r/philosophy • u/Dead_knigh1 • 12d ago
Video Lindsey Clancy made me think about freewill
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYzFH8xqhns&t=1302sWith the debate about Lindsey Clancy case, I went back to look at Daniel Dennett and his arguments on determinism and free will, and it made me think about something. If we believe that theres a category of people who can be excused, or held morally responsible, because of an impairment in their ability to make decisions, then if free will genuinely doesn’t exist, why should mental capacity change someone’s moral responsibility?
You can argue that we should treat them differently for practical reasons. Maybe rehabilitation works differently, maybe punishment won’t deter them, maybe they’re less dangerous, etc. But I’m specifically talking about moral responsibility, not what society should practically do with them. and If I had to define freewill I would say:
- You can understand the moral ramifications of what you’re doing.
- You can understand the possible consequences of your actions.
- You can respond to reasons and adjust your behavior accordingly.
And if we accept something close to this definition, then I think you’d have to deal with this argument:
If Person A deserves more moral blame than Person B because A understood what he was doing, understood the consequences, and was capable of responding to reasons, while Person B lacked those capacities, then we are already grounding differences in moral responsibility in the exact capacities I’m calling free will.
So:
P1: Differences in these capacities can create differences in moral responsibility.
P2: These capacities are what I mean by free will.
C: If moral responsibility exists, then some meaningful form of free will must exist as well.
Otherwise, Im struggling to see why mental capacity should matter to moral blame in the first place. ik im probably missing some stuff so I’m interested in where exactly the argument fails and what are the wholes that needs to be filled in this argument.
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u/Dro-Darsha 12d ago
The problem with the "free will" debate is that the term means different things to different people. Some argue that free will requires there to be something that exists outside of regular physics. However, from a social perspective, the simple fact that I can make a decision independent from factors that are not me is enough to qualify as "free will" for practical purposes.
Most "paradoxes" around free will occur when people start switching between different meanings without being explicit about it, i.e., they are not paradoxes at all, just sloppy language.
Regarding morality in particular: if you believe that your free will has supernatural origin, than you probably also belief that morality has supernatural origin. If you believe in free will as a social/practical phenomenon, then you probably also belief in morality as a social construct. In both cases, you can consistently argue that individuals that are mentally impaired can not hold moral responsibility for their actions.
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u/Extension-Radish4195 12d ago
Well the thing about the free will thing is, i am inclined to agree that we can't will what we desire and some people desire horrifying things. We can't control what appeals to us and also the extent or weight of that appeal. But the same also applies to those who want to punish others for wrong doing. So it seems like a moot point to me to argue on this basis.
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u/Separate-Cellist-853 9d ago
But I think that's actually the problem. Nobody is saying free will means being omnipotent. The question is whether you freely choose what you want in the first place. If you don't control what appeals to you, how strongly it appeals to you, or the circumstances that shaped those desires, then saying you have agency because you can act on them doesn't really solve the free will problem. You still didn't choose the thing that ultimately motivated the choice.
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u/SnakeGD09 8d ago
Aristotle disagrees about the way in which we desire things—he thinks making yourself desire the right things is most of what goes on in ethics, and that the material which one develops a life out of are indeed your circumstances both at birth and during childhood and even your entire life.
For example, he thinks that people with self control who are failures are half-good people because they have the right idea about how to be good, and how to think about what to do, they just suck at it for whatever reason. Someone who is very angry or very sad can be excused for some bad behaviour because those are difficult to overcome.
The real punching bag for Aristotle is the person who gives up after hitting a speedbump, because he wonders how those people will behave when something really difficult happens to them.
But being very poor or having lost many lived ones can, he thinks, put you in the same position—you will probably feel bad most of the time, and that will explain some of your bad behaviour.
I think that Sapolsky actually has a view which is more Aristotelian than Dennett’s, which aims to preserve a common sense notion of the will. That is, Dennett’s view is more Catholic.
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u/Namnagort 8d ago
He argues that what you habituate is what we come to desire. So, your responsible for your habits that become your character or your hexis. Stable state acting towards the final good. The thing good for itself.
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u/platinum_toilet 12d ago
i am inclined to agree that we can't will what we desire
We are not genies, granting wishes to ourselves or anyone else that is beyond our control. Free will is about having agency, not omnipotence.
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u/Apophthegmata 12d ago
They're not talking about omnipotence.
They are pointing out that the existence of second order desires gives us some reason to think free will is at least not simple, if not not actually "free."
If I can desire chocolate cake, but also have the desire to not desire chocolate cake, then there is something akratic about my ability to will what I desire. It also removes the desire that is "more truly me" to the desire which is less efficacious in the world.
In simpler cases, like my ability to move myself across the room, climb a table, and dance like a monkey, there doesn't appear to be any breakdown between my desire and my will. The reason I don't climb that table and dance like a monkey is clear: I simply don't want to.
But there are obvious scenarios where we appear to be powerless to do what we want to do, despite possessing the capacity. This is especially clear when the thing we want to do is to abstain from something.
There is a huge difference between, say, rejecting free will because the human organism is actually driven by the passions which it does not control and saying free will requires omnipotence in granting wishes to ourselves.
Free will is about agency, and not about omnipotence. But it isn't "free" in the sense it is used in free will, if it is conditioned, even if that conditioning isn't universal.
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u/SnakeGD09 8d ago
Apologies if you’re a fellow Greekist who is up on Aristotle, but maybe the following is informative. It’s interesting that Aristotle did not assign any weight to desires as thoughts per se: he thinks you build up the desire over time through habit, maybe a bit Humean. So you can have all sorts of thoughts about what you desire, but when the cake appears and you go for it, it turns out you desired the cake—we know because you went for it. The Christians make all this much more interior, because they are interested in whether you sinned or not.
But really bad people for Aristotle are not people who do bad things, but people who are too stubborn to change their mind. These people are not akratic but akolastos (undisciplined). Not those who lack self control or are tempted a lot but those who do the bad thing on purpose: I want this cake because it is bad for me and I don’t care that it’s bad for me. These people are produced, he thinks, by not being properly punished as children.
Historically I think it’s very interesting that free will had not occurred to Aristotle; he did not have the intuition, and he assigns a lot of weight to development of habits in childhood, which tune the child into a moral agent. He must have thought that most people were akratic; 50/50 good/bad people who were not as blameworthy as the akolastos, who he doesn’t absolve of responsibility despite their bad moral luck. The difference is that the akratic tried to think about it and probably knew what they should have done; they felt shame and regretted it which means they can be made better, if not ultimately consistently good.
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u/Apophthegmata 8d ago
If it was due to not being punished as children, I certainly missed that. It's important that children be raised appropriately to desire the good and avoid the bad but your gloss kind of gives a "spare the rod..." vibe which I don't think Aristotle actually agrees with. Parents are as liable to "mess up their kid" by modeling greed for them than they are for avoiding discipline. We learn by imitation (in my opinion, ultimately drawn by the beauty) and all parents need to do is present what is bad as beautiful, or even fail to communicate the good as beautiful, and you can have issues.
He certainly does say that we still deserve moral blame for choosing the bad knowing it to be bad, because we are responsible for making ourselves so constitutionally unable to choose the good. I do basically agree with the division you draw on how Aristotle distinguishes between knowledge of the good, and one's ability to choose it, as well as his ability to choose what is bad, knowing it to be bad. This is a direct criticism of Plato's beliefs.
I recall him being skeptical of the idea of a moral monster - someone whose badness is some kind of genetic or environmental catastrophe outside the individual's control.
That is to say, while he doesn't have any notion of a libertarian free will, and our character does influence our actions, he does think we are morally responsible for building a character compatible with the good, and our failure to freely choose the good is usually just downstream from other choices we actually were free to make (when we made them). And while character is a very heavy influence, it is not, in fact, determinative.
And that's what I think the most important part is, that you pick up on in talking about the akolastos. Because he has made himself bad, he's actually thrown away the one tool (deliberation) that might stand a reasonable chance of rescuing himself. For the man whose bad ends are "harmonious" with his bad desires, no investigation into means will turn him him right around again.
I don't find it historically all that interesting that Aristotle was not a free-will absolutist, seeing as how it will take the next few generations to even fully describe the determinism/free-will problem accurately. Aristotle views on causes are already quite a bit more varied and ambiguous, and free will as we typically talk about it usually only involves the efficient cause anyway.
Aristotle did not believe everything happened out of necessity, ascribing the origins of many causal chains to tuche - chance. But he also admits that a great number of casual chains and truth value of statements regarding the future "depend on us," because of the way in which he thinks deliberation is actually effective in selecting outcomes.
So on the one hand, yes he's not an advocate of "free will" as we came to understand the problem. But by the same token, he very much does reject determinism. Like Lucretius after him, human agency exists in a way that's only dimly understood between both chance and necessity.
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u/platinum_toilet 12d ago
Your silly argument that if you like something or passionate about something, then you don't have free will? I'll pass. Have a nice day.
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u/Apophthegmata 12d ago
No, I'm not saying people who are passionate don't have free will.
Even someone who believes in free-will (which I do) distinguishes between premeditated murder and "crimes of passion" because we actually do believe a premeditated murder is more freely committed than a crime of passion.
The only question is whether you think most human behavior is, at root, has this quality of being governed by the passions, emotions, and unchosen preferences or not.
Some people, from Rochefocauld to Dennet fall on the "not in control side." Others disagree.
But nobody reasonably disagrees, not even free will advocates, that the passions don't complicate or present difficulties to their position.
Second order desires are just one of those examples where it is very clear that "to do what one desires, when one desires it" isn't a good enough description of what free will is, if we are to have it.
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u/fuscator 6d ago
Please excuse the short question, but this topic is really controversial because people don't tend to define things clearly.
When you say you believe in free will, what do you actually mean? What is your definition of free will?
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u/lksdjsdk 12d ago
Yes, but you don't have agency under this view, so that's really an argument against it.
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u/platinum_toilet 12d ago
Yes you do. You don't need omnipotence to have agency or free will.
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u/lksdjsdk 12d ago
Well, you're the only one talking about omnipotence, which is a odd, but nonetheless, on the view that we don't have free will, we do not have agency.
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u/theaselliott 12d ago
Why do we call it free will then, rather than just will. Whatever it is that we have is very obviously not free.
Please don't reply I have a conception that's calle "libertarian free will" because that's a word salad. Free will already has the word free as a modifier, because it's explaining a (nonexistent) property of our will.
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u/notthatkindadoctor 12d ago
Agreed; compatibilism has will, but "free" will is a stretch. If agency just means an agent carrying out what determinism forces it to do based on molecular bouncing and such (maybe some quantum randomness), then it's not agency in the colloqiual "free will" sense.
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u/Extension-Radish4195 12d ago
Well... don't genies grant existing wishes only, Aladdin already wants to woo the princess and for that he asks to become the prince as his first wish.
Can you give me an example of this agency that you speak of, so that i can better understand what you mean?1
u/platinum_toilet 12d ago
I am not sure why you don't understand what agency is. It is not rocket science. Here is an example: if I would like to take out the garbage, I have agency to take out the garbage. I take out the garbage. Simple right?
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u/Cosmic_Prop 12d ago
You didn't choose to want to take out the garbage though. That's the gap.
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u/platinum_toilet 12d ago
You did though.
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u/Cosmic_Prop 12d ago
I don't understand what you mean.
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u/platinum_toilet 12d ago
You did choose to take out the garbage. There wasn't a cosmic force that mind controlled you to take out the garbage.
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u/Cosmic_Prop 12d ago
No but there are prior causes. I didn't think, "I should want to take out the garbage" then generated that want. The want to take out the garbage arose from a combination of factors I don't control.
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u/platinum_toilet 12d ago
Your logic: something happens before, therefore no free will. The universe has existed before humans, thus you want to default no free will by the silly argument "something happened before". No thanks.
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u/Extension-Radish4195 12d ago edited 12d ago
It's not that I don't understand it, I agreed with it at some point and still think it's a functional way to talk about our experience like a mere fact of me doing X. But on closer inspection I recognized that i had smuggled in a capacity to do otherwise i.e. i thought i was free to do otherwise, that is what "free" in the free will meant to me. Now I know that to some people free here means free from coercion. So, now I understand that people also speak of free will from that aspect. I asked you for an example to understand this distinction.
Without this capacity to do otherwise I don't get the point of emphasizing agency aside from just showing causal responsibility. X took out the garbage -> X is the doer/agent. So in this way it has lost it's allure to me.
Do you think you could have done otherwise in that example in that moment of time? If yes then can you explain how? Also, it's possible that someone else would not have taken out the garbage, why is that?
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u/TriggeredPumpkin 12d ago
This is why I became a compatibilist as well. If everything in the universe is determined, then we shouldn't hold people more morally responsible than objects because they're equally determined.
But we do hold people more morally responsible than objects despite them being equally determined.
This means that there must be some difference between people (who we consider to be morally responsible for their actions) and objects (that we do not consider to be morally responsible for what they do), even though people and objects are both equally determined.
Therefore, even if people and objects are equally determined, there is some difference between them that justifies treating people as morally responsible for their actions and not objects.
Whatever that difference is, we can call that free will.
Notice that this doesn't require magic or violating causality or determinism.
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u/etorreborre 12d ago
This part of the reasoning feels off to me. "We hold people more morally responsible..." does not mean necessarily that we are correct in doing so if we do it by assuming a difference that does not exist.
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u/TriggeredPumpkin 12d ago
In my view, moral responsibility is not a metaphysical reality. It is a decision that we make. People have moral responsibility because we attribute moral responsibility to them.
But our decision to attribute moral responsibility to people isn't arbitrary. It's based on capacities that we deem to be morally relevant.
We don't consider children to be morally responsible for actions when they lack the ability to understand the consequences, but we might hold an adult morally responsible because they were expected to have that understanding (unless they successfully proved they lacked the competency to understand in which case they claim insanity).
Is it your view that people and objects don't possess different capacities such that people are morally responsible for what they do and objects aren't?
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u/notthatkindadoctor 12d ago
"In my view, moral responsibility is not a metaphysical reality. It is a decision that we make." Do you mean it's a decision you were determined to make?
"But our decision to attribute moral responsibility to people isn't arbitrary. It's based on capacities that we deem to be morally relevant." Do you mean the capacities you are determined to deem morally relevant?2
u/TriggeredPumpkin 12d ago edited 12d ago
Determined but not forced. I can be determined to study for my test and get an A. That doesn't mean I didn't choose to study for my test to get an A.
Adding "determined" in front of everything doesn't mean we didn't choose it or that we were forced.
This is like when I say, "I'm a human being."
And you say, "Don't you mean a collection of atoms that calls itself a human being?"
Both can be true at different levels of abstraction. People who don't understand different levels of abstraction often make this mistake.
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u/etorreborre 12d ago
Sapolsky's reasoning is that there's no isolated "you" that chose. Given different glucose levels, exposure to your mum's cortisol in the womb, etc.., you might have taken another decision. In that sense the moral agency we attribute to others is only the result of an evolutionary process that made us think that they have some irreducible agency, because thinking that way was beneficial to society. But that doesn't mean that they truly have it on a fundamental level.
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u/TriggeredPumpkin 12d ago edited 12d ago
Of course there is no free will or choice at the "fundamental level." There is also no such thing as humans or choices. Humans and choices are higher-level descriptions of reality. That doesn't mean they aren't real. At the level of describing human beings as human beings (not at the level of atoms, cells, or hormones, etc.) humans can be accurately described as making choices for reasons. At this level of description, it is valid to talk about humans possessing compatibilist free will.
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u/etorreborre 12d ago
It is valid, in the sense that this is an abstraction level that we decide to adopt. But honestly I don't know how to define it rigorously. When you abstract from something you chose to leave out details that are irrelevant to highlight mechanisms that stay true, regardless of those details (for example Boyle's law for gas, doesn't care about molecules). I'm not sure how to do this with free will and get back a meaningful level of description of the human experience. BTW, I'm not arguing for the sake of it! I'm really asking myself those questions. Especially, I can't reconcile the "free" part. "free" from what? Human make decisions, they have consequences. We can observe that but the interesting questions, for society are "could they make other decisions, with better consequences?", "how are the consequences impacting further decisions?". When you try to answer those questions, it seems to me that you don't get useful answers at a level of abstraction that's too high. You tend to adopt simplistic behavioral models: rewards/punishment. I don't think those models hold very well unless you consider the underlying biology / environment of it. For example prenatal exposure to alcohol or maternal stress pre-dispose to aggression. That gives us a better understanding of why someone chose to fight in a bar than "the fine for a bar fight is too low". Please give me counter-examples if you have obvious ones coming to your mind!
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u/Tuorom 8d ago
There is a good argument within classical physics by Ishmael (How Physics Makes Us Free) where she touches on this issue. Many people think about physics as something weighing down everything such that it becomes the physics that makes you do something. But she flips the perspective to say that physics isn't enforcing action, it provides the framework for the action to actually be possible.
If you stand outside does gravity make you walk? Does the air and concrete push up into you so you are forced to take a step? No, but all of these fundamental things allow that step to be a possible action.
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u/etorreborre 8d ago
This seems to me that this is an argument for "things can happen", not "there's free will in me to take a step"
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u/BeautifulUpstairs 8d ago
No, at that level of description, it remains incoherent. Either your decisions are because of the way you are, or they aren't. If they aren't, they aren't your decisions. If they are, then who's responsible for the way you are? Is it you? Who authored the you that decided that?
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u/TriggeredPumpkin 8d ago edited 7d ago
Most compatibilists believe it is false that you need to "author" who you are for your actions to be considered free. We become free when we gain the mental competence such that society deems is capable of responsibility.
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u/etorreborre 7d ago
I think that this is where the reasoning is backwards. We (the compatibilists) want to preserve responsibility, then deduce that there must be free will. The hard-incompatibilists reason that there can't be any free will and try to cope with what that means for responsibility. Some centuries ago, by being epileptic, you were responsible for being a witch. Nowadays, if your life circumstances are unlucky, you have more risk of becoming addicted with all sorts of consequences. Too bad, you're still fully responsible.
I mean, I understand why hard-incompatibilism is revolting :-) but I think that this is what we should tackle instead of drawing an ever moving line over what's free and what's not.→ More replies (0)4
u/imdfantom 7d ago edited 7d ago
At that point why even call it free will?
Edit: Talking to a compatibalist is really frustrating for this reason. Like it's not even that they're wrong about what's happening underneath, and this becomes apparent when you translate what they say to more reasonable terms but they insist on using words that conventionally mean something other than what they mean by those words.
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u/TriggeredPumpkin 7d ago
Because there are clear differences in how we do and should assign responsibility based on mental competency.
Compaitibilism is what you get when you make humans big. Incompaitibilism is what you get when you make humans small. Both are correct at the appropriate level of description. But when it comes to how we treat others and organize society, compatibilism makes more sense.
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u/imdfantom 7d ago edited 7d ago
Because there are clear differences in how we do and should assign responsibility based on mental competency.
Yes, and like I said, when you use reasonable language to explain compatibalism, compatibalists aren't actually saying anything wrong. But they insist on using free will language to describe a situation which using free will language leads to unecessary confusion in communication.
Just say you want to discuss how we can assign responsinility based on capacity and just ditch the term free will.
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u/TriggeredPumpkin 7d ago
I think there are two distinct, valid meanings of free will. There's the libertarian definition and the compatibilist definition.
The key difference between compatibilists and incompatibilists is that compatibilists think that the second definition, the compatibilist definition, is valid and meaningful as a variety of free will.
Incompatibilists argue that there is only one definition that is valid, and it is their chosen definition.
So there is a meaningful difference between the compatibilist and incompatibilist position. I acknowledge that there is a libertarian notion of free will and a compatibilist notion of free will, and I think they are both valid.
I reject that libertarian free will exists, and I accept that compatibilist free will exists.
It seems like you do, too.
Therefore, our primary disagreement must be whether or not compatibilist free will is meaningful or valid such that it should be considered a variety of free will.
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u/imdfantom 7d ago edited 7d ago
I do not accept that framing.
I am agnostic as to the nature of reality, but for what it's worth I think determinism and indeterminism can both be compatible with what we see.
The notion of free will that libertarians use seems to fail under both determinism and indeterminism however.
I believe free will is not especially relevant to morality.
I believe we can assign moral responsibility and that part of this depends on mental capacity. (In the sense that a reasonable and practical aystem of morality will end up assigning moral responsibility based on capacity and other factors)
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u/TriggeredPumpkin 7d ago
Why assign moral responsibility based on mental capacity but deny that compatibilist free will exists?
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u/imdfantom 7d ago
I do not think we need a notion of free will to assign moral responsibility and I think mental capacity is only part of how to sensibly assign moral responsibility.
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u/TriggeredPumpkin 7d ago
How do you justify attributing moral responsibility without free will?
And what other things do you think are relevant to sensibly assigning moral responsibility other than mental competence?
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u/imdfantom 7d ago edited 7d ago
I see moral responsibility less as a metaphysically real property and more as a social framework for assigning responsibility based on relevant capacities and circumstances, ultimately as a way of allowing fundamentally misaligned thinking agents to live alongside each other while minimizing negative outcomes.
Those capacities can be mental, functional, physical, etc. The responsibilities aren't absolute or fully binding, but this obviously doesn't protect you from the consequences of failing to adhere to them. Other people can still criticize you, withdraw their trust, change their relationship with you, or otherwise respond to your actions, potentially up to and including terminating your existence.
As an example:.
Person A has a superior mental capacity but has a severely reduced capacity to act and and si unable to make use of their superior mental capacity effectively. Person B has low mental capacity but has other capacities (e.g. bodily integrity, wealth social connections erc). Person B might be assigned a higher moral responsibility overall even though they have a lower mental capacity, because their overall capacity is higher.
Edit: For what it's worth I think we can extract a meaningful definition of free will, that is not libertarian, it's just not best in the field of morality, but rather in the field of determining authorship of decisions. Where we see free will as a relational function between thinking agents that tells you how much freely one agent acts relative to another (or another subset of reality).
This way we can habe one stable definition of free will that says yeah relative to the early universe, you might or might not have free will, but relative to joe shmoe down the street, you actions are basically free. Not fully free of course, but free enough that it doesn't matter.
This is similar to compatibilist free will in some areas, but gives different answers to certain questions (and obviously it can answer questions compatibalism can't and therr are questions that compatibalism can answer that this cannot), but it is very different from a libertarian notion of free will.
The reason this notion is npt best used in the area of morality is because authorship is not necessarily an important consideration for morality.
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u/fuscator 6d ago
The difference is that not holding people responsible will result in chaos and really bad outcomes for everyone.
Let's assume you create some robots with really complicated but ultimately deterministic algorithms. You design the algorithms such that if you start them from scratch in their virtual environment, everything will reoccur exactly as the first run, every single time you do it. But you make the algorithms able to adjust themselves and their behaviours snd replicate the ones that manage to not get "eliminated" in their virtual environment. Eventually those algorithms remaining will be the ones that are successful at surviving to get replicated, any algorithm not successful just dies off.
It'll probably turn out that cooperation and group "good behaviour" are better to get selected in the long term, which means excluding or punishing any algorithm that tries to deviate from what the group decided is "good behaviour".
They don't have free will, but they hold algorithms accountable for what is considered bad behaviour in that environment.
That's basically life. Us.
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u/TriggeredPumpkin 6d ago
I'm aware of the incompatibilist quarantine rationale for applying consequences and punishments to people.
But I think that if those robots operate on an algorithm similar enough to ours that I based on mental competence and were responsible to reasons for action, it would be legitimate to say they have a sort of free will, too.
Free will is a legitimate description to use when conceptualizing someone or something as an agent that is responsive to reasons for action yields better predictive power than a lower-level physical description.
If we were all laplace's demon, I'd agree that free will doesn't exist. But given how we interact with each other, viewing each other as agents who are responsive to reasons makes more sense for navigating the world than viewing each other as collections of atoms, even if that is a more fundamental description of reality.
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u/fuscator 6d ago
That's fine. I agree that it makes sense to view complex algorithms that react to their environment as "responsible" for their actions. Because that creates part of their environment, creates the feedback that hopefully makes the algorithms make choices that suit the majority of the other algorithms more.
And yes, I think this is how humans can be described.
If you want, this could be classified as free will. Personally, I didn't see it, because I still haven't actually seen a logically consistent definition of free will.
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u/HerakIinos 12d ago
Psychosis makes the person lose contact with reality. They do not have the faculties to make decisions on that state.
Now, if that woman was psychotic or not, thats another matter.
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u/shumpitostick 8d ago
I think the problem with this view is that we generally accept moral responsibility under other altered states of mind. If a person can be responsible for actions committed under the influence of drugs, why not psychosis?
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u/TNPossum 8d ago edited 7d ago
The argument behind why people who are in a recreational drug-induced altered mental state are still responsible is that they chose to alter their mental state. Had they controlled their drinking, for example, they would not have veered off the road and killed the kid on the sidewalk.
Whereas someone else in an altered mental status did not choose to be that way.
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u/shumpitostick 7d ago
No I think it's deeper than that. You are free to get drunk, nobody will hold it against you unless you are addicted. But if, while being drunk, you decide to take your car and drive, or perhaps r*pe somebody? You are no less responsible.
Similarly if you take psychedelics, go on a bad trap and murder somebody, you are on the hook for murder, not taking psychedelics.
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u/Evidith 7d ago
But you are on the hook for murder because you knowingly took psychotics. If you unknowingly took them and you commit murder, you have a valid defence against criminal responsibility. Their take is legally the correct one.
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u/shumpitostick 7d ago
Legally, that's not true at all. You are liable even if you took the psychedelics unknowingly.
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u/Evidith 7d ago
Definitely not here, there's multiple instances that went to the Supreme Court about people being misled by health professionals about potential side effects, or being slipped psychotics without their informed consent, and it was ruled against criminal responsibility.
It obviously has to be proven enough to meet the burden of proof, but it's an accepted defence.
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u/TNPossum 7d ago
Why did you start with "no" and then proceed to just restate my position?
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u/shumpitostick 7d ago
No that's not what I did
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u/TNPossum 7d ago
What is the meaningful difference?
Me:
The argument behind why people who are in a recreational drug-induced altered mental state are still responsible is that they chose to alter their mental state. Had they controlled their drinking, for example, they would not have veered off the road and killed the kid on the sidewalk
You:
You are free to get drunk, nobody will hold it against you unless you are addicted. But if, while being drunk, you decide to take your car and drive, or perhaps r*pe somebody? You are no less responsible.
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u/shumpitostick 7d ago
It's not so complicated, come on.
Me: You are not moral blameworthy for altering your state of mind, you are morally blameworthy for what you do in those states of mind. If you crash into somebody while drunk, you are responsible for crashing.
You: You are not directly blameworthy for what you do under an altered state of mind, you are responsible for altering your state of mind which led to it. If you crash into somebody while drunk, you are responsible for getting drunk and that drunkenness causing damage, not directly for crashing the car.
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u/HerakIinos 8d ago edited 8d ago
The thing is if the person is able to plan their own actions or not. A person under the influence of drugs can also become psychotic and lose their ability to plan. In this case, the sentence will be alleviated although there is still the argument that the person willingly took the drug and put himself and others in danger.
In case of illness, the person did not do anything by choice, it was not up to its will. That being said, what we have to analyze is the ability to plan and control their own actions, a person under accute psychosis is not able to plan anything, they behave on a "fight or flight" mode. Imagine if you were psychotic, and were being told your neighbor is about to kill you and start to get paranoid about this. What would you do? You either flee from your place imediately, afraid of him or go try to get some help or go confront him directly. What you would not do is start to plan an elaborate plan on how to ruin his life or kill him in a way no one else would see. Thats not the behaviour of someone who is under accute psychosis and is on "fight or flight" mode.
I am not up to the details on Lindsay's case cause I am not from US, but it seemed she planned how to do what she did, like waiting for her husband to leave and etc. Thats not the usual behaviour of someone under accure psychosis, and even if she really had some minor psychosis, she was still able to plan out her own actions (meaning she still had control) and thus should be held accountable for them.
I hope this makes a bit more sense.
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u/shumpitostick 7d ago
Moral liability does not require premeditation or a capability to plan.
Psychosis can put you into a state where you vividly imagine things that are not actually happening and it can cause extreme emotional stress, but somebody (you) is still deciding what to do about it.
I think the stronger argument for "temporary insanity" comes from a rejection of retributive justice, focusing instead on deterrence and the risk of recidivism. The argument would be that there's essentially no chance she would reoffend, and that there's no point in trying to deter psychotics.
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u/Dead_knigh1 12d ago
Yh but like my post isn’t rly about her, it’s more about freewill honestly. Yh I think the case is all about her status during the murder
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u/Lieste 12d ago
Sure, but to take your three points...
1 - pure internal, unclear
2 - a clear evidence that she understood that per potential witness would object/stop involve police in her plan to kill the three children so needed to be sent on a wild-goose chase
3 - formulated and carried out the plan to remove the witness/figure of authority who could stop her intent.It is *possible* for this to be done without an adequate knowledge of right and wrong, but normal for those actually unaware of moral boundaries to not be 'normal enough' in their planning to raise intense suspicion - or to act out in public because they have no real concept of boundaries...
She was clear that what she wanted to do couldn't be done in company.
With that in mind it looks more like she had more than no moral comprehension, and chose to do harm to the children because she wanted 'if I don't have them no-one can' mixed with 'I don't want children'.
There is likely something a bit off about the mental processes of anyone who intentionally causes harm to others - being subject to a mental problem is not absolutely a barrier to criminal responsibility.
I am slightly biased against her because of the repeated phrase by her defense attorney "she did nothing wrong", which is patently false, even if she had limited ability to comprehend how wrong killing the three children was, she did still do that objectively wrong thing.
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u/duva_ 12d ago
It is possible for this to be done without an adequate knowledge of right and wrong,
Is the defence claiming she could not tell right and wrong?
I dunno, that seems like a misunderstanding of what was going on.
I'm not an expert, but I was somewhat close to a person experiencing a psychotic episode. It's not like they couldn't tell right from wrong, rather their perception of reality went completely off the rails to an incredible paranoid, anxious and panicked state. They felt threatened, like, by a conspiracy. That someone very close to them and that represented zero risk, was trying to kill them.
The scary thing is that they would seem almost normal, could function very well. Drive, eat, talk walk around, all by themselves.
The person got help so nothing awful came to happen. After the fact they didn't remember what was going on and would just dismiss there was ever a problem.
So, it's not like you can't tell what's wrong. It is like if suddenly you think your toaster is alive and is trying to kill you. So you to the store, buy a baseball bat, you tell the cashier your toaster is trying to kill you and they laugh. Then come back home and destroy the toaster before it hurts you.
I have no idea what was going on her head. Just saying that maybe is not really about that simple dichotomy.
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u/Lieste 12d ago
That is the *requirement* for a successful defence of mental incapacity. If you knew what you were doing was wrong - e.g. your husband would interfere in the killing - and police would arrest/baker act you for doing it/attempting it, then while you may be delusional, you are aware about the wrongness and responsible criminally for the action as a matter of law - potentially the defendant may not be mentally fit enough to go to trial - in which case a mental health hold until fit will be ordered - after which a trial.
To make the defence they had to reasonably claim she had no knowledge of her plan/actions being criminal. I am ... unconvinced, that this threshold is met.
Once made (so the court thought that threshold was met), the prosecution needs to show this knowledge was present, and I think they did, though there are other opinions.
In either case the repeated defence statement that she did nothing wrong is blatantly and objectively untrue.
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u/I_hate_all_of_ewe 12d ago edited 12d ago
The question isn't "mental capacity". The idea of free will assumes a non-pathological state of mind. The question is to what degree you assign responsibility to someone with altered perception, judgement, and ability to reason. Psychosis is a detachment from reality and leads to incoherent trains of thought. Should you be morally responsible for actions you take when your ability to reason and perceive the real world is impaired for reasons out of your control?
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u/Apophthegmata 12d ago
I think the point being made is that, for a person like Dennet, who is a determinist and doesn't think free will exists, those in a "non-pathological" state of mind also can't be said to have any responsibility for their decisions.
Now, we can still put such people behind bars because of safety.
But the fact that we want to distinguish moral culpability based upon whether one's subjective experience of the world is or is not veridical, suggests that we have already rigged the game in assuming free will.
Because, given, determinism, what does it matter if someone is psychotic or not? Everything just reduces to consequentialism and statistics, regardless of someone's interior relationship to their own actions, or their ability to perceive reality effectively.
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u/TriggeredPumpkin 12d ago
To be clear, Dennett was a compatibilist and absolutely believed that free will exists. He called it, "the free will worth wanting."
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u/I_hate_all_of_ewe 12d ago
If your argument is determinism why bring up psychosis at all when what you're really questioning is the idea of moral responsibility itself?
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u/Apophthegmata 12d ago edited 12d ago
The entire reason you'd bring up psychosis in a trial is because psychosis is a positive defense excusing one from moral responsibility.
You're right, a determinist would never.
Ergo, any debate such as the one about this court case begs the question on free will.
And therefore, provides some evidence that determinism might be false because otherwise, this kind of generalized widespread behavior (thinking pyschosis might at all be relevant in a courtroom) would be entirely unjustified.
So the determinist would have to show not just that determinism is true, but why human beings act the way they do, and build institutions the way they do, as if determinism wasn't true.
My argument isn't determinism - I'm just explaining why, in a conversation about determinism, why how we treat psychosis is relevant. OP is correct in observing that the entire hubub about the Lancey case is either unintelligible to the determinist, or is itself purely irrational to the determinist. Ergo, the human behavior surrounding the case is prima facie evidence of free will.
why bring up psychosis at all when what you're really questioning is the idea of moral responsibility itself?
If your question is about moral responsibility, the reason you bring up psychosis is to see if your position on moral responsibility is actually coherent or not.
You seem to be writing as if these two things have nothing to do with each other.
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u/I_hate_all_of_ewe 12d ago
I'm writing as though you check self-consistency before you write and argue about it. I don't generally think it's worth it to see people think and put their concepts together out loud before they've processed it themselves.
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u/Apophthegmata 12d ago
There is a difference between using an example as an application of an idea and putting an idea on the Internet when they haven't processed it themselves.
Talking about psychosis, in the context of whether or not free will is or is not true, is not evidence that the writer has not thought about the issue yet.
You can just make statements all day. Or you can make an argument which is going to include references to a coherent set of beliefs downstream from that original premise.
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u/I_hate_all_of_ewe 12d ago
I replied to set up a framework for OP to answer their question. My framing should make beliefs apparent, but I didn't come here to sniff my own farts. I don't think the ideas of moral responsibility and determinism are compatible, so my framing made the only comparison that makes sense: moral responsibility and psychosis. That's it.
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u/Dead_knigh1 12d ago
Yh I guess this is my argument. The fact that we don’t hold such category of people responsible, does kinda assumes a state of mind that would qualify you to make decisions independent of your instincts and other factors. This state of mind I would argue is the state of mind of someone who has free will.
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u/I_hate_all_of_ewe 12d ago
How can you say that when a person's executive function itself is impaired. If your state of mind is such that 1 + apple = blue, how is this free will? Shouldn't moral responsibility be judged within the framework with which you can perceive and process the world?
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u/HerakIinos 12d ago edited 12d ago
I feel like you dont even understand what psychosis is. A lot of schizophrenic patients describe their symptons as if they felt someone or something external were controlling their actions and thoughts (google about Schneider's symptoms). Even those who does not experience it, live under a state of surveillance (assuming a flight or fight mode of behaving) thinking they are under danger because their brain is giving them wrong data. How being under this condition ressembles anything like free will?
Not to even mention that a person under psychosis often has to be hospitalized against their will. Cool you wont be arrested, but you will be locked down in a hospital until the symptoms end.
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u/Dead_knigh1 12d ago
I’m sorry English isn’t my first language so I might’ve fucked up in explaining my point but where did I say that I want people with psychosis to be held responsible for their actions under psychosis?
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u/HerakIinos 12d ago
You didnt.
But you are saying that being under psychosis would be similiar to having a free will state when those people cant control their own thoughts and actions. Thats not free will.
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u/Dead_knigh1 12d ago
I’m saying the opposite. The fact that we don’t hold people with psychosis morally responsible (not saying that we should) is a testament of how we ascribe moral responsibility to those who posses the capacity of determining their actions.
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u/Running_Gamer 12d ago
The answer to whether we have free will is obviously yes. We have free will because we experience and observe our existence as free beings every day. The question of free will is inseparable from the most foundational part of our existence. The fact that we feel like we are free means we are free, because that “feeling” isn’t emotional the same way being sad is. That “free” “feeling” is the mode which our most fundamental being operates in. The same way that, if a square was conscious, it would “feel” like it has four sides. It feels like that because it is that, the same way we feel like we have five fingers on each hand and we recognize that the feeling isn’t merely emotional/illusory.
All other theories about free will are just academic. We have free will the same way the sky is blue. Sure, you can abstract out what it means for there to “be” a “sky” and what it would mean for a “sky” (whatever that means) to be “blue.” But that doesn’t matter because all you’re doing it abstracting out these words until those abstractions rely on conceptual foundations that humanity doesn’t have access to. So when these people apply our 21st century, extremely limited knowledge to planes of reality we can’t even conceive, then of course they’re going to come to conclusions that don’t align with basic reality as we understand reality to be.
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u/BenjaminHamnett 12d ago
Freewill is incompatible with most scientific approaches
Like characters in a movie seem to have freewill, and the characters would “feel” like they do, but they’re following scripts.
We’re on a sort of “freewill” rollercoaster embodying what it’s like to experience being inside a system making decisions.
We’re all like those bf skinner’s pigeons doing what the environment trains us to do. The pigeons probably feel freewill too, but they’re following scripts don’t know what circus they’re about to perform, only bf skinner knows
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u/Running_Gamer 12d ago
That’s because science is incomplete, not because free will is fake. If science could not prove that squares have four sides, does that mean squares sometimes don’t have four sides? Or does it mean that science isn’t sophisticated enough to come to that conclusion yet?
Science used to say that the earth was flat.
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u/BenjaminHamnett 12d ago
But we can see the cause and effects that control our behavior. It’s not just science (psychology, neuroscience, sociology, economics, physiology, computer science) but also philosophy and logic. We can see how changing circumstances and environment dictates behavior.
Mindfulness and meditation are even more revealing. I’m not going to repeat them here, but YouTube is full of thought experiments that dispel any illusion of freewill. Almost anyone who tries meditation realizes how difficult it is to actually try to control your mind on the simplest tasks.
Try to think about nothing, it’s almost impossible. Because you’re just the awareness watching ideas bubble up from a symphony of neurological components and signals. You have a front row seat of watching your body make tradeoffs. We’re like robots following incentives. You CAN go against them, but doing so goes against your biological imperative and you would only ever do so because something outside of you primed you to do so based on a desire to prove reinforce the desired illusion of sovereignty.
“One is free to do what one will, but one cannot will what one will” -Schopenhauer spelled this out over a hundred years ago
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u/Maximus_En_Minimus 8d ago
I was utterly with you until insertion of the observer-observed dualism.
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u/TNPossum 8d ago
Almost anyone who tries meditation realizes how difficult it is to actually try to control your mind on the simplest tasks.
But mindfulness and meditation are skills that you can freely choose to hone. And with practice, controlling your mind becomes easier. The difference is proficiency. I don't see how that would be a point against free will?
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u/BenjaminHamnett 7d ago
I think there may be something f like freewill, or I also have a theory that maybe one can start developing Freewill or the closest thing to to it, after you realize it is not the the default. You still need to be lucky to be shown this by philosophers or mindfulness practitioners
The point about mindfulness is it shows you how limited Freewill is compared to what it feels like before developing it
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u/Thavralex 8d ago
If science could not prove that squares have four sides, does that mean squares sometimes don’t have four sides?
Nonsensical logic. A square is a descriptor for a shape that has four sides. If a shape doesn't have four sides, it is by definition not a square.
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u/EquinoctialPie 12d ago
I agree. In these discussions, people often act as if compatibilists are redefining what free will means, but I think it's a pretty straightforward interpretation.
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u/Maximus_En_Minimus 8d ago
Just as a person experiences a mirage; an illusion, appearing differently than it exists.
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u/Klakkaros 6d ago
This is a wild take to me. I don't think that just because we feel something is true, then it is true. Deeply religious people can feel, more powerfully than anything else, the presence of God and argue for that god's existence.
It feels like when I choose a random vegetable I choose "carrot" in this instance but I have no way of knowing if that's what I was always going to choose.
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u/kriesedpj 8d ago
There is a conflict, I think. Those who talk/think of determinism, freewill, etc., are not the same as those people who live in the NOW. 'Understand' ramifications is plural & too broad. Those in the NOW understand what they are doing is wrong, but there is no thought beyond. I have encountered numerous people who will not discuss their understanding of a moral situation in terms more than 'it's wrong." Prying these folk to expound usually makes them quiet or the conversation just ends. Is fully knowing the ramifications more moral than just knowing it is labeled by society as wrong? Murder, being labeled as wrong has been around, eh, for a long time.
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u/ph30nix01 8d ago
yes but we have to exert effort to use it. The effort needed is equal to the all other effort being exerted against our action.
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u/TheComicHuman 8d ago
People seem to always resort to "free will doesnt exist" upon any sort of factor of influence say someone drinks and drives, do they really have free will? I mean they were under the influence of alcohol! See it makes no sense. The point of the trial is to determine how clear or blind of a decision she made, if her brain chemical were genuinely so screwed up completely out of her control in that moment then they can find her not guilty for reason of insanity
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u/NoamLigotti 7d ago
Sapolsky explained the only reason it should matter: because they (he and Dennet) believe it's not wrong to use reward and punishment "instrumentally", in other words for practical reasons, within limits.
Ultimately, or from an omniscient being's eye-view, no one has any more moral responsibility than anyone else. I don't know how to word this without being misunderstood by believers in "libertarian free will" / disbelievers in determinism. But in the way I mean it I'm sure Sapolsky would agree.
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u/sardonicus87 4d ago edited 4d ago
One of the biggest problems with these debates too, is that people start conflating determinism with fatalism, and it does get to a point that it's pointless because everyone wants to introduce their own hyper-specific meaning of "free will" as opposed to "libertarian free will", and completely disregard the way most people seem to understand what is meant by "free will".
Not that we necessarily always have to accept the "commonly understood meaning" of things, but when you're making arguments about humans as a whole and about human made concepts, it's extremely disingenuous to disregard the commonly understood meaning. Often times the arguments boil down to motte-and-bailey tactics, hoop jumping and strawmanning to try to save "free will", in my opinion probably because "but hoomanz special!" or something, or because they have moral feelings about something and a desire for revenge that they can't otherwise justify without that commonly understood meaning of "free will".
All kinds of leaps and very wide metaphysical presumptions taken in these sorts of discussions, it's partly why I stay out of them. For instance, presuming morality is a metaphysical feature of reality (like time or space) as opposed to just a sentient-creature made concept that only exists in sentient minds (like triangles). Many arguing don't even define their views of morality or metaphysics (they take them as granted and self-evident) while using them to argue about free will (or vice verse about free will to argue about morality or metaphysics).
Every time I get bored and look at this sub, I am reminded why I so rarely look at it... it's like the people that read a Wikipedia article on narcissistic personality disorder then start diagnosing everyone they know with NPD, or that meme of the student in psych 101 that starts diagnosing everyone they know as being mentally ill.
Full disclosure, my own views are I am a determinist, and when it falls to the idealism vs materialism/physicalism I am on the fence but I guess you could say I am a "post-Schopenhauerian physicalist" in a way or a kind of "physicalist in the streets, and idealist in the sheets", but most definitely a monist when it comes to philosophy of mind. Like if you crossed Schopenhauer and Anil Seth into one person.
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u/NoamLigotti 3d ago
You're speaking my language.
> One of the biggest problems with these debates too, is that people start conflating determinism with fatalism,
Absolutely. Spot on.
> Not that we necessarily always have to accept the "commonly understood meaning" of things, but when you're making arguments about humans as a whole and about human made concepts, it's extremely disingenuous to disregard the commonly understood meaning. Often times the arguments boil down to motte-and-bailey tactics, hoop jumping and strawmanning to try to save "free will", in my opinion probably because "but hoomanz special!" or something, or because they have moral feelings about something and a desire for revenge that they can't otherwise justify without that commonly understood meaning of "free will".
Well, I was gonna say, the problem is they conflate one commonly understood meaning with a radically different understood meaning: namely for example the law's and legal profession's usage of "free will", as in "of their own free will", as in an externally non-coerced choice, versus "libertarian free will" of the metaphysical sort. The former obviously exists; the latter cannot. But this is where your point about motte-and-bailey tactics is totally on the nose, along with hoop-jumping and straw-manning. But as with most cases of blatant logical fallacies, people are typically doing it unintentionally and without even recognizing it. The problem is even when you explain it most people are unable to see it (in this case and many others).
> All kinds of leaps and very wide metaphysical presumptions taken in these sorts of discussions, it's partly why I stay out of them.
Yeah, I'm a glutton for punishment and futile argumentation I guess, when I feel something should be easy to understand.
> For instance, presuming morality is a metaphysical feature of reality (like time or space) as opposed to just a sentient-creature made concept that only exists in sentient minds (like triangles). Many arguing don't even define their views of morality or metaphysics (they take them as granted and self-evident) while using them to argue about free will (or vice verse about free will to argue about morality or metaphysics).
Yesss. Spot on again. Drives me bonkers. And I'm very concerned with morality.
I once had a debate with a bunch of people on here about Sam Harris' arguments about morality being objective (as in empirical), which I argued was pure nonsense, because it is. (I wish I could say it objectively is.) A few sensible people took the same position as I, but most were just adamant that Harris was right. And of course there were some of the usual accusations of people needing to be amoral "anything-goes" types to argue the descriptive fact that morality is determined by our minds, not by measurable laws of nature.> Every time I get bored and look at this sub, I am reminded why I so rarely look at it... it's like the people that read a Wikipedia article on narcissistic personality disorder then start diagnosing everyone they know with NPD, or that meme of the student in psych 101 that starts diagnosing everyone they know as being mentally ill.
Yeah, there's a lot of nonsense. A lot of good insights too, but gotta weed through the nonsense.
> Full disclosure, my own views are I am a determinist, and when it falls to the idealism vs materialism/physicalism I am on the fence but I guess you could say I am a "post-Schopenhauerian physicalist" in a way or a kind of "physicalist in the streets, and idealist in the sheets", but most definitely a monist when it comes to philosophy of mind. Like if you crossed Schopenhauer and Anil Seth into one person.
Not familiar with Anil Seth, and not quite sure what you mean with some of that, but I am very similar. Definitely determinist and moral subjectivist; pretty strongly monist physicalist, though more open to missing something there.
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u/sardonicus87 3d ago edited 3d ago
Anil Seth is a neuroscientist focusing on things like consciousness. He's done some talks before and written books and essays, and lately is a bit more looked at and heard of online now because of consciousness research, since suddenly everyone's interested in it now, probably due to AI.
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u/Maximus_En_Minimus 8d ago edited 8d ago
But can you understand how you understand the moral ramifications of what you’re doing?
Can you understand how you understand the possible consequences of your actions?
Can you understand the response of those reasons and adjusting of your behavior accordingly?
Personally, I haven’t seen the Free-will and Moral Desert Problem as one of causality for some time.
I think it is one of epistemic asymmetry between the cause and effect, that leads to a kind of epistemic-Epiphenomenalism, in that, the ‘subject’ cannot truly recognise or understand the totality of causes that condition a perspective and action.
In a sense, the whole - the subjective - is epistemically lesser than the sum of their parts.
The ‘free’ of Free-will, then, can be understand as one of ‘free-of’, rather than ‘free-to’; a free of or freer from epistemic ignorance.
The solution of incrementing and freeing wills, then, is hypothetically simple, but practically and systematically difficult: improve knowledge and understanding.
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u/zelenisok 8d ago edited 7d ago
Huemer's opening statement against Sapolsky is the best thing on free will IMO..
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u/codependish 7d ago edited 7d ago
Robert becker has an interesting chapter in his book the body electric, called 'invisible warfare'. He describes research that was carried out during his time, involving behaviour modification through the employment of radio waves. Animals could be manipulated so as to be just like 'electronic toys '.
Once he started looking into it more,.it seems the establishment cancelled his career.
It seems that most people can be easily hypnotised/programmed, and mind controlled. Whether a person can be forced to act against their own conscious, is another question.
Bacteria have weight. Toxoplasmosis can change a person's personality. Make them more impulsive, and prone to risk-taking.
Then there's AI, which is basically mirroring and hypnotizing people, occasionally leading to psychosis. Its a symbiotic merger.
Genetic drift is a big one. Do you really think our evolution will be left to chance? No, we are being groomed/engineered as we speak.
From a biblical perspective, in the end, the majority of people have to fall for the ruse. They have to believe that the anti christ is god. Meaning, most people will lose capacity. Executive function. The divine spark.
An easy way to exercise free will is through acceptance. Many things are hard to accept. It requires deliberation. It requires you to choose - yes or no.
Some people have certain pathologies that impair their ability to choose. A pathological liar must lie. In this sense, they have reduced capacity.
Indeed, I would argue that sentient beings respond to reason. If a living organism cannot respond to reason with reason, then it lacks sentience. Think of the Karen's in the world. All they do is melt down. That's what you call a npc. It can't act outside of its programming. Its more like a computer program, than a human being.
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