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Substantive disagreements over free will
Dec. 8th, 2018 04:03 amI'd like to refute the claim that hard determinists and compatibilists don't really disagree about free will, but merely pick different words to express the same position. Well, not quite. Since "free will" is used in a lot of subtly different ways and it's difficult to pinpoint a really precise definition for any of them, when people give different answers to "Do people have free will?" it's kind of hard to tell whether they're using the word in the same way or not. So let's make the question "What constraints, if any, does physical determinism place on how freely we can be said to make our choices, or on how much those choices can be understood as really ours?" This is intentionally vague and open-ended, but I claim that people can and do have meaningfully different positions on this question even if they agree about physical determinism.
I've sometimes encountered people making the claim that physical determinism proves that moral responsibility or moral desert is not a real thing. I don't agree with this. I'm not sure exactly what argument people have in mind when they make this claim, but clearly there's some sense in which they think that physical determinism means that people's choices are less free, or less theirs, or less... choice-y, somehow, than we otherwise might have thought. Surely we can't blame someone for having the genes/environment/brain chemistry that led to them making that choice, goes the thinking. Whereas I think that their choice is every bit as free as we might have thought before thinking about determinism, and any form of responsibility or blame or deservingness that seemed reasonable before considering determinism should seem just as reasonable after. You could possibly describe the difference between our positions here by saying that they're hard determinists and I'm a compatibilist. It's not clear to me exactly what sense of "free will" they reject that I believe in, but it does seem clear that there must be some.
(For the record, I don't believe in moral desert, at least in the sense that I believe bad things are still just as bad when they happen to bad people. But I don't see determinism as lending support to that belief.)
I've sometimes encountered people making the claim that physical determinism proves that moral responsibility or moral desert is not a real thing. I don't agree with this. I'm not sure exactly what argument people have in mind when they make this claim, but clearly there's some sense in which they think that physical determinism means that people's choices are less free, or less theirs, or less... choice-y, somehow, than we otherwise might have thought. Surely we can't blame someone for having the genes/environment/brain chemistry that led to them making that choice, goes the thinking. Whereas I think that their choice is every bit as free as we might have thought before thinking about determinism, and any form of responsibility or blame or deservingness that seemed reasonable before considering determinism should seem just as reasonable after. You could possibly describe the difference between our positions here by saying that they're hard determinists and I'm a compatibilist. It's not clear to me exactly what sense of "free will" they reject that I believe in, but it does seem clear that there must be some.
(For the record, I don't believe in moral desert, at least in the sense that I believe bad things are still just as bad when they happen to bad people. But I don't see determinism as lending support to that belief.)
