Another Free-will poll, please bear with me!

[robvalue]

I keep seeing this free will vs justice argument, and I don't think it's an issue.

If we say/discover there is no free will, then the very concepts of justice and responsibility are meaningless. No one is making any justice or non justice decisions, as free will has been removed from this also. We're doing what we would do anyway, be that locking someone up or releasing them. So I see it as a non issue. You can say they go "out the window", but they are still there exactly as before, we've just found out there are no choices behind them and so are meaningless. We can't "change" anything given the information that we have no free will, unless that information is actually false.

This would only be a problem if you had an agent with free will judging an agent without free will. In other words, what we "should" do becomes a non issue if we don't have free will.

And if someone says a child rapist should be murdered, that would be in case there actually is free will. If there isn't, then the statement is as meaningless as everything else. It's not convenient to write "in case we do have free will..." before every sentence, so I think you could assume it from a determinist After all, a determinist shouldn't assume they are correct and talk/act like it's true, in case it's not. If it is, they've just done/said what they would do anyway. I call it Hawking's Wager. To put it another way: before we make any discussion about what anyone "should" do, there is an implicit assumption that free will does exist in some form, as far as that conversation is concerned. If we don't make that assumption, the conversation is meaningless. Even if we believe in determinism, it doesn't mean we assume we are correct.

Really, you can't act "like it's true", because that would imply it's actually false because you're making a decision. So you're always automatically making Hawking's Wager, you just don't know which side is correct.