Like how child abusers argue that moral intuition is an illusion.
Er, no - I thought I'd explained that. Moral intuition is a subjective feeling, it implies nothing about how the world works, just how you respond to it. The feeling of free will concerns how the world objectively works. You can't be wrong about how you feel, but your feelings can be wrong about how the world is. I don't see how a feeling, in itself, can be illusory - its referent can be illusory (e.g. phantom limb syndrome), but the feeling is real enough.
Felt morals are from subjects sensing an objective realm of moral values and duties. The philosophically amoral however deny that this objective dimension exists, even while experiencing the objective moral values themselves. They have undercut their own means of understanding reality, like how you have with the experience of libertarian free choice.
The existence of objective moral values and duties is an unsubstantiated claim. Lacking belief in objective values doesn't mean lacking values. Empirically, morals and values are subjective and cultural. There are a few widely accepted rudimentary 'universals', but even they are honoured in the breach by different cultures.
Generic predispositions aren’t divine predestination (or any kind of determinism.)
Genetic predispositions; they're not divine anything, but they are deterministic in the sense that they determine how you're initially inclined to respond to the world.
Influences and experiences don’t cause your choices, rather they influence and inform you. The decisive reason of any choice is the chooser. Having genetics and past experiences aren’t going to do away with your own ability to choose.
What influences and informs you, has causal effect on your knowledge and how you feel. That's what choices are based on. Only a random selection (e.g. rolling a die) is free of the effects of influences and experiences, and it's arguable whether a random selection is a choice at all.
Your ability to choose is the product of your genetics and development, it's not guaranteed - there are genetic and developmental abnormalities, and physical injuries that can impair or destroy the ability to choose and make decisions (executive dysfunction).
But the
ability to choose is not the same as the
reasons for choice, which are determined by how you feel about the apparent options, and how you feel about things is also a product of your genetics and life experiences.
I’m not writing about your memory of moral experiences or your memory of libertarian choice, rather I’ve written about the immediate experience itself. You have direct access to these things, making them the absolute best guide to knowledge.
Immediate experience is the absolute best guide to knowledge of immediate experience, but it is not a particularly reliable guide to how the world is. We all have misleading experiences at times.
As people receive a sense of protection and satisfaction over determinism.
If you mean that determinism gives people a sense of protection and satisfaction, it's possible that some feel that way, but there is just as much uncertainty in the world for determinists as for everyone else. It can even make some people anxious that they can't change things (a mistake, btw).
Worse still they can feel helpless and unchosen by a God who has already decided they are doomed, these users are on CF daily.
So maybe some determinists get a sense of protection and satisfaction from it, and some feel helpless and unchosen by God - just as some religious believers get a sense of protection and satisfaction from their beliefs and some are plagued by doubts, uncertainties, and guilt (and some feel helpless and unchosen by a God who has already decided they are doomed)... It's not so surprising - people are all different; some are more anxious than others and some more confident - again, it's largely down to their genetic predispositions and their life experiences.
For determinists that feel helpless and unchosen by a God who has already decided they are doomed, I suggest they think carefully about whether determinism and a belief in God are really compatible (it sounds a bit odd). The closest to that I can think of are Calvinists, but I'm not sure they're really determinists, except in respect of whether they're saved or not. But then I'm no expert in Christian sects.
The big difference between philosophical determinism versus movies, music and books is that people can lay those things down for what they are, rather than insist they are the secrets to the hidden workings of the universe.
Books, movies and rollercoasters aren’t examples of mental compartmentalism, while believing every choice you make is already decided (while in the act of deciding yourself) is near insane for believers willing to contemplate the thing.
The point was about how you can get satisfaction, enjoyment, and reward from things you know are not real or not accurate representations of reality. For fictional media it sometimes means suspending your disbelief, for the determinist it means mostly accepting the way things seem (see below). But like the physicist who is happy most of the time to treat classical mechanics as an acceptable everyday approximation, sometimes it's useful or necessary to use a more accurate model.
Determinism doesn't mean you believe every choice is 'already decided' - the decision is not made until there's an outcome - but the outcome is inevitable. 'Decision' and 'choice' are the names we give to the process of arriving at an outcome. No one knows what the outcome will be until the process is finished.
Living as though you’re making choices while believing you don’t make choices is the definition of inconsistent.
Not at all, that's a semantic confusion. 'Choices' must be made whether you think they're deterministic or not. Either way, a 'choosing' is the name for the process of evaluating and selecting a preferred option, and the 'choice' is the selected option.
If you want inconsistency, contrast the belief in an afterlife of eternal happiness in the presence of a transcendent loving creator, with the desperation to stay alive in the most awful circumstances, and the terrible grief at losing a loved one you believe is going to a far better place, and that you'll be reunited with in a cosmic blink of an eye.
It’s a rejection when you experience freewill as being libertarian, yet deny that libertarian freewill exists. Again, it’s rejecting your own lived reality by definition.
No, it's recognising that how things superficially feel isn't always how they really are. In fact, once you get used to the idea, it feels quite natural to see choice as a complex deterministic process, and you realise that 'free will' is just a label to cover our lack of insight into, i.e. ignorance of, the underlying (unconscious) details of that process.
It's something that people have always done - reification - make up a label for something unexplained and treat it as a 'thing' in its own right.
Sure experiences can be mistaken, but that’s not much to go on when you have daily experiences and can accurately glean the world through those things.
If experiences can be mistaken, then you're not always accurately gleaning the world through them. Astrologers, homoeopaths, crystal healers, and so on, think they're accurately gleaning the world through their experiences, but empirical evidence shows that they're consistently mistaken.
Errors in hearing, sight and even on moral things doesn’t invalidate the experience itself, just having the tools help properly basic beliefs arise around those tools.
As I said, the experience is real enough but it may not accurately reflect the world. I don't know what you mean by "
just having the tools help properly basic beliefs arise around those tools."
Likewise, having the experience of choice or that you and I could have done differently in any given situation is the foundation of knowledge.
How? Please explain.
When you reject those things you aren’t rejecting memory or spoon bending, you are rejecting human knowledge in its most accessible form.
Again, I'm not talking about rejecting them, I'm talking about how they're interpreted.
That’s not the standard definition of determinism though. Determinism is about your choices having been determined by external factors beyond your own control.
It wasn't intended to be a definition, and your description isn't a definition either. The simple definition is 'every event has a cause'.
It's true that for a determinist, choices are ultimately determined by factors outside their control, but that's partly because the idea of 'control' is ambiguous in this context. Individuals are products of factors outside themselves - they don't choose their parents or their early development or environment, which makes them the kind of individuals they are; their ongoing development is determined by experiences of events outside their control. So when they start making conscious decisions for themselves, they use a brain that is the product of factors outside their control to make decisions about events in the world that are outside their control.
You can say reasonably that by making these decisions they are taking control, but that's just another way of saying what we call 'taking control' is people deciding and acting on the events that impact them using brains developed and moulded by events outside their control
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You could live normally without believing in objective moral values and duties too, you’d end up denying your own lived experiences and describing them as an illusion in conversation however.
It’s not an intellectually genuine way to live imo.
Most people I know don't believe in objective morals and duties (they'd ask "where do they come from? how do you know what they are?"), but they don't feel they're denying their lived experiences and they don't call them illusions because they understand that they've absorbed moral values and duties from the people they grew up with and as a result of their lived experiences. They see that this explains why different cultures can have different moral values.
That’s just word games to get you back into the safety of determinism though.
It's a different definition of free will, certainly, and it replaces an incoherent definition, which is good, but why do you think there's safety in determinism? You still have to make choices, you can still make bad decisions, you're still held responsible for your choices and actions, and people still like or dislike you for who you are and what you do.
I'm undecided about the utility of compatibilism, particularly when it's used in support of moral responsibility, which does, on the face of it, seem intellectually dishonest.
You’re misunderstanding the argument again. I’ll try one last time.
Believing that your moral experiences, experiences felt as being objective, to then believe that they are illusory (therefore not objective,) that’s a denial of your own lived experience.
To restate the earlier point. The moral experience is a certain type of knowledge, immediately experienced knowledge about the world in which we live. Denying that type of knowledge as an illusion leads into denying similar types of immediately experienced knowledge as being illusory too.
Our experiences appear to be different. I don't feel my moral experience is 'objective', I feel it's personal, i.e. subjective, very noticeably largely a product of my upbringing and education, refined by my later experiences. I'm very aware that other people have their own moral values and rank the values we have in common differently from me. I don't believe my moral experiences are illusory.
I don't deny knowledge about the world obtained through experience - that's how all knowledge is obtained, I just acknowledge that not all experience accurately reflects how the world is. Whether I'm happy or sad, have regret or satisfaction, or think something is right or wrong, they're all undeniably real feelings, but the experiences that made me feel that way may not have been accurate reflections of the world.
Yes - it appears next to every post I make, under my name.
