You do what you do, in any given situation, because of the way you are. — Sargon

Okay, this doesn't make sense. You also behave the way you do based on external constraints. You might will one thing over another because of some event or conclusion reached through deduction, for instance. You might choose a vanilla ice cream cone semi-arbitrarily even if you prefer chocolate because chocolate isn't available.

Or you might act in such a way as is contrary to the way you are, insofar as you could want to stop smoking crack even if you are addicted to smoking crack because someone persuaded you to quit. You are acting in a way that is antithetical to the way you are; you are a reluctant crack smoker.

Furthermore, if you have libertarian free-will you are not necessarily choosing based on the way you are, but rather your choices originate with some magical mechanism that allows you to choose unimpeded. So, (1) presupposes that we don't have free-will. Unless you can demonstrate how choice is only determined by the way one is?

It seems to me Strawson must have had some other premises in there.

1. You do what you do, in any given situation, because of the way you are. — Sargon

A meaningless statement. "The way you are" is too vague.

The whole thing sounds like a campaign slogan for someone running for District Attorney of Las Angeles.

Galen Strawson's argument against free will, and if not, why? — Sargon

I disagree with this argument because we are caused to will.

I think Strawson would argue that the way we are is caused itself. That seems implicit in (3).

edit: thus, our will would be caused because we will what we will because of the way we are

I agree we are caused, but to will. And what you will, well take responsibility for.

So, we are caused to will, but we are still willing one thing over another. Seems like a safe thing to say. How does that relate to the (probably misrepresented) argument in the OP? The argument seems to dispute that we can will one thing over another in any meaningful sense.

1. You do what you do, in any given situation, because of the way you are. — Sargon

This is problematic. The argument declares for determinism in the first premise, and then discovers it at the end as if it has proved it. But of course the cause of my actions is my imagination. I imagine the pleasant taste of beer and that might cause me to head to the fridge, or I might catch sight of my burgeoning beer-gut and think again. The causal path of thought cannot be predicted even if it is mechanical because of the halting problem. So the question is begged as it always must be.

But the argument is further disguised by talk of "ultimate responsibility" as if it is something deeper than ordinary responsibility. Which it clearly isn't. I choose to drink beer and then I am drunk, and I am responsible for the way I am - drunk. And if I get in a fight or run someone down, I am responsible for that because I am responsible for the way I am. And of course the law recognises that one attains an age of responsibility, one is not born with it, but develops the capacity to change one's state. It also recognises diminished responsibility, when circumstances are overwhelming. There is a lot of work being done by that weasel word, 'ultimate', that it has no permit for.

Can one overcome a born predisposition to harm others? Circumstances are strong factors, as are upbringing. In the end we are largely responsible for our actions.

Well, according to Galen I say what I say about this argument because of the way I am. So, if you want to ultimately understand what caused me to say “I am caused to will”, you will have to go back in the causal train in which I believe we have no hope to determine.

So, the puzzle is 1. does the argument provide the reason to accept the conclusion? or 2. should we go with some arational natural cause

Can one overcome a born predisposition to harm others? — jgill

Yes, one can overcome such a predisposition. I have a predisposition for doing self-destructive things, but with time that has diminished. Sometimes you also have to shift the goalposts to something more reasonable than some ideal you have in your head. But largely, yes.

In the end we are largely responsible for our actions. — jgill

I agree.

In my experience, you can't cure a sadist or a psychopath, but you can get them to play by the rules.

edit: for whatever that's worth

The opening argument is taken from Galen Strawson.

https://iai.tv/articles/moral-responsibility-without-free-will-auid-2115

This topic wasn't my focus when I wrote about Strawson, so I can say very little. Free will arguments often get stuck really quickly on intuitions.

I think we should distinguish personal pre-disposition with choices. I have a pre-disposition to get really bored in large crowds, but I still have a choice to remain or to leave.

I can't, of course, force myself to be pre-disposed to change what I like or dislike, with some minor exceptions. But within this constraint, I have plenty of options.

I’m not sure how it is possible that you cannot be ultimately responsible for the way you are in any respect at all, given that so much of oneself (genes, body, hormones, and so on) is responsible for “the way you are”.

1. You do what you do, in any given situation, because of the way you are. — Sargon

Not sure about the explanatory power of this premise. It's not clear to me to what extent one can determine the way we are prior to determining what we do: e.g. if X kills somebody, X is a murderer. In this case, we wouldn't explain X killed somebody (what X did) because X was a murderer (the way X was) but the other way around: X is a murderer because X killed somebody. One could claim that some set of X’s features pre-existing the murder explain why X committed a murder: all right, what is this set of features exactly? One can claim that thanks to some human science research (sociology, criminology, psychology, etc.) we can determine at best some set of features correlated with unleashing murderous impulses with great probability.There are 2 problems with that: 1. Great probability doesn’t mean “necessary” 2. Unleashing murderous impulses doesn’t necessarily lead to murder (think of all the ways murder attempts could fail), so my features would explain my doing when it succeeds and it fails. Yet it’s what results from our doing that may loop back to gratify or frustrate, reinforce or weaken those features, as well as the pool of related possibilities and expectations, so again changing what I am. In other words our doing redefine our identity, the way we are.

Strawson's argument boils down to us having no say, no say at all, in, as hs puts it, the way we are. The rest follows of course.

Metaphysics is too speculative and too vast to navigate, relatively speaking; simplify at your own risk.

Here is Strawson's paper: Galen Strawson: The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility (1994)

summarizes it accurately. Much of the short paper consists of restatements and elaborations (or belaboring) of this thesis. Here is a longer version from the paper:

(1) You do what you do because of the way you are.

So

(2) To be truly morally responsible for what you do you must be truly responsible for the way you are – at least in certain crucial mental respects.

But

(3) You cannot be truly responsible for the way you are, so you cannot be truly responsible for what you do.

Why can’t you be truly responsible for the way you are? Because

(4) To be truly responsible for the way you are, you must have intentionally brought it about that you are the way you are, and this is impossible.

Why is it impossible? Well, suppose it is not. Suppose that

(5) You have somehow intentionally brought it about that you are the way you now are, and that you have brought this about in such a way that you can now be said to be truly responsible for being the way you are now.

For this to be true

(6) You must already have had a certain nature N in the light of which you intentionally brought it about that you are as you now are.

But then

(7) For it to be true that you and you alone are truly responsible for how you now are, you must be truly responsible for having had the nature N in the light of which you intentionally brought it about that you are the way you now are.

So

(8) You must have intentionally brought it about that you had that nature N, in which case you must have existed already with a prior nature in the light of which you intentionally brought it about that you had the nature N in the light of which you intentionally brought it about that you are the way you now are …

Here one is setting off on the regress. Nothing can be causa sui in the required way. — Strawson

Thanks for the extended version of the argument and link to the article. Makes a lot of sense, and I certainly have no immediate objections.

This is problematic. The argument declares for determinism in the first premise, and then discovers it at the end as if it has proved it. — unenlightened

Although the main argument seems to leave out the possibility of indeterminism, Strawson does discuss indeterminism and argues that, if anything, "random factors, for which one is ex hypothesi in no way responsible" make matters worse for personal responsibility. This is the part of the argument with which I unreservedly agree. (But these are well-known objections - cf. Ayer: "But if it is a matter of pure chance that a man should act in one way rather than another, he may be free but can hardly be responsible.")

But of course the cause of my actions is my imagination. I imagine the pleasant taste of beer and that might cause me to head to the fridge, or I might catch sight of my burgeoning beer-gut and think again. The causal path of thought cannot be predicted even if it is mechanical because of the halting problem. So the question is begged as it always must be. — unenlightened

I don't really understand what this has to do with predictability. The argument is that, assuming causal determinism and a fixed past, you could not have become anything other than what you are. (And furthermore, if a non-deterministic component is also in play, you have no more control of it than you have of the past.) Predictability does not play any role here. (And halting problem?)

But the argument is further disguised by talk of "ultimate responsibility" as if it is something deeper than ordinary responsibility. Which it clearly isn't. I choose to drink beer and then I am drunk, and I am responsible for the way I am - drunk. And if I get in a fight or run someone down, I am responsible for that because I am responsible for the way I am. And of course the law recognises that one attains an age of responsibility, one is not born with it, but develops the capacity to change one's state. It also recognises diminished responsibility, when circumstances are overwhelming. There is a lot of work being done by that weasel word, 'ultimate', that it has no permit for. — unenlightened

I agree. If "utlimate responsibility" is defined as causa sui, against which Strawson needlessly argues, then it has little to do with what we normally understand by responsibility. And if it is his argument that what we take responsibility to be is reducible to mechanistic causation, then he is plainly wrong.

In an Interview with Galen Strawson:

"I just want to stress the word “ultimate” before “moral responsibility.” Because there’s a clear, weaker, everyday sense of “morally responsible” in which you and I and millions of other people are thoroughly morally responsible people."

I don't know what he means by "ultimate" responsibility.

I don't know what he means by "ultimate" responsibility. — ChrisH

I think I have an idea. As a blame skeptic, like Pereboom, Nussbaum and others, Strawson rejects the kind of radical free will that makes the subject responsible in an ultimate way. I take this to mean the deliberately willed actions of an autonomous, morally responsible Cartesian subject. Those who believe in such an ultimately responsible subject are necessarily harsher and more ‘blameful' in their views of justice than deterministic , non-desert based modernist approaches, which rest on shaping influences (bodily-affective and social) outside of an agent's control.

The very autonomy of the Cartesian subject presupposes a profound arbitrariness to free will. We say that the subject who has free will wills of their own accord, chooses what they want to choose , and as such has autonomy with respect to ‘foreign' social and internal bodily influences. The machinations of the free will amount to a self-enclosed system.

This solipsist self functions via an internal logic of values that, while rational within the internal bounds of its own subjectivity, is walled off from the wider community of selves and therefore can choose value in a profoundly irrational or immoral manner with respect to social consensus.

Therefore, the very autonomy of the Cartesian subject presupposes a profound potential laxity and arbitrariness to individual free will in relation to the moral norms of a wider social community. Modernist deterministic moral arguments of those like Pereboom, Strawson and Nussbaum surrender the absolute solipsist rationalism of free will-based models of the self in favor of a view of the self as belonging to and determined by a wider causal empirical social and natural order. If we ask why the agent endowed with free will chose to perform a certain action , the only explanation we can give is that it made sense to them given their own desires and whims. If we instead inquire why the individual ensconced within a modernist deterministic or postmodern relativist world performed the same action, we would be able to make use of the wider explanatory framework of the natural or discursive order in situating the causes of behavior.

Here is Strawson's paper: Galen Strawson: The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility (1994)

↪Sargon summarizes it accurately. Much of the short paper consists of restatements and elaborations (or belaboring) of this thesis. Here is a longer version from the paper:

(1) You do what you do because of the way you are. — SophistiCat

Not if I have free will, because if I have free will, I can do what I do in spite of the way I am. Strawson's initial premise therefore begs the question, and his argument is therefore circular. Why are we wasting our time with this?

For the record, I don't believe in free will, but that's because
a) no-one seems to be able to explain how it works, and
b) the only available options seem to be full determinism, indeterminism, or some mixture of the two, none of which seem to deliver free will, and
c) the only way you can prove you could have acted differently is to have acted differently, which is impossible.

Premise 3 is false.

Strawson believes that to be morally responsible you need to have created yourself. And he believes that is impossible. That's his justification for 3.

But both claims are false, I think. First, literal self creation is possible. The only reason to think it isn't is because a cause must come before its effect. However, a cause does not have to come before its effect (and thus that to create yourself you would need to exist prior to your own existence). However, simultaneous causation is possible (indeed, arguable all effects are simultaneously with their causes). So, self creation is possible (or at least the burden of proof is now on its denier). But even if it wasn't, selfcreation is not necessary for moral responsibility. The only reason to think it is, is that if you have self created then nothing external to you is responsible for how you are. But that will also be the case if nothing created you. That is, it will be true if you exist uncreated.

Thus his argument is unsound. It might be objected that this hardly restores faith in our moral responsibility as surely we are not self created or uncreated things.

However, that is bad reasoning. As our reason represents us to be morally responsible we should assume we are and the burden of proof is on the denier. So, absent evidence to the contrary, we should conclude that we are morally responsible and that we satisfy whatever conditions on responsibility our reason tells us it has.

1. You do what you do, in any given situation, because of the way you are. — Sargon

There is no such thing as "the way you are". We are constantly active, changing, and each activity you are engaged in is making you different from before. So the premise is self-contradicting. The fact that you are doing what you are doing implies that you are actively changing, therefore it is impossible that there is such a thing as the way you are.

Why are we wasting our time with this? — Herg

:up:

If we instead inquire why the individual ensconced within a modernist deterministic or postmodern relativist world performed the same action, we would be able to make use of the wider explanatory framework of the natural or discursive order in situating the causes of behavior. — Joshs

Some people are born bad. End of story.

8) "You must have intentionally brought it about that you had that nature N, in which case you must have existed already with a prior nature in the light of which you intentionally brought it about that you had the nature N in the light of which you intentionally brought it about that you are the way you now are …" — Strawson

This is an example of world class philosophical thinking?

Thanks.

Some people are born bad. End of story — jgill

Yes, but if you agree with the following, then you are actually in Strawson’s camp:

“what we do and the way we are is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control, whether that be determinism, chance, or luck, and because of this agents are never morally responsible in the sense needed to justify certain kinds of desert-based judgments, attitudes, or treatments—such as resentment, indignation, moral anger, backward-looking blame, and retributive punishment.” “In the basic form of desert, someone who has done wrong for bad reasons deserves to be blamed and perhaps punished just because he has done wrong for those reasons, and someone who has performed a morally exemplary action for good reasons deserves credit, praise, and perhaps reward just because she has performed that action for those reasons (Feinberg 1970; Pereboom 2001, 2014; Scanlon 2013). This backward-looking sense is closely linked with the reactive attitudes of indignation, moral resentment, and guilt, and on the positive side, with gratitude (Strawson 1962); arguably because these attitudes presuppose that their targets are morally responsible in the basic desert sense.” (Caruso 2018)

“The more you believe in a person's free will, the more you will hold them morally responsible for their actions. ...and the amount that you hold a person responsible is related to how much they deserve to be praised or blamed, rewarded or punished, which, of course, affects the entire justice system.”

In sum, Strawson et al are not arguing against blame , punishment and justice but against revenge, retribution and backward-looking blame, which they see as the outcome of a traditional belief in free-will. They are advocating instead for a forward-looking constructive form of justice and blame no longer tied to revenge and anger. You dont have to go back too far in history to find
rampant examples of systems of justice based on retribution and an eye for a eye ( or a hand for a theft).

Strawson believes that to be morally responsible you need to have created yourself. And he believes that is impossible. That's his justification for 3. — Bartricks

This excludes every child that learns from their parents, that is convenient.

I think Galen was not convince of this argument
, but was caused by his rebellion to his father, P.F Strawson, who defended free will. I think he would have to agree to stay consistent with his argument.

I think Galen was not convince of this argument
, but was caused by his rebellion to his father, P.F Strawson, who defended free will. I think he would have to agree to stay consistent with his argument. — Richard B

Nothing about Strawson’s general philosophical outlook leads me to think he would share his father’s view on free will, especially his belief that the self is continually changing.

In sum, Strawson et al are not arguing against blame , punishment and justice but against revenge, retribution and backward-looking blame, which they see as the outcome of a traditional belief in free-will. — Joshs

They are presenting a straw man then or being patronising.

It does not follow that if you believe in free will you become a foaming at the mouth lynch mob. People who have believed in predestination have also supported punishment. People that don't believe in free will can believe in punishment as a deterrent to others

A lot of Christians have believed in the theory that we are born sinful not by choice and have total depravity which is not a free will stance but that we deserve to be punished.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_depravity

"Total depravity (also called radical corruption[1] or pervasive depravity) is a Protestant theological doctrine derived from the concept of original sin. It teaches that, as a consequence of man's fall, every person born into the world is enslaved to the service of sin as a result of their fallen nature and, apart from the efficacious (irresistible) or prevenient (enabling) grace of God, is completely unable to choose by themselves to follow God, refrain from evil, or accept the gift of salvation as it is offered."

I think the no free will brigade commit themselves to denying blame where it is due in an inappropriate way that has a negative effects on the victims of someone else. It is the culture of making bullies equal victims to their victims and further victimising victims.