In Defense of Compatibilism: A Response to Edwards and Coyne
written by Ben Burgis at the quillette website
My point though [expressed over and again] is that what matters far more is that we cannot seem to pin down with any degree of finality whether what we think matters here in and of itself is merely the embodiment of the psychological illusion of free will imparted to us by a brain wholly compelled by the laws of matter sustaining the only possible reality or in fact it matters precisely because we can choose among actual options that it either does or does not.
And then the part where, given human autonomy, some insist others deserve to be punished for behaviors that still others insist they should be rewarded for. And the part where those like me argue that what we come to believe others deserve is not within the reach of philosophers or ethicists but instead is embodied only in subjective points of view rooted in dasein and ever subject to change given new experiences in a world awash in contingency, chance and change.
Here we go again. Yes, we can “choose” to justify punishing violent criminals. But only in the same way that men and women “choose” to become violent criminals in the first place: because they were never able not to. What’s deemed important or not important is no less subsumed in the only possible world.
The laws of nature that caused the plague are the same laws that cause some to get infected by it that cause others to isolate them. How, in a wholly determined universe, does anyone or anything become an exception?
That’s that part that [compelled or not[ eludes me.
Instead, arguments like this…
…are made given what I presume to be the frame of mind that those who embrace free will would propose. Nothing is not made sense of other than as it can only be made sense of. Whether it’s human interactions involving crime or the plague doesn’t change that for me. The is/ought world of human value judgments is just another manifestation of the either/or world to nature. All the dominoes fall wholly in sync with nature’s “design”.
And yet clearly I have to acknowledge there are many very, very intelligent people who are able to think of compatibilism in a different way. So I would never rule out that the problem here is my own inability to grasp what they do about determinism.
Unlike, say, the objectivists here among us.