Morality in Nature

[bennyboy]

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.

. . . unless it's being recalled and used in the brain.

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.

In your model, the sun chooses to burn, and the rock chooses to roll down the hill under the force of gravity, in the exact same way that a person chooses to act in a particular way. The only difference is that rock-rolling is more difficult to predict. But you could say something like, "I think that cloud is going to choose to rain when it hits Seattle" as well as you could say, "I think that girl is going to choose the pink umbrella."

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.

This is my point. ALL the words in which humans are considered singular entities are as fictional as the idea of actually-free-will is in your view. If you say, "Mom's brain processed her environment, accessed her memories, and caused her to hit me," you are only getting it half right. You have to say, "The collection of interconnected but independent processes called Mom has exchibited a hitting behavior." If you accept a moral agent, you have to accept all its implications, including actual-free-will.

So back to our murderer-- there IS actually no singular agent responsible for the behavior. Maybe a particular brain region led to the killing, and all the rest of the brain is a nice, functional guy. Maybe he had a stroke, or has a blood clot. Maybe he was abused and his world view is broken. Lumping all those possibilities under a single agency, just because they are collectively called by a single name, is cruel. If there's no single agent (i.e. the brain somehow unified by a spirit, or a will or whatever), then inflicting punishment on the entire system is immoral.