Indulge me for a moment.
Imagine you're watching a video on your most trusted news source. It's a short 5 second video of Dave standing over his neighbor Mike as Mike tries to crawl away from Dave....Dave shoots him 3 times ending his life. This is horrific video of Dave committing murder. I've no doubt at all that you would feel compelled to morally judge Dave as a murderer and decide rather quickly that this is a bad man who did something immoral.
The next day, you're watching the same news and it says that they have an update to the Mike murder. It's a slightly longer video from a different angle...and it shows Mike pointing a pistol at his neighbor Dave clearly threatening to kill him before Dave draws his own gun, shoots Mike who then falls to the ground and starts crawling to the pistol he dropped and this is when the previous video began. You're obviously stunned...and the new information changes who you think is a bad person doing immoral things. Poor Dave was nearly killed and had to defend his life from evil Mike.
The next day while watching the same news and yet another update....a 3rd video....this one showing the entire incident beginning to end. It reveals Dave pouring kerosene onto Mike's bushes with the intention of burning down Mike's house with him, his wife, and their 3 children inside. This was caught on Mike's home security cameras just prior to Mike stepped out of his home with his gun to confront Dave. Then the rest of the incident happened....and you're back to viewing Dave as doing someone who acts immorally....an evil man.
If you've read this far, ty for indulging me. The hypothetical scenario above is overly dramatic on purpose and lacking on nuance deliberately...
Is this not a fair example of how both perception and truth interact in our views of morality? As each bit of true information is revealed....you adjust your view of good and bad accordingly (assuming you believe it's true of course)?
Yes, updating our credences of the situation as new information arrives is widely accepted as the most effective way to understand the world. Bayes' Theorem provides a mathematical foundation for doing this.
From my POV, being enculturated in the UK, and brought up in a very Christian environment, my immediate emotional reactions would be roughly as you describe, but on reflection my rational interpretation would be to wonder what led the individual in each case to behave the way they did - and probably change my emotional stance to a degree of sympathy of for all involved, that those events led them to the ruin of their lives.
Yeah but he didn't see human perception or experiences as you do.
I interpret his aphorism's philosophical foundations to be that reason is motivated by value judgements (feelings, emotions).
Please do. I'd love to hear it.
The incoherence is in the claim that it is not deterministic, i.e. depends on no prior cause, yet is not random, or any combination of the two. This is logically incoherent - if something has no prior cause, it is, by definition, random (unpredictable
in principle).
One common formulation is that, having made a particular choice in some situation, that individual
could have chosen differently in that exact situation. One can accept that they might have chosen differently if their mental state was different, so their assessment of the perceived options was different, etc., but their mental state was part of the situation in which they chose as they did, so in the exact same situation, they must make the same choice. Sometimes the claim is, "If I had that choice in those circumstances
again", which clearly fails because repeating the choice means the individual (if not the circumstances) would have changed. As Heraclitus pointed out, "No man steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man" (or words to that effect).
Another point is that we make choices
for a reason (or reasons), i.e. because of some value judgement (feeling: preference, desire, need, want, etc.). These reasons causally determine the choices we make. In many decisions, there may be a number of competing reasons, e.g. we'd like a doughnut but don't want to spoil our lunch, or put on weight, but we don't want to look impolite by refusing the offer, etc. The strength of these feelings depends on various prior causes - whether you had breakfast, social pressure to be slim, social customs & mores, etc. The strongest will determine the choice - if a choice discounts long-term goals in favour of short-term gratification, it's called being 'weak-willed' on the assumption that long-term goals have greater value or are worthier, but it was the emirically stronger feeling (will?) at the time.
The redundancy of free will is that causal explanations are sufficient to account for behaviour, and the feeling of having free will can be accounted for as the result of our agency in the evaluation process - we don't know the result until we weigh up the perceived potential benefits of the options and establish which best suits us - combined with our ignorance of the determinants of the value judgements (feelings) underlying that process.
IOW, the feelings (and their strength) that we use to evaluate the options, originate below our conscious awareness. In the main, we have these feelings without knowing why - and if you know the causal origin of the feeling that 'wins out' in making the choice (e.g. hunger, thirst, pain), there's no need to invoke free will. But despite the often uncertain causes of these feelings, they are, nevertheless,
our feelings, so we arrogate them and view their role in our choices as if they were somehow causeless.
Sure....how about this?
We, as human beings, have a biological faculty or "mechanism" if you prefer which allows us to make free will choices, or not, whenever we engage with it.
That's simply a wordy restatement that we have free will.
Simple enough. Free will is the idea that we are capable of making choices that aren't predetermined.
As above, that means we're capable of random choices. If you're suggesting that there's a 'third' way, neither causal nor random, can you explain how that can be?
I'm not sure why everyone keeps saying this. We would have laws....sure...but "wrong" is a value assigned to something, in this case behaviour....and it's unclear how the determinist sees any such values.
It's a word that people understand in our current society for actions considered contrary to the common good, so I don't see why it shouldn't be used. It is a value judgment in either situation - disbelief in free will doesn't mean emotions, feelings, and value judgements go away.
