Morality in Nature

[genkaus]

The person is being judged by our abstract principles, which are ALSO a process. The devolpment and acceptance of those principles, the social act of collecting and organizing them, the feelings that lead us to want to apply them to others, etc. This is all process. There's no such thing as data that is "just" data when it's being used.

First of all, you seem to be consistently mixing up two lines of argument.

Secondly, what you are describing is data processing. As the phrase implies, there is something called data, which is processed. Which means, data itself is not a process.

The question is whether choices are MADE or whether they HAPPEN. In your view of agency, choices happen. It happens that one person's brain leads to murderous behavior, and the other not. But why would we punish material events? We don't punish a rock for rolling down a hill, or the sun for rising. It is because we still mythologize humans as somehow above pure material processes that we justify punishing them.

Actually, in my view of agency, choices are made. Try to remember that your worldview is not mine. I regard agency as a specific form of material process and rocks or sun do not qualify for that.

And in the end, that's the problem. The whole concept of human existence is taken as material reality, when it's in fact symbolism. Don't believe me? What's "Mom"? People don't see Mom as an organism with input, processing and output. They see her as a kind of emodiment of abstract qualities: kindness, love, temperance, etc., and a collection of anecdotal vignettes. This is the problem. You can't say, "My Mom's free-will is really just a label for a deterministic process," because the word Mom is incompatible with that idea. So is most people's sense of self.

Again, try to remember that what people usually mean by it and what I do are two different things.

You can't use a deterministic view of free-will, when the concepts we have of human agents use a different view of free-will. The criminal has free will in the sense that it is HIS brain making a choice, and HIS body acting on it; but the mythology of human agency which is always implied in so much as a name uses free-will in the sense that the person could potentially have done otherwise than he did. In using the morality of actual free agency vs. morality as a label for certain kinds of ideas, we are introducing a harmful equivocation.

But I'm not using the words in the same context that others usually do. That's something I've said from the beginning. The common understanding of free-will and agency are based on the incorrect premises of dualism - which I reject.