Morality in Nature

[bennyboy]

Yes, but your definition of agency is arbitrary. There's no singular agent at all-- there's the IDEA of a singular agent. These are very different things.

You mean you don't regard yourself as a single person?

I've course I do. I'm not a determinist, or a physical monist. I believe in actual mind and actual free will.

I didn't say "free-will," by whatever totally not-free definition you are trying to make it mean. I said "actual-free-will."

I regard my definition of free will as "actual-free-will".

Except that it's neither free nor will.

You forgot abuse, brain development issues, exposure to crime and violence at a young age, etc. etc. That is, you exactly forgot all the influences, totally beyond a person's control, which inevitably led to his murderous moment.

On the contrary, I don't regard these influences as inevitably leading to the murderous moment - given that they are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for the murder.

Yes, because determinism has wiggle-room, so that the murder itself isn't proof enough that it had to happen. So where does this wiggle-room come from? Space pixies?

Anyway, this singular "agent" you talk about is a complete myth. Just because you attach a name to multiple processes, most of them completely unconscious and inaccessible to the murderer, does not mean there is anything singular about them.

Wrong. All those processes work towards generating a singular identity and in doing so, become part of that singular identity. Compare it to multiple threads of code generating a single program. That is what's singular about them.

Okay, so if you blow a CPU, and the computer doesn't function, you'd say, "Goddamned computer doesn't work" and throw out the whole thing, right? Because that's what punishing an individual is-- the entirety of the individual didn't cause a murder.

EXCEPT as an idea. And that's what I'm talking about. As much as you want to objectify SOME of the human experience (e.g. free will), you continue to mythologize this singular agent, which I challenge you either to define or produce. Sure, you can wave airily at a person and say, "There's Bob. He's the agent. He killed someone." But that's not really a good representation of the processes that led to the killing.

I think I've answered this question before. I can't say exactly at which level of complexity do the involved processes generate an identity. But that they do is evident from the fact that it exists.

What matters isn't whether the self exists. What matters is whether it is a byproduct of deterministic processes. If it is, then the apparent agency of the self is irrelevant-- it is a single experience of multiple functions, none of which the self has control over.