Thomas_More
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Societies have different codes of morality.
The morality of capitalism expects the poor unemployed to feel shame. Most people will say you should be ashamed not to fight in a war.
In ancient Sparta the thief was honoured and the victim of theft punished. It was moral to expose infants who were weak and leave them to die.
As socialists we would expect one another to have a socialist morality.
In countries which have the death penalty, your neighbour may consider leading the police to an escapee from death row to be a moral and responsible thing to do. As a socialist, however, you would consider sheltering him to be the moral and responsible thing to do.Many other socialists do not share my morality when it comes to other animals. They may, like me, consider trophy hunting to be immoral, yet they would rather the lion die than the hunter. I would consider it my moral duty to kill the hunter and save the lion.
Morality is a social construct. The religious want the universe to be interested in the contemporary values of humans. They call it God and raise this anthropoid puppet of their desires to ruler of the cosmos.
No, Wez, i see no dilemma.
Malefactors are produced by the chain of antecedents within them; so are benefactors.
By responsibility, you want them to feel culpable. You want them to repent. We are again in religious, penitential, territory.
If they do feel ashamed, that too is within them, as is if they do not. Uf they are rendered powerless to do more harm, that should suffice. Some will be open to education and shame; others will not.
You want physical laws to accord wirh what you view as moral. Fair enough You and i agree war is immoral. Hence we strive to persuade the wills of others toward socialist revolution. That is our morality, but both we and the proponents of war are being nonsensical to graft our opposing moralities on the universe. We have to recognise that there is social philosophy and there is natural philosophy, and we only matter to us. So if we want the chain of cause and effect to go a certain way for us, then we strive to push it in that direction. This is what you would term our moral agency. But it is itself the result of personal and social antecedents, which push you in one way and another another way, because your experiences and reactions have made you a thinker in this way, and him in that way.Freedom to do what one wants. You are missing the point, and Hobbes would agree with me. Read his letter against free will.
You may do what you want to do should there be no impediment, but you are not free to want. You are not free to will. Your want has been produced. Your will has yielded to the strongest motive weighing upon you, even if its farthest antecedents are not known to you.Hobbes supported the death penalty whilst being a Necessarian and denying free will. He supported it on the grounds of deterrence, which we know does not work.
Knowing that the fear of execution does not deter murderers, necessarians cannot now support the death penalty.
Punishment can have no part in a knowledgeable and mature (socialist) society, only restraint. If you disagree, please say why punishment would be valid in a classless society.You must elaborate on “holding people accountable.” Are you suggesting more than restraint? Are you suggesting punishment?
The necessarian can hold people accountable without accepting they have free will.
People’s desires and feelings are just as much part of the chain of causation as are their actions.
One may be motivated more to hold back from punching someone in the face than motivated to do so. It feels thereby that your will was faced with a choice. In fact, it could but yield to the motive which proved the strongest.
There need be no contradiction here.
Morality is a social construct. The morality of a socialist society would be to leave everyone free to do what is not harmful to another.
You pick Hitler (but you may equally pick Truman or Pol Pot or any other notorious person). While recognising someone has become what they are from a multitude of social and personal factors, one still hates and despises them and would have the moral duty to restrain them.
We know capitalism produces war, and produces tyrants. If we turn down a notch to lower the profile to, say,an average person … If someone in a socialist society were to run rampage, killing people etc., we would know they are sick. That does not mean we let them rampage. If they cannot be stopped without violence, then we would use violence. But the object of our violence would be to stop them, not to punish them.
If someone is motivated to hurt others then that should motivate us to render that impossible by restraining them. We don’t pass moral judgment and sentence them. Once they are restrained and rendered harmless, that would be it. If they need to be restrained indefinitely, so be it. But that does not mean we take vengeance on them.
” .. the most vital argument that the Socialist advances against free will is that its acceptance precludes the possibility of a science of sociology. The Socialist expounds the principle of laws acting behind social causation. If man, individually and en masse, is a creature of caprice, if he thinks and acts independently of his heredity and social milieu, then the search for laws supposed to govern human history, economics and social relations is forever doomed to futility. The acceptance of free will is a flat denial of social science.”
THE WESTERN SOCIALIST.
Nothing new is being offered here; just repetition, forcing me too into repetition of what has already been said, over and over, on this thread.
Please go back and read Cde. Currey’s article again, instead of just showing a desperate determination to rescue the ridiculous notion of free will. Why socialists are so desperate to do so really puzzles me.
These exchanges seem to have the one object of scoring points rather than thinking about the matter, or even bothering to read the messages on the thread, which, of course, explains the endless repetition of the same questions and answers.
Which only, again, shows the absurdity of any free will.
One will not know that which is subconscious, but one can trace the rise of conscious feelings and thoughts from immediate antecedents. In therapy it is done all the time, and what is subconscious can be rendered conscious.
Anyone would think free will is a valid subject for debate, because the notion offers no substance. And, as i have said time and time again, complexity only proves even more the fallacy of the free will myth.
Concerning God, freewill and destiny: Of all that earth has been or yet may be, all that vain men imagine or believe, or hope can paint or suffering may achieve, we descanted.
Percy Bysshe Shelley.
I’m referring to proponents here of a free will, not expecting people generally to retrace their thoughts and feelings.
One can only retrace for a little bit anyway. It is sufficient to admit that every feeling and thought springs from what precedes it. That’s easy enough.Needless to say, a fragrance or a piece of music can elicit the same feelings they accompanied decades previously, and bring back the memory immediately to mind of a particular moment.
