Summations Only

The issue is that people often view a crime committed due to extenuating circumstances, such as being mentally ill, temporarily insane, or suffering from depression, etc as somehow "not their fault." If we assume determinism, it is entirely possible that a savvy defense attorney could say, "Yes, Your Honor, my client killed that girl, but it was due to the fact that he received bad genes from his parents, was abused as a child, didn't get medical help in time and was left in the cruel world. It's more a failure of our system to find and help him than it is a failing of him. All of these things were beyond his control and as such, he shouldn't be punished for them."This would be a misuse of a deterministic defense, but I could see it working on a jury.

culpable yes in that our system holds the person to be responsible. But not because they could not help being born a
cannibalistic murdering pediophile.Yes in a court of law the guy is going to get the juice. Because our laws could give a rats-ass what made the monster, it just wants to find a way of removing the monster from the innocent population.Frankenstein could not help it he was a murdering monster. No more than Gacy could help it he was.It was predetermined they would offend. Perhaps that movie Minority Report would be the best way to deal with such dilemmas. To bad time travel is not possible.*At this time*Edited by 1.61803, : * added*

He could, but there is nothing in the doctrine of compatibilist free will that compels one to receive that argument. It might be misrepresented as such, but then I've seen people misrepresent evolution as giving support to racism, and that isn't an argument against evolution, it's an argument against people misrepresenting things.In any case, even if the attorney was right, it is still the case the argument from consequences is invalid. If c.f.w. implied something that was false, that would be an argument against it, if it merely implied something that we don't like, then we'd have to bite it.

I was merely pointing out that this is often how people would view the end result. If there were extenuating circumstances, many (or most) people would then see the crime as not the perpetrator's fault.I agree that this is a faulty application, but I think it is this argument that is being used.As for compatibilism, I'm not an advocate because the type of free will being used in it is ont the free will that people often mean. "Free Will" often means that people can do something despite thier genetic predisposition and the environment they are in, that they can some how make a decision that is not dictated by physics. It's dualism in another form. The compatibilist free will redefines it as being simply a determined outcome where the proximal cause is internal to a person, but that would seem to indicate that automatic machines have free will. The door at the super market opens because of the programming internal to its working, which means it opens because it wanted to (or chose to), under the compatibilist view.

You are completely right if one applies the definition of freewill that you are applying. However those who say that determinism and freewill are not compatible are just as right about the definition of freewill that they are applying.

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A number of psychologists and empirically oriented philosophers have been doing experimental work relevant to these issues. One especially interesting set of results come from the work of Shaun Nichols and Joshua Knobe. In one experiment, they gave their subjects descriptions of two different universes, one in which everything is completely caused by whatever happened before it, and the other a universe in which almost everything is determined by whatever happened before except human decision making. Then, they asked their subjects to identify which universe is more like ours. Roughly 95 percent of respondents describe the second universe (the one in which human decision making was indeterministic) as the one most like ours. This result seems to strongly favor the view that our ordinary self-conception of human agency is incompatibilist (specifically, libertarian). It is difficult to imagine why we would suppose human decision making is exempt from determinism if it were not linked to our having free will.

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What the experimental data appear to show is that we really do imagine ourselves to be agents with genuine, metaphysically robust alternative possibilities, and we really do, at least in moments of cool, abstract consideration, tend to favor an alternative possibilities requirement on moral responsibility. So, the experimental data seem to be something of a victory for incompatibilist diagnoses of commonsense.

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Link"agents with genuine, metaphysically robust alternative possibilities"....The common conception of freewill is not compatible with determinism. I maintain that the common conception of freewill (or more specifically that we possess such a thing) is probably best described as illusory.

Well, what of it? I can't help people being stupid. The world is as it is. But in fact the dualists are in the same boat. Let's imagine an ethereal metaphysical mind which is not the brain. Very well then. Your actions are either determined by the state of your mind, or random with respect to it. In the latter case, I should say that you do not have free will; in the former case, if you want to think you have free will you need to be a compatibilist. What you cannot do is demand a will so free that it is free of your will, because that makes no sense. Whether it's a physical brain or a metaphysical soul, the sort of free will I believe in is the freest sort of will you can have.The fact that I am also a mental materialist has nothing to do with my arguments really. You could take any place where I say "brain" and substitute "immortal soul" and it would still work out the same. The reason that I deny that the automatic door has free will is not because I think that I am immune to causality, or that I think I have no physical substrate, but because I think that the automatic door has no will. I do the things I do because I desire to do so, but I do not attribute the same consciousness to the door.

Well, suppose that the common conception of dinosaurs is that they were cold-blooded. I think they were warm-blooded. However, it would not be helpful, nor in the last analysis honest, if I went around saying "Dinosaurs did not exist" and "Dinosaurs are illusory".The reason why it would not be honest is that people think a lot of other things about dinosaurs as well. If I say: "Dinosaurs did not exist" then interpreted in plain English people would understand me as saying that there were no sauropods and no ceratopians, and so forth, not that I differed from them about whether dinosaurs were endotherms.Now in the case of free will, people think that we have free will, that it is our capacity to make choices, that free will means that we do what we want to do, that we are morally culpable for doing evil, and so on and so forth. But they also, when you prod their metaphysics, seem to think that real free will should be so free that it is free of our will. It is only on this last point that I disagree with them, because that's really stupid and amounts to a denial of free will in every other sense in which they mean it. It is therefore more honest to say that I think we have free will, and to explain what I mean by that, then to go about saying that we don't and then explaining that in every other respect I agree with them that we do.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

I still don't understand how you can be convinced of this. It sounds deply speculative and very poorly founded. Well the same is true of electrons. Yet no-one complains if we say that electrons behave deterministically. Albeit determinism with probability entailed. Quite.

But this isn't what people are doing. They're demanding that their will is free of physical causality. The belief in free will insists that you can make a decision that doesn't follow from any preceding states of matter or energy. The will is not determined by physics. Ok, now I'm confused. You've said that your will is still subject to causality, so the "programming" of your mind determines what choice you will make in a given circumstance, right? How is that different from the programming of an automatic door deciding to open in a given circumstance?

That is the best and most concise reason for applying the definition of freewill that compatibilist philosophers apply I have heard.It's almost enough to persuade me to call myself a compatibilist.

Ok, maybe convinced is too strong a word, but I would be surprised if there were no quantum effects going on in our brain resulting in thoughts or actions. I guess I've never noticed anyone saying that electrons behave deterministically. I usually hear it said that they behave probabilistically. It may be just a difference of preference.

But the reason you don't want to rape the nun was not arrived at by your choice - your will - it was pre-programmed into you.You are free to override the bad feeling and do it anyway but in some cases, such as this one, you may also not be able to physically do what you are attempting to do as a result of your choice.Your freedom to choose has been limited by your brain before 'you' arrived in it. You live inside a house that the 'you' that you call you, didn't entirely design.That's fine and dandy because you are happy with the you that doesn't want to rape a nun. (And so am I.) I assume that the psychopath with a fondness for nuns is also happy with his you too - or is he?But are either of you totally free to choose? I don't think so, or at least not as much as we think.

Wiki on determinism seems to agree more with your use of "determinism" and describes what I am talking about as "adequate determinism": Link quoted extensively because I think it is very relevant here.

We are condemned to be free, at least according to Sarte.It is by acting in bad faith that we attempt to relinquish our responsibility. We are indeed thrown into the world not of our making, but I believe we are free agents in that we inevitably decide what we do. I could of course be completely wrong. But I can not see how pure determinism would explain random off the cuff shit that happens. A microtube in the flaggellum of a sperm could have a electron be entangled with some other virtual particle and bingo that inevitable noble peace prize winner or mass murder will perhaps not be born. Or some random mutation occurs that selects out some needed protein and again a deterministic path is disrupted by chance. I believe obscure random events can and do affect our macro world.For lack of a nail the kingdom was lost.

If I have a consistent philosophical theme it is that we should stick as closely as possible to ordinary language.So, for example, in talking about epistemology, I do not say: "There is no such thing as proof in science". Because that statement is, in plain English, false.Instead, I say: "Of course scientists can prove things. The world is not flat. This has been proved." Then I might bring in the philosophical caveats, and say: "It is of course true that when I say "proved", I do not mean proved beyond all conceivable doubt, such that you are presently confined in a mental hospital hallucinating the "proof" that the world isn't flat, or that you are beset by a Cartesian demon. I mean, in the ordinary sense, that this has been proved."Someone who changes the definition of "proved" so that it includes these recondite epistemological anxieties, and so that he goes about saying "nothing can be proved" is simply lying.Now it might be shown that an ordinary person, quizzed about his epistemology, thinks that "proved" means "proved beyond all conceivable doubt", but this is only because the ordinary person has not contemplated the Cartesian demon. It is not a concession to his naive views to go about saying "science can't prove anything", rather, it is a mean dirty trick to play on his naivety. Precisely because he is an ordinary person and not a philosopher, if I say to him "there is no such thing as proof in science", I am telling him the most enormous lie.Therefore, when we do philosophy, we should choose our terms to be as close as possible to ordinary language. We should not strut about stating our conclusions as: "there is no such thing as proof"; "there is no such thing as free will"; because if the ordinary person does not, on hearing these blatant lies, recognize us as liars and fools, then he will fall into an even greater error --- he will believe us.