On Nov 9, 8:23 pm, Michael Gordge <mikegor...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> On Nov 10, 10:47 am, Don Stockbauer <donstockba...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> > Humans have free will.
>
> Which doesn't change the simple fact that man, an entity, will act in
> contradiction of his nature at his peril, e.g. just look at the
> disgusting scourge that the masochistical parasitical anti-human dopey
> socialist ideology has become.
>
> Irresponsibility is created as responsibility is removed.
>
Steven Pinker - HOW THE MIND WORKS page 54-6
http://makeashorterlink.com/?M10722072
As science advances and explanations of behavior become less fanciful,
the Specter of Creeping Exculpation, as Dennett calls it, will loom
larger. Without a clearer moral philosophy, any cause of behavior
could be taken to undermine free will and hence moral responsibility.
Science is guaranteed to appear to eat away at the will, regardless of
what it finds, because j the scientific mode of explanation cannot
accommodate the mysterious notion of uncaused causation that underlies
the will. If scientists wanted to show that people had free will, what
would they look for? Some random neural event that the rest of the
brain amplifies into a signal triggering behavior? But a random event
does not fit the concept of free will any more than a lawful one does,
and could not serve as the long-sought locus of moral responsibility.
We would not find someone guilty if his finger pulled the trigger when
it was mechanically connected to a roulette wheel why should it be any
different if the roulette wheel is inside his skull? The me problem
arises for another unpredictable cause that has been sugted as the
source of free will, chaos theory, in which, according to the cliche',
a butterfly's flutter can set off a cascade of events culminating in a
hurricane. A fluttering in the brain that causes a hurricane of
behavior, if it were ever found, would still be a cause of behavior
and would not fit the concept of uncaused free will that underlies
moral responsibility.
Either we dispense with all morality as an unscientific superstition,
or we find a way to reconcile causation (genetic or otherwise) with
responsibility and free will. I doubt that our puzzlement will ever be
completely assuaged, but we can surely reconcile them in part. Like
many philosophers, I believe that science and ethics are two self-
contained systems played out among the same entities in the world,
just as poker and bridge are different games played with the same
fifty-two-card deck. The science game treats people as material
objects, and its rules are the physical processes that cause behavior
through natural selection and neurophysiology. The ethics game treats
people as equivalent, sentient, rational, free-willed agents, and its
rules are the calculus that assigns moral value to behavior through
the behavior's inherent nature or its consequences.
Free will is an idealization of human beings that makes the ethics
game playable. Euclidean geometry requires idealizations like infinite
straight lines and perfect circles, and its deductions are sound and
useful even though the world does not really have infinite straight
lines or perfect circles. The world is close enough to the
idealization that the theorems can usefully be applied. Similarly,
ethical theory requires idealizations like tree, sentient, rational,
equivalent agents whose behavior is uncaused, and its conclusions can
be sound and useful even though the world, as seen by science, does
not really have uncaused events. As long as there is n=B0 outright
coercion or gross malfunction of reasoning, the world is close enough
to the idealization of free will that moral theory can meaningfully be
applied to it.
Science and morality are separate spheres of reasoning. Only by rec-
gnizing them as separate can we have them both. If discrimination is
wrong only if group averages are the same, if war and rape and greed
are wrong only if people are never inclined toward them, if people are
responsible for their actions only if the actions are mysterious, then
either scientists must be prepared to fudge their data or all of us
must be Pared to give up our values. Scientific arguments would turn
into the National Lampoon cover showing a puppy with a gun at its head
and the caption "Buy This Magazine or We'll Shoot the Dog."
The knife that separates causal explanations of behavior from moral
responsibility for behavior cuts both ways. In the latest twist in the
human-nature morality play, a chromosomal marker for homo***uality in
some men, the so-called gay gene, was identified by the geneticist
Dean Hamer. To the bemusement of Science for the People, this time it
is the genetic explanation that is politically correct. Supposedly it
refutes right-wingers like Dan Quayle, who had said that homo***uality
"is more of a choice than a biological situation. It is a wrong
choice." The gay gene has been used to argue that homo***uality is not
a choice for which gay people can be held responsible but an
involuntary orientation they just can't help. But the reasoning is
dangerous. The gay gene could just as easily be said to influence some
people to choose homo***uality. And like all good science, Hamer's
result might be falsified someday, and then where would we be?
Conceding that bigotry against gay people is OK after all? The
argument against persecuting gay people must be made not in terms of
the gay gene or the gay brain but in terms of people's right to engage
in private consensual acts without discrimination or harassment.
The cloistering of scientific and moral reasoning in separate arenas
also lies behind my recurring metaphor of the mind as a machine, of
people as robots. Does this not dehumanize and objectify people and
lead us to treat them as inanimate objects? As one humanistic scholar
lucidly put it in an Internet posting, does it not render human
experience invalid, reifying a model of relating based on an I-It
relation****p, and delegitimating all other forms of discourse with
fundamentally destructive consequences to society? Only if one is so
literal-minded that one cannot ****ft among different stances in
conceptualizing people for different purposes. A human being is
simultaneously a machine and a sentient free agent, depending on the
purpose of the discussion, just as he is also a taxpayer, an insurance
salesman, a dental patient, and two hundre pounds of ballast on a
commuter airplane, depending on the purpose o the discussion. The
mechanistic stance allows us to understand what makes us tick and how
we fit into the physical universe. When those dis cussions wind down
for the day, we go back to talking about each otne as free and
dignified human beings.
> > An emergent phenomenon from their complexity.
>
> A Clayton's choice more like.
>
I think it is a reason to accept mitigated skepticism. This seems to
be Rands actual position when she believes that reality is certain.
She repeats the bold venture as Hume did and makes a choice. Personaly
I like Hume's position better than the kid making choices about drugs
and peers.
David Hume qualified his own Scepticism by pointing out that to live
at all we have perpetually to make choices, decisions, and this forces
us to form judgements about the way things are, whether we like it or
not. Since certainty is not available to us we have to make the best
*****sments we can of the realities we face - and this is incompatible
with regarding all alternatives with equal scepticism. Our Scepticism
therefore needs to be, as he put it, mitigated. It is indeed doubtful
whether anyone could live on the basis of complete Scepticism - or, if
they could, whether such a life would be worth living. But this
refutation of Scepticism, if refutation it is, is not a logical
argument.
In practical life we must steer a middle course between demanding a
degree of certainty that we can never have and treating all
possibilities as if they were of equal weight when they are not.
Story of Philosophy
by Bryan Magee
http://www.amazon.com/Story-Philosophy-Bryan-Magee/dp/078947994X
Seems like there really isn't much difference between empiricism and
objectivism when confronted with the ned to survive.
> MG
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