Ask HN: Is "compatibilism" causing students to lose interest in philosophy?
I feel that this idea is giving philosophy in general and philosophers who support it a very bad reputation.
Professional philosophers don't, in fact, spend a lot of time on extremely broad subjects like "is free will real or what?" It's the stuff of dorm-room banter, which has a deservedly bad reputation as philosophy.
The students who wish to actually study philosophy get introduced to this stuff early on, because it's easy and accessible. Then it is quickly left behind for actual work.
Students from outside the philosophy department imagine that this is what the philosophers spend the rest of their lives doing -- as if physicists spent the rest of their lives sliding blocks down inclined planes, and mathematicians get really, really, really good at long division.
I do believe that philosophers could do a much better job of explaining their craft, but it's difficult to do. Philosophy is a mishmash of disciplines. Anything that gets sufficiently well defined leaves the philosophy department and becomes a department of its own -- as economics, linguistics, and cognitive science are doing now. What remains is vague by definition.
So students get caught up in questions like "free will" where a few bits of jargon can give the impression that the state of the art is accessible to anybody, and also don't look very productive. Which they aren't -- and most philosophers spend zero time on it.
I don't know how to help the reputation of philosophy, but I think the philosophers are content to have a bad reputation. They're going to keep plugging away, mostly performing for each other.
It does this by redefining genuine free will into something that isn't free will but still calling it free will.
Why would anyone want to study philosophy further after hearing this nonsense?
Why should one single philosophical idea cause someone to reject the entire approach to understanding? Philosophy is full of different, sometimes competing, ideas of which this is just one.
Rejecting an entire field of study because of one hypothesis seems like rejecting all of literature because of a single book you didn't like.
If you read about it, you will notice they are redefining terms such as free will and moral responsibility to mean something else entirely.
And in so doing, they are trying to gaslight the general public into thinking that a deterministic world is compatible with moral responsibility.
I personally don't agree with most of what compatibalism posits, but that doesn't mean I don't agree with philosophy as a field of study.
> they are trying to gaslight the general public
Who is "they"? And I'd venture to say that the vast majority of the general public have never even heard of compatibilism, so are hardly being "gaslit" by it.
Scientists who say they don't understand compatibilism should say what they really think about it (e.g., that it is nonsense or an attempt at gaslighting).
I have no idea what you mean by this.
> Scientists should stop pretending that it does.
Science and philosophy are two entirely different fields. Very few people are both. Whatever scientists think about philosophical topics carries no more weight than what anyone else thinks about philosophical topics.
Since moral responsibility does exist it is obviously "compatible" with determinism. Perhaps you meant free-will which I would agree is a chimera.
[Though I would argue it is still compatible]
To my understanding:
1. We have something that we've come to call moral responsibility. If I punch someone, I'm considered morally responsible for that action and may be punished for doing so. Seems to me a useful social construct to discourage behavior detrimental to a collaborative society
2. We have a world that is, to all evidence we've observed so far, consistent with both deterministic and non-deterministic interpretations of physics. True that Copenhagen interpretation is the most prevalent and is non-deterministic - but I'd argue that's at least in part because it makes the math simpler opposed to physicists necessarily believing that a split between classical observers and quantum systems, with random collapses when the two interact, is actually how the universe works
If tomorrow new experiments somehow validated Everett's interpretation, that the whole universe is just one big quantum system evolving according to the Schrödinger equation, would it mean we've been wrong this whole time to talk about our moral responsibility? Would we have to upend laws based on supposedly realizing that we don't actually have moral responsibility? Personally, I don't see why it should have any real bearing on the concept of moral responsibility - or really anything in day-to-day life (else our observations wouldn't have been consistent with both interpretations for so long).
I think all that's needed for punishment to make sense is for that punishment to have a deterrence effect, reducing frequency of the targeted behavior. I'm not seeing why whether or not punishment makes sense would hinge on whether our universe turns out to be deterministic or to be non-deterministic.
While a punishment in a deterministic universe can have a deterrence effect, it might not be the morally right thing to do.
And if you remove moral responsibility from criminals (to the extent that makes sense as a term in a free-will-free deterministic universe), then those punishing criminals are also free of moral responsibility. They did not make a choice, it was made for them and they are merely moving per the rules of the deterministic universe.
In terms of humans without free will, evolution could make them try to avoid punishment as a survival instinct.
I feel whether it's the morally right thing to do depends on your ethical framework, not really whether the universe is deterministic. For instance in terms of maximizing pleasure and minimizing suffering, you'd want to punish when you estimate the suffering relieved by enacting the punishment (deterred crime, long-term precedents encouraging benevolence, etc.) outweighs the suffering caused by the punishment itself.
I mostly agree with you but punishing people for wrong doing does make sense if it's aligned with your definition of rehabilitation - i.e. if you think it will have a deterrence effect.
But I guess, and maybe it's because I'm a compatibilist, I personally think it's morally wrong to punish people for for purely moral reasons.
That's not to say I disagree with the criticism to reuse free will. I don't feel things like coercion-less actions regardless of a casual environment is best represented by 'free'+'will' even if the original definition didn't pre-exist; even if it might present an argument for responsibility on a specific person to still apply.
Annoying? Perhaps. But personally I just don't believe most people see philosophy through such a monolithic lens that they would be like, "compatiblists did something annoying so Kant on another topic will have to go unread".