Is Moral Responsibility Compatible With Determinism?

[Anomalocaris]

If determinism is true, then moral responsibility cannot exist. Moral bad actors have no free will, and the members of society who punish them have no free will.  It's a wash.

Boru

Not true.  Moral responsibility is a perception, and in a deterministic world it is a deterministic perception. Whether it will exist or not is dependent on the neurological workings that facilitates it, and at a fundamental level independent of whether the rhetorical basis for its existence is actually paralleled in the real workings of the real world.

[vulcanlogician]

No, it is not "all stimulus response."  You are completely overlooking motivated selective focus, the human ability to suppress reactions, and conflicting desires, not all of which can be followed at one time.

(my bold)

Alan, you don't need to read Hume. Hume doubted that the laws of cause and effect exist. That's just radical skepticism. You just need to address a (possible) misconception you have that just because the brain is complex and is self-mediating (in addition to its perceptive, interpretive, and responsive powers)... that it is somehow endowed with free will. Let's look at what you've said with laser beam focus and see if it contains a misconception or not.

The one quoted statement above is what I take issue with here. When I can show what's wrong with this statement, I can show you why we don't agree that brains do not make free will possible. Let's break it down. Let's just focus on what you've said in this one sentence because this is why it is erroneous to think brains have anything to do with free will. And just to remind you: free will may be true. Determinism may be false. That's not the issue here. The issue is brains have nothing to do with it.

1) No, it is not "all stimulus response."

* Yes it is. (see below)

2) You are completely overlooking motivated selective focus...

* I am not overlooking motivated selective focus. Motivated selective focus is stimulus driven. It all happens on an unconscious level (how can free will be pertinent to decisions you don't even know you are making?). As is remarked in a scholarly article "[Effects of motivated selective focus] depend on internal states but arise without conscious will," So, free will or no... it doesn't matter. Motivated selective focus doesn't involve the will at all. It is a piece of brain software, an adaptive algorithm that helps direct consciousness to this or that external stimulus in order to obtain rewards as per the dictates of evolutionary conditioning.

If anything, motivated selective focus is an argument for determinism because it controls what we focus on before we are even conscious of anything at all. (But I'm not apt to pick up this line of reasoning, even though it speaks to my point. Because, as far as I'm concerned, brains and their inner workings are irrelevant to the discussion.)

3) You are completely overlooking... the human ability to suppress reactions, and conflicting desires, not all of which can be followed at one time.

*Nope. I had things like these in mind all along. You need to ask yourself: "What IS the human ability to suppress reactions?" Is it the brain suddenly gaining the ability to change how the laws of nature operate? No. It's actually the brain in conflict with itself... or more aptly... one part of the the brain sending one impulse and another part of the brain sending another. I'm no neuroscientist, but I think such things are resolved via a mediating feature in the prefrontal cortex. But even if I have my neuroscience wrong there this does not prove free will because it can be explained (again) in terms of computer algorithms. Sometimes one algorithm conflicts with another within a program. One way to deal with this in computer science (and it appears it's also nature's way of dealing with it) is to tack on a third algorithm that makes certain "calls" about which of the other algorithms will "win out" in a given scenario.

Unless a 1980s apple computer has free will in your conception, neither does the human brain... at least insofar as it can suppress certain responses that arise within it or handle conflicting desires.

[vulcanlogician]

I would like to address again the OP's topic generally.

From the perspective of the moral theorist, or (better said) , moral responsibility may come naturally to one who understands that he lives in a determined universe.

Spinoza's Ethics is so chalk full of metaphysics, it is often referred to as a philosophical work of metaphysics. It's easy to forget that Spinoza's intention is to find an adequate ethics (as the title implies) that follows naturally from his robust metaphysics.

Like Plato, Spinoza is a rationalist, (though this moniker was applied long after either philosopher completed his work and may not be the best descriptor of either). 

Plato and Spinoza both believed that adequate knowledge would lead to adequate virtue. Why does someone choose to become a car thief? Because they don't have sufficient knowledge to realize they would be happier doing something else and living in an entirely different way. According to Plato and Spinoza, ignorance is to blame for all immorality.

So keeping in mind the "rationalist" relation between knowledge and morality, we see that Spinoza describes what he thinks is the kind of moral agent that results from understanding his metaphysics. Upon realizing determinism is true and also liberating oneself from the imprisoning influence of certain emotions, according to Spinoza one becomes free and possesses a strength of character that accompanies such freedom:

(see the bolded portions especially- my bold)

These and similar observations, which we have made on man's true freedom, may be referred to
strength, that is, to courage and nobility of character (III. lix. note). I do not think it worth while to prove
separately all the properties of strength; much less need I show, that he that is strong hates no man, is angry
with no man, envies no man, is indignant with no man, despises no man, and least of all things is proud.
These propositions, and all that relate to the true way of life and religion, are easily proved from IV. xxxvii.
and xlvi.; namely, that hatred should be overcome with love, and that every man should desire for others the
good which he seeks for himself. We may also repeat what we drew attention to in the note to IV. l., and in
other places; namely, that the strong man has ever first in his thoughts, that all things follow from the
necessity of the divine nature; so that whatsoever he deems to be hurtful and evil, and whatsoever,
accordingly, seems to him impious, horrible, unjust, and base, assumes that appearance owing to his own
disordered, fragmentary, and confused view of the universe. Wherefore he strives before all things to
conceive things as they really are, and to remove the hindrances to true knowledge, such as are hatred, anger,
envy, derision, pride, and similar emotions, which I have mentioned above. Thus he endeavours, as we said
before, as far as in him lies, to do good, and to go on his way rejoicing

http://www.naturalthinker.net/trl/texts/...otions.pdf

[Alan V]

No, it is not "all stimulus response."  You are completely overlooking motivated selective focus, the human ability to suppress reactions, and conflicting desires, not all of which can be followed at one time.

Vulcanlogician,

The problem with saying that all motivated selective focus is unconscious is that it isn't. Much of it is decidedly due to conscious efforts practicing behaviors for the future, even more is because of past conscious efforts which became habitual, and even more is because of consciousness overseeing and modifying, in real time, the playout of habitual behaviors. These contentions are in no way unusual in psychological studies of how humans actually work.

Are you a Freudian?

And you still haven't addressed the difference between reasoning to make decisions and direct material causation, which is the discrimination I assert the concept of free will maintains. Reasons are not the same thing as stimuli because of the level of abstraction involved. Reasons are generated in our brains as glosses of large categories of potential stimuli. We therefore don't even have to be paying attention to the world at all to act on reasons.

I would think a philosopher would be very concerned to maintain the discrimination between automatic behaviors and reasoned ones. Otherwise you undercut your own endeavors.

My whole point with mentioning conflicting desires and suppressing reactions is that they raise the execution of actions to the level of reasoning. Otherwise we could simply let our habits play out with minimal supervision.

You are defining the human self as a foreign object imposed on us from without. Where exactly are we in that view of the world? If I am indeed a material object, as I maintain, then I have at least as much causal effectiveness as any other material object in the world, and really much more since I have a much wider range of options than, say, a rock.

As far as I am concerned, you continue to beg the question of whether reductionism is true. What I am saying is that you need much better reasons to abandon a common-sense, observation-based concept of free will than you apparently have. I personally think the "appearances" of our direct observations carry much more weight, at least until scientific research into this subject has progressed a lot further.

[SenseMaker007]

The problem with saying that all motivated selective focus is unconscious is that it isn't.  Much of it is decidedly due to conscious efforts practicing behaviors for the future

If determinism is true then all of that conscious activity is ultimately determined by unconscious activity.

[Sal]

The problem with saying that all motivated selective focus is unconscious is that it isn't.  Much of it is decidedly due to conscious efforts practicing behaviors for the future

If determinism is true then all of that conscious activity is ultimately determined by unconscious activity.

Well, yeah.

The problem I have with Free Will is that, when it gets down to it, is that you at some point have to deny physical causes in the mind. Why is that? Isn't the mind made of matter? And doesn't that matter follow the same physical laws that are present in other configurations of non-brains? Brains, and ultimately minds, aren't made from some exotic matter that isn't subject to natural cause and effect.

To say that we have Free Will, to me, is the same as saying we're not bound by nature.

Emergent properties do not escape those physical realities.

[SenseMaker007]

Brains, and ultimately minds, aren't made from some exotic matter that isn't subject to natural cause and effect.

We aren't these extra things apart from the physical universe.

[Jehanne]

I have been told that absent an ability to do otherwise is essential to say a person is morally responsible (or in other areas, though I'll concentrate on morality) as this rests on "ought" statements. So "you should not murder" etc. As ought implies can, there is a problem with determinism. This would include both compatibilist and incompatibilist views, I'd assume. What do others here think?

I am a compatibilist, except with respect to the death penalty; there I am a determinist, and so, oppose executions for any and all offenses.

[SenseMaker007]

I am a compatibilist, except with respect to the death penalty; there I am a determinist, and so, oppose executions for any and all offenses.

Many compatibilists are also determinists. Compatibilism refers to 'compatible with determinism'.

[Jehanne]

I am a compatibilist, except with respect to the death penalty; there I am a determinist, and so, oppose executions for any and all offenses.

Many compatibilists are also determinists. Compatibilism refers to 'compatible with determinism'.

At a minimum, free will is at least a useful fiction. But, few would accuse Alzheimer's patients of choosing to forget the names of their grandchildren.