(April 26, 2018 at 10:03 am)henryp Wrote: So is kicking a lady in the stomach, who unbeknownst to everyone, is going to be giving birth to Hitler moral or immoral according to consequentionalism? You kind of wandered off on me there for a bit.
No I didn't. You keep jumping to conclusions.
It's bad if it leads to bad consequences, it's good if it leads to good consequences. But obviously kicking a woman in the stomach is in itself a bad consequence. So it depends how much moral weight you put on that. And that's where subtheories of conseuqentalism come in. Consequentialism as a whole is extremely broad but 1) All subtheories of consequentailism are, obviously, consequentalist. 2)It is my view that all other rival non-consequentalist moral theories ultimately collapse into consequentalism. Perhaps because consequentalism is so broad. Like I said: If certain moral rules or guidelines lead to good consequences generally speaking... then they are good moral rules because they tend to lead to good consequences. And if certain virtues or moral intuitions are good it's because they tend to lead to good consequences.
Any moral theory that usually leads to overall negative consequences and a lack of overall positive consequences... is a bad moral theory.
Quote:You think you're being critiqued, but there are ?'s at the end of these sentences for a reason. You're not being criticized by me. You're being asked for clarification.
I don't think I'm being critiqued I think you think I think I'm being critiqued. I think you're questioning me and asking for clarification because you're struggling to understand what I'm saying. And that's why I am continuing to try to explain what I'm saying.
Quote:We both, (i believe) think compatabilist free will is mostly meaningless, no?
I don't think it's meaningless at all I just think it's so trivially true that it's pointless at best and misleading at worst to call that "free will". Compataiblist free will is just having a will that isn't in an especially weak state: a mature will that isn't threatened, drunk or psychotic. I don't think compatabilist free will is untrue, I just think it's completely misleading and unhelpful to call that "free will" because the free will that most people believe in is far more than simply that. So by parading that as all free will is, as this very pedestrian and obvious things, compatabilists go around saying free will is real because duh we have intentional actions and are often not totally drunk and psychotic or mentally immature, etc, etc..... most people just here "free will is real" and ignore the more interesting and non-obvious and non-trivially true question as to whether incompatabilist free will exists. It's logically incoherent and yet most people believe in it and use it as an excuse to punish and mistreat people even when it's barbaric or immoral to do so because it assumes that people ultimately deserve punishment for XYZ rather than because punishing them actually teaches them a lesson or warns others of the consequences of behaving that way as a way to discourage others from behaving badly.
Like, some of the most immoral and most barbaric punishments throughout history were justified in that way, demonizing people as evil in some sort of ultimate "They made themselves 100% be this way" way. The idea of ultimate desert.
It's also a cause of intense arrogance and smugness. People not just feeling glad that they acheived something, but taking ultimate credit and thinking they're better than other people because they caused themselves ultimately to become highly skillful when really even all their hard work and effort is ultimately determined by prior causes. And it's a cause of revenge and tribalism, too. And of course, this explains, to me, why the intuition for incompatabilist free will runs so deep despite being so incoherent: because it's evolutionary useful in primitive societies. Revenge, tribalism, etc. It's a useful heutistic to just assume someone is ultimately bad and punish them, rather than stopping and analyzing it. In hunter gather times analyzing whether someone really deserves to be punished and how much they should be punished justly would just be a waste of energy. All that mattered was a quick rule of thumb as to whether it was appropriate to punish them or not. The evolution of the idea of people being ultimately bad or ultimately good depending on their behavior... makes sense within tribalisitc primitive people.
So I think that's an argument for why we feel this way. That's the nature argument anyway. The nurture argument is that: Incompatabilist free will has largely came from the Bible. "God gave people free will" and all that shite. That was in the old testament, and then Christianity and Islam adopted it too. All three abrahamic religions have all had a huge impact on the world (almost entirely negative in my opinion) and one of the notions that came out of it was free will. In the more ultimate sense, the incompatabilist sense. Free will is pushed so strongly in it that there's the doctrine of original sin. The idea that we are punished by God for the first two people ever to exist. The idea of ultimate punishment is also implied in the whole notion of heaven and hell. The idea of something such as ultimate punishment only makes sense within the context of ultimate free will. The whole of the Bible is this story of ultimate praise and blame, ultimate reward and punishment. It's very extreme on all those grounds.
Buddhism on the other hand... doesn't seem to suggest any such thing. And in fact, the illusion of the self as a distinct entity in buddhism... appears to be analgous with the notion of incompatabilist free will being illusorary. Buddhism is about mindfulness in the sense of spectating one's own thoughts without judgement: as if thoughts just pop into consciousness and think themselves, rather than trying to control one's mind.
You don't tend to find the concept of the absolute sense of free will in eastern religions, to my mind.
Also, think of ancient Greece that also predates the Bible. The philosophers of the time tended to disagree about the free will thing. It was more of a rational open question, whereas in the Bible it's all just assumed to be true.
And notice that the idea of compabilist free will came about thousands of years later. It's the sort of cop-out answer.
Quote: We don't put Tornados in prison, because you can't put Tornados in prison. That being said, we do try to modify non-human objects behavior.
To get better results from humans, maybe we put them in jail. To get better results from the weather, we reduce carbon output. Both are just actions taken to get more desirable results from a system.
Right. But again, tornadoes aren't intentional agents. There's a distinction between someone accidentally killing someone... say, bumping into them and knocking them off a cliff... and a serial killer that goes around killing people on purpose. There's a difference between manslaughter and fully intentional murder. There's difference between sadistic murder for pleasure (as is often the case in psychopathy) and killing someone to save a loved one. You can't make such a distinction with a tornado. With a tornado it's all accidental. Ultimately everything is an accidental... but when someone intentionally does something, despite the fact that their intentions are ultimately accidental, that says a lot about them and you can expect they may do similar in the future. That is not the case with tornadoes. You don't get tornadoes that happen because the tornado wanted to tornade and tornados that happen by unintentionally when the tornado didn't want to tornade (I made a new verb "to tornade" it means "to behave like a tornado as a torando" lol).... but if you did... and if the desires of tornadoes were indicators of future behavior in the same way that desires are in humans... you could expect tornadoes that wanted to tornade to show up and tornade again in the same place next time. Or maybe somewhere else where they won't get caught. You'd get crafty tornadoes that tried to escape detection before ambushing people. You'd get tornadoes that did all they can to stop us reducing carbon output so they could keep tornadoing.
There's a reason we don't anthropohorize tornadoes. If we had good reasons to anthrorpizne tornadoes then it would make sense to speak of tornado morality.
But even then... I think part of it would be dealing with perpetrators that also have emotions and can suffer. Tornadoes can't be harmed. When you punish an immoral person you can't treat them like some object without feelings or the best way to stop them hurting people would be to just kill them quick and efficently. The point is that: even perpatrators have feelings. We can't treat them like objects. If someone commits a mild crime and we decide that overall they are unlikely to do more good than harm in the world... even if they are likely to do 51% harm overall and 49% good overall... if there's any net negative... it would make sense to kill them if we treated them like objects without feelings.
So perhaps that's the biggest key difference of all. In the realm of morality even the bad guys have feelings and we have to think about how severe the punishment is or how they are treated when they are detained... you don't have to do that with tornadoes.
So I think.... to commit an immoral action you have to be a conscious living being capable of suffering.... otherwise you're just a hazard or an object like a tornado.
