That is, they think all of their decisions were preordained, and then use this to claim that they can’t be held responsible for anything they do.
Punch them in the mouth, it’s not like you have a choice.
“What have I done? What have I done some more?? What have I continued to do??”
You punch them in the face, and then tell them they can’t be mad about it, because it’s not your fault, it was preordained.
Smack em, assert the same statements. If they argue, smack em again and repeat.
I’m a fairly hardcore/radical determinist, and tend to agree that individuals shouldn’t be held morally responsible for actions, any more than a hammer is morally responsible for driving a nail. However, that does not mean people should be free from consequence. There are plenty of reasons - even as a hardcore determinist - to hold people to account for their actions, either as a social corrective mechanism, public safety, deterrent, or personal sanity.
As for getting their actions to align with your morals, that’s a more complicated question that depends on the type of person they are.
How does a hardcore determinist believe in “shouldn’t?” Doesn’t that imply that people have the ability to change their behavior?
Doesn’t that imply that people have the ability to change their behavior?
My answer changes depending on your meaning but:
Of course. My brain is constantly updating and improving itself. I’m just not ultimately in control of how that process happens. Though that does not mean that I should stop living. I can still experience and enjoy my life, and ‘choose’ to improve it. It’s just that the I that made that choice is a consequence of my brain calculating optimal paths based on a myriad of factors: genetics, culture, circumstance, biological drives, personal history, drugs, etc.
Let’s say you see someone playing in traffic, and tell them they shouldn’t be doing that. They respond, “I can’t not do it, because my brain already made the decision to do it, so I have no choice but to do it.”
Is this person correct? Or do they have the ability to just follow your advice and stop playing? Do they have the ability to ignore your advice and keep playing? If they have the ability to do both, then to what degree can we say that your advice is determining their choice? How can we say that choice is determined if we can also say that they should make a different choice?
To clarify: are you saying that there is a “you” who is a separate entity from your brain (and the rest of your body?)
Do you see it as your fingers are typing a reply and you’re just watching them do it on their own? You wouldn’t say that you’re the one typing?
I am genuinely and in good faith interested what you think about quantum mechanics and that there seems to be an element of true randomness there.
I was pretty much a determinist until an actual physicist that I know and respect told me that he is totally convinced that there is stuff in quantum mechanics that just cannot be predetermined.
And if anything can be undeterminable then by influencing other things there would exist true randomness and then a fully deterministic world cannot exist in my eyes.
But I am very willing to learn more if you know a good counter-argument since I always thought determinism is quite an elegant view of the world.
I just cannot follow it if I am not convinced it is true.
Randomness doesn’t really save traditional free will. A robot that selects its actions by rolling dice is not any more “free to choose” than a robot that selects its actions according to a deterministic program. There isn’t any free-will juice that gets introduced by adding randomness.
Your “free will” is the process by which you select actions. For humans, that’s a bunch of physics and chemistry happening in your brain; it receives influences from your senses, your body, and its own self-awareness (i.e. its model of you, your actions, tendencies, etc.). Whether that process depends closely on QM, or is boringly classical, doesn’t control how “self-determined” it is.
I am not sure you replied to the right comment since I never mentioned free will at all but was more interested in how a person believing in determinism handles the current state of science that at least suggests the existence of true randomness.
In my eyes true randomness contradicts a deterministic world, but I am interested to learn more from anyone who is more educated on this topic.
If I understand you correctly I agree with you though that what might be called free will is what happens in an individuals brain when they make a decision.
The discussion whether this decision making process in the brain can be truly free is a very interesting one, but not the one I wanted to have.
My personal layman’s opinion is that my brain has enough uniqueness to it that the decisions I make are individually mine and there are other unique people that make their own individual choices.
If those choices and decisions are truly free matters less to me as long as they are truly individual.
One interpretation would be Many Worlds; that is, every quantum possibility is real in its own multiversal branch. So, to assign moral agency you would need to show that I chose the world I’m in now, over some other version of my life in which different choices were made. Although, I’m not certain you even need to go that far: I have no idea to what degree quantum randomness can actually affect our choices. But, in any case, that too would be out of our control.
There are layers to the universe. While you can’t predict everything you don’t usually need to. The object is dropped and therefore it falls. If you zoomed in deep enough you would see the chaos that is going on in the subatomic but the object still falls all the same.
Not being able to predict everything does not mean we can predict nothing.
“Ah, then my decision to shun you and tell everyone I know to do the same … that is also preordained, and you mustn’t hold me responsible for doing so.”
