One of the best interviews on this channel. I might just be saying that because I agree so much with the guest. I have thought that it is luck all the way down for so long. Its nice to hear an academic actually agreeing with this.
The moral aspect and notions of punishment with regard to free will is somethin I commonly hear from moral realists when they ask me about how we can punish murderers etc, and I always make the point that I simply wouldnt base my notions of punishment on morality, but rather use morality as a supplement for secondary guidance. To this end I tend to just base the notion of punishment on some line is thinking like: "mitigating further instances of X action/behavior occuring because such instances are notably problematic".
Rabinowitz seems to rely on what is effectively a Noble Lie of human equality to justify the positive outcomes he associates with embracing moral luck. However, the concept of human equality was developed in the context of moral blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. Without these concepts, it’s unclear why treating people differently based on "what" they are (their genetics and environment) would be wrong. If someone commits murder because of their genetics or environment, why should that matter? The fact that they, as an entity, murder seems sufficient to justify punishment. Similarly, if good genetics and environments produce praiseworthy people, why not reward them for their outcomes? Rabinowitz’s framework doesn’t seem to provide the resources to critique such a view in any meaningful way. Moreover, if moral luck has always been a factor, why did humans adopt customs and laws that punish and reward based on deservedness? This wasn’t because of a "just world illusion," but because evolution and civilization demanded them for survival. Rabinowitz's rejection of these traditions feels out of step with the practical realities that shaped them.
I don't know all Rabinowitz work, but I do think he's sort of utilitarian and he thinks the psychological harms of believing in deservedness outweigh societal benefits of a genetic or meritocratic caste system. I think a lot of this is tied into at the moral level there's again psychological harms in making someone believe they are lesser than someone else in some sort of intrinsic sense. Personally, I agree that this sort of "value just for being human" seems hard to ground in anything that isn't maybe theistic. But I don't think this is a practical problem for luckpilling at least not this way - the whole point is that the person isn't at some deep fault for things that happen. Think of something like height - if you're 5'7" you're not a worse person or a failure for not being in the NBA, or more specifically for not being 7' tall. I think the idea of mindfulness is how to accept and deal with your actual circumstances. On the justifying punishment - I guess it depends on what you consider punishment. I would suggest that luckpilling allows for separating dangerous people from the rest of society, it just doesn't think we should do so in an intentionally cruel or painful way. It seems like hurting someone just for fun as it were if the person is separated just because of luck. On the praiseworthy people due to genetics and environments - rewarding people for their outcomes: If you are just lucky - it seems weird to praise that in some moral sense. Lets say you win a coin toss - is that even a moral action at all? If everything in life comes down to toss of a coin - they're no more a moral action. Maybe you believe in participation trophies where just taking part is praiseworthy (or whatever the odd opposite of that is). However, if you're meritocratic usually you don't think accidents or random chance need to be rewarded or punished. If you can't control the outcome, what are you rewarding or punishing? What precedent or deterrent are you setting? I am pretty sure the timeframe for humans adopting laws is not long enough for biological evolution to have done any selection of note. It's not clear that deservedness exists in Rabinowitz framework, so you'd need to show that first. Did I deserve my parents? Or the time I was born? How does deservedness work if every event is completely luck all the way down? Also, admitting things are based on luck doesn't mean that it somehow makes civilization fail - it doesn't make much statements other than a strand of utilitarianism on how a whole bunch of civilization ought to work. It's mostly about how you weight utility in that framework - do the calculations sans meritocracy.
@@jamespulver3890 Moral luck doesn’t alter a purely utilitarian approach. As you noted, even under moral luck, punishment can remain a necessity, regardless of whether a person’s actions were determined by luck. However, moral luck introduces a notion of desert-suggesting that people don’t deserve certain treatment because their actions stem from luck. Philosophically, this proves too much. From the discussion, it appears moral luck mostly justifies policies like criminal justice reform or wealth redistribution. But its implications extend further. For instance, if moral luck applies to humans, why not extend it to non-human animals? We could imagine massive funding for programs that alleviate wild animal suffering, since their hardships result from luck. Traditional utilitarianism already struggles with the scope of such obligations, and a moral luck perspective magnifies these difficulties. Moreover, we can consider potential living beings. If it’s merely luck whether someone is ever born, maybe current populations should make substantial sacrifices-whether in standard of living or personal autonomy-to support future generations. I oppose overturning practical policies based on this kind of abstract philosophical reasoning. People invoke these arguments to support specific reforms, but the same line of thought often implies policies that almost no one-even the proponents-would truly accept. When a theoretical framework suggests we should stop letting productive individuals earn more or cease punishing dangerous people, something has gone wrong in the abstract reasoning, not in the practice.
“Moral luck” is just the allocation of moral responsibility assigned to parties based on moral principles developed in the original agreement (those principles developed behind the veil of ignorance). Even in the case of pure “luck” we can justly assign ownership of those luck based consequences. There is nothing arbitrary or mysterious about it.
So this is interesting in terms of how it make political sense. But does this apply to how we treat each other as individuals? Like if my mom tells my brother to stack the dishwasher and he doesn’t, is there really no moral blame there? If I do it instead and I get thanked for it, do I not deserve praise, is that praise a psychological trick my make me be more helpful? That seems like a really stupid way the think about it. Also in terms of free will. My bother could have stacked the dishwasher and he didn’t. He’s not a psychopath, he has an average amount of executive function, we have the same upbringing. How do we interpret that when there’s no exceptional moral luck that made the difference. Stacking the dish washer is such a benign thing anyone could do it, but he chose not to. Also how to we make sense of everyday language like thanking someone. Thanking assumes someone does something extra that they otherwise didn’t wise didn’t have to do. That’s what makes it deserving of thanks.
Your brother chose not to stack the dishes, but how do you know he could've chosen otherwise? What if you had been the person refusing instead? You're not different enough from him that you couldn't have been in that situation. I think that's where the "luck" comes in.
@I don’t think that the argument is that “I could have been the one refusing.” That makes the argument self interested, when I don’t think that’s the point. I think the argument is that whether i refused or not is luck, and whether my brother refused or not is also luck. But I’m proposing the same standard or ethical responsibility or “free will” used in law, which is the reasonable person standard. Me and my brother are both reasonable people, and a reasonable person would stack the dish washer. Reasonable people are in control of their actions, and can be held accountable for them. Unreasonable people are not in control of their actions, and we all understand the distinction between the two. And it may be luck that you were born a reasonable person, but it’s also luck you weren’t born a cat. What does this luck have to do with the fact that we are a reasonable person and have the ability to accept moral responsibility for our actions. Whether it’s me or my brother doesn’t matter.
Also nested inside of being a reasonable person we have another standard, which is that being good is hard and we have to try to be good. Being good is trying. How do we reconcile not being morally responsible for our good deeds with the fact that we work hard for it? Of that good act was inevitable then what is the feeling of work? If the bad act what inevitable, then what is the feeling of guilt?
@@idanzigm I think a main point of disagreement is that there are any reasonable people by your definition, because this point of view disputes that there is any control over your actions. I think there are two compelling arguments here. First - even in the common parlance usage - there's a continuous spectrum in cognitive ability between people and over time. How do we justify drawing a line when it's completely arbitrary? Appealing to law or custom is not satisfying philosophically to me because they're so contradictory and ad hoc. Consider even the concept of age of responsibility in the US. Generally we set this at 18, but you can't drink at 18 because... what, you're not responsible enough. Yet you're responsible enough to vote or go in the military or get a job. But wait, actually, you can get some jobs at 14. You can drive with some restrictions at 16. Age of consent varies. It seems incoherent to say there's this range of ages where we think legally you're responsible enough to do various things and yet also maintain a legal binary concept of "responsible adult" that is somewhere in the middle of the range. Forget about the bizarre idea legally that the "worse" the crime, the more likely we are to claim someone well under 18 is actually "an adult" for legal purposes. Now consider across people. There's some people who we never think reach a cognitive level that lets them "become a responsible adult". There's injury and illness that also change our evaluation. So given that the entire "capability" to be responsible is so fluid and incremental - we can attack any place along the line as unjustified. Now back to the control question. If you actively are making decisions unmoved by anything outside of you then you would have relevant control. Our legal system has an intuition that the less you were at ultimate relevant control the less responsible you could be. What do I mean by this? If you're driving a car and you hit a patch of ice and the car just slides where it's sliding, no matter how much you spin the wheel or hit the gas or brakes. If there's nothing you can do, holding you proximately responsible for a crash there seems wrong. You weren't in control. Ahh, but you say - you made the decision to drive when there was ice so you're responsible because of that. Well - the reason you were driving was because of other outside considerations - maybe you needed to get to work to not lose your job. Maybe you were trying to get to the hospital to visit an injured family member. Maybe you really wanted take out pizza. You didn't choose or control our capitalistic society that makes you need a job, you didn't choose our culture making you feel compelled to rush to the side of an injured family member, and you didn't choose the effects of hunger or what sorts of food would satisfy that hunger for you. And luckpilling would say you can pretty easily regress all this back to not choosing your parents or the culture where the reasonable person would load the dishwasher. You didn't have any control of that. One of the things I find compelling is stuff like the "hangry judge" research that shows that judges are harsher in sentencing on the same sorts of cases depending on how close it is to lunch because as they get hungry their judgement gets harsher. If you're actual judgement is changed based on subtle variations in your physical state that you're not easily (and maybe not at all) aware of I question how "in control" you are there. Same with many chemicals, many cultural norms, physical changes etc. Back to my spectrum, if you admit any ability for physical phenomenon to change your mental processes (and I'd say something as simple as Phineas Gauge or getting drunk proves that is occurring) then you have to deal with the problem of why and how you'd define which sorts of effects count as control impacting while others don't. Now how does this all tie together? Well, if everything about us - who we are, how we think, what abilities we have, what chemical balances are present etc are in a major sense imposed on us from outside, we're like a much more complicated version of a programmed robot. My intuition on a robot really never includes "it's culpable because it should have changed it's programming" - that seems kind of bizarre to me, at least in pre AI robots. But in a "reasonable person" sense it seems like the robot made decisions and took actions that it made and took. However, given the if then programming tree and physical capabilities of the robot, I don't think it could have done otherwise aside from perhaps randomly breaking down. In none of those cases would I ascribe moral duties or responsibility to it. Maybe you would? But then I don't see what a reasonable person standard would have to do with it - all objects in the world are assigned moral responsibility regardless of their intentions or if they even have intentions.
@@idanzigm In this case I'm not sure that "being good is hard". At least not in some general universal sense. Just like "doing math is hard" - no for some people it's really easy. Again, I think mental states are like height states - some people just are more inclined mentally to "be good" as defined by our society - evolution would work on that as fitting in a society is adaptive. Some senses of "being good" are much easier for some people outside the mental state too - One finds it a lot easier to "not steal" when one has lots of money. I think "working hard" for something is a maguffin. Lets take a thought experiment of the little old lady who forgot the key code to her building. One person lives in the building and knows the master code for the main door and just punches it in and lets the lady in the building. Almost no work at all. The second person doesn't live in the building so gets out their phone, starts trying to figure out the phone number, calls in to the landlord / office, goes over to that building to explain and bring the guard over to the little old lady and waits till she's let in. Person 2 worked a LOT harder, but does this mean person 1 did a *less* moral act? Maybe, but I wouldn't say Person 1 was not worthy of praise because the act of kindness was *easy* for them. On the inevitability of the actions - how we subjectively feel about something has no bearing on whether it was inevitable or not.
So basically, you define free will, control, moral responsibility, etc. as requiring magic and then say they don't exist because magic doesn't exist. I think some of the revisionist compatibilist accounts of these concepts do a better job of naturalizing and making sense of them. As Dennett used to say, "We have free will but it's not what you think it is."
@@lanceindependent That's kind of ambiguous. I think it makes sense to disambiguate between libertarian free will (which we don't have) and compatibilist free will (which we probably do). The compatibilist version that I accept involves taking a level of abstraction where we treat certain entities as agents with motivations and desires. Moral responsibility is usually attributed to an agent when that agent possesses certain mental competencies and can act with volition under suitable circumstances after deliberation.
How do these mental competencies get us close to a sense of retributive, "just desert" sense of moral responsibility? If they don't, and they just get us to something else instead, why are we calling *that* "moral responsibility"?
@@clashmanthethird I don't believe in basic desert moral responsibility. Moral responsibility is socially attributed to people. It's similar to the concept of maturity. We can disagree about what is required to consider someone to be morally responsible or mature. That doesn't mean they're not useful concepts for explaining why we consider some people to be morally responsible and others not. If we're going to be free will eliminativists, should we also be eliminativists about maturity?
@@captainbeefheart5815 If a large enough majority of the public had a very metaphysically loaded idea of maturity, where something magical emerged the second someone turns over 18, and this divine power of maturity was used as the justification for awful things happening to others...I guess I would probably favor eliminativism about maturity as well?
One of the best interviews on this channel. I might just be saying that because I agree so much with the guest. I have thought that it is luck all the way down for so long. Its nice to hear an academic actually agreeing with this.
Is strongly urge everyone to check out the Philosophers is Space podcast that Aaron co-hosts. It'a by far my most favorite podcast.
I will check it out based on this recommendation. Any specific episode to check out?
@lanceindependent an episode called "A Scanner Darkly and PKD High Weirdnes"
@@lanceindependent let me know how you like it
The moral aspect and notions of punishment with regard to free will is somethin I commonly hear from moral realists when they ask me about how we can punish murderers etc, and I always make the point that I simply wouldnt base my notions of punishment on morality, but rather use morality as a supplement for secondary guidance. To this end I tend to just base the notion of punishment on some line is thinking like: "mitigating further instances of X action/behavior occuring because such instances are notably problematic".
Rabinowitz seems to rely on what is effectively a Noble Lie of human equality to justify the positive outcomes he associates with embracing moral luck. However, the concept of human equality was developed in the context of moral blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. Without these concepts, it’s unclear why treating people differently based on "what" they are (their genetics and environment) would be wrong.
If someone commits murder because of their genetics or environment, why should that matter? The fact that they, as an entity, murder seems sufficient to justify punishment. Similarly, if good genetics and environments produce praiseworthy people, why not reward them for their outcomes? Rabinowitz’s framework doesn’t seem to provide the resources to critique such a view in any meaningful way.
Moreover, if moral luck has always been a factor, why did humans adopt customs and laws that punish and reward based on deservedness? This wasn’t because of a "just world illusion," but because evolution and civilization demanded them for survival. Rabinowitz's rejection of these traditions feels out of step with the practical realities that shaped them.
I don't know all Rabinowitz work, but I do think he's sort of utilitarian and he thinks the psychological harms of believing in deservedness outweigh societal benefits of a genetic or meritocratic caste system. I think a lot of this is tied into at the moral level there's again psychological harms in making someone believe they are lesser than someone else in some sort of intrinsic sense. Personally, I agree that this sort of "value just for being human" seems hard to ground in anything that isn't maybe theistic. But I don't think this is a practical problem for luckpilling at least not this way - the whole point is that the person isn't at some deep fault for things that happen. Think of something like height - if you're 5'7" you're not a worse person or a failure for not being in the NBA, or more specifically for not being 7' tall. I think the idea of mindfulness is how to accept and deal with your actual circumstances.
On the justifying punishment - I guess it depends on what you consider punishment. I would suggest that luckpilling allows for separating dangerous people from the rest of society, it just doesn't think we should do so in an intentionally cruel or painful way. It seems like hurting someone just for fun as it were if the person is separated just because of luck.
On the praiseworthy people due to genetics and environments - rewarding people for their outcomes: If you are just lucky - it seems weird to praise that in some moral sense. Lets say you win a coin toss - is that even a moral action at all? If everything in life comes down to toss of a coin - they're no more a moral action. Maybe you believe in participation trophies where just taking part is praiseworthy (or whatever the odd opposite of that is). However, if you're meritocratic usually you don't think accidents or random chance need to be rewarded or punished. If you can't control the outcome, what are you rewarding or punishing? What precedent or deterrent are you setting?
I am pretty sure the timeframe for humans adopting laws is not long enough for biological evolution to have done any selection of note. It's not clear that deservedness exists in Rabinowitz framework, so you'd need to show that first. Did I deserve my parents? Or the time I was born? How does deservedness work if every event is completely luck all the way down? Also, admitting things are based on luck doesn't mean that it somehow makes civilization fail - it doesn't make much statements other than a strand of utilitarianism on how a whole bunch of civilization ought to work. It's mostly about how you weight utility in that framework - do the calculations sans meritocracy.
@@jamespulver3890 Moral luck doesn’t alter a purely utilitarian approach. As you noted, even under moral luck, punishment can remain a necessity, regardless of whether a person’s actions were determined by luck. However, moral luck introduces a notion of desert-suggesting that people don’t deserve certain treatment because their actions stem from luck. Philosophically, this proves too much.
From the discussion, it appears moral luck mostly justifies policies like criminal justice reform or wealth redistribution. But its implications extend further. For instance, if moral luck applies to humans, why not extend it to non-human animals? We could imagine massive funding for programs that alleviate wild animal suffering, since their hardships result from luck. Traditional utilitarianism already struggles with the scope of such obligations, and a moral luck perspective magnifies these difficulties.
Moreover, we can consider potential living beings. If it’s merely luck whether someone is ever born, maybe current populations should make substantial sacrifices-whether in standard of living or personal autonomy-to support future generations.
I oppose overturning practical policies based on this kind of abstract philosophical reasoning. People invoke these arguments to support specific reforms, but the same line of thought often implies policies that almost no one-even the proponents-would truly accept. When a theoretical framework suggests we should stop letting productive individuals earn more or cease punishing dangerous people, something has gone wrong in the abstract reasoning, not in the practice.
Is this different than what Sam Harris said?
What video or substack post should i watch / read to get your take on semantic analysis of moral language ?
Oof, I don't know. There's like 120 videos now. Maybe someone in the comments has a better sense of what they'd recommend than I do.
where can i hear your discussion about moral realism?
On Embrace the Void: www.voidpod.com/podcasts/2024/6/17/moral-antirealism-with-lance-bush
“Moral luck” is just the allocation of moral responsibility assigned to parties based on moral principles developed in the original agreement (those principles developed behind the veil of ignorance). Even in the case of pure “luck” we can justly assign ownership of those luck based consequences. There is nothing arbitrary or mysterious about it.
So this is interesting in terms of how it make political sense. But does this apply to how we treat each other as individuals? Like if my mom tells my brother to stack the dishwasher and he doesn’t, is there really no moral blame there? If I do it instead and I get thanked for it, do I not deserve praise, is that praise a psychological trick my make me be more helpful? That seems like a really stupid way the think about it.
Also in terms of free will. My bother could have stacked the dishwasher and he didn’t. He’s not a psychopath, he has an average amount of executive function, we have the same upbringing. How do we interpret that when there’s no exceptional moral luck that made the difference. Stacking the dish washer is such a benign thing anyone could do it, but he chose not to.
Also how to we make sense of everyday language like thanking someone. Thanking assumes someone does something extra that they otherwise didn’t wise didn’t have to do. That’s what makes it deserving of thanks.
Your brother chose not to stack the dishes, but how do you know he could've chosen otherwise? What if you had been the person refusing instead? You're not different enough from him that you couldn't have been in that situation. I think that's where the "luck" comes in.
@I don’t think that the argument is that “I could have been the one refusing.” That makes the argument self interested, when I don’t think that’s the point. I think the argument is that whether i refused or not is luck, and whether my brother refused or not is also luck. But I’m proposing the same standard or ethical responsibility or “free will” used in law, which is the reasonable person standard.
Me and my brother are both reasonable people, and a reasonable person would stack the dish washer. Reasonable people are in control of their actions, and can be held accountable for them. Unreasonable people are not in control of their actions, and we all understand the distinction between the two. And it may be luck that you were born a reasonable person, but it’s also luck you weren’t born a cat. What does this luck have to do with the fact that we are a reasonable person and have the ability to accept moral responsibility for our actions. Whether it’s me or my brother doesn’t matter.
Also nested inside of being a reasonable person we have another standard, which is that being good is hard and we have to try to be good. Being good is trying. How do we reconcile not being morally responsible for our good deeds with the fact that we work hard for it? Of that good act was inevitable then what is the feeling of work? If the bad act what inevitable, then what is the feeling of guilt?
@@idanzigm I think a main point of disagreement is that there are any reasonable people by your definition, because this point of view disputes that there is any control over your actions. I think there are two compelling arguments here. First - even in the common parlance usage - there's a continuous spectrum in cognitive ability between people and over time. How do we justify drawing a line when it's completely arbitrary? Appealing to law or custom is not satisfying philosophically to me because they're so contradictory and ad hoc. Consider even the concept of age of responsibility in the US. Generally we set this at 18, but you can't drink at 18 because... what, you're not responsible enough. Yet you're responsible enough to vote or go in the military or get a job. But wait, actually, you can get some jobs at 14. You can drive with some restrictions at 16. Age of consent varies. It seems incoherent to say there's this range of ages where we think legally you're responsible enough to do various things and yet also maintain a legal binary concept of "responsible adult" that is somewhere in the middle of the range. Forget about the bizarre idea legally that the "worse" the crime, the more likely we are to claim someone well under 18 is actually "an adult" for legal purposes.
Now consider across people. There's some people who we never think reach a cognitive level that lets them "become a responsible adult". There's injury and illness that also change our evaluation. So given that the entire "capability" to be responsible is so fluid and incremental - we can attack any place along the line as unjustified.
Now back to the control question. If you actively are making decisions unmoved by anything outside of you then you would have relevant control. Our legal system has an intuition that the less you were at ultimate relevant control the less responsible you could be. What do I mean by this? If you're driving a car and you hit a patch of ice and the car just slides where it's sliding, no matter how much you spin the wheel or hit the gas or brakes. If there's nothing you can do, holding you proximately responsible for a crash there seems wrong. You weren't in control. Ahh, but you say - you made the decision to drive when there was ice so you're responsible because of that. Well - the reason you were driving was because of other outside considerations - maybe you needed to get to work to not lose your job. Maybe you were trying to get to the hospital to visit an injured family member. Maybe you really wanted take out pizza. You didn't choose or control our capitalistic society that makes you need a job, you didn't choose our culture making you feel compelled to rush to the side of an injured family member, and you didn't choose the effects of hunger or what sorts of food would satisfy that hunger for you. And luckpilling would say you can pretty easily regress all this back to not choosing your parents or the culture where the reasonable person would load the dishwasher. You didn't have any control of that.
One of the things I find compelling is stuff like the "hangry judge" research that shows that judges are harsher in sentencing on the same sorts of cases depending on how close it is to lunch because as they get hungry their judgement gets harsher. If you're actual judgement is changed based on subtle variations in your physical state that you're not easily (and maybe not at all) aware of I question how "in control" you are there. Same with many chemicals, many cultural norms, physical changes etc. Back to my spectrum, if you admit any ability for physical phenomenon to change your mental processes (and I'd say something as simple as Phineas Gauge or getting drunk proves that is occurring) then you have to deal with the problem of why and how you'd define which sorts of effects count as control impacting while others don't.
Now how does this all tie together? Well, if everything about us - who we are, how we think, what abilities we have, what chemical balances are present etc are in a major sense imposed on us from outside, we're like a much more complicated version of a programmed robot. My intuition on a robot really never includes "it's culpable because it should have changed it's programming" - that seems kind of bizarre to me, at least in pre AI robots. But in a "reasonable person" sense it seems like the robot made decisions and took actions that it made and took. However, given the if then programming tree and physical capabilities of the robot, I don't think it could have done otherwise aside from perhaps randomly breaking down. In none of those cases would I ascribe moral duties or responsibility to it. Maybe you would? But then I don't see what a reasonable person standard would have to do with it - all objects in the world are assigned moral responsibility regardless of their intentions or if they even have intentions.
@@idanzigm In this case I'm not sure that "being good is hard". At least not in some general universal sense. Just like "doing math is hard" - no for some people it's really easy. Again, I think mental states are like height states - some people just are more inclined mentally to "be good" as defined by our society - evolution would work on that as fitting in a society is adaptive. Some senses of "being good" are much easier for some people outside the mental state too - One finds it a lot easier to "not steal" when one has lots of money.
I think "working hard" for something is a maguffin. Lets take a thought experiment of the little old lady who forgot the key code to her building. One person lives in the building and knows the master code for the main door and just punches it in and lets the lady in the building. Almost no work at all. The second person doesn't live in the building so gets out their phone, starts trying to figure out the phone number, calls in to the landlord / office, goes over to that building to explain and bring the guard over to the little old lady and waits till she's let in. Person 2 worked a LOT harder, but does this mean person 1 did a *less* moral act? Maybe, but I wouldn't say Person 1 was not worthy of praise because the act of kindness was *easy* for them.
On the inevitability of the actions - how we subjectively feel about something has no bearing on whether it was inevitable or not.
So basically, you define free will, control, moral responsibility, etc. as requiring magic and then say they don't exist because magic doesn't exist. I think some of the revisionist compatibilist accounts of these concepts do a better job of naturalizing and making sense of them. As Dennett used to say, "We have free will but it's not what you think it is."
What specifically would we call "free will"?
@@lanceindependent That's kind of ambiguous. I think it makes sense to disambiguate between libertarian free will (which we don't have) and compatibilist free will (which we probably do). The compatibilist version that I accept involves taking a level of abstraction where we treat certain entities as agents with motivations and desires. Moral responsibility is usually attributed to an agent when that agent possesses certain mental competencies and can act with volition under suitable circumstances after deliberation.
How do these mental competencies get us close to a sense of retributive, "just desert" sense of moral responsibility? If they don't, and they just get us to something else instead, why are we calling *that* "moral responsibility"?
@@clashmanthethird I don't believe in basic desert moral responsibility. Moral responsibility is socially attributed to people. It's similar to the concept of maturity. We can disagree about what is required to consider someone to be morally responsible or mature. That doesn't mean they're not useful concepts for explaining why we consider some people to be morally responsible and others not.
If we're going to be free will eliminativists, should we also be eliminativists about maturity?
@@captainbeefheart5815 If a large enough majority of the public had a very metaphysically loaded idea of maturity, where something magical emerged the second someone turns over 18, and this divine power of maturity was used as the justification for awful things happening to others...I guess I would probably favor eliminativism about maturity as well?