If the agent determines all of his actions then yes he has free will.

Is he not his ingrained predispositions?

Can the agent choose not to avoid those actions? If he cannot, is he acting freely?

Yes.

You hold the same standards for news as you do politicians? No wonder fake news works so well.

Journalist Sharyl Attkisson has a great compendium of media mistakes, lies, and propaganda in the Trump era.

https://sharylattkisson.com/2022/03/50-media-mistakes-in-the-trump-era-the-definitive-list/

But you are not isolated from your environment. You cannot think freely without breathing oxygen and you cannot walk freely without having a ground to walk on. So why is that slip on a banana peel not your free act?

I’ve already argued that the actions we take while slipping on a banana peel are myriad, but invariably have to do with avoiding slipping. The moment a slipping action occurs, everything from our inner ear, our brain, our flesh and bone, move to avoid the act of falling and injury. Slipping, falling, colliding with the ground, and breaking one’s arm are not the “free acts” of the agent because those are the actions he is trying to avoid.

I’m not sure why one has to be isolated from his environment for this to be the case.

nothing pops into the head, as if from nowhere. I think; and whatever contents could be said to be found in that act are freely generated by me and no one or nothing else.

So it is not enough for my free will act to originate in me. I must also be alive and maybe also intend to do the act? But how do I choose an intention without already having it?

It is enough for your act to originate in you. Whether an action is willed, determined, directed, chosen, intended, controlled, conditioned, dictated, regulated, they arise within and are performed by the same agent. In a sense, then, you’ve chosen, determined, directed, regulated, willed your thought by having it.

Nope. Free will pertains to living beings, in particular humans.

If you slip on a banana peel is it an act of your free will or is it an act of the banana's free will?

Neither. When one slips on a banana the actions he takes range from trying to limit the harms of slipping (trying to regain balance, extending one’s arms to suppress the fall) to doing nothing. The slip itself is more of an act of physics, I suppose.

I think that’s a fair analysis. But, of course, there is no such syndrome. It’s less to do with mental illness and more to do with belief and propaganda. No doubt people want to believe certain things about Trump, and continue to believe certain things, even when the opposite has proven to be the case.

Forgive me, but I have trouble with the “ability to do otherwise” principle of free will. Many have taken it as a priori while I can hardly wrap my head around it. What matters to me, and responsibility in general, is whether he was the source of his actions. Thanks for clarifying.

True. Right and left are relatively meaningless in the Trumpian context. He is hated on all sides.

It does not mean that you do them un-freely either. The action is generated without cause or input from anything else in the universe. There is no restraint or anything barring such actions from being committed. It is not “determined” by any other being. So how is it not free?

‘To choose’ implies that a set of options exists *from which one chooses*. I don’t see how else ‘to choose’ could be understood. So in order for one to be able to choose their thoughts, they would have to be able to *think* of several options and choose one of them to be their next thought *without thinking their next thought in the process*, which is of course impossible.

If this is correct, does this automatically rule out the possibility of free will?

It doesn’t. To rule out the possibility of free will one will have to show that thoughts, or any action for that matter, comes from somewhere or someone else.

Well said. It is a phenomenon on the level of mass psychosis, even a religion. He’s both folk hero to his supporters and folk devil to his detractors at the same time.

Fair enough. But, just to say, we can read the opinions of the highest court in the land to discover why in fact it was overturned.

What if RBG didn’t die? Any speculations on what would have happened had she lived?

Trump finally announced his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election. Get your popcorn.

Counterfactuals. Such speculation is fun, no doubt.

I believe his point was that Congress would have protected abortion by federal law, in the same way that they plan to protect same-sex marriage by federal law.

Is it a “They would have” but they didn’t, sort of argument?

Yeah, they're definitely both the same. One party believes in climate change, the other says it's a hoax. Minor differences.

Bipartisan Senate Climate Solutions Caucus
Conservative Climate Caucus

I apologize and thanks for clarifying. The legal outcome, though, is decided by the Supreme Court, and has zero to do with party politics. My point was that the parties can avoid this by amending the constitution so as to make it unequivocal. Thanks for the last word.

A non-sequitur is when the logic does not follow. I thought we were talking about the differences between the two parties. Then you mentioned Supreme Court decisions, for some reason.

That's quite a non-sequitur.

I’m not sure how. As I understand it SCOTUS ruled that abortion was not a protected right under the Constitution in that case.

Dobbs would not have happened if the Senate was Democratic during the last half of Obama's second term or while Trump was president.

It would not have happened if there was an amendment to the constitution affording people the right to an abortion.

The only viewpoint under consideration when it comes to voting is deciding which person you want to decide matters for you.

None of which was legislated in congress.

I’m against voting in general. But I don’t think we should get rid of the parties. Parties can change. Party civil wars are welcome, in my opinion.

A dead guy was elected in Pennsylvania. It reminds me of the Artemis Ward quote, “inasmuch as we don't seem to have a live statesman in our National Congress, let us by all means have a first-class corpse”. The absolute state of American elections.

It isn’t the two-party system that’s the problem—proportional representation, where those voted out can still cling to power in their coalitions and minority governments, is stupid. It’s that there isn’t an effective opposition. You could not get a sheet of paper between the official positions of the two parties.

Is there any justification for censorship of any kind?
If so - where, when, why and by whom?

The most pernicious justification for censorship at any institutional level that I notice is that such and such information will cause harm, and is therefor dangerous. But invariably, and at its core, the motivation of the censor is that there exists information he does not like (or his masters do not like) and he does not want others to see it. He will deprive others of their right to receive and impart information so that this motivation will be satiated. It’s a pitiable existence.

The Hitler example was an ad aburdum of the unforeseen consequence of an action. And in that sense we have to predict the future before we act and make assumption about the results of our choices. On forming some beliefs about future outcomes we can decide to act.

This is one of the perils of utilitarianism. One cannot fathom the entire results of one’s actions, and one can never be sure what will produce the greatest good to the greater number. Too many variables, I suppose. This is what the baby Hitler thought experiment reveals. People are willing to kill an innocent child to prevent a future catastrophe on what amounts to a hunch. No matter how positive he was that this child would murder millions, he will never find a beneficiary of that action, he will never be able to justify his motives by showing us something in the world, and the reality that he has sacrificed a child to an idea will eventually set in. In adding up the sum total of goods to the greatest number, he has instead propagated more evil than he has good.

There is an alternate, an old one: do Justice though the heavens fall. With this in mind one can survey his actions according to justice rather than utility, consequences be damned. The just at least reserve some sense of dignity in dealing with others and are generally superior moral exemplars than any utilitarian.

I suppose that as we age we develop a set of moral principles with which we will live by. We justify our actions according to these principles, and in so doing subject them to a series of trial-and-error tests in various social interactions throughout life, but mostly earlier life.

So where does the crisis come from? My guess is that continuing to justify actions by reference to rules or teleology beyond early adulthood only hamstrings this development, or at least hinders one from moving beyond the stage where one guides his actions in order to avoid censure from social authorities. I wager that this lack of moral testing, so to speak, is especially prevalent in regions of conduct and behavior that are most subject to external moral constraints, such as law. The region where conduct is controlled by law so far encroaches upon the region of free choice that the trial-and-error stage of moral development is incomplete, and one’s conscience doesn’t get a chance to be field-tested. So he is morally adrift without a paddle.

Linguistic activity does not have the causal effects you claim they do. At best such activity makes concrete what the speaker thinks. Here they reveal what Isaac thinks, nothing more. The effects on me never manifest, however. I’ll be sure to let you know if they do, though.

Yes, the cat is looking a bit hungry, maybe I ought to feed it.

I didn’t feel anything this time, unfortunately. I suppose a higher quality of sorcery is likelier to have an effect.

Would you say propaganda works on everyone, without fail?



It’s nice to know my words have an effect on you. Yours as well. And such an effect they’ve had that we’ve adopted each other’s positions.

Watch Christopher Hitchens yell “fire” in a crowded theater here:

Does another’s inflammatory words convince you to do evil, jorndoe?

Maybe congress is just that terrible. These people are worthy of contempt. They make shitty laws, spend vast sums of taxpayer dollars on pork and boondoggles, and represent only the worst of society.

It isn't an issue with the value—each of us are one of a kind, wholly unique, something the universe will never see again—but with how we value. We tend to put value on nothings, for instance the non-physical and supernatural, but in doing so devalue what is present and real.

I’m not so sure about that. If the monopoly on healthcare were to fall, I’m sure men could devise some other scheme that doesn’t involve them becoming state agents.

The shortage here is entirely state manufactured. Around 2,500 health-care employees have been fired around the province for refusing to get vaccinated, for example. This was during a time when it was all hands on deck, so to speak, the system already overwhelmed. It’s no wonder people don’t want to work there anymore. At any rate, so-called universal healthcare loses its wring when very few can access it.