Yes but you haven’t explained why free or will is neceessary with the condition of morallity or otherwise. I get you up to that point, but just being a cunt we all can do, and some people are born cunts, we chose not to be cunts and that is a free choice, but being a cunt is something as defined by someone else, if we have to be uncuntish because of societal pressure is that truly free? It’s like the term intelligent, I can say I am intelligent, because I reflect and reason well, but can I say I am a genius because I reason and reflect well? Likewise can I say I am free because I behave well or don’t?
Can’t but agree the moral life is the only rational or even wise life, that’s kinda self evident and if philosophy teaches anything it is that the unreflected life is meek and remorseless, but it has little or nothing to do with our ability to be free.
I have killed both man and God. I suppose that’s why Nietzsche is seen as morally nihilistic, if not a nihilist, because he rejects not freedom or will only conformity.
I think Schopenhaur is brilliant but was saying things under the assumption of causality and determinism, hence I think his picture and view of free will would change if he had to explain a non causal system according to his philosophy. I think in his time just as in Laplaces time all laws were considered deterministic so in context it makes sense, but that is no longer the context and all natural laws are certainly not deterministic.
Morality is the language of social control and conformity, “he should” and “I shouldn’t”. So proposing a morality based purely on one’s own will, an individual morality (but noteworthily still with a code, not self-indulgence), is in a sense anti-moral.
I apologize to Schopie for just throwing this quote in without context - I have no source, unfortunately, I remembered he said something like that and found it on some quote-page. So I don’t know if he made a difference between first order wants and second order wants - I hear that distinction for the first time, and I’m not sure I understand what it means.
But in the case of wanting to quite smoking and also wanting to smoke, it seems to me that the unfreedom still applies. You’re both unfree to not want to quit, and to not want to smoke. These wants / wills / desires are simply in you, caused by whatever, and regardless of which one of them is the strongest, you have to live with these wills, and in this case, this conflict of wills / wants.
That does seem to make sense, but if I use this argumentation in the smoking case, I’m not sure that it does. Does lighting a cigarette liberate you of the will to smoke? I would say it doesn’t. Does not smoking liberate you of the will not to smoke? I don’t think so.
Of course, it is absurd. But what else does free will mean?
I’m still not quite getting why moral = free or will or even immoral = lack of freedom or will?
Really don’t see why they are conditions that have any place in the debate of free will.
You are free if you chose freely surely, everything else is just a subscript?
If you chose to smoke yourself to death, that might be considered immoral, but it certainly isn’t a lack of freedom, to be unable to choose to smoke yourself to death would be surely? Morality matters not at all in the case of free and will. You can freely choose only if you have the choice between moral and immoral or either or neither, smoking or not; if you have neither the choice nor the ability to do other than you are told, must be true is it any sort of choice, free or otherwise? Or are you just pandering to laws imposed on you? Free and will must suppose the ability to chose to do otherwise or it’s just a codified law you have to follow. So how have you chosen if you were always meant to do what was expected of you?
Don’t get me wrong freedom isn’t chaos but neither is being beholden to absolute laws. It can’t be and still be free. Hence as I said on the other thread, there is no logic in compatibilism it is only sophistry and prevarication.
I see freedom of the will as freedom to do the right thing. I do not feel as though I want freedom to do the wrong thing (eg, eat sand when I am thirsty), especially as that kind of “freedom” is really surrender to base instincts ( or,as in my example of sand eating,surrender to madness).
Knowledge helps us do the right thing, ie, it frees us to do what is correct (which we all want).
Moral codes (the subjection of personal behaviour to what we believe is truth) are concerned with control of the will by the intellect, ie ,attempts at forms of freedom/attempts at doing the right thing.I guess it means that morality is the reason why we have free will, it (morality) is the highest test of freedom of the will.Our morality defines us, and the nearer to truth it is , the freer we are.
Eating, reproducing, making friends, it’s all methods of a form of power expanding.
“Freedom” is a senstation of experiencing power. Without power there is no action, that means no choice, and no power.
When we have fuel and gain more, we feel more free in our “Will”.
??? Dude, moral responsibility is precisely what is at stake in free will, as it is generally considered a necessary condition of moral responsibility. Free will is what gives us agency, and agency is what gives us action, and moral responsibility requires actions. In fact, the difference between the action of me hitting someone in the face and being morally responsible for it, and the event of my arm being thrown at that same persons face is what we call free will, whatever we think that difference may be. The reason free will is a question that is worth asking is because of moral responsibility.
What do you suppose is the relevant difference between wants versus more transparent feelings like hot that results in us saying that the former is a matter of freedom while the latter clearly is not? I too have this intuition, but I am unable to articulate reasons for it. In fact, the case against wants being relevant to freedom seems to be stronger than the case against “hot”.
And yet if free will is just the agency to act morally then how is it free? Is the agency to act imorrally therefore not free? It makes no sense to have an ability to act unless you can chose how to act freely, otherwise its just morallity.
I should be free to chose to punch someone in the face, whether or not I am responsible. To be free is to be free to chose not restricted by dogmatic a priori assumptions. I am not born with the inability to murder programmed into my DNA as a moral code. The only way murder could be considered immoral is objectively.
Wants are internally generated feelings although they are affected by the external, heat is external environmental, and we have no direct control over it except in terms of finding shelter or fire or some form of warmth. You can act to make yourself hot but you can’t directly control how hot it is externally as such as it depends on the sun and the weather over which you have no direct control. Likewise you have no direct control over either morality or it’s legal equivalent in practice the law.
Freedom is the ability to act, it is neutral morally, morality is the restriction society or the laws of the land places on our freedom, it is not intrinsic any more than Gods divine commands are actually real or intrinsically part of us. If I chose to murder and decide not to because of fear of the law then that is restriction on my will and my want to kill, if I chose to murder despite fear of the law, then that is freely chosen and it becomes murder when I act to kill, but what is the difference between kill and murder and essentially that is the difference between morality and will. Morality is just an invention of social order it therefore has no meaning to the term free or will. They are simply manifestations of our consciousness, were as morality is a doctrine or dogma made by consensus in order to restrict our baser impulses. Laws are objective and institutionalised but will and free are subjective and subjectively dependant. You can find an exploration of this in Dostoyevskis Crime and Punishment.
Compatibilism is a nonsense, it says if I act with free moral agency then determinism is compatible with free will. Which is plainly an a priori axiom that has no meaning to libertarian free will by definition.
Compatibilism is a Jedi mind trick invented by the religious to give the herd the illusion of free will.
I think logically and with material being intrinsically chancy ie at it’s most simple level probabilistic and random, Laplaces demon could not exist. Even if cause and effect ruled matter the possibility of determining 3 objects in motion in a gravitational environment given the size of the universe as a limit of distance concerns, is impossible, infinite objects is infinitely impossible therefore any determinism is merely a fantasy divised to give God omniscience. If God is dead then so is compatibilism. If there were any chancey nature to matter though even this deterministic consideration using cause and effect is merely sophistry; as shown by Pauli and Heisenberg et al determinism has no place in science nor are states reversible, nor is any entropy event practically modelled by such considerations, but all events are in fact statistical and stochastic; the universe is inherently subject to infinite degrees of freedom at its very foundation (in essence the wave function is infinite) and natural law hence quantum mecahnics hence nano technology. Hence philosophy still suggesting that the universe acts in a reversible fashion if we were to reverse the arrow of time. Simply because that is what they are taught to think by their rather deluded philosophy teachers who appear to still be labouring under the delusion that cause and effect rule everything and Charge Parity Time violations(CPT violations) are impossible. Hence Einsteins 1905 seminal papers on Brownian motion, quanta of light and special relativity. Hence the Heisenburg uncertainty principle, hence the Pauli exclusion principle etc hence quantum mechanics.
Hence:
Causal determinism and classical mechanics are all very well but to labour under their conclusions and further suggest the Universe runs in a clockwork fashion from start to finish is absurd and practically invalid in any scientific experiment except those within limited systems, ie newtons laws work on Earth but are not as accurate as Einsteins in all frames of reference.
To return to heat that is an analogy of all quantum systems and all systems even classical ones are governed by processes that are non causal and inherently chancy. Even if we percieve causally time as consistently causal that suggests nothing about the actual nature of time, nor could it, it is merely the way we have evolved to make sense of reality. reality has no regards for our delusional notions nor common sense nor practicality, it just is so get used to it. Or you could prove quantum time and quantum mechanics and general and special reltivity likewise wrong, either way I’m not fussed but I’d like to see you try and make sense of the Universe without it. Of further interest might be the natural development by Bohr, Pauli Dirac et al of the interpretations of physics ie many worlds (Copenhagen in science fiction form) Copenhagen, Bohmian mechanics etc. The Born rule , Pauli’s exclusion principle, relativistic/relational statistical mechanics et al. Also M-Theory is an interesting read if somewhat abstract.
The photon is probabilistic, but is what you see what you get or is it just a mask of reality? How would Schopenhaur have reacted to quantum theory?
No, here moral responsibility does not mean being a virtuous person and only a virtuous person, it means the general capacity for your actions to be scrutinized morally. The morally responsible agent is capable of action that is either praiseworthy or blameworthy, or somewhere in between.
If I do not act morally, it does not mean I am depraved. If I do not act immorally it does not mean I am ‘good.’
The moral agency induces one to question his actions before and after they are done. Is there a natural act or free act as long as we think between opposites?
Where does that put you if someone else tells you what is right. You experience what that tells you. But that is not what the core essence of what rightness is.
But it’s still just morality, your just indulging yourself in ethical scrutiny, if your determined it’s worse than that you can’t do anything other than indulge yourself no matter how much you think you chose freely you simply could not nor ever will.
Since he is the ultimate moral agent you have simply replaced God with society. Now you are no longer a slave to Gods will just a slave to the system.
And yet despite merely replacing your master with another agent you still claim you are free.
If to be a free moral agent means to give over your right to chose to a higher power spiritual or mundane how does that make you free exactly? Because you have never committed any crime or despite it?
My instincts may well clash with my more reasoned thoughts.What side of my being do I think should have the upper hand? My instincts are not freely chosen, they are chains.Ok , it is true that many of my instincts are good for me, but it is also clear to me that some of my drives are bad for me and others, those drives need to be subordinate to my intellect, to my self control.Freedom of the will should really be seen as self control, self control aimed (logically) at the betterment of our condition, which clearly requires knowledge.
We have to understand that there is more than one side to being human, the instinctive side , and the intellectual side.Surrender to instincts without intellectual evaluation of them is not freedom (though it is a choice).
I failed my English O level so maybe I ain’t making myself clear.
Mr. Anderson …. In the movie, Neo asked Morpheus, “If you die in the matrix do you die in actuality?” The answer was something like, “The body cannot live without the mind.” Being that the mind pertains to things not physical (Descartes) , how can mind harm the body? How do you explain the connection between mind and body in this context?
What? Honestly, starting with the second part of your last post there hasn’t been a single sentence coherent enough to understand. I suppose it’s for the best though, as the last thing I want to do is argue with wikipedia.
