Is it nature vs nurture? If, so, how does your anecdote untangle that?
Here is a good starting point for getting educated on the matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C...
My take is that free will is, 90% of the time, a necessary lie. Because if we didn’t believe it, everything would get far far worse.
Why? Would people choose to do bad things because they don't have a choice?
And folks on the fence will hop over it onto that side.
Because consequences do matter for preventing most behavior (weighed by the rational and non-rational part of the mind), but punishing someone for something they can’t control seems cruel - and that will stop many people from applying them. Resulting in more damage and more bad behavior.
So regardless of if it’s true or not, treating it as true is fundamental for a functioning society.
Regarding the second - see my comment.
At least in the western world, most crimes require fault and mens rea. Those require someone being able to make a informed choice, which means having free will. If there is (actually) no choice, or the choice was based on faulty information processing (aka actual insanity), then therefore there is no fault and no mens rea.
The underlying belief (philosophically) is one cannot be good or evil if one cannot comprehend a choice or it's ramifications, or in fact actually effectively choose between options due to a lack of knowledge and independent agency.
Interestingly, this is why the 'original sin' in Christian mythology was eating the apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. [https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-0-3....]
So philosophically, before that point, there was no 'good' or 'evil' because humans didn't know of such things, therefore were just acting. Regardless of what they did, they were innocent, because they were incapable of being anything else. After that, everything they did had such knowledge as a factor, and were no longer innocent - because they could choose.
So, for example, if I murder someone in cold blood (aka rational/thinking/choosing), that is 1st degree murder. One of the most serious crimes in any society.
However, if I murder my spouse because I found they betrayed me right in front of me and lose my mind (literally can't think straight, and react instinctively without being able to think or plan anything), most locations will consider me not guilty by reason of insanity, and let me go. [https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/temporary_insanity]
This is already a great example of the problem, as MANY folks try to claim insanity already after getting caught when they are not actually insane.
Another example is if I accidentally kill someone without knowing such a thing was a possibility. For example, I'm out hunting in the woods. I see a deer, and (as far as I know) legally shoot it. However, it turns out that was actually a human dressed in a very convincing deer costume, and I had no way of knowing this was the case. Most of the time, I would be charged with no crime, or worst case likely negligent homicide.
As per the Supreme Court of Iowa, "In order to be an excuse and defense for a criminal act, the person accused, and who claims [temporary] insanity as a defense, must prove that the crime charged was caused by mental disease or unsoundness which dethroned, overcame, or swayed her reason and judgment with respect to that act, which destroyed her power rationally to comprehend the nature and consequences of that act.”
If we assert that people actually act based on their nature/upbringing and have little to no rational control over their actions in fact (aka no free will), then does it not follow that no one actually has a choice, and therefore it makes no sense to actually punish anyone for anything they do? Since philosophically, without the ability to rationally actually choose their actions, they cannot be good or bad - they just are.
And if we punish people based on who they 'just are', that opens another can of very nasty worms, and likely a lot of serious evil will result.
My understanding is the focus on punitive punishment has been higher than average since roughly the 1970s beginning with the war on drugs and is arguably not working very well measured in incarceration rates (US is #6th worldwide) so a shift seems away from culpability seems like it could potentially be a positive change. That being said like you say it's potentially it's own can of worms overcorrecting the other way.
If a unique situation not likely to reoccur is an defense for criminal behavior, Then this rule provides the unique situation.
Imagine a rule that rehabilitation is the punishment for a first murder. For a rational person, this is a free pass to commit exactly one murder, because as soon as they do, they have every reason to avoid the 2nd and require no rehabilitation for compliance.
Retribution is largely in the eyes of victim, so the need is subjective and depends on their emotional desire for revenge. I'm not convinced that victims will be emotionally satisfied with the explanation of causal chain that goes back to the big bang.
To be honest, I dont really understand how the concept of restitution differs from deterrence and retribution. the cost is a deterrent, and paying it to the victim partially mitigates the desire for revenge.
I posted this elsewhere in this thread, but I think free will is entirely irrelevant to assessments of responsibility, fault, and culpability. Why should it matter if someone is a robot with bad programing, or a puppet animated with a bad spirit. In both case, they a black box which took an action in a given situation.
It seems like the game theory, emotion, and economics around punishment is the same in either case.
Maybe I simply understand the argument/theory why free will is a justification for harsher/additional punishment in the first place.
If someone is a ‘bad puppet’/fundamentally programmed badly, then what choice do we have except to destroy them or ‘rewrite’ their programming?
That is the difference, and a big one - because in the first case, consent is possible and meaningful.
The second one, it is not.
Do you think that rationality is related or equivalent to free will???
I agree that someone's rationality may impact the efficacy of deterrence and Rehabilitation.
Both irrational and the rational would need reprogramming, just by different means. You would try to convince a rational person that it's in their interest to obey if you can. For an irrational person you'd have to use other means. This is basically how it works today.
Where does consent come into all of this? I understand that there maybe a difference in capacity to understand and consent, but not always. Irrational, for example impulsive people, can still consent. Normally consent isn't required for criminal justice to be carried out.
They’re being driven by things they have no choice in, and no way to meaningfully actually control.
When that is happening, they don’t actually have free will.
And this is where my original statement around ‘90% of the time free will is a necessary lie we tell ourselves’.
It’s why emotional manipulation (including advertising and propaganda) is so remarkably effective, and why it is so remarkably prevalent. It works - very well - 90% of the time.
And the reason this matters (philosophically), is because someone isn’t actually consenting (in the medical ethical sense [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informed_consent]) if they never had an option to actually make a choice - aka if they have no free will.
In the criminal justice system, that also comes into play with plea bargains, mens rea, sentencing, etc.
It also comes into play with sexual relations. And business. And things like gambling (which we generally excuse by saying ‘they are adults and can make their own decisions’ which presumes actual free will). Depending on who you ask, it comes into play with recreational drugs -or should never apply to recreational drugs.
If people don’t have free will, then all those excuses, rationalizations, justifications, freedom, etc. make no sense.
What actually makes sense in a no-actual-free-will scenario is a state-machine-like series of conditioning/programming responses to produce an expected society and/or individual. At least from a utilitarian perspective.
Which from a philosophical perspective is severely dystopian, if explicitly stated that way, as there is no freedom or actual choice - only fate.
But may legitimately produce more aggregate human happiness. Or more aggregate absolute human misery.
Depending on the goal of the state machine and the actual rules and application in practice.
Retribution and restitution as punishments don't seem justifiable without free will or the ability to have mens rea, but punishments for the sake of deterrence, incapacitation and rehabilitation still seem reasonable if free will is assumed to not exist. For example incapacitating someone who is clinically insane and dangerous is already considered reasonable, and not on the grounds that they have using free will chosen to be insane.
Changing that would require a complete rethink of core western philosophy IMO.
i fall on strongly on the nurture side of the nature vs nurture question, but the issue is that with the amount of habits and behavior patterns that we acquire, we simply don't have the capacity to change all of them without effort. we can change a few at a time, and each can take considerable effort to change. not to mention many that we are not even aware of.
in short, there is no need to fall back to nature as a reason for why certain behaviors don't change. moreover, even if a certain behavior is nature, i believe willpower can allow us to change that too.
what bothers me is that nature or lack of free will are abused to excuse certain behaviors as unchangeable. everything can be changed, because humans are very adaptable. we just need to carefully consider which things we actually want to change.
You cant 100% predict what a person will do without duplicating the entire person and the world they are interacting with.
Even if everything is causally driven by historic circumstance, it is the human that synthesizes that history and computes an action
In your statement, there is no choice - just a lack of predictability due to unknown starting states.
Individual choice happens if someone believes in an extra-physical soul or not. It happens if you believe in determinism or not.
The question of if someone could have made a different choice is meaningless without an argument for why someone would make have a different choice.
People who do believe in free will make an argument that regardless of the input state, the individual always has a choice what course they take, and is responsible for those decisions.
So for example, if someone chooses to be a concentration camp guard or a capo vs be a prisoner and be murdered - that is their choice, and they are responsible for it.
If free will exists.
It's a rather fundamental philosophical question, actually.
Because those concentration camp guards and capos did pretty evil things, which were also (in their circumstances) often the least 'bad' thing for them. Which enabled evil at a truly massive scale against others because of those other peoples upbringings/genetics.
And those prisoners (most of which had no choice in the matter) mostly ended up dead, and stopped having much of a say in the matter.
This is why it's an important philosophical debate. Because if people play out a script based on their circumstances/upbringing/genetics and have no actual choice in the matter (philosophically), then isn't punishing those guards and capos essentially doing the same thing to them that they did to those prisoners? Hurting them due to factors outside of their (actual) control, even up to murder?
And if we think that upbringing/genetics was a major factor in creating that sort of destructive evil, doesn't that open up the possibility of tracking down and killing/punishing other people based on their upbringing/genetics? Regardless of any individual choices they had made? In this example, other potential concentration camp guards and capos - though it would play out as relatives and those with similar genetic traits and upbringings?
Which then creates the circumstances exactly that was at the root cause of the Holocaust to begin with? Namely, assigning 'goodness' and 'badness' based on some general attribute (ethnicity aka genetics/upbringing, sexual orientation, etc.) that cannot be changed or chosen, and NOT a persons choices (aka did they commit a crime knowing good vs bad)?
My point is that even with free will, you have to have some difference in input to get different output. Normally people invoke metaphysics, but even if you have a soul making the choice, it still has inputs (good soul/bad soul). It is a different object making the choice, but changes nothing about the choice itself.
I think the inside/outside of control argument is arbitrary with respect to responsibility. If you simply look at inputs and output actions, it doesnt matter what goes on the black box. It doesnt matter if it is biology, chemistry, or a soul, you still have a black box that takes inputs and executes an action.
A black box selects an action, no mater the mechanism. The black box is the causal link, independent of "control" or "not".
I'm not a philosophy expert, but this position reminds me consequentialism and Kantian ideas. I think it renders the different positions on free will/choice as distinctions without a difference. Doing something bad because you were programed to it is no better than doing something bad because you chose to.
It doesn't matter if the capos made a choice, were predetermined, or could have done different if they were raised by a loving mother instead.
But that position means all resulting choices are fundamentally due to the inputs, which means there actually is no possibility for a truly independent or ‘free’ choice, no? The outcome was inevitable when the input was fixed, de facto.
That is the crux of the issue.
Notably this debate has been going on as long as we have records, so not like we’re going to ‘solve’ it now.
I dont see how this changes the question of free will from a personal or moral responsibility perspective.
Someone can ascribe no responsibility because actions are just the product of your physical inputs. Similarly, you can ascribe no responsibility because that is how someone's soul is made.
How does someone with free will choose one option and not another? Is it not their character or soul but determines a choice? How could they choose something different without being someone different.
I'm willing to believe that a Choice can't be predetermined or calculated before it happens. What I don't understand is why the choice would ever be different in an identical universe with an identical person making the decision.
This seems to be a paradox of free will. A person has the freedom to choose between options, but choice and will imply this action is based on something, and not purely random. If Free Will choice is based on something, why would the choice be different for the same chooser.
there was no decision that was entirely random yet strongly influencing the future.
however, here is an idea for a possible proof that free will exists: the freedom to believe in god or not. there is nothing in the world or in ones life that can determine that belief. sure, certain experiences can influence that belief, but nothing can determine it. we always have the freedom to either believe or not believe in god. and we can change our mind any time. on the other hand, the choice whether to believe in god or not is able to influence every other choice we make.