Until immorality vanishes, acting as if there is free will even if we do not accept it’s existance is the preferable course.

I would put it differently. There are no uncaused decisions, which depending on your definition may mean there’s no free will. One of the “causes” (or “influences”) of a decision is the surrounding incentive structure. So, we should set up the incentive structure to minimize people doing bad things. As you say, punishment acts as a deterrent. It does this, in fact, because there is no free will.

We tend to see coercion as a “subversion of free will” because we clearly observe a causal mechanism influencing the decision. But in fact there is always some causal mechanism that influences the decision, it’s just usually much murkier to us than coercion.

Society’s role should be to embrace this (let’s be happy that human actions are not uncaused) and design incentive structures to minimize bad things happening. This social engineering literally is morality, it is not that we should pine for the days when humans will never have incentive to do bad things to each other.

Even if it were possible to perfectly rehabilitate wrongdoers without punishing them, and to perfectly ascertain the causitive factors that led to the wrong doing, society could still conceivably be served by punishing the wrongdoer for their actions. Punishment would still act as a deterrent. Otherwise, the anti-social man of the far future could think, “OK, I’ll kill my wife, take the rehabilitation pill and marry my mistress. That’s a good deal for me!”

Until immorality vanishes, acting as if there is free will even if we do not accept it’s existance is the preferable course.

I hate to rain on your parade because I fear doing so will feed the trolls (Sorry, but I’ve just called anyone who carries on to the effect that freedom, goodness, etc… requires God a troll), but there’s something epistemically questionable about what you’re suggesting.

Let’s suppose you know we have freedom on the basis of e. You then learn that the universe is made of what it’s made of. However, we’re assuming this isn’t a tautology b/c otherwise you knew it all along. Rather, we learn what the universe is made of. Surely what you learn, when combined with e could in principle lead to lowering the probability that you had free will even if you initially knew you had free will on the basis of e alone.

To deny this is a possibility out of hand, it seems you’d have to deny that you could have knowledge on the basis of uncertain evidence. Surely, however, we don’t have certain evidence that we’re free, in which case even if you denied that we could have knowledge on less than certain grounds, we’d not know we’re free.

The scenario I posed (use science to model/predict human behavior, use this model to assess punishment to maximize expected utility) is indeed fanciful by today’s standards.

But we can use the same principles to set up a consequentialist justice system, even today. If we don’t know most of the causes, oh well, that means that the punishment is mostly focused on the perpetrator (that’s already the case today). It would still change the game to focus explicitly on minimizing the number of crimes*, rather than on some more abstract notion of morality.

Then, as scientific capacity to accurately model human behavior ramps up, our justice system won’t be faced with a “human deliberation is a result of external causes” crisis– instead, we’ll have a mechanism in place to assign blame and punishment to the external causes (the human ones, anyway).

(* “Minimizing the # crimes” is too specific. You have to take into account the reduction in utility from the penalties themselves– otherwise simply executing all criminals might seem the best policy)

All that I meant by traditional morality above was what we have traditionally thought we meant when employing terms like right, wrong, ought, etc.. To wit, we traditionally had a notion of a robustly free agent who could have done otherwise and whose action therefore merits praise or blame on a moral basis (as opposed to for its technical skill, say).

I was in no way referring to the content of the moral scheme, just to its presumptions about human freedom. My very simple point is that if human freedom to do otherwise is in fact not clear, or if freedom amounts only to the capacity to learn and the ability to respond to reasons then that is not likely (certainly not necessarily) a sufficient freedom to sustain the old meanings behind obligation, rightness, or wrongness.

Cheers.

I get iffy around claims to represent ‘traditional morality.’ I don’t know whether this means the peculiar institution of rules and interdicts, or whether we’re talking about sets of virtues, or what. In any case, claims about what ‘traditional morality’ is are never more than second-order beliefs. And we are not very good at forming second-order beliefs.

My argument was intended to sketch a conception of agency which is consonant with our first-order moral/ethical beliefs and practices. And my claim was that at this level, our traditional beliefs and practices are very much independent of determinism. The truth of determinism (and I don’t know if determinism is true) may shatter some second-order moral beliefs, but it does not touch moral practice and first-order moral beliefs. If this is right, then Ponnuru is wrong to say that physicalism or reductionism is incompatible with actual moral practice. (I do think eliminativism does, but that’s a different kettle of fish.)

The only place I diverge greatly from traditional morality is in rejecting the revenge impulse to re-balance the moral scales downward. I prefer a compensatory view of justice which would balance the scales by leveling up as best as possible the state of the victim. But this is at best a side issue.

In any case, I think you’re right about over-staying, but I would be glad to continue the discussion elsewhere. Via electronic mail, I can be reached at kyle (my last name is the handle I’m using) the mail service run by google.

Right, I don’t believe it. I was putting on my cg hat to point out the contradiction your statement revealed.

You know that it’s worse when people behave unjustly, because you expect them to choose responsibly. You know that people, unlike earthquakes and hurricanes, can think about, and choose “How to achieve the best possible outcome.”

And that’s what matters, right?

I think my point still stands: there is something fucked up about a world in which people are forced to suffer for things they couldn’t have avoided. What’s fucked up about this? It is making us agents of (what you seem to admit is, in the case of hurricanes) an unfair system: a system in which people are born, are causally lead to a certain predetermined outcome, and suffer greatly as a result of their original, unchosen conditions.

There is another, seemingly more fair, choice - we can not punish criminals! But that’s not really a choice, and that’s the issue.

cg made the point well with natural disasters: people are better off as a matter of states of affairs when they are not covered in lava, but when a volcano erupts we don’t say “Bad Volcano!” If it turns out that the best accounts of human agency suggest that, though suggestible and able to learn, we are more like the volcano than like the free-willed beings we have traditionally imagined ourselves to be, then we will have moved away from what Ponnuru, and most people who currently employ moral vocabularies, mean by the term “morality.”

It doesn’t mean that we will have lost all evaluative capacity–we can say whether a tree is healthy or not, and that a storm caused a fire that made a forest far less healthy, but we would not call the conditions that made the tree healthy morally praiseworthy, nor the storm that destroyed the forest wicked.

And with that run-on, I’m sure I have overstayed my welcome.