Responsibility

[Travis]

I was not sure where to post this or what to call it at all. After reading countless free will vs. determinism posts on countless message boards it has become clear to me that this argument is utterly useless. In fact it does not matter whether or not we have a freedom of will. We certainly have no standard by which to assign responsibility. Other than of course the present judicial system, which seems to be a system of spite punishment rather than responsible punishment.

When a child does something that results in the death of an adult we do not regard this as a crime, nor do we hold accountability to the child. The same goes for a mentally ill person who sees a nurse or doctor, not at all as they are, but as an animal attacking them. This mentally ill person is relieved of the responsibility of his responding act. This same idea of relieving responsibility has been and is preached by all of us. We certainly do this after an accident. A killer is not in the same sense a killer if the act was unintentional.

And with the constant upgrades in our biological understanding of human nature, some crimes and criminals are relieved of responsibility because its simply in their genes. A shrunken amygdala or a hypometabolism in the frontal lobe, or a defective gene for monoamine oxidase A, can render a person ‘out of control’. Do we say that a person can have helped what he has done in this case? (No matter how rare or how common) It seems silly to me to call someone a chicken for not jumping out of a plane, even if me along with everyone else in the group are going to do it and it is perfectly safe. To call such a person a chicken is unreasonable because in all probability it is simply a smaller version of the D4DR dopamine receptor gene that causes this not-so-thrill seeking quality. Eventually is it not possible that biology finds us all unaccountable for our actions?

Environmental Determinism theory says that there are factors in a persons life that shape them and can help us understand the person and give an explanation as to why a person would commit a crime. There are countless times when I have heard that a person is more likely to be an abuser if they were exposed to abuse. That media violence begets violence in viewers, that rock lyrics can cause two teens to walk into a school and begin shooting.

Then there are the evolutionary psychologists that tell us that men are prone to promiscuity because of the theory that our ancestors were rewarded with a larger number of descendants if they slept around. Just another excuse for men that cheat. We have evolved through the survival of the fittest and it is seen that the great warriors and chiefs in most civilizations were rewarded with more wives. So we have evolved into cheaters. It’s not our fault.

It is in science that we should look to see that we are determined beings. Through science, shall we slowly see our responsibility go out the window? Do not look at the three fields I have briefly mention and think one as right and the other two wrong, or two right and one wrong, for it is the contention of all the leaders of the fields as well as many others that it is a combination of all three that best and most accurately portrays our human nature. As these fields grow there will be grand cases against freedom of the will. And against responsibility for actions as well. The infamous bumper sticker that says ‘guns don’t kill people - people kill people’ seems quite accurate. Doesn’t it seem silly that we won’t blame guns but we will blame people? Are we not just as mechanical?

But on the other side of the scale we have the free will advocates. The theists who have the daunting task of upholding their notion of human nature against the force of science. Not an easy thing to do. Although it seems many of the theists I have encountered in conversation have a hard enough time refuting the problem of evil; they haven’t even gotten outside their religion yet to see the problem of science. It is through our God given free will that we choose to do such and such a thing. There seems to be no problem to assigning responsibility. Just take anyone who does something contrary to Natural Law, apply the notion of free will and reason, then blammo we have a person responsible for the action. Wonderful, but wait a minute, what is this Natural Law? (Defined as) ‘A rational creatures participation with the eternal law’. And what is this eternal law? (Defined as) ‘Gods wisdom’.

Who is God?

That is a little off topic I suppose, so back to the point. Free will relieves a person from responsibility because if a person has true free will, than would behavior not be utterly random? Who would take heed of punishment and be deterred from following this freedom of the will to the degree that this free will is satisfied? And why would anyone take an example of their neighbor’s punishment and let it be a deterrent? Is responsibility not restricting free will? Then are we not determined to do only what is right? Do we see the totalitarian trend beginning here? True freedom of will would have to alleviate responsibility on account of equality, unless it is indeed that one persons freedom of will is certainly not equal to another’s.

I suppose all that is left is my remark on the present judicial system; on justice. There is no true ground to assess responsibility, so it is out of our spite that we punish people now. The matter of principle, and a complete disregard for common sense lets a suicidal death row inmate receive all the best medical attention and best modern doctors at our expense so that we can get the empty satisfaction of watching him be killed. It is the same principle that sees us punish old age and dying Nazis, when there is no reason to believe that punishing that man will stop a future Hitler. More though, we still do it despite the fact that the manpower could be used to help prevent street crime and things of the sorts. But again that Nazi won’t cheat justice, not under our watch.

~Travis

[Pax_Vitae]

This was an interesting read and I agree with some sections of what you have written. Mostly the parts about how freewill is something aloof and currently not realised for what it truly is.

The Freewill Defence:
It is possible for God to create a World, but not the evil in that world. By the very fact that God gave us freewill we can choose to do Good, or we can do Evil, either way it’s up to us. Therefore God creates us with the potential to be what we choose to be. God makes us neither one nor the other, as we become what we choose to become.

But because the world we live in is based off cause and effect, it is impossible to make “free” decisions, as our environment and the things we’re told affects the choices we make. So no matter what choice we choose, it has been affected by the sum of our life’s experiences. This then invalidates the Freewill defence for evil.

But it’s this very fact that cause and effect affect everything that makes punishment for crimes all the more important. This will explain why:

@A passage on Schopenhauer's concept of Freewill

Schopenhauer’s main point is that we cannot freely decide for ourselves what that shall be. The prevalence — or, if that is not conceded, the undeniably considerable extent — of unconscious motivation is in itself enough to demonstrate this. But it is a truth that holds also at the level of conscious choice. This can be demonstrated by a simple example. If I am ordering a meal in a restaurant I may be free to choose whatever I like from among the alternatives on the menu. But I am not free to choose what what I like shall be. I cannot say to myself: ‘Up to this point in my life I have always detested spinach, but just for today I am going to like it.’ Nor am I in a position to ask myself: ‘Shall I decide that I am in the mood for fish, or shall I decide that I am in the mood for chicken?’ What I am in the mood for, and what I like or detest, are not at my command. It is not they that are matters of choice for me: they are given to me as accomplished facts, and it is on the basis of them that I make my choice. I can choose whatever it is I wish to choose, but I cannot will what it is that I shall wish to choose. As it has often been put, I can choose what I will but I cannot will what I will.

The validity of this example is not dependent on the presence in it of the element of taste, and it will be found to remain valid however complicated the choice-situation becomes. It is quite often the case that what I order in a restaurant is not decided by what I most feel like eating. I may be trying to lose weight, or I may be anxious to fit in with what my companions are having, or with the fact that one of them has only a limited time, or I may be influenced by the relative prices of the dishes. I may even be swayed by the potential reactions of someone who is not present (for instance the thought, if I am a timid husband, that my wife will nag me when I get home if I have spent too much money, or ordered something fattening, or failed to squeeze some errand into my lunch-hour). It could only too easily be that every one of these motives is operative at the same time — the complex of motivation in even so trivial a matter can be intricate. Yet whatever these conflicting motives balance themselves out at, that will decide what I shall order. And it is not open to me to choose how they will balance out. If I am anxious about the reactions of my companions or of my wife, I can pretend to be indifferent, but I cannot be indifferent. I cannot decide that the amount of money in my pocket shall be twice what it is; and if I have an appointment in half an hour I cannot decide to spend a further hour over lunch without being late for my appointment. But that is what a genuinely ‘free’ choice would be like. It would be a choice untrammelled by the principle of sufficient reason. My wishes would determine reality. In other words it would be magic, the magic of wish-fulfilment. And of course we simply do not have free choice, and therefore free will, in that sense (though it is illuminating that the notion has such profound appeal to us that it is a central element in many perennial human creations, such as myth, fairy story, personal daydreams, magic, ritual, and others). All the factors I have given in my example are what they are, independent of my wishes, and they will all impinge on what I decide. In short, we will what we are most strongly motivated to will by factors which we do not determine, and we then choose accordingly.

The full point of what this means is brought out if we consider what the alternative would be like. If I were to say to the waiter: ‘Taking everything into consideration my preference today is for lamb chops, but please bring me a Dover sole,’ both he and my companions would think I had taken leave of my senses. And they would be right: rationality in such situations consists in acting in accordance with the balance of actual considerations. Not to do so is arbitrary, eccentric, mad -‘free’, certainly, (if you like) but not in any desirable sense. It is more like being insane. And if we were to start being ‘free’ in this way in all our behaviour we should very quickly find it impossible to conduct our dealings with other people, or to cope with our environment at all, and before long we should have to be taken into care, if we had not already destroyed ourselves by sitting in the fire, or strolling into the path of an oncoming vehicle, or taken some other such action as disregarded the principle of sufficient reason with disastrous consequences.

Like the passage above highlights, reason goes against the idea of freewill as reason works because there is no freed will. So that said we use reason up to a point when making choices. Our reason is fuelled by what we know and are taught. That means we must have punishment to influence our reasoned choice; that if you commit a crime you will have to suffer the consequences, is a reason not to commit the crime in the first place. While our chemical makeup is a fact so to is the knowledge of what will happen to us if we break the law. I fully agree with you that there are some people who are imbalanced and no amount of saying, “Don’t do that,” will stop them. But for a lot of others this is enough, and if you removed this “Don’t do that,” they would go and do what they shouldn’t. Therefore it’s because of this that punishment is of vital importance.

[postmodern]

I don’t think anybody who doesn’t fight and so on are any more responsible, they have only other ways of coping with a system that doesn’t correspond with what is within. Smashing windows and so on in demonstrations is no surprise to me. Neither hearing music that is very loud. That is why there is no such thing as responsibleness. What’s within is what is, so that’s what one ought to follow to live a happy life. The system doesn’t correspond to this all the time, so then one tries to find ways of obeying what’s within without the system coming and putting you into prison and making things worse. Or you may just some moment forget about that and do something that makes you “irresponsible”…

[Kennethamy]

@Travis

I was not sure where to post this or what to call it at all. After reading countless free will vs. determinism posts on countless message boards it has become clear to me that this argument is utterly useless. In fact it does not matter whether or not we have a freedom of will. We certainly have no standard by which to assign responsibility. Other than of course the present judicial system, which seems to be a system of spite punishment rather than responsible punishment.

When a child does something that results in the death of an adult we do not regard this as a crime, nor do we hold accountability to the child. The same goes for a mentally ill person who sees a nurse or doctor, not at all as they are, but as an animal attacking them. This mentally ill person is relieved of the responsibility of his responding act. This same idea of relieving responsibility has been and is preached by all of us. We certainly do this after an accident. A killer is not in the same sense a killer if the act was unintentional.

And with the constant upgrades in our biological understanding of human nature, some crimes and criminals are relieved of responsibility because its simply in their genes. A shrunken amygdala or a hypometabolism in the frontal lobe, or a defective gene for monoamine oxidase A, can render a person ‘out of control’. Do we say that a person can have helped what he has done in this case? (No matter how rare or how common) It seems silly to me to call someone a chicken for not jumping out of a plane, even if me along with everyone else in the group are going to do it and it is perfectly safe. To call such a person a chicken is unreasonable because in all probability it is simply a smaller version of the D4DR dopamine receptor gene that causes this not-so-thrill seeking quality. Eventually is it not possible that biology finds us all unaccountable for our actions?

Environmental Determinism theory says that there are factors in a persons life that shape them and can help us understand the person and give an explanation as to why a person would commit a crime. There are countless times when I have heard that a person is more likely to be an abuser if they were exposed to abuse. That media violence begets violence in viewers, that rock lyrics can cause two teens to walk into a school and begin shooting.

Then there are the evolutionary psychologists that tell us that men are prone to promiscuity because of the theory that our ancestors were rewarded with a larger number of descendants if they slept around. Just another excuse for men that cheat. We have evolved through the survival of the fittest and it is seen that the great warriors and chiefs in most civilizations were rewarded with more wives. So we have evolved into cheaters. It’s not our fault.

It is in science that we should look to see that we are determined beings. Through science, shall we slowly see our responsibility go out the window? Do not look at the three fields I have briefly mention and think one as right and the other two wrong, or two right and one wrong, for it is the contention of all the leaders of the fields as well as many others that it is a combination of all three that best and most accurately portrays our human nature. As these fields grow there will be grand cases against freedom of the will. And against responsibility for actions as well. The infamous bumper sticker that says ‘guns don’t kill people - people kill people’ seems quite accurate. Doesn’t it seem silly that we won’t blame guns but we will blame people? Are we not just as mechanical?

But on the other side of the scale we have the free will advocates. The theists who have the daunting task of upholding their notion of human nature against the force of science. Not an easy thing to do. Although it seems many of the theists I have encountered in conversation have a hard enough time refuting the problem of evil; they haven’t even gotten outside their religion yet to see the problem of science. It is through our God given free will that we choose to do such and such a thing. There seems to be no problem to assigning responsibility. Just take anyone who does something contrary to Natural Law, apply the notion of free will and reason, then blammo we have a person responsible for the action. Wonderful, but wait a minute, what is this Natural Law? (Defined as) ‘A rational creatures participation with the eternal law’. And what is this eternal law? (Defined as) ‘Gods wisdom’.

Who is God?

That is a little off topic I suppose, so back to the point. Free will relieves a person from responsibility because if a person has true free will, than would behavior not be utterly random? Who would take heed of punishment and be deterred from following this freedom of the will to the degree that this free will is satisfied? And why would anyone take an example of their neighbor’s punishment and let it be a deterrent? Is responsibility not restricting free will? Then are we not determined to do only what is right? Do we see the totalitarian trend beginning here? True freedom of will would have to alleviate responsibility on account of equality, unless it is indeed that one persons freedom of will is certainly not equal to another’s.

I suppose all that is left is my remark on the present judicial system; on justice. There is no true ground to assess responsibility, so it is out of our spite that we punish people now. The matter of principle, and a complete disregard for common sense lets a suicidal death row inmate receive all the best medical attention and best modern doctors at our expense so that we can get the empty satisfaction of watching him be killed. It is the same principle that sees us punish old age and dying Nazis, when there is no reason to believe that punishing that man will stop a future Hitler. More though, we still do it despite the fact that the manpower could be used to help prevent street crime and things of the sorts. But again that Nazi won’t cheat justice, not under our watch.

~Travis

---

Even if all you say is true, why could not punishment be forward looking, rather than backward looking? I mean holding people responsible for what they have done might deter others from acting similarly, and the same people from acting similarly again. Maybe no one could have done otherwise than he did do last time, but that doesn’t mean that with the proper deterrence (or encouragment) no one would do other than he is contemplating doing next time. Since, then, the threat of punishment (or the promise of reward) might change a person’s future behavior and be one of the causes acting on him. That is completely consistent with determinism.