then you move to a utility argument ("we pay this guy because paying people like him more leads to good for all of us"), and miraculously the right payment works out to exactly the same?
I mean yes.
> We are all simply running out the simulation that was predetermined long before we were born.
If you believe in Einstein theory, yes. QM is a bit more complicated since there is the possibility you took all the paths that are out there. But let's not get into that?
> We punish people for doing the wrong things
No, we don't. Most cultures and countries just put them in jail. In modern times, it can be a psychiatric institution.
> even though they didn't chose to do them
No one care. People also usually don't care much if it's "them" who did these things.
> but the act of punishing them makes them less likely to happen
No, it doesn't. Crime rates are not determined by the severity of your laws but rather the circumstances of the country, families and culture. See?
> we give rewards to people who worked hard
No we don't. Reward are distributed most randomly but sometimes through privilege. Few tech and other people make their money by merit.
> if we just handed out money evenly to everyone
That's communism. It did actually quite well until it collapsed. It seems some countries have a bias for it, while it doesn't work well in others.
In general, yes. And that's the justifiable for reason for punishing people for crimes. Which is different from saying that they "deserve" it
> do something or have or show qualities worthy of (reward or punishment).
That seems to fit punishment for committing a crime.
I think we can all imagine dozens of confounding factors among the people assigned to community service vs prison if the assignment is done via an element of human judgment.
This meta-study pulls together RCTs and experimental programs and covers non-custodial (which includes a range of options besides community service) v custodial, and finds them to be at worst equivalent for recidivism https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.4073/csr.2015.1
> Why did you choose for your parents
… you gave in to an abridged “why?” discussion very early in this example.
Any time I am interacting with someone I feel like is ignorant/stupid/foolish/whatever pejorative, I take a deep breath and remind myself that nobody chooses to be stupid.
One might say "well they chose to be ignorant, they could learn about XYZ but they choose not to". But that would require them having the thought "I should learn about XYZ". That thought does not come by choice. And, if it did, the thought to make that choice does not come by choice, et cetera.
Once you accept that nobody makes themself the way they are, it removes the punch behind the emotion of hatred. You don't hate fire because it sometimes causes destruction. It's just doing what fire does. You might not like it, but you don't hate it. The same can be said of people.
I agree with you. I’d owe you the same apology for misreading you if I came to disagree. But I do agree. And I’m glad you were thoughtful in your reply, which I probably didn’t welcome enough.
For what it’s worth I do think there’s still a case for nihilism in there! Just the good kind.
People are more constrained by their environment than they often think. They choose less often than they think they do. At the same time, your post goes too far the other direction. People have more choice than that. And they have responsibility for those choices.
If you start from a materialist position (including from the modern scientific position), then you are inevitably faced with some kind of reductionism, and even far stronger reductionism than you are arguing. If all that exists is matter and the laws of physics, then all you can be is matter that obeys the laws of physics - nothing more. You're just a collection of atoms that obey the laws of atomic physics, assembled into molecules that obey the laws of biochemistry, assembled into neurons that obey the laws of neurology.
There is no room for choice in that view. But equally, there is no room for love. (Especially love in the highest sense, of choosing to do what's best for the other, because you can't choose anything. But even in the sense of attraction, that's just neurons and biochemicals doing their thing.) There is no room for beauty as a real thing - it's just what hits our neurons a particular way. There is no room for truth as truth. (There are things that we find convincing, in our hardware that evolved to get a good enough answer fast enough, rather than to find actual truth or to do pure logic correctly.)
There is not even room for personality. All you can be is the impersonal plus complexity - that's all "personality" can be. There is nothing more for "personality" to be but the artifact of complexity.
But that doesn't match our experience. We all experience love, even though the logic of our position says that love doesn't exist. We all make choices, even though logic says we don't actually choose. We all experience beauty and we all long for truth. And we all long for personal contact - to touch each other as persons, not just as complicated machines. We can try to live within the logic of the materialist position, but it doesn't actually fit who we are as human beings.
It's kind of like when you put a t-shirt on backwards. It covers all the places that need to be covered, but it doesn't fit right. And no matter how much you try to wiggle it around and adjust it, it just doesn't fit.
I suggest that the materialist position doesn't fit who we are as human beings, and that the lack of fit is telling us something. Either we are the products of random chance, thrown up in and by an impersonal universe, with aspirations of personality that can never be fulfilled, or we are not actually what our philosophy says we are. And I think it's the latter.
So I invite you to consider the alternative to the materialist position. If the beginning of it all was someone, rather than something impersonal, then it is possible that we could be truly personal, rather than just the impersonal plus complexity. Then we also could be able to make real choices, and to really love, and to know real truth and beauty. We could be what humans have always thought we were. But you can never have that as long as you hold to the purely materialist view.
But if you can't step out of the materialist view and consider the alternative, then no, I can't give you the example that you're asking for.
For a much longer and better treatment of this, see the first chapter of He Is There And He Is Not Silent, by Francis Schaeffer.
Because, you do :)
A. Because you choose to.
Choosing to work means taking action in the world, which is where you can stop looking for a cause outside yourself. How did you choose, you can still ask. But you choose to work because you choose to work. It's because of this that you can say you have a good work ethic. A choice is something that you take responsibility for. Not your parents, or your work ethic, or the way you were raised.
For you to have any kind of real agency rather than being the product of cause and effect beyond any control of yours would upend both logic and physics (in other words: free will is nothing but an illusion).
Free will is no more an illusion than the qualia of red. If what you think is outside your control, then who is the "you" that is not in control? Where is it?
If you can't choose to swap the color red to blue, then what makes you think you have any other choice with other things in your mind?
Attributing everything to luck is:
A) A coping mechanism for people who don’t want to do the work required to succeed.
B) A rationalization technique for people who think they should be entitled to the fruits of other people labor.
Already, we can make an example of you--you can't think beyond your own circumstances, and you think that just because you made a choice to better your life and succeeded in it, then people whom you don't deem successful must simply be choosing to not make the choices that you did. I'm sorry, but even if you come from a painful background, that doesn't give you a pass to say that your path to get where you are is supposed to be the same for everyone.
1. The ability to move out of your house. There are places in the world where people don't have as much freedom of movement because they are not as democratic as countries in the west.
2. Been hired as a bartender. Need I say that this is not a choice that you made, but by your then-employer, or that it was possible for such a job to exist in the first place because you found another town with enough economy to create such jobs, while many other places in the world are not as fortunate?
Good for you wherever you are in your life right now, but I hate to break it to you buddy--you didn't do everything yourself, and you were lucky to have an environment that enabled your growth and to have other people to play a part in your success.
Getting a basic, entry level, no skill job has barely anything to do with luck. I guess I’m lucky that I was born, and that my mind and body works. But that’s all the luck you need to attain that level of success, nearly everywhere in the world.
This is why so many people push it back onto their children to have it better, but it typically does not work for either them or their kids.
Having minimal means to survive, including health, is but a necessary condition for being a whole, successful person.
It is averting abject immediate failure at best. Definition of success for more people would be starting a family or helping theirs out. Which you almost certainly cannot do these days with even copious amounts of hard work, not you can build something just ever slightly more with that.
Savings? Don't exist really, are subject to every whim and throw of economy. Use a calculator and multiply how much of forever you will have to work to establish basic stability.
As is your boss of that gastronomic business, even in North Korea. Owning an actual place to live that will not be taken from you on a whim, hmm?
Even farmers are subject to a degree of luck they're not always allowed to play around...
There's no objective way to determine what is success. It depends a lot on one's background.
And they are. I see a lifetime of people making choices.
But luck is still important. I have a non tech background and got my first tech job through a friend I knew from a completely unrelated hobby. Less than a year later, our startup was acquired, making my unvested options well in the money, and within five years I had earned more money than many if not most Americans earn in their lifetimes. Many people working at startups never get the kind of windfall I got within a year (and given the length of my tenure, I can hardly claim any credit for the company's success at the time of acquisition). I probably would have made good money eventually, but it easily could have taken far longer or not happened at all had I not known my hobby acquaintance.
Of course luck isn't the only reason for anyone's success or failure, but it plays a huge role.
You can certainly work hard to succeed and also realize that a lot of your successes are just that, attributed to "luck" or things out of your control. This isn't to take anything anyway from hard work.
I've always attributed hard work to basically buying more chances to play. Hard workers tend to succeed because they get more pulls at the slot machine. Just because you "win" doesn't change the fact that you're still playing the percentages.
I think the type of person who is probably more likely to succeed is one that doesn't believe in luck (i.e. not willing to just accept the lot that was given to them).
My theory: the mind works in binary by default - it is a quick and dirty (and low energy) heuristic to make predictions, and reality/causality/etc from the perspective of an observer is fundamentally prediction based.
If you think that's weird, you should see all the other sub-perceptual weirdness going on in this thread.
> You can certainly work hard to succeed and also realize that a lot of your successes are just that, attributed to "luck" or things out of your control. This isn't to take anything anyway from hard work.
Technically, it does kinda/plausibly take something away from hard work in that you are attributing the causality of outcomes to luck vs hard work, based on unacknowledged speculation.
> Hard workers tend to succeed because they get more pulls at the slot machine. Just because you "win" doesn't change the fact that you're still playing the percentages.
Technically, you are necessarily speculating here, perhaps while criticizing the speculations of others for being speculative?
> I think the type of person who is probably more likely to succeed is one that doesn't believe in luck (i.e. not willing to just accept the lot that was given to them).
And not only that, there are other approaches available to humans, like cooperation, which has a dependency on communication and other things. Unfortunately, there seems to be more than a few unrealized bugs in the stack so outcomes are (presumably) less optimal than is possible. My hope is that we try to change this some day, but I do not anticipate this happening.
The comment I initially replied to attributed success to the luck having a good childhood, and several people have chimed in saying I was also lucky and should attribute my own success to having a miserable one. All of this is clearly just unfalsifiable, post-facto rationalization to support the insane luck hypothesis. Your life is far too long to be governed by luck. If you have goals, then simply being dedicated to them over a period of time essentially eliminates the influence of luck (unless your goals are specifically highly luck dependant).
I would still disagree with your point, though. There are swathes of people who worked their ass off and got nowhere. My own successes in life (if I'm to be honest) have had their roots in an off-chance break or what not. I suppose you could attribute that to hard work and being set up for success, but nothing in life guarantees that if you try 100 times you are owed success.
I think in the nitty gritty of life, it doesn't make a difference what your philosophy is. Just work hard and count your blessings. Those that subscribe to no luck will work hard and if they fail, would probably never blame it on bad "luck" anyway. Those that blame luck as a reason to not try would probably would not have done anything even if luck wasn't a factor.
This is the just world fallacy in a nutshell. Are you consciously saying that every parent in history who watched their children starve to death was just not dedicated and hard working enough? Perhaps didn't have 'feed my children' as a clear enough goal?
All this is only interesting though when I compare my life to my siblings. I have talked about this with my parents to some extent. Some of my siblings just seem to be terrible decision makers, and seem to not have any ability to think forward. My older brother's life is a complete disaster, and it is hard to piece together why, because all macro things considered, we were dealt the exact same cards--yet he seems incapable, and always has, of practicing self discipline or instilling any ambition.
In short, I think luck definitely plays a major role, but I also wonder if genetics is more at play than people are willing to admit. If such is the case, it could make conciliation extremely troublesome in some circumstances.
I certainly include genetics in the 'luck' component of life, and I am under the impression most people do. ADHD and autism, for example, are extreme examples of genetic impact on executive function, which is commonly confused with willpower and other 'personal decisions'.
Being born to a drug dealer is the lucky part.
> If you imagine she had a lot of money, you’d be wrong.
And that’s not what I meant.
It motivated you to pursue your little success story. So it was lucky.
Well,
1. You were born in a rich country.
2. You were born in an age where the phrase "financially successful" even makes sense. You could have been born in the stone age, for example.
3. You were born as a human. You could have been a mosquito (16,000x higher odds, actually)
Living at the same time means very little. Try entering a game of Monopoly after a few rounds have been played, and see how your chances of winning drop to almost 0.
That’s some confirmation bias I think.
How many people grow up like that and never get out of it? Is it just because they are all weak willed?
Some of them certainly, but not all of them. I think you need the right combination of both will and circumstance to improve.
Isn’t it just purely sad that some people will never improve because they just haven’t been born with that drive?
and some of the others were having the opportunity at the right time, making the right connections at the right time, and the other hundreds of things that went right for you and might not have.
Not crediting at least some of your success to random factors that you had no control over is a mistake, too.
There are people out there who worked as hard as you but failed because of those random factors.
What are you going to do about it?
That's not what our best current science about consciousness tell us. It tells us that consciousness is part of the process of what "the rest of the meat sack" does; that it's not possible to separate out a "witness" part that "journals" what the rest does. It's all one process.
The ability to make choices about actions based on some more adaptive criteria than the initial impulse itself.
What is a choice in this context? A thought about weighing the costs of possible choices relative to their outcomes.
What is lack of impulse control? Just a different thought, or the absence of the “right” thoughts.
What are the right thoughts? Thoughts that we’ve formed thoughts about and “assigned” a particular status (by thinking).
There is nothing metaphysical here and it all boils down to a really simple question: from where do thoughts arise?
Scientists have observed activity in the brain that is associated with decision making firing up to 10 seconds before the subject became consciously aware of the decision. At a minimum, this raises serious questions about the nature of the decisions we make, and is understandably uncomfortable to consider.
Can you claim?
Not a thing
Not your name.
I don't understand why it's such a popular attitude these days.
A while ago, I noticed something interesting. None of my friends believes their lives are all about luck. They all believe they have agency, and are constantly taking responsibility for their lives and acting accordingly. They're a lot of fun to be around.
The great thing about taking responsibility is one can do something to fix issues in their lives.
The other ones, the ones who say it's all luck, it's always someone else's fault, why me, etc., aren't any fun to be around. No thanks.
People who think their entire lives is the sole result of their hard work and intelligence make my life more miserable
Surely one's starting conditions, all of which predate conscious choice, have some impact on where one finds themselves in life. I'm approaching my 60's and have made some good decisions (and some not-so-good ones, too) but where I find myself today is the result of those decisions overlaid on a foundation of where my family of origin positioned me. Not necessarily in financial terms, but in terms of habits of mind that enabled good decisions in the first place. So I'm happy to celebrate my perspicacity and where it has taken me, but how far along I started on the curve, as with all of us? - that's pure luck.
It likewise can be a recipe for misery to ignore the role of luck in your own life and the lives of others. It's not only inaccurate (sub luck out for the mechanisms by which the world turns), it attributes an unreasonable level of burden of consequence on the decision maker, one they can never hope to live up to and one no one around them will ever live up to.
Of course as with many things the most reasonable course of action is something in between. To both acknowledge the ways in which we understand the world works and how much of that is outside your control, and then take very real ownership of the things that are in your control (namely your actions), and take special care to note how taking control of the things you can over time ends up compounding in unforeseen ways such that you end up "luckier" (the meeting of hard work and opportunity and all that).
If anything this just seems to once again show that any extreme along nearly any axis is not only inaccurate but detrimental to mental health. Nuance and acknowledgement of opposing ideals, and realizing they're compatible and not actually opposing at all, is where one finds truth and solace.
Bob and Tim fall down the stairs, each breaks a leg.
Bob says, oh I'm so unlucky! My leg broke! Woe is me!
Tim says, oh I'm so lucky! I could have broken my head instead of my leg! Next time I'll be more careful.
Yes, it is to externalise your locus of control. This has been shown to result in bad outcomes regarding all kinds of things, including obesity, overall health, psychological well-being, academic, and professional success. Self-victimisation is not a good thing at all, and should not be encouraged.
This is fallacious. Doing or not doing X has just the same consequences no matter whether “you” really did them or not. The outcomes of things happening in the world are still the same.
If you change your mindset to this one (all luck) and notice that you “don’t even try”, then that is a reason to revert that mindset. (Who or what really reverts the mindset is a philosophical question.) Cause and effect is still, you know, the same as it ever was.
> The outcome of this is self-fulfilling - misery.
Jumping to a conclusion. Some people seem to do just fine with such an attitude. Some do worse.
No one serious is saying life is all about luck, but there's been a long-held view that bad outcomes are solely due to bad choices and good outcomes solely due to bad choices. It's a good thing to recognize that there's a significant degree of luck involved in both directions, and that you're not a stupid fool for not foreseeing the 2008 financial crisis, for instance, or that you're not a flawless genius for making a few fortuitous business decisions. It can return a sense of control/agency back to people who've had a string of bad luck despite seemingly careful planning, and should humble people who've had a string of good luck so they don't get too big a head.
I was lucky enough that my parents instilled senses of responsibility and hard work into my brain. In that way, I suspect, the transformation in my unconscious mind that maps those inputs to outputs considers things such as responsibility. It automatically (from the perspective of my conscious mind) prefers me being accountable, me doubling down in the face of challenges, etc.
I agree with you that I’m sick of seeing “it’s always someone else’s fault”, the “I can’t do it because I don’t have X”, etc. crowd. None of us can control everything, but we all ought to control what we can in an effort to improve our lives. How do we folk who are imbued with responsibility and a strong work ethic transfer that from our brains, and use that to transform the cognitive processes of others’ brains? I assume this is what happens when raising a child, and it’s easier because their brain is more impressionable. But it is certainly possible in adults, too. Emotionally moving books and stories, and ordinary people we meet can change our perspectives on life. Experiences can change our lives. The crowd we keep can influence us in certain directions. I suspect that transfer is the missing link that would allow someone who thinks “it’s all luck” to become someone who recognizes that they have agency in absence of luck.
Regardless of the effects of luck, I should point out how far from scientific observation this is. One can examine the evidence of, as this article says, luck, in society. Or, one can talk about magical thinking, and if one doesn't believe some received hegemony it will lead to misery. It sounds close to Christian fundamentalism - believe in the received divine word of the Bible or suffer eternally.
The evidence based scientific method has less value in observing human society than in observing the orbit of planets and such, for a variety of reasons. The picture gotten from social science is less clear than from natural science. It is better than the alternative though.
If one observed society, and the class structure of society, and the forces of production and relations of production - and the changes to the forces of production and resulting changes to relations of production - one would have an evidence based observation of society. Including the luck of being born into one class or the other.
We can look at Mark Zuckerberg, who went to the Phillips Exeter high school (current yearly tuition - $47000 a year and up). His company bought Instagram for $1 billion, founded by Kevin Systrom who went to Middlesex high school (current yearly tuition - $55000 a year and up). We can then look at people who did not pay $47000 for their freshman year in high school (or its mid 1990s equivalent).
> None of my friends believes their lives are all about luck. They all believe they have agency, and are constantly taking responsibility for their lives and acting accordingly.
I'm sure Zuckerberg and Systrom believe they have agency - I believe they have agency. I'm sure when Bill Gates and Paul Allen left the Lakeside prep school they had agency.
These are in fact people who were upper middle class and actually went out and worked. Plenty of heirs inherit their billions, live as "rich kids of Instagram" as shall their kids.
Or you can take the advice if this poster - forget evidence in the world and engage in magical thinking or face misery.
In fact my experience is the opposite in my cohort. We see luck of birth and class structure as bearing on relations if production. My friends are fun to be around in a manner smarmy, entitled trust fund kids are not fun to be around.
I suggest reading a biography of Steve Jobs. Not a trust fund baby. Audited a couple classes in college only. Lower middle class parents. Started in a garage. Sold his Volkswagon to finance Apple. Outdid all of the ones you mentioned.
Play against a professional backgammon player, and you will win exactly zero matches.
The luck averages out over the long run, but the better play accumulates with each move.
In real life, the better play is sometimes hard work, but many times it can be something else: making friends, doing them favors, and getting favors in return, knowing when to take a calculated risk, and knowing when to call it quits, drinking and having fun at parties, but knowing to keep the alcohol away otherwise, saying no do drugs, reading books instead of watching TikTok.
Because the real issue here is not whether our lives are predictable or random (they are obviously both), but to what extent. Your analogy demonstrates a case where randomness can be controlled, mine a case where it can't. So which applies best to our actual lives?
Another analogy from the world of board games: one annoying habit of bad board gamers that gets brought up often in forums and hobby discussion boards is the habit of ascribing good outcomes to skill, and bad outcomes to luck. In my experience, that's true in other aspects of our lives as well. It's very difficult to see the luck involved when you do something successfully, even though it's usually there.
There's exactly zero guarantee that our society or life in general is similarly well-balanced.
It seems to be a lot more like "Candy Land" or "Chutes and Ladders" for many people.
How come? Take Zuckerberg. He's the son of a dentist and a psychiatrist. Upper-middle class for sure. He will have better dice rolls in life than the son of a window cleaner from Queens, but he'll have about the same rolls as the sons of millions of other dentists and doctors and lawyers and senior software engineers. Still, he became a billionaire by the time he was 30, while most of his peers were lucky if they became millionaires by the same time.
But I know a lot of people who claim that Zuckerberg was just a lucky guy.
He isn't *just* lucky. But if theFacebook (a literal face book for harvard students) didn't go viral (which requires a great deal of luck), Mark Zuckerberg might be a middle manager at Google.
Of course there are a lot of people who couldn't execute if given that opportunity. Maybe very few who could.
But there are huge butterfly effects for these types of outlier outcomes in life.
He would not have been only a "middle manager" at Google. Mark was (maybe still is) a 100x developer. He would have had a meteoric career at Google. By now, he would have $100 million in the bank.
The guy went to Phillips Exeter for high school and was captain of the fencing team. Not exactly middle class.
That is, unless you take something like the view of "I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it."
My spouse and I work hard to ensure that our family has that kind of luck. That our kids get a safe, stable, secure home, nutritious food, adequate exercise, exposure to a variety of novel (to them) experiences. We copiously support and nurture their educational efforts. We display love and tolerance for each other, but also demonstrate and uphold high standards in areas that we think matter. We spend less than our means and save for our family's future and invest for our retirement and their current and future education.
Given all that, maybe our kids are just plain lucky after all and luck is responsible for everything that they'll ever do. I can't stop you from believing that, but I don't and we don't live our lives as if it were true.
Once this basic fact is recognized, then it necessarily dictates that we should structure a society in a way where everyone has access to the necessities of life. Things like food, healthcare, education, and housing should be universal rights that are guaranteed for everyone.
I have no problem if Bezos or Musk eat better food, live in a better house, can pay for elite education, or have access to better/more comprehensive medical care than I do.
Elite education at the highest level kinda breaks down how it is currently implemented. Tutors are one thing, private schools maybe an other. But Universities should be fixed. Either outright pay, or compete in total meritocracy with admission tests or standardised testing.
The reason this is the case is because people like Bezos own the means of production and ensure that labour and resources are directed towards their benefit first and foremost. These people simply won the birth lottery and now they get to rule over the rest of the people because of that. If you don't see that as a problem then I really don't know what to tell you.
Once that baseline is guaranteed, it's a much cleaner argument that Joe freely decided to work in a job moving heavy things around because he valued having a more pleasurable existence, rather than saying it was because he didn't want to slowly starve to death.
No one wants to wake up at 4 AM and farm the land, to clean other people's shit out of a septic tank, or to wipe an incontinent 90 year old's ass. But all of those things need to be done and if we look at the history various economic systems, it seems like there's a lot to be gained in societal wealth, comfort, and advancement from one particular flavor over the others that we've tried.
Giving everyone a safety net I believe is good and prevents exploitation. Giving everyone a hammock I believe is bad and prevents societal advancement.
Seems to me that a much fairer system would be to have a mix of cooperative and state ownership. The state could own all the essential industry that's required to provide the basic services such as food, healthcare, education, housing, and so on.
Meanwhile, any nice to have things could be produced by cooperatively owned companies that compete on the market. Cooperative ownership would ensure that the profits are fairly distributed amongst the workers avoiding the problem with wealth accumulation.
This model has been shown to work very successfully at scale already. A couple of great examples to look at are Mondragon and Huwawei. These are huge companies that employ thousands of people and have excellent track record of profitability and resilience.
https://www.mondragon-corporation.com/en/about-us/
https://www.huawei.com/en/facts/question-answer/who-owns-hua...
The moment I start a company, I own 100% of it. There’s no reason that I can’t hire someone for $X and Y shares per year (provided they agree, of course), exactly as Huawei does. It is very likely that some people would prefer $X+n and 0 shares rather than $X and Y shares. (This is especially true if those shares are not publicly sellable.) Someone else might prefer $X-n and 2*Y shares per year. If that’s agreeable to the shareholders (me, in this example) and the employee, we’re free to strike that deal as well.
Again, the point here is to have fair wealth distribution as opposed to having wealth accumulation. Given that the initial wealth is largely a factor of luck, the current model hardly seems fair or moral.
“Acknowledging the importance of hard work and personal responsibility is threatening to the lazy.”
“Whoa, look at how many lazy people there are.”
[1]: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-rol...
But we are bombarded with commercials every day, that want's us to wish for things we don't have. It is a foundation of our society.
Also rich people have more power than poor, even in democracies. And if there is too wide a gap between people in a society, they have fewer common goals.
Yeah, because the folks making the advertisements aren't wasting energy wishing for things they don't have, they're going out and putting themselves in a position where they can buy those things if they want.
And yes, instead you could help and network with people instead of being an asshole. Usually if set up right, both sides benefit. Though it's not easy to do so right at all times.
You seem to have missed the part "make your own life better, in any way you can."
Envy is a worthless emotion. Spend the energy on yourself.
> These episodes illustrate what seems to be one of the enduring themes of our age: socially dominant groups, recipients of myriad unearned advantages, willfully refusing to acknowledge them, despite persistent efforts from socially disadvantaged groups.
A more useful understanding of morality is that it’s a framework for cultivating individually and socially desirable behavior. If you’re a member of one of those “socially disadvantaged groups” you can’t do anything about the unearned advantages held by other people. All you can do is control your own actions.
From that perspective, it’s better for a member of a socially disadvantaged group to discount luck altogether-act is if nothing is holding them back—whether it’s true or not. I probably wouldn’t be here in America if my dad had sat around dwelling on the happenstance of his having been born in a third world village, or thinking about the unearned privileges reaped by British colonization of his homeland.
This is not true. You can organize others in your group, in other disadvantaged groups, and even allies in the socially dominant groups and try to change society to be more just. Atomization and learned helplessness are tools of these unfairly-advantaged groups. Believing this is doing their work for them.
This doesn't mean you have to be Rosa Luxembourg, but know that keeping your nose down is not the only option. There are others.
If you look at the disadvantaged subgroups in American society that ultimately overcame those disadvantages (Jews, Cubans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Mormons, etc.) they did't achieve that through organizing and solidarity and social change. They assumed that nobody was going to help them and acted accordingly.
> Atomization and learned helplessness are tools of these unfairly-advantaged groups.
A moral framework that emphasizes the role of personal actions in outcomes is a survival strategy. It's not a creation of "unfairly-advantaged groups." It's something you see over and over in societies confronted with harsh realities, from pioneers to Puritans to third-world villagers. Hoping that "allies in the socially dominant groups" are going to come to your rescue one day--instead of using your support to advance their own interests--is what's "learned helplessness."
Jewish people have long allied themselves with social justice politics, as have affluent, educated Asians since 2000, but mainly social justice for other people. They act in the model of the “allies in the advantaged groups,” not in the model of disadvantaged groups organizing to pursue their own interests. But when it comes to socializing their own kids, however, it’s typically bootstraps and personal responsibility.
If there is some nuance of difference between our views, I don't have the energy or interest to find out what it is. Have a good day.
We're exposed to a lot more small-bore organizing today, largely because of the media environment, probably also a fair bit because we've shifted virtually every adult in the country onto a college track. There's lots of ineffective organizing to dunk on. But talking down the entire concept of organizing? That seems wildly false.
Obviously I'm not denying that political participation never works. But Obamacare or child labor laws are society-wide improvements. I'm talking specifically about disadvantaged groups organizing as a way out of their disadvantaged predicament. On that front, organizing has had limited success. For example, you mention eliminating de jure segregation, which was obviously great. But black-white income gaps are pretty much the same today as in 1965.
This reminds me of Edward Slingerland's definition of Virtue from "Trying Not To Try": Stable dispositions to perform socially desirable actions in manner that is sincerely motivated by shared values.
https://www.amazon.com/Trying-Not-Try-Science-Spontaneity/dp...
Not to mention the physical world which plays no favourites.
I look at Bezos/Musk/etc and they are on top of wealth pyramid solely because someone has to. Next year it will be someone else.
All we can do is try to make clear rational decisions and then let the universe unfold as it will.
Luck is a narrative concept that is not useful in reasoning.
For example in the article:
> As many people pointed out, Jenner’s success would have been impossible if she hadn’t been born white, healthy, rich, and famous
She could not have been born as anything but those things. Those things are what she is and removing them would not simply make her "unlucky", it would make her in to another person. Luck as used here in the article is just a way to differentiate and classify people, it does not have causal power.
...I mean I suppose it all is right... It was luck that we exist goldilocks
By this logic, it could have been anyone. How do you account for the fact that people at the top of this list all started their own businesses (or inherited one)?
Bezos is a bit harder. I would have to look in detail on his earlier history.
Criminy. Both made choices.
I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; nor bread to the wise, nor wealth to the brilliant, nor favor to the skilled. But time and chance happen to them all.[1]
Instead of fretting how rich people have an unfair advantage, we should try to give more people that advantage.
And say it takes a rich family to create one Neurosurgeon. Shouldn't we be happy that society is able to produce some Neurosurgeons?
Another note: genetics and evolution are not random luck. People struggle to find partners with good genes.
Nor is it useful to someone whose circumstances lead them to die of some more pedestrian cause before they ever need someone as specialized as a neurosurgeon.
Your second argument is just nonsensical garbage.
But I disagree on what the author is suggesting : wealth redistribution.
I do think that taxes are necessary (until proven otherwise) but I think that wealth is a second order effect of power. Trying to fix the inequality problem by targeting its derivative is barely helpful.
We should really look at the power structure and network instead, obviously this is also more difficult to tackle as power is somewhat ill defined and not fungible.
I tend to think that the _less wrong_ solution would be to build power traps and power diffusers, in practice trying both to avoid concentration and to maintain a minimal floor.
Redistribution of wealth would accomplish that.
But it still comes back to, where is the first mover, best summarized by Schopenhauer.
"A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills."
Go watch some Robert Sapolsky lectures. We are just a monkey society, reacting to stimuli based on hormones and what we just ate. If you drill down far enough, sure some electrons twitched one way or the other, and yeah, if you steal something, or do something the group doesn’t like, then all the other monkeys will want to beat you up and call it justice, and dream up some logic to justify it and call it morality.
I highly recommend his “Justice” lectures from Harvard though.
I think it's super hard to balance "agency" versus "random factors beyond my control" on a daily basis. I agree that embracing the role of luck is one step forward, but I also wonder whether we'll ever get there.
No, not at all. Moral obligations come from the idea of sharing your success with the rest of society instead of being strictly selfish, because you live in that society and it has the added benefits of indirectly helping you in the long run.
Luck doesn’t change the sharing story and people don’t view luck that way either. When someone wins at a casino they don’t feel any obligation to share because it was lucky.
You share out of moral obligation to support the common good, if there’s zero luck involved it doesn’t give you some moral ground to maximize your selfishness.
The answer to this is really simple. You may take credit for how much better you have done relative to those who had a similar upbringing and opportunity. That's it.
(Different from a reputation. And both can and have been gamed.)
As an inherently lazy person who has enjoyed moderate success in spite of it, I reject that attitude.
If we leave out environmental luck (parents, neighborhood...), the very simple fact that you cannot choose which brain you want (einstein brain or some famous artist brain?) or simply a brain/body that is more capable of enduring stress /hard-work, should make people understand that luck play a far bigger role than everything else.
You can work with what you have and express the best version of yourself, but that doesn't mean you will be succesfull in the envoirnment you are surrounded with. Some people waste away their life just because they could not find a suitable environment (maybe it doesn't exist) where their best self can overcome the average. And finding the best enviornment where you can thrive and have success is, I guess, another lottery.
So don't feel bad if you're not a self-starter, don't feel like you need to keep trying. Accept it as bad luck, and accept your fate.
Was this written by someone lucky?
Some people want to conflate it. Don't let them.
Don't let them compare the trust-fund kid who built a business to the non-trust-fund kid who didn't build a business.
Compare them to the trust-fund kid who didn't even try to build anything and ended up writing sad opinion pieces against the unfairness of it all.
Are trust-fund kids with an IQ of 40 in the same group as the not-triers?
Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music: https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.2726
Dopamine is significant to the brain's "executive functions" (things having to do with planning, short term memory, ability to direct focus on boring task): https://www.additudemag.com/inside-the-add-mind/
1. stay in school, or drop out
2. pay attention in class, or not
3. do drugs, or not
4. commit crimes, or not
5. go to college, or not
6. do something useful, or watch TV
These all have a massive downstream effect on your life. And you chose.
It meant that I need to get out of my comfort zone often and that my workload increased a lot. But that shift in mindset completely changed my life; It created opportunities and lead to making a lot of new friends.
> 2. pay attention in class, or not
I would usually /choose/ to pay attention in class, but also I seldom paid attention in class. I envy those who have the ability to pay attention to something just because they decide to.
This is the learned helplessness that, IMO, fuels modern socialism here in the US. It’s the “there’s nothing I could have done” sentiment. It’s the “I wasn’t born into wealth” sentiment. Even if there are situations in life that confer one a disadvantage, why not make the best of them? Yes, it takes effort to have self control and make good decisions. That doesn’t mean people should be told that their circumstances in life provide them a “get out of jail free” card to not even attempt to exercise them. That type of thinking is defeatist.
I support a meritocracy. In accordance with that, I think we should aim to reduce the inequities that our social structure creates. Drawing attention to those pain points is useful and can be something we can improve upon. Telling entire swaths of people that their upbringing was unlucky and that’s the cause of their lot in life is not a recipe for empowering those people. So long as they are stuck waiting for someone else to fix their problems, IMO, they will never have them fixed.
sometimes you’re ahead sometimes you’re behind