An Agnostic Manifesto

[Leela]

Well, if we came to believe in determinism, we would have no basis of justice.

What I was arguing is that this notion of everyone believing that they all of their choices are determined by forces not themselves is incoherent and therefore nothing to fear. This whole issue only comes up for those who posit an beneficent, omniscient, and omnipotent being who could control everything. It is only the result of a theological need to explain evil by further positing an extra-added ingredient called “free will.” Those who do not use theological explanations say that humans make choices and that the universe has discoverable patterns that can be used to make predictions including the choices that humans make, and they see no contradiction between the two notions.

If it is true then legal systems and systems of morality have no real basis whatsoever. If determinism is true then in reality I need not act morally. And if I honestly believed this, why not? You’d have no basis for telling me I’m wrong and to “stop” doing what I’m doing. The only true thing you could say is “You had no choice, and you are not responsible for having 6 million people killed.” Not that I think determinism or metaphysical naturalism are true.

On the other hand, if we acknowledge free will, we do have responsibility for our actions, and can make moral statements and judgments. If reality is otherwise, we cannot. Obviously we can linguistically-speaking, but it contradicts objective reality.

Scientific inquiry in a pragmatic understanding is the attempt to find a coherent description of the world that will best enable us to to predict and control our environment. The fact that when we are doing science we are always looking for causes does not mean that scientists need to take sides on a metaphysical debate between free will and determinism. A scientific methodological pose of accepting determinism has no metaphysical implications. It doesn’t need to include the belief that our scientific models are something more than tools for copying reality and rather hand us that one True account of reality. A physicist need not take his description of a table as any more to the point of what the table really is than the description offered by a carpenter or a person who will use the table for any other purpose. The methodological pose of of a physicist toward determinism need not necessarily apply to any other behaviors where we she is not engaged in trying to predict and control the sorts of things she wants to predict and control.

In seeking justice through courts of law, we are not trying to predict or control anything so much as decide guilt or innocence, so we take a different methodological pose that supposes that people have such things as intentions. We do so because it is easier to predict what humans will do if we apply the notion and because our moral intuitions tell us that intentions and not just consequences matter when one person’s behavior results in the behavior of another. We don’t blame a person who was pushed out of a window and injured someone he landed on, we blame the one who did the pushing. In doing so we are not saying that the one who pushed had more of that extra-added ingredient called free will than the one who fell. All we must accept is the notion that anyone in the pusher’s circumstances shouldn’t push. We think that the pusher could have behaved differently while the person failing could not. This is a method we use for assigning culpability rather than a metaphysical assertion about about the existence or nonexistence of an added ingredient to biological homo sapiens called “free will.” This method like all of our practices is held as one that perhaps could be improved rather than held to be simply Natural and grounded in a foundational notion called “free will.”

 

[awatkins69]

In seeking justice through courts of law, we are not trying to predict or control anything so much as decide guilt or innocence, (guilo so we take a different methodological pose that supposes that people have such things as intentions. We do so because it is easier to predict what humans will do if we apply the notion and because our moral intuitions tell us that intentions and not just consequences matter when one person’s behavior results in the behavior of another. We don’t blame a person who was pushed out of a window and injured someone he landed on, we blame the one who did the pushing. In doing so we are not saying that the one who pushed had more of that extra-added ingredient called free will than the one who fell. All we must accept is the notion that anyone in the pusher’s circumstances shouldn’t push. We think that the pusher could have behaved differently while the person failing could not. This is a method we use for assigning culpability rather than a metaphysical assertion about about the existence or nonexistence of an added ingredient to biological homo sapiens called “free will.” This method like all of our practices is held as one that perhaps could be improved rather than held to be simply Natural and grounded in a foundational notion called “free will.”

Hi Leela. Culpability, in the moral sense, can only be attributed to a free agent.“We think that the pusher could have behaved differently”. Well, the necessary consequence of a naturalistic worldview is that they could not have behaved differently. No matter what combination you give it, matter does not produce consciousness or free agency.

As for your earlier post, if one refuses to sit down and make a move, you cannot be checkmated.

 

[Leela]

Hi Leela. Culpability, in the moral sense, can only be attributed to a free agent.“We think that the pusher could have behaved differently”. Well, the necessary consequence of a naturalistic worldview is that they could not have behaved differently. No matter what combination you give it, matter does not produce consciousness or free agency.

Perhaps some people think of things in that way (and such a person might even claim that he has no choice but to believe in free will), but those who subscribe to such a view of naturalistic determinism and would apply it to our justice system (if there are such people) recognize that another person in the same situation wouldn’t push the guy out the window, which is all that is needed to convince anyone that someone who is likely to push others out windows ought to be reformed or separated from society indefinitely. So I can see no reason whatsoever to think that if people stop talking about an extra-added ingredient called Free Will that we will not be able to deal with criminals.

As for your earlier post, if one refuses to sit down and make a move, you cannot be checkmated.

Something like that. I’m saying that I am unwilling to accept your basic premises that something can’t come from nothing and that there can be no infinite chain of causation, so I can’t see how that conversation about the proofs can proceed. And you are correct to infer that I am not interested in trying to convince you about where exactly Aquinas went wrong. I’ve been round and round with enough others on the subject to have no expectation of reaching consensus. But it is worth noting that there exists no broad consensus of these proofs among intellectuals. If these proofs are so incontrovertible, why do you suppose that God is not considered to be proven beyond any reasonable doubt in academic circles in the way that, say, the Pythagorean Theorem or the germ theory of disease is known to be have been proven?

 

[awatkins69]

So that would make our legal system a means purely of utility, not of justice. And again, we could not make *any *ethical statements with a grounding in reality. True statements could only be those which express some physical reality. For me, this is absurd, but people who must cling on to their errors would admit it.

I think that even Saint Thomas did not consider them necessarily to be proofs but rather evidence for the existence of God. I would say that there is nothing to provide reasonable doubt as to the principles non-contradiction and actus et potentia.That is, you certainly have no *reason *to doubt them.

 

[Leela]

So that would make our legal system a means purely of utility, not of justice.

Not that I subscribe exclusively to naturalistic determinism, but if I did, you may be right that it would deny the dichotomy philosophers have tried to make between prudence and morality. If you are excluding all talk of intentions, and focussing only on consequences, then there would indeed be nothing to distinguish prudence from morality. But note also that there has traditionally been the idea of enlightened self interest, that doing good is good for the one who does it (all the “gifts of the spirit” Catholic talk for example), which also blurs that distinction. Justice and utility need not be thought of as opposed to one another when doing good is thought to be its own reward, which is how I think most of us would like to think about goodness.

And again, we could not make *any *ethical statements with a grounding in reality. True statements could only be those which express some physical reality. For me, this is absurd, but people who must cling on to their errors would admit it.

Beliefs are habits of action. To believe something is to be prepared to act in certain ways under certain conditions. True statements are ones which when believed lead to successful action. On this take on belief and truth there is no metaphysical grounding or restriction to physical reality needed here.

Your issue of ethical statements is a matter of whether it makes sense to say that “oughts” can be true given a picture of humans as being caused to do what they do. You think it only makes sense for “oughts” to be true if humans can choose to do what they do. My view is that causes are only of interest when we are trying to make predictions about what others will do. W don’t have to decide between metaphysical realities about what is REALLY going on (whether people really choose or have their choices made for them). We can just think in terms of causes for whatever purposes it is useful to do so and think in terns of intentions for whatever purposes it is useful to do so without ever making a ruling about what is the one TRUE perspective. They are both true because they both lead us to successful action for different purposes. It is impossible to think of one’s self as not REALLY making choices, and it is often useful to think of the choices of others being explainable based on environmental and internal conditions. We don’t have to decide which is the one of these is the TRUE way of seeing things any more than we have to decide between rectangular and polar coordinates as the one true way of locating a point in a plane.

That said, even though mine is not the position of the naturalistic determinist who does see causation as a metaphysical reality rather than as an often useful methodological pose (especially when doing science), I still think that your objection to that position in terns of ethics does not hold up. It is no more problematic to say that sometimes people are caused to do things that they ought not do than to say that they sometimes choose to do things that they ought not do.

I think that even Saint Thomas did not consider them necessarily to be proofs but rather evidence for the existence of God.

This is good for you to say since earlier you seemed to be making comments about how anyone who does not believe in God is simply being irrational. I understand where the temptation to say such things comes from given that it is exactly the sort of attack that atheists have often tried to make on religious belief, but I don’t think either side of the debate ought to claim that they are the ones who possess Reason and that the other side has an allergy to be rational. It doesn’t help dialogue, and it just isn’t true. Everyone tries to have good reasons for their beliefs and ought to be interested in new evidence and arguments when they become available. And anyone not willing to give the other side the benefit of any doubt on the matter ought to not bother trying to converse with such people believed to be so unreasonable.

 

[Mystic_Banana]

True statements are ones which when believed lead to successful action. On this take on belief and truth there is no metaphysical grounding or restriction to physical reality needed here.

Hmmm - I’m not sure I’d quite go along with this. There are such things as false positives, and you can have multiple different groundings leading to successful actions, based on entirely different understandings, only some (or one, or perhaps none) based on understanding of things as they actually are (i.e. are correct).

The movements of the stars were essentially successfully calculated according to the belief in a geocentric world, to highlight a popular favourite… and presumably medicine based on the 4 humors seemed quite efficatious!

Similarly, I often think the role of a psychotherapist is very similar to that of a Priest in confession… and I’m sure we can find statistics to show that both of them are better than the other

Then again, of course, to continue to split hairs, there is also the issue of what ‘success’ is!

 

[Mystic_Banana]

People around here who speak Aristotelian tend to think that they are speaking a special language called Philosophy that everyone else has an obligation to learn. It has to be one of the ugliest languages ever invented. That isn’t so surprising when you recall that the whole enterprise began with Plato subordinating the Good to the True. We are supposed to be this sort of “Rational” even if it isn’t any good.

Well, personally I think they’re both overrated… still, beats what seems the current kind of rational, which I’ve a tendency to think is anything but… and the same could easily be said of science or theology (althougfh technically speaking, both are essentially applied philosophy anyway, so…)