Morality in Nature

[bennyboy]

Okay. At least you're consistent.

I accept moral ideas, including those of punishment, exactly because I don't accept the deterministic definition of free will, and of self, that you do. I take choices to be real things, not labels for reducing a complex environment down to a single behavioral impulse.

I don't think your position makes sense. To accept a determinist view, in which a person ultimately has a choice of 1 option in every scenario, means that morality has no meaning.

Fair enough. I don't think your view of free-will and morality makes sense either. The idea that morality can only apply to non-deterministic choices would require that there was no specific cause or reason behind the choice and we know from experience that that is not the case with our choices.

If it's a deterministic choice, then it really has only one possible outcome, so I would say the idea that there's a choice at all is an illusion-- I'd just call it data processing. If you want to make the assertion that it seems to you there are no real choices, but only data processing, then that position will make sense to me. But it's much harder to get morally outraged when "data processor Bob Smith" inevitably (even though it's unpredictable or surprising) kills someone.

And here's something on a slightly different note. What if a murderer is surprised that he has murdered someone? What if after stabbing someone 10 times, his expression suddenly changes, he drops the knife, looks around confused, and says, "I. . . I. . . what just. . . happened?" In this case, the processing of the brain leads to the murder, but the conscious agent may have had no chance to mediate the behavior. Does the conscious agent have to take responsibility for unconscious mechanisms over which it has no control?