RE: Morality in Nature
October 1, 2013 at 12:34 am
(This post was last modified: October 1, 2013 at 12:39 am by bennyboy.)
@genkaus
re: mores
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.
re: choices
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.
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.
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.
re: mores
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.
re: choices
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.
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.
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.
