Free Will

[Mudhammam]

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Yeah, we would still try to rehabilitate people and keep those who pose an imminent threat away from society, but it would make no sense to moralize, to say to the convicted murderer or rapist: "You had the genuine possibility of doing otherwise but you choose not to," which, if such in fact is not the case, seems repugnant to my conception of human dignity.

When I encounter an apple that is rotten, I interact with it differently than I interact with a fresh, ripe apple.  How the one got to be rotten, and how the other got to be ripe, makes no difference for this.  The same applies to people.  The difference between a good and a bad person is in what they are, not in how they got to be what they are.  I married my wife because of what she is, not because of how she came to be what she is.

That's what separates us from beasts: we can reason against the passions; we can demarcate right and wrong and choose to do the former in spite of whatever proclivities draw us towards the latter.

We can see from various nonhuman animal studies that there appears to be moral behavior, and a sense of right and wrong, in a variety of animals.  See, for example:

http://www.livescience.com/24802-animals...-book.html

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2...in-animals

http://www.npr.org/2014/08/15/338936897/...ave-morals

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/041612.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/10...59579.html

So a sense of morality does not separate humans from other animals.

We function with a deeply imbedded sense of latitude to make decisions independent of any prior circumstances that have led up to that point. It seems to me that's what the philosophic virtues are largely about: living in accordance to a set of principles regardless of the situations that we find ourselves in. To commit to such ideals seems to me to be a choice that I am freely able to make at any given moment.

You can do what you want, within limits (e.g., you cannot fly without the aid of any devices, etc.).  That is the freedom that you have.  What would be the advantage to being able to choose what you do not want?

As for why you want what you want, that is another matter.  That will involve things that are beyond your control, as my hand example is meant to illustrate.

I'm also just not so sure that I'm persuaded of the idea that science, which deals exclusively with the physical world, is capable of answering such questions as whether or not the physical world is all that exists (and much of experience, if we include imagination and intellection, hardly seems remotely physical), and if it is not, then we might have to arrive at certain (that's an intentional double entendre) conclusions through other means - which is what we are always doing in exercising pure reason, anyway, and possibly free will, if it can survive.

Science deals with things that are testable.  It is not inherently committed to a purely physical world.  If psychics were real and had their abilities due to nonphysical things, their abilities would still be testable and demonstrable.


Going back to your idea of something being repugnant to your idea of human dignity, that is an interesting emotional aspect of you.  That is not a way to determine the truth about things in the world.  Humans are animals.  Too many people have been infected with that vile superstition known as "Christianity" which warps their view and gets them to believe that humans are somehow separate from other animals.  Modern evolutionary theory teaches us otherwise.  Which explains why so many Christians hate evolution.

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