Spiker439

I was just reading the thread on whether or not free will exists given an omniscient creator. I think it does; I can choose to go outside or stay inside, provided I have the physical means to do so, regardless of whether or not god actually knows what I'm going to do. His knowledge does not impede my choices, as far as I'm concerned. This is basically the PAP - the principle of alternate possibilities. If you grant me this assumption, then let me pose the following question:

First let us define responsibility. One can only be held responsible for one's actions if one had free will to perform those actions in the first place. If one is causally determined to do something (Ie if you adopt a deterministic view of causality) then no one should be held responsible for anything. Given that we do have prisons and detention after class, I think this is rather counterintuitive. If I shoot someone then surely I will be held responsible for my actions. However if I was caused to shoot someone, and I could not have done otherwise (Ie there's a chip in my brain controlling my behaviour that makes me shoot someone), then surely I would not be held responsible within this context. Let us therefore assume a stance of non-determinism, to allow for the concept of responsibility, in any case.

Let us examine the following case**:

We have a test subject Jones. Jones wants to perform action X. With no outside influence, Jones will likely perform the action X unhindered.

Enter a second test subject Black. Black REALLY wants Jones to do X. Black will go to ANY means to get Jones to do X. In any imaginable scenario, Black will make Jones do X. Black will do this by implanting a chip in Jones' brain while Jones is sleeping. Jones will NOT know of it's existence, or of the wishes of Black for Jones to do X. If the chip detecs any un-X thought process or behaviour from jones, it will instantaneously kick in and make Jones perform X.

Now we imagine that Jones wakes up, and performs the action X without the chip having had to do anything at all - That is to say, he did X and the chip did not have to make him do X. I think that certainly we would hold Jones responsible for action X. The thing is... he could not have done otherwise! While Jones did X because of his previous conviction to do X, he still had no choice because if he had tried to do otherwise, Black (The chip) would have made him do X. And so, even though he had no choice, he is still held accountable for X.

Does this mean that it is possible to be determined (Not be able to do otherwise) and to still be held responsible for our actions? Seems counterintuitive but... what are your thoughts?

**I must of course add that this is not from the depths of my own mind, but was envisioned by Harry Frankfurt (Journal of Philosophy Vol. 66, 1969). This is one of four so called Frankfurt cases.

politicophile

Free will exists in the last discrecionary act of the agent. That is to say, an act becomes determined immediately after the last act is made which could change the outcome of the decision.

Soooo, if an omniscient God who knows all our "decisions" well in advance exists, and our actions cannot ever contradict the predictions he makes about our actions, then those actions were determined by God's prediction, as it was not possible for those actions to be altered after God has predicted them. It is in this way that infallable prediction of a human action by God determines that action and denies the possibility of free will.

That said, determinism, at least in its "soft" variety, does not necessarily suggest that punishing criminals is not an effective deterant because there has been shown a causal relationship between punishment and reduced future crime...

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Spiker439

I really didn't want to talk about God and free will in this thread - there's another one going for that. Either way, you make an interesting point about determinism and jails, etc. I suppose that jails could be construed as causing less crime, and so they would be deterrents, but it seems counterintuitive to me. Are you saying that if I kill someone, I go to jail so that other people will thereby be deterred from killing? No, I think I'm going to jail because I killed someone. What about the Black and Jones case, any thoughts?

Zyr

To quote a t-shirt: "Some people are alive only because it's illegal to kill them"

You aren't in jail because you killed that person. You are in jail so others will go "Hey, I don't want to go to jail", so you will go "Hey I'd better not kill anymore people when I get out, or I'll go to jail", and to physically prevent you from killing more people during that period of detainment. Putting you in jail doesn't bring back the dead guy. You go to jail to maintain the integrity of the judicial system, so that order in general, is kept.

As to whether or not you should be held responsible, yes, you should. More and more often I'm hearing that criminals are "products of society", that pedophiles were abused as children, etc. Punishment has nothing to do with your specific crime, but more the crime in general.

When you make choices, you go through a thought process, which is influenced by previous experiences, etc. While some would take the view that this means you have no free will, I would say that the fact that you are able to make these choices is free will. Just because you are able to say that a series of events caused you to make the decision that you did, doesn't mean you didn't make the choice. Perhaps you should have considered the consequences more heavily into your thought process.



Hmmm, slightly disjointed, but there you go.

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Omnia mutantu, nos et mutamur in illis.
All things change, and we change with them.
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Mantus

If you have a machine that does not work as it should what do you do?Decommission it or fix it. That is the essence of our justice system. The only role that free will plays in our justice system is in abolishing the blame from those dispensing the punishment.

1010011010

Free will does not exist in a universe with an omniscient creator. All apparent choices made in the universe are subordinate to the choice of the omniscient creator to create this particular universe in which these particular choice are to be made. If it is merely an omnicient being (i.e not a/the creator), free will is possible for those reasons discussed in the prior thread.

As for free will and responsibility...
If we have free will, then people are responsible for their actions and there is no blame in holding people responsble.
If we do not have free will, then people are not responsible for their actions- including the action of holding others responsible- so there is still no blame in holding peple responsible. He had no coice but to commit a crime, and the various representatives of the justice system had no choice but to take him to trail, sentencing, and execution.

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Simple Machines in Higher Dimensions

Spiker439

If no one is responsible for anything, aren't we just the sum of our experiences acting without control? Doesn't this take the agent completely out of the causal chain? I don't think you can just take the agent out of the causal chain and say "Well, you've got experience A, plus experience B, ad infinitum, equals result A, given set experiences A, B,..." I think agents have a role to play in causation, namely that we act upon our experiences to produce the action, and not that the experiences directly produce the action, which it seems to me that some of you are saying. Doesn't it seem counterintuitive to say that experiences produce results? An experience, or even reason for that matter, can't produce anything on it's own, not without an agent.

Zyr

An agent produces results based on it's experiences, how ever, we must still hold people responsible. Society holding people responsible is another experience for an agent. It may very well affect his decision to kill, etc.

__________________
"Oh, irony! Oh, no, no, we don't get that here. See, uh, people ski topless here while smoking dope, so irony's not really a high priority. We haven't had any irony here since about, uh, '83 when I was the only practitioner of it, and I stopped because I was tired of being stared at."

Omnia mutantu, nos et mutamur in illis.
All things change, and we change with them.
- Neil Gaiman, Marvel 1602

1010011010

The entire idea of an agent came about from the belief that the human body is, more or less, a biological robot acting on behalf, and/or at the direction, of the soul/spirit/anima/etc

If we think of a human as a biological robot running the program of its experiences... then a human is no longer an agent as it manifests no will... it just runs programs. This presents no particular problem as far as responsibility goes, because there would be some LegalBots with a program to remove CrimeBots with faulty programming.

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Simple Machines in Higher Dimensions

asaris

It's not an either/or; we don't have to choose between being substance dualists or not having free will. Even a strict materialist could, depending on how she defined free will, believe in free will. And certainly property dualists and emergentists are going to be able to have something similar to the traditional view.

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"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

Jinn

The conundrum that Frankfurt proposes (and later, Striker) is that of being a determined agent yet still exercising free-will, which is the reason I believe we've structured our legal system in the way that we have. If we are to allow that an entity can be determined, we can still not conclusively say that their actions weren't the result of free will. A defense of criminal insanity, for example, proves nothing about the defendant's state of free will.

Unfortunately, you could be in a determined system to murder (murderous insanity) and yet murder simply out of free-will and not the determination of the insanity. Another example would be that of a man holding a gun to your head, forcing you to kill other people. In this situation, it could be argued that you're a determined entity and not one exercising free will -- but what if you wanted to kill people, but felt it was societally unacceptable? The determinant in this case is just a handy excuse that you were determined, and not acting out of free will. Our legal system would likely pardon or lessen your sentence with a gun-to-my-head defense, even without knowing if you would have murdered those people otherwise. I think its unfortunate, but it's the only equitable way in which we can dispense justice.

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