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Post by permutojoe on Jul 4, 2017 18:00:01 GMT
It works like a charm at an individual level too but it seems to me that it's a blue pill solution, which philosophically speaking should not be encouraged. Well philisophically speaking one has to justify why anything should or shouldn't be encouraged. I feel an advantage of pragmatism over its rivals is its self-justifying - the reason we assess concepts on their utility is because that is a useful way to assess something. While as to take logical positivism as a rival, the stance to accept only that which can be verified is itself not a verifiable stance meaning the logical positivist has to make an exception to its own rules to justify itself. Another advantage is that the noumenal is by definition unknowable so why waste time on trying to find out what it is like when one can instead focus on what is worthwhile believing that it might be like. I'm a bit flummoxed on how best to respond to that because I see so many potential holes in it. I think at the basest level I disagree with your dichotomy of truth vs utility. Are you able to define utility in a way that truth in and of itself cannot have a high utility? To go back to the Matrix example this feels like a simple red vs blue pill question. There are perhaps no right or wrong answers. Just a matter of personal preference.
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The Lost One
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Post by The Lost One on Jul 4, 2017 18:43:30 GMT
I'm a bit flummoxed on how best to respond to that because I see so many potential holes in it. I think at the basest level I disagree with your dichotomy of truth vs utility. Are you able to define utility in a way that truth in and of itself cannot have a high utility? Truth can have a high utility. It's useful that my watch tells the truth or else I'll be late for work. But if I had no appointments to keep, the truth of my watch would have no utility bar satisfying my idle curiousity. If of course you really value truth for its own sake, then it is of much greater utility. But when it comes to metaphysics, you're likely to be disappointed by what truth you can glean. And if you don't value truth that much, why should you? I don't necessarily disagree with that.
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Post by Eva Yojimbo on Jul 4, 2017 21:30:32 GMT
- If hard determinism is true, moral desert is not justified and should not be implemented
Haven't read the whole thread, but this is simply incorrect. The only thing that changes in the HD/L dichotomy is who/what "you" are and "will" is. Under L, both are vague entities outside the laws of physics that act; under HD, both are arrangements of matter within the laws of physics that act. In either case, "moral desert" is about influencing the way they act, and this works just as well under either. It really makes no sense to say that under HD that "you" don't have a "choice" because this is implicitly assuming that "you" and "your choice" are still the thing(s) that L says you are; but if you're the thing HD says you are, then "you" are most certainly what did it, and your "choice" was simply what "you" did, and "physics made me do it" is no more an excuse than "the devil made me do it" would be under L. Good article on this important point: lesswrong.com/lw/r0/thou_art_physics/
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The Lost One
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Post by The Lost One on Jul 4, 2017 21:44:45 GMT
- If hard determinism is true, moral desert is not justified and should not be implemented
Haven't read the whole thread, but this is simply incorrect. The only thing that changes in the HD/L dichotomy is who/what "you" are and "will" is. Under L, both are vague entities outside the laws of physics that act; under HD, both are arrangements of matter within the laws of physics that act. In either case, "moral desert" is about influencing the way they act, and this works just as well under either. It really makes no sense to say that under HD that "you" don't have a "choice" because this is implicitly assuming that "you" and "your choice" are still the thing(s) that L says you are; but if you're the thing HD says you are, then "you" are most certainly what did it, and your "choice" was simply what "you" did, and "physics made me do it" is no more an excuse than "the devil made me do it" would be under L. Good article on this important point: lesswrong.com/lw/r0/thou_art_physics/It seems if anything that link could be said to cast doubt on moral desert if libertarianism is true rather than justify moral desert if HD is true. If our choices are determined, how can we be said to merit rewards or punishment based on them?
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Post by permutojoe on Jul 4, 2017 22:16:14 GMT
Isn't moral desert justified regardless, since it sets up a mechanism whereby good behavior is actively promoted and actuated? Our justice system is an important part of maintaining a stable society and I want it in place regardless of whether free will exists.
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Post by The Lost One on Jul 4, 2017 22:36:41 GMT
Isn't moral desert justified regardless, since it sets up a mechanism whereby good behavior is actively promoted and actuated? Our justice system is an important part of maintaining a stable society and I want it in place regardless of whether free will exists. Sort of. You are right that there are practical reasons to usually punish those who do bad and reward those who do good. But that in itself is not desert (imo) because this would also justify punishing a good person who everyone thought bad or rewarding a bad person who everyone thought good. If you think this unfair then it shows this practical defense of desert is lacking. Now if moral desert is never justified anyway, then the notion of this being unfair disappears.
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Post by permutojoe on Jul 4, 2017 23:25:16 GMT
"because this would also justify punishing a good person who everyone thought bad or rewarding a bad person who everyone thought good."
Don't see how this follows. This type of thing does happen of course but it's hardly required or justified in preserving the desired cause and effect of a justice system that ultimately wants to promote good behavior. My guess is the real reason it happens is because the sheriff doesn't want to get run out of town or the judge doesn't want to get voted out of office. Neither of these scenarios has any bearing here.
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Post by Eva Yojimbo on Jul 4, 2017 23:51:29 GMT
Haven't read the whole thread, but this is simply incorrect. The only thing that changes in the HD/L dichotomy is who/what "you" are and "will" is. Under L, both are vague entities outside the laws of physics that act; under HD, both are arrangements of matter within the laws of physics that act. In either case, "moral desert" is about influencing the way they act, and this works just as well under either. It really makes no sense to say that under HD that "you" don't have a "choice" because this is implicitly assuming that "you" and "your choice" are still the thing(s) that L says you are; but if you're the thing HD says you are, then "you" are most certainly what did it, and your "choice" was simply what "you" did, and "physics made me do it" is no more an excuse than "the devil made me do it" would be under L. Good article on this important point: lesswrong.com/lw/r0/thou_art_physics/It seems if anything that link could be said to cast doubt on moral desert if libertarianism is true rather than justify moral desert if HD is true. If our choices are determined, how can we be said to merit rewards or punishment based on them? The point of rewards and punishments are to influence future behavior, both our own and those of others. This applies regardless of whether HD or L is true. Our choices may be determined, but this doesn't mean that their determining isn't affected by things like rewards and punishments. The point of the article is that, because we are within physics, what we do affects other physical systems.We are part of the deterministic chain, and by virtue of being part of it we can influence it, and that's where notions like "moral desert" comes in. If rewards and punishments had no tangible, physical affects, we probably wouldn't care about them.
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Post by The Lost One on Jul 5, 2017 6:28:28 GMT
It seems if anything that link could be said to cast doubt on moral desert if libertarianism is true rather than justify moral desert if HD is true. If our choices are determined, how can we be said to merit rewards or punishment based on them? The point of rewards and punishments are to influence future behavior, both our own and those of others. This applies regardless of whether HD or L is true. Our choices may be determined, but this doesn't mean that their determining isn't affected by things like rewards and punishments. The point of the article is that, because we are within physics, what we do affects other physical systems.We are part of the deterministic chain, and by virtue of being part of it we can influence it, and that's where notions like "moral desert" comes in. If rewards and punishments had no tangible, physical affects, we probably wouldn't care about them. See my reply to permutojoe above your post. I'm not saying there is not good reason for rewards and punishments in a hard deterministic world, I'm saying that in such a system "deserve's got nothing to do with it". So here's an illustration of what I mean. Dunno if you heard much about this case, but there was a beloved entertainer in the UK called Jimmy Saville. By the time he died, he had earned a fortune and got a bucketload of commendations for his charity work. It came out a couple of years later that he was an extremely predatory child abuser. He went from beloved to despised and was posthumously stripped of many of his commendations such as his knighthood. Now suppose the truth had never come out about Saville. As far as the vast majority of the population are concerned he would still be thought of as a very good man. Suppose you knew the truth about him but for some reason you couldn't convince the world about it (perhaps you were one of the people he abused). If HD is true, you would have to logically concede that it is right for him to be well thought of and lauded with rewards during his lifetime even though he was a child abuser. Since most of society thought him a good man then it is good for society to see him rewarded. Now most people would say moral desert goes beyond this. They would say Saville did not merit all these good things whatever the social benefit of seeing him get them because deep down he was bad and bad people shouldn't get good things. But if HD is true, this is a foolish way to look at things. Thinking Saville accountable for his actions would be like thinking an earthquake accountable. However if L is true, Saville had a real choice to do other than what it was determined he do and one could therefore legitimately say he should get bad things regardless of the effect this would have on society.
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Post by The Lost One on Jul 5, 2017 6:46:40 GMT
Don't see how this follows. This type of thing does happen of course but it's hardly required or justified in preserving the desired cause and effect of a justice system that ultimately wants to promote good behavior. Why not? If the goal is to promote good behaviour then anything which does so could be allowed. If someone were to assess that rewarding a bad person in a particular instance were more likely to lead to good behaviour than punishing him would then that is what should be done under HD. To argue otherwise would be to say bad people deserve punishment because they did bad not solely for the purposes of promoting good behaviour. And that stance requires free will. If the sheriff or judge does a decent job at promoting good behaviour then that could be a legitimate reason. Suppose a good sheriff hangs a murderer that most people think is a good man. The people then riot and drive him out of town. It seems good behaviour has suffered. So should he have let the murderer go and rewarded him in this instance even knowing of his guilt?
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Post by Eva Yojimbo on Jul 6, 2017 1:11:00 GMT
The point of rewards and punishments are to influence future behavior, both our own and those of others. This applies regardless of whether HD or L is true. Our choices may be determined, but this doesn't mean that their determining isn't affected by things like rewards and punishments. The point of the article is that, because we are within physics, what we do affects other physical systems.We are part of the deterministic chain, and by virtue of being part of it we can influence it, and that's where notions like "moral desert" comes in. If rewards and punishments had no tangible, physical affects, we probably wouldn't care about them. Now suppose the truth had never come out about Saville. As far as the vast majority of the population are concerned he would still be thought of as a very good man. Suppose you knew the truth about him but for some reason you couldn't convince the world about it (perhaps you were one of the people he abused). If HD is true, you would have to logically concede that it is right for him to be well thought of and lauded with rewards during his lifetime even though he was a child abuser. Since most of society thought him a good man then it is good for society to see him rewarded.
...But if HD is true, this is a foolish way to look at things. Thinking Saville accountable for his actions would be like thinking an earthquake accountable. However if L is true, Saville had a real choice to do other than what it was determined he do and one could therefore legitimately say he should get bad things regardless of the effect this would have on society. I don't think the part in bold follows at all. We've determined that child abusers are bad for society, and if someone is a child abuser they do not deserve to be thought of as a good person and lauded for their accomplishments. Just because someone who's a child abuser isn't caught doesn't mean they aren't deserving of punishment and denouncement by the moral standards set by society. This is an issue with understanding the truth, not moral deserts (the latter follows from the former). We hold Saville accountable because Saville is who did it, and holding him accountable stands as a warning for anyone else that tries to do the same thing. Again, thinking otherwise is implicitly assuming the L view to begin with, that just because "you" are made-up of a deterministic physical system that "you" can't be accountable. That's just not true. We don't hold earthquakes accountable because doing so doesn't influence them to not do what they do. If holding earthquakes accountable decreased the number of earthquakes, or suppressed the desires of the earthquake gods to do it, then that's what we would do. I don't know what you mean by "real choice" and how you differentiate it from any kind of choice. Even if HD is true, I can't go around saying "I choose to do whatever I was predetermined to do," I actually have to make a choice. The only thing that changes under HD is who "I" am and how the choice is made. "I" am just a deterministic physical machine, and my "choice" is whatever that deterministic physical machine does. What the deterministic physical machine does, however, is tremendously affected by the inputs it receives from external reality including social morals. Like Yudkowsky says in that link, if reality wasn't ordered and deterministic, it's hard to imagine how it would even be possible to have influence over things (including the thoughts/actions of others).
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Post by The Lost One on Jul 6, 2017 7:21:16 GMT
Again, thinking otherwise is implicitly assuming the L view to begin with, that just because "you" are made-up of a deterministic physical system that "you" can't be accountable. Well L and HD agree what free will is which is why they're both incompatibilist positions. Your stance seems more like compatibilism to me. I feel though that's not what most people mean when they say someone deserves to be in jail or deserves a reward. The paedophile deserves jail because he is (for want of a better word) wicked. If hd is true though, people can't help being wicked anymore than a fire can help being hot. If of course you disagree with this common view of desert then we have no argument. Again this sounds more like C than HD. Though if any form of determinism is true, choice is no more than an awareness of options that no-one external to yourself is forcing upon you. Not really. You don't seem to me to really be comparing L and HD so much as physical determinism and a more complex form of determinism where other potential determined factors (eg the nature of your soul) occasionally carry more weight than the physical determined factors. You could maybe call this Calvinist determinism. But Calvin did not think moral desert justified - no-one deserves to be saved re Calvinism but some are lucky enough that God saves them. L is different. It can be defined as the position that free actions are: - The product of an act of will - Have no causal antecedent - But are not random Another way to look at is whenever we make choice a, there is another possible world where we made choice b instead. And it is will itself that has power over which possible world we go to. Now you might think such a concept makes no sense. And I would probably agree. But that's acknowledged in my premises - it doesn't matter if a concept is incoherent, only if it carries high utility to accept. I don't think that follows. Libertarians acknowledge influence. But they say it only determines the reasons we have for choosing a and b, it doesn't determine which we pick.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 7, 2017 14:43:15 GMT
Does that mean the selected model would remain unverifiable /unfalsifiable? Quite possibly. It doesn't really matter if the model's truth/falsehood cannot be demonstrated so long as the utility of its acceptance can. I was trying to think of a way this would be distinguished form compatibilism as I understand it. An unfalsifiable libertarian free will would be existing as a sign/symbol that enables agents to be something other than they are. So people with "magic gem" also have libertarian free will and people who behave like those with "magic gem" may also be said to have it. The core difference I see is that if you exist in a world where "determinist literature" is proliferated to such an extent that not believing in the libertarian free will may incapacitate people. Like Dennett's irresponsible neuroscientist speech. So yes, there is pragmatic value to libertarianism in such worlds, I agree fully with that. I suppose we arguably exist in such a world currently. The difference between compatibilism and libertarianism seems to me that the former is science apathetic (agency is assumed, and ontologically real to add, it just happens to rely on determinism). There isn't a single experiment that could disprove it exists because free will is about being responsible for yourself and actions over the course of an entire life. The latter is interested in exploring specific questions about the nature of agency. I'm interested in the libertarian stuff more because I find it more interesting metaphysically, although Dennett's put-down of Sam Harris' free will book was a good read, and funny too.
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Post by The Lost One on Jul 7, 2017 15:54:16 GMT
The difference between compatibilism and libertarianism seems to me that the former is science apathetic (agency is assumed, and ontologically real to add, it just happens to rely on determinism). There isn't a single experiment that could disprove it exists because free will is about being responsible for yourself and actions over the course of an entire life. The latter is interested in exploring specific questions about the nature of agency. True, I hadn't really looked at it quite like that before. Out of interest do you find any of the suggested libertarian models compelling? Haven't read that but think I will have to definitely check that out!
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Post by Eva Yojimbo on Jul 7, 2017 19:04:00 GMT
Again, thinking otherwise is implicitly assuming the L view to begin with, that just because "you" are made-up of a deterministic physical system that "you" can't be accountable. Well L and HD agree what free will is which is why they're both incompatibilist positions. Your stance seems more like compatibilism to me. My stance is compatibilism, but I don't see how even under HD that you can't hold someone accountable for their actions. Like I said, all that's really changed is what "you" are and what "will/act" is. It's probably not what most people mean but people are pretty bad at figuring out the real causes and sources of their intuition. Most people probably just intuitively feel a sense of fairness and balance when it comes to moral desert, but the reason we feel that is precisely because we want to keep people and society under a rule so that people aren't free to go around harming other people. In the end, it's that harm we're trying to prevent, both from those that do the harm and from those that would consider doing it. This simply gets expressed as a feeling of fairness, balance, justice--call it what you will. I still maintain that the difference between the fire/earthquake and the paedophile (we should really say child abuser, since not all paedophiles are abusers) is that we have the ability to influence the actions of the latter but not the former. Even though they're equally determined, what determines them is very different. And again I am C, but I also think it applies equally for HD. The biggest difference between those two stances is semantic--the definition of free will--but I don't see any other major differences when it comes to ideas like moral desert, causality/determinism, actions, etc. It's possible I'm a bit confused on the labels but even with your explanation here I'm not really seeing what you think I'm confusing. You can see my bit above about not seeing any real differences between C and HD other than the semantic aspect. Even if you say it's the reasons that are determined then I would think it would follow that the choice itself would be transitively determined since it was the reasons that made us choose whatever we chose.
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Post by The Lost One on Jul 8, 2017 9:22:14 GMT
Even if you say it's the reasons that are determined then I would think it would follow that the choice itself would be transitively determined since it was the reasons that made us choose whatever we chose. Well here's the issue - I kinda agree. But if that were true, it would not be libertarianism. For L to be true, our reasons must inform but not cause our decisions which must, as Kant put it, be a first cause in themselves. I suppose a way you might look at it is suppose we have a choice between X and Y, and we have more compelling reasons (both logical and emotional) for doing X over Y. For a proponent of C or HD, it is thereby determined you will do X. For a proponent of L, the reasons might increase your likelihood to do X but you can still do Y as an act of pure will. What is pure will and how can we think of it in a non-determinist fashion (because saying it's something like the nature of the soul or karma is still deterministic)? I have no idea. It seems either it does not exist or it is beyond human comprehension (or at least my comprehension anyway). The argument I'm making is that there may be pragmatic reasons to assume the latter rather than the former. As for your point about where our intuitions of desert come from, it's quite plausible. But that's what I meant by moral desert, this common (and perhaps, ill-conceived) conception of it. If by moral desert you mean merely the preventative measures for bad behaviour, then I agree this exists under HD. However if L were true, it seems the intuitive sense of desert would not be so ill-conceived after all. In which sense it would be worse for someone not to get their just deserts under L than it would be under HD.
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Post by permutojoe on Jul 15, 2017 12:13:53 GMT
Don't see how this follows. This type of thing does happen of course but it's hardly required or justified in preserving the desired cause and effect of a justice system that ultimately wants to promote good behavior. Why not? If the goal is to promote good behaviour then anything which does so could be allowed. If someone were to assess that rewarding a bad person in a particular instance were more likely to lead to good behaviour than punishing him would then that is what should be done under HD. To argue otherwise would be to say bad people deserve punishment because they did bad not solely for the purposes of promoting good behaviour. And that stance requires free will. If the sheriff or judge does a decent job at promoting good behaviour then that could be a legitimate reason. Suppose a good sheriff hangs a murderer that most people think is a good man. The people then riot and drive him out of town. It seems good behaviour has suffered. So should he have let the murderer go and rewarded him in this instance even knowing of his guilt? Can't we just assume an ideal case where the system does everything it can to get it right and is set up not to engage in these type of shenanigans? I'm still on my first cup of coffee so maybe I'm mistaken but I don't know that the shortcomings of a real world system can be used to define it in a metaphysical discussion.
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Post by The Lost One on Jul 16, 2017 9:34:21 GMT
Can't we just assume an ideal case where the system does everything it can to get it right and is set up not to engage in these type of shenanigans? I'm still on my first cup of coffee so maybe I'm mistaken but I don't know that the shortcomings of a real world system can be used to define it in a metaphysical discussion. But are these shortcomings? The ideal for the pragmatist is what works. If what works involves unpleasantness then so be it. If we say that an ideal world wouldn't let people ever get away with vile acts then we need to say why such a world would be less than ideal. If we take libertarianism to be true then that might give us a reason to object to such a world. But if we remove any concept of desert beyond that which is necessary to ensure good behaviour then it seems that the world where occasionally people should be let off for vile crimes or not rewarded for great deeds is ideal so long as future good behaviour is unaffected.
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