Thomas_More
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“Walpola Rahula points out in What the Buddha Taught, “If the whole of existence is relative, conditioned and interdependent, how can will alone be free? Will, like any other thought, is conditioned. So-called ‘freedom’ itself is conditioned and relative.”
“the idea of free will is part of the larger human illusion that we are the central focus of all creation. Consider the belief held until the early 1600s that the Earth was at the center of the universe. This belief was challenged by Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, who put the sun at the center of our solar system and made our observations of the heavens much easier to explain. Although resisted by some at first, this new way of thinking gradually entered into mainstream thought.
Two hundred fifty years later Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection removed humans from the pedestal of special creation. Nevertheless, many still believe that humans must occupy a special place in the evolutionary scheme, perhaps as the inevitable peak of evolution on Earth.” The second question raised by accepting the absence of free will deals with moral responsibility. Although biological evolution in humans has not changed much over the last 50,000 years, cultural evolution has shaped the biological imperatives for survival into religious and civil laws. If there is no free will, are these laws meaningless? What happens to good and bad, reward and punishment? One answer is that even if we see free will as an illusion, we can still recognize the social requirements for ethics and morals.
” In the end, we can embrace this paradox like a Zen koan: we can live our lives as though we have free will yet realize it is just an illusion. This may be the ultimate freedom.”
∞
From the Fall 2001 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 18, No. 1)
Text © 2001 Robert FraserYou think there is an entity called “you” inside your body, inside your brain, receiving audiences like a king, or god, and whose decisions are independent of material motion. Christians call this fiction the “soul”, which is answerable, motivelessly, for its thoughts, desires and actions.
But there is no such thing.There are not different levels of intelligence, only different levels of understanding.
I.Q. is bogus.
S.J. Gould wrote a book about this.No, i know many people who are not socialists but have better characters than some socialists do.
Why is internal moral debate redundant? I am doing it all the time with myself. I know that i will yield and make a decision according to the strongest motive that presents itself. A free will, on the other hand, would be independent of motive, and therefore impervious. It would have no morality or immorality, because it doesn’t exist.Your wrestling, or inner conflicts, mean that opposing motives have presented themselves. You will, however, yield to the strongest acting upon your will, not the weakest, and your choice will be made accordingly.
You are conflicted because you are thinking in a non-material, idealist way, without being aware of it. I, however, have no such dilemma.
I am fortunate in that my father was a materialist (and an SPGB member). My philosophical reading were the materialists. Ancient as well as modern.
Were you raised a Christian?
Most people are raised either religiously, but more modern, nominally, Christian. Children were smacked and grow up just accepting free will, without thinking about it, and in a society that is blame-oriented.
“Who’s to blame?”
“It’s your fault.”
“No, it’s your fault.”
“It’s those bloody immigrants!”
“You bumped into me!”
“No, you bumped into me!”
“He’s just bloody-minded.”
“He’s the one that done it.”Behaviour is seen as freely originating, with no reference to cause.
Hence, blame is endemic, and if someone says free will is a myth, he’s a “bleedin’ heart liberal.”Free will is a parrotted term (apologies to parrots!) thrown around and seldom if ever explored, except by academics.
“Good and Evil”, Original Sin, reward and punishment, all are part of a religious scenario that is ingrained in the mass of people, including professed atheists. They are culturally visceral.
They have always also proven useful to ruling classes since antiquity, and the stick with which to beat materialists has always been “morality “
Just a bit extra, for a scientific bent:
More simply put.
Your morality has been produced in you as a result of your life experiences, thoughts, feelings, relationships with others and with the society you were born into.
You think, feel and act in accordance with (except when constrained by others, i e. wage slavery, obedience to a boss) what is moral and right behaviour in your produced opinion. This opinion, or sense of morality you feel to be freely yours, but it too is the result of the motivations, feelings, ideas, produced in you by multitudes of causes and effects in you, both conscious and subconscious.
To be sure, you are a moral agent, you possess a will, and act as it dictates; but it is not free of the causes and effects that have moulded it and is not independent of them.You are a DETERMINED, produced, moral agent, your actions producing effects and continuing the line of cause and effect: within it, not a God outside and above it. Your will is not free and you are not free to will. You do, however, act according to your unfree will, a will that is itself an effect as well as a cause of more effects.
Why is intelligence problematic? We are all intelligent. That does not mean we are all rational, although the irrational (i.e. the religious fanatic) are rational in their own opinion.
The formation of a political ideology is an intelligent act. It might be dangerous and harmful (i e. Maoism, Hitlerism), but it has to be constructed by intelligence. A table or a chair can’t do it. It has to be the product of intelligent beings. But these intelligent beings are not plucking ideas from the air. They are themselves products of a society and are within the chain of cause and effect, both societal and personal. To be sure, they are then themselves causes, giving rise to more effects, but within the chain, not beyond it. As they were effects, so they became causes giving rise to other effects which were more causes producing effects on them. All life is within this dynamic, including the one who frames and/or follows an ideology or accepts a philosophy.
Moral agency. One’s morality is likewise societally, experientially, and thus both internally and externally produced by a chain of antecedents. One person’s moral code, and one society’s moral values, can well be different from another’s. No doubt Hitler and Truman both considered themselves moral, not immoral, agents.
Since all moral agents are also within the chain of cause and effect, i see no contradiction with what you call determinism and I call necessarianism. To be a moral agent whose will is not motivated, but free, you would have to be a first cause, i e. God, outside of all life and without motive (hence, not a material entity but a supernatural one) issuing unmotivated edicts from on high.I agree he can be interpreted in different ways because he is somewhat obscure in his messianic vocabulary.
I always perceived his Superman not as any individual but as society, a society which has emerged from its adolescent following of leaders into a rational maturity.
As Zarathustra rejects those who are following him,
“Only when you have all rejected me (ceased to follow), shall I return to you (as one of you).”Superman is about “becoming oneself”, or, society finally becoming itself, coming of age:
in our terms, socialism.Nietzsche’s politics?
Or his sister’s posthumous Nazification of him?
Read about Elisabeth Nietzsche’s vicious racist distortions of her brother’s writings, including outright forgery.
I would urge you to study this further. Nietzsche hated her and her husband’s racist views. He could be adopted by the Nazis because he was dead and couldn’t make any opposition. He said German nationalism made him vomit.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Elisabeth-Forster-Nietzsche
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/06/exploding-nietzsche-myths-need-dynamiting
Well, they, like Sade’s villains, might use Necessarianism as an excuse, were they ever brought to book, but they rarely are. In fact, as it is the poor who are mostly brought up before the beak, these have to face a judicial system that has inherited the dogma of free will, and is in fact based upon it. Our masters prefer this old dogma because it suits them to chastise the poor who rob and kill, whilst the rich do both with impunity.
Shelley:
” The doctrine of Necessity tends to introduce a great change into the established notions of morality, and utterly to destroy religion. Reward and punishment must be considered, by the Necessarian, merely as motives which he would employ in order to procure the adoption or abandonment of any given line of conduct. Desert, in the present sense of the word, would no longer have any meaning; and he who should inflict pain upon another for no better reason than that he deserved it, would only gratify his revenge under pretence of satisfying justice. It is not enough, says the advocate of free-will, that a criminal should be prevented from a repetition of his crime: he should feel pain, and his torments, when justly inflicted, ought precisely to be proportioned to his fault. But utility is morality; that which is incapable of producing happiness is useless; and though the crime of Damiens must be condemned, yet the frightful torments which revenge, under the name of justice, inflicted on this unhappy man cannot be supposed to have augmented, even at the long run, the stock of pleasurable sensation in the world. At the same time, the doctrine of Necessity does not in the least diminish our disapprobation of vice. The conviction which all feel that a viper is a poisonous animal, and that a tiger is constrained, by the inevitable condition of his existence, to devour men, does not induce us to avoid them less sedulously, or, even more, to hesitate in destroying them: but he would surely be of a hard heart who, meeting with a serpent on a desert island, or in a situation where it was incapable of injury, should wantonly deprive it of existence. A Necessarian is inconsequent to his own principles if he indulges in hatred or contempt; the compassion which he feels for the criminal is unmixed with a desire of injuring him: he looks with an elevated and dreadless composure upon the links of the universal chain as they pass before his eyes; whilst cowardice, curiosity, and inconsistency only assail him in proportion to the feebleness and indistinctness with which he has perceived and rejected the delusions of free-will.”
Shelley:
” Were the doctrine of Necessity false, the human mind would no longer be a legitimate object of science; from like causes it would be in vain that we should expect like effects; the strongest motive would no longer be paramount over the conduct; all knowledge would be vague and undeterminate; we could not predict with any certainty that we might not meet as an enemy to-morrow him with whom we have parted in friendship to-night; the most probable inducements and the clearest reasonings would lose the invariable influence they possess. The contrary of this is demonstrably the fact. Similar circumstances produce the same unvariable effects. The precise character and motives of any man on any occasion being given, the moral philosopher could predict his actions with as much certainty as the natural philosopher could predict the effects of the mixture of any particular chemical substances. Why is the aged husbandman more experienced than the young beginner? Because there is a uniform, undeniable necessity in the operations of the material universe. “
Well yes. The motive of fear of getting caught is heavier on your will than the pleasure of robbing.
Hobbes is however wrong regarding the death penalty. It would deter me from throttling a trophy hunter, but then so would the threat of life in prison too.
But, in the US today, statistics show that immediately following an execution, the murder rate increases. Also, the states which execute the most frequently have more murders than the states which have no death penalty. And there was never more crime in England than during the 18th century, when hanging was the punishment for almost everything.If i do something i am unhappy about, i know that philosophically i am not “responsible.” However, i do not use philosophy to justify what i did, or keep on doing it. That’s because i am not the type of person who would do that.
On the other hand, if something i did or neglected to do is causing me self-reproach, i would turn to philosophy to console myself (i e. when grieving: if i had done such and such, maybe my dog would not have died, etc. My philosophy tells me what did not happen could not happen, and that beating myself up about it is useless self-castigation).People like us who are motivated to behave in a responsible manner, are not likely to hide behind Necessarianism in order to justify bad behaviour. Those who would are not likely to think in philosophical terms in the first place; unless they are the fictional villains of De Sade’s novels. (And i don’t think your unrepentant rapist or street thug is that bright).
You want the malefactor to feel shame and guilt because you and I find his actions reprehensible. It is unlikely that you and I can change his will after many years have conditioned it in the direction he has taken. Perhaps a violent shock might work. Most likely not, since he is not shocked by what we find shocking, but probably enjoys it.
Remember that years have gone into producing both him and us, but in different directions.
So we are left with the immediate utilitarian solution: forcing him to stop doing harm, since reasoning won’t work.
If you want to go further by wreaking punishment on him, then admit that that is to soothe the anger and hatred you feel and is about you, not him.
