Hacker News Reader

Comment by fsckboy | Hacker News Reader

They are both largely incoherent in that debate because they both think "the right next move" is to test "free will" against their notions of morality. Morality has nothing to do with free will. If you consider morality important, then you might care about free will within your moral framework; but you can debate free will without any notion of morality, and neither of them can see that. (is - ought, which they both are aware of)

View on HN

On the contrary, morality has everything to do with free will. It's one of the central motivations of the concept and always has been. From the greeks right up through the enlightenment, the question was always "in what sense are we capable of making responsible choices," with that term 'responsible' just dripping with moral implications. Without the moral implications, free will would not have the place it does in our cultural ethos.

you might be making a case that you can't talk about morality without talking about free will.

but you have not made a case that talking about free will requires talking about morality

You can talk about free will without talking about morality in the same way that you can talk about ICBMs without talking about nuclear war. Sure you can do it, but complaining when other people discuss both things together is silly.

Morality motivates our interest in the question of free will, but I understand morality to be a concept only whereas free will is supposed to be a feature of reality. That’s why it seems crazy to me and probably the above poster that morality should be a test of free will.

Please excuse my probably oversimplified understanding of the debate as someone who hasn’t read most of the arguments yet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com