Are you familiar with the concept of the ‘specious present’, which I think was coined by William James? The idea, presented famously by Husserl, is that the present moment is a tripartite structure that consists of retention , primal presentation and protention (anticipation). Retention and protention don’t occupy separate temporal positions relative to the ‘now’, they all belong simultaneously to it. — Joshs

No, I wasn't familiar with this concept at all. It seems quite relevant to my topic, though. So, thanks for pointing it out. I'm going to look it up further and give it some thought.

I put it to you that the following image changes from one colour to another, from left to right; and that this change does not occur over time. — Banno

When you used the nominal phrase "the following image", did you mean to refer to a picture that is square shaped or you did you mean to refer to a thin vertical segment of the whole square area ? I ask because if you meant the former, then your statement is false. And if you meant the latter, then there are very many such images and none of them change at all.

No, it's the same floor.

I've no idea what the remainder of your post says. Can you clarify?

I think folk are trying to defend a broken notion - that change can only occur over time. Observation shows this to be false. The replies here indicate the rather than adjust their thinking about change, they would rather redefine change as that which occurs over time... — Banno

Even if it's the same floor, then it still has different parts. Would you say of a banana that it is a thing that changes from being thin to being thick and then ends up being thin again? In you floor example, you seem to be taking as the underlying substrate of the change the vantage point of a local observer who surveys it from a moving perspective. In that case, the change that is being referred to is being premised on a temporal change in the location or vantage point of the observer.

Here is another example. You want to skate on a lake and inquire if the ice is thick enough. Other skaters tell you that the ice becomes thinner towards the center of the lake. What this means is that the part of the frozen surface of the lake that is in the immediate vicinity of whoever is skating on it (and hence affords support to that person) is thinner when the skater is nearer to the center of the lake. It's not the thickness of the ice itself that changes but rather, the spatial movement of the skater brings about that, as they move towards the center of the lake, that thicker areas get replaced by (different) thinner areas. It is the tacit embedding in a determinate pragmatic context that give meaning to the phrase "the ice is becoming thinner..." since this context tells us in what order and for what purpose the different parts of the unchanging ice sheet are being surveyed.

You seem to be just looking for a particular phrasing to save a broken theory. — Banno

According to your own theory of change, would you say that natural numbers change from being even to being uneven, and back to being even again, alternatively, from one number to the next? What is it that is changing then? Or is it just pure change without any underlying substrate that persists (or endures) through change?

My floor changes from wood to bamboo, from one room to another, at the one time. — Banno

They are two different floors, or two separate parts of one floor. So the analogy with temporal change only really holds if we assume something like a perdurantist conception of persistence and identity whereby things that appear to be changing in time don't really change at all but rather merely have dissimilar temporal parts. This meshes well with a block-universe view or time but that is also, just like perdurantism, debatable.

Two places might be different at a point in time, but nothing changes at a point in time.

Time is required to get "from place to place" or to perceive (and compare) one place and then another. — Luke

Indeed that's a very important point. This also is very much the point Kant was making in the
Second Analogy of Experience (in the Critique of Pure Reason). Let me quote from this course handout.

"In the Second Analogy, Kant compares our perceptions of a concrete particular, a house, and an event, the floating of a ship down a river. In the former case, the order of the perceptions is not determined; in the latter case, the order is. In other words, in looking at a house, I can look at the chimney first, then the shingles, then the windows; or I can look at the windows first, then the chimney, etc. Nevertheless, I suppose that these perceptions refer to the same permanent object. When the boat is moving down the river, I must perceive a certain order."

Kant's Second Analogy is discussed quite enlighteningly in Sebastian Rödl's book Categories of the Temporal: An Inquiry into the Forms of the Finite Intellect.

• Helgoland, Carlo Rovelli — 180 Proof

Great, I was looking forward for this to come out in English! I will read it in short order.

If something has no effect on the universe, and then itself fades from said universe, through both memory and physical existence, then it does not exist, and it never has existed. — Bradaction

There is a logical problem with your thesis. It has the form of a counterfactual conditional statement. It could be paraphrased thus: "If an object A exists at some time but, at a later time, no longer has an effect on anything else still existing, then it never existed". But the antecedent can never be true if the consequent is true. An object can not exist and then fade from existence if it never existed.

Well, that's fine if her view is that blame and praise come with the same control and origination requirements (I am not sure if that is her view - though it has also been a while since I read anything by her, and the last thing I read was her Freedom within Reason, which is quite old so perhaps her views have changed or perhaps the view I attributed to her was not her view). But from memory her view there was that someone born evil is not morally responsible for their subsequent evil acts, whereas someone born good is morally responsible for their subsequent good acts. And if that's right, well, it seems prima facie implausible. — Bartricks

That seems to be somewhat of a distortion of Wolf's view. What might be rather more consistent with her views, I think, is the claim that someone born with (or, more plausibly, who has at a later stage of her maturation from infancy come to acquire) a rational capacity to differentiate good from evil is thereafter suited to be held responsible for her actions. The very idea of someone being born evil -- having no capacity whatsoever to be good, or to mend her ways -- may be incoherent. Someone being born innocent, and not having yet matured out of this stage of innocence, as is the case with human infants and non-human animals, rather is a condition that makes one incapable of being either good or evil, and hence also unsuited to be held personally responsible for their actions, except proleptically in the case of very young human children who we expect to be on their way towards rational autonomy, and towards whom our reactive attitudes (such as those we express with praise and blame) scaffold the growth of their capacities for rational and moral judgement.

OK, but where I have used "natural" you have substituted "physical". I'm not sure whether you draw a distinction between them, but as far as I understand, determinism is the thesis that all events are fully determined by antecedent physical events. This is often expressed in the thought experiment wherein it is claimed that if the evolution of the universe were to be played out again from the Big Bang everything would unfold again exactly as it has.

So, for me the kind of determinism which incorporates reductive physicalism is logically incompatible with the kind of freedom that could rationally be understood to justify the idea of moral responsibility.

So, I agree with what you've said above, but as I read it, what you've said does not support compatibilism, but rather rejects it. — Janus

Yes, I had purposefully replaced "natural" with "physical" because I meant to deny that human actions having natural causes must imply that they also have (fully determinative) physical causes. Endorsing naturalism without physicalism is enough to ward off implausible forms of super-naturalism, I would hope.

It seems to be assumed by many philosophers that (1) the thesis of micro-physical determinism conjoined with both (2) the thesis of the causal closure of the physical and (3) some doctrine of supervenience, imply (4) the thesis of universal determinism, such that human actions, in addition to everything else that takes place in the natural world, are fully determined by the past physical state of the universe (at some arbitrary moment in time). This would appear to follow from Jaegwon Kim's causal exclusion argument (according to which, roughly, anything that happens has a sufficient physical causes and higher level 'causes' therefore are epiphenomenal). But I think Kim's argument fails to apply to human actions (and to scores of other natural and social phenomena) because he gets the metaphysics of those higher-level phenomena (and of higher-level material agents) wrong.

As I had suggested earlier, human actions can't sensibly be construed as causal impacts that some agent exerts on the material world, at a moment in time, from outside of the world, as it were. Human beings are material beings in the world. As such, they are not divorced from their own pasts, and the material (bodily) and cognitive powers that they possess at some moment in time aren't features that merely determine them to act but rather constitute them acting in the world.

Hence, when a human being reflects on the physical determinations of her own embodied actions, some of those determinations indeed constitute external constraints on what she can do. (Someone, for instance, may be unable to deadlift 300 pounds, or mentally calculate 10 decimals of Pi). But some other among those physical determinations realize instances of that person's own abilities. They are enabling causes, rather than constraints, with respect to an agent's physical abilities and her powers of rational practical deliberation.

So, let us suppose that we grant the possibility of micro-physical determinism being true, and of the thesis of the physical-closure of the physical being true as well, but nothing more. It remains true, then, that given 'the past', as it was, there was no possibility that some agent, who actually did A, would (counterfactually) have done anything else consistently with the past having been as it was. So, indeed, if the state of the universe was 'rolled back' to some earlier state, the agent would still necessarily do A and nothing else. But that doesn't imply that this agent was constrained by the past physical state of the universe to do A. That's because the agent herself figures in that past (at least recently). And so she is (and was) an active participant in the process of determination of the future. And when we say that she could have done something differently (or refrained from doing it), we don't mean that she could have done it consistently with there being nothing about herself that would have been different (including the states of her character, her motivations, her reasons, habits and inclinations, etc.) but rather that nothing outside of herself fully determined her to act in the way she did.

Some worries that remain may stem from regress arguments against ultimate responsibility (such as Strawson's 'Basic Argument' for hard incompatibilism) or consequence arguments that set up regress of antecedent determinative physical causes reaching back to a past time before the agent existed. But I think I should address those worries in a separate post.

I am not sure I follow. If right-doing requires the ability to do the right thing, then right-doing does not require the ability to do otherwise. But if wrongdoing does require the ability to do otherwise, then wrongdoing is plausibly incompatible with determinism in a way that right doing does not appear to be. — Bartricks

The issue isn't just what the conditions are for there existing agents who have rational practical abilities, but also what the conditions are are for there being responsible agents who have those rational practical abilities. Rational agents can only be deemed praiseworthy (end hence personally responsible) for successfully exercising their rational abilities if those abilities are fallible. An ability being fallible just means that it has a liability to fail. If you hold that the fallibility of such abilities is inconsistent with the thesis of determinism (in whichever way you understand this thesis) then this would mean that indeterminism is a requirement for praiseworthiness and blameworthiness alike. That's because indeterminism, on that view, would be a requirement for the possession of the fallible abilities, the possession of which grounds both praiseworthiness and blameworthiness.

I think Wolf would rather hold the opposite thesis: that determinism and the fallibility of rational abilities are compatible. Hence she would hold indeterminism to be a requirement neither for praiseworthiness nor for blameworthiness.

It therefore seems to me that Wolf's asymmetry thesis regarding the requirement for an 'ability to have done otherwise', for holding agents responsible just in cases of a failure to act rationally (and/or ethically), and the lack of a similar requirement for deeming them praiseworthy of having done the right thing, is preserved by her compatibilist account of fallible rational abilities. The metaphysical doctrine of indeterminism, on the one hand, and the thesis that agents have, in some circumstances, an 'ability to have done otherwise' (than what they actually did), on the other hand, are consistent with one another on her compatibilist stance.

Yes, I do not deny that her view is coherent. Ought implies can, and ought not implies can not. Which seems sufficient to explain how it is that right-doing and wrong-doing might require different abilities (one to do, the other to do otherwise). — Bartricks

Actually, I was putting forth, on behalf of Wolf, the thesis that right-doing (and hence also, praiseworthiness) and wrong-doing (and hence also, blameworthiness) do not require different abilities. They both require the exact same ability, which is to deliberate correctly what it is that the agent ought to do, and to do it. It's not an asymmetry of abilities that is postulated, but rather an asymmetry in the way good and bad deeds relate to that one singular ability: as the manifestation of its proper actualization, or as a manifestation of its defective (or failure of) actualization, respectively.

But it nevertheless seems prima facie implausible. For instance, it seems implausible that if determinism is true, then we are praiseworthy for all our right deeds, but blameless for our immoral ones. Intuitively if one is one, one is the other - it's a package deal.

The way I would rather put it, again, on behalf of Wolf (although I myself agree with her), is that blameworthiness (responsibility for bad deeds) requires a rational ability to have done otherwise (namely, the right thing), whereas praiseworthiness doesn't require a rational ability to have done otherwise (since there is no such thing as a rational ability to do the wrong thing). I agree with you that the metaphysical requirements of personal responsibility (for good and bad deeds alike) all come in a single package and hence it doesn't make much sense to say that the truth of the metaphysical doctrine of determinism is a requirement for blameworthiness and not for praiseworthiness. It seems to me that Wolf's picture, correctly understood, show why that wouldn't make much sense. It's been a while since I've last read Wolf, though, so maybe she slips up somewhere. Maybe you can point out to me where exactly you think she might have advanced the implausible thesis.

Wolf, I think, holds a bizarre asymmetrical view according to which right-doing and praisewothiness are compatible with determinism whereas wrongdoing and blame worthiness are not (or at least require alternative possibilities). An unstable view. — Bartricks

I think you can make sense of her asymmetry thesis if you keep in mind that the rational practical abilities of human agents (and, even more so, their abilities to correctly evaluate ethical features of practical situations) are essentially normative. Hence, when an agent sets up to deliberate between doing A and doing B, say, and only the first option is the right thing to do, then for the agent to choose to do A (on cogent grounds) constitutes the proper actualization of her rational abilities of practical deliberation whereas for her to choose to do B constitutes a failed or defective actualization of those abilities (such as a manifestation of akrasia, of some other vice, or of some culpable ignorance, etc.).

Hence, unlike many agent-causal libertarians, Wolf deems agents to be blameworthy when they fail to actualize their ability to do the right thing, on the condition that they indeed possess such an ability, but it makes no sense to view them as praiseworthy just on the condition that they would have an ability refrain from doing the right thing. But that's not so much (or primarily) because praiseworthiness is uniquely compatible with determinism, but rather because there is no such rational ability (to chose to do the wrong thing). Failing or refraining to do the right thing just is a failure to properly exercise the ability to do the right thing.

What you seem to be missing is the realization that the idea that human decision making is determined by natural forces is a groundless assumption. How would you ever set about testing it? — Janus

I don't think human decisions are determined by physical forces but neither are they determined by psychic forces outside of nature (as they seemingly would need to be for the sort of 'rollback' libertarianism under discussion to be cogent). I rather think that human decisions are determined by human beings. The sort of causation at issue is a sort of agent causation, which is an exemplification both of substance causation and of rational causation, on my view. Embodied and encultured rational human beings can determine things to happen on rational (and ethical) grounds.

It sounds like you are separating the human agent from nature, i.e. assuming a non-physicalist philosophy of mind. — Pfhorrest

Indeed. It seems like this is what tends to happen when libertarians hold that the 'circumstances' in which an agent acts must be taken to include the immediate 'past' of the agent herself, including the state of her own body and of her cognitive apparatus (brain, habits, character, etc.). In that case, libertarians who insist on an indeterminist requirement, treat this requirement as the provision of alternative physical possibilities when the universe has been 'rolled back', as it were, in the same exact state just before the agent deliberated or acted. While this libertarian requirement brings along troublesome consequences about luck and the intelligibility of actions that are now severed from their intelligible cognitive sources, it's not so much indeterminism that is at fault, on my view(*), but rather the disembodied conception of agency that is carried into the picture by a flawed conception of the 'circumstances' of human actions. Someone's character, just before she acts, isn't an external constraint on what she can do. It's rather part of what she is at that time, and what her intentional action will therefore reveal her to have been.

(*) ...although your point about too much indeterminism actually undermining free agency is well taken.

Ordinarily we would say no. So why does it matter if there's a fact about what I will do in the future, any more than it matters there's a fact about what I did in the past? It has no bearing on whether the thing I do is chosen freely or not. — Pfhorrest

That's a very nice multi-part OP! I just finished reading the whole thing. I had copy-pasted all parts in a unique documents and saved it as a pdf in order to be able to highlight and annotate.

It looks like I will have many quibbles on a background of broad agreement about some of the core issues. My positive characterisation of the power of the will is quite similar to yours although I stress social aspects of the constitutive role of the 'reactive attitudes' a little more. I also deal somewhat differently with the thesis of 'leeway incompatibilism', which relates imperfectly to what you call 'metaphysical will'. I had very much enjoyed Susan Wolf's Freedom Within Reason, and read it two or three times. You seem to also have gained much from it, or, at least, to find common ground with her.

I'll be back with more comments. I just wanted to congratulate you for the very well crafted OP!

He doesn't express the view I attributed to him in that piece. But it is attributed to him by John Martin Fischer in his article "Recent Work on Moral Responsibility" (Ethics 1999, fn. 67). — Bartricks

Oh, I see. Thanks. I'll probably have a look at that too, as well as Lewis's Are we free to break the laws?

What I do share with Van Inwagen is a belief that it is more plausible that we have free will and are morally responsible than that free will requires indeterminism. As I understand him, he has argued that if determinism could somehow be established to be true, then he would simply conclude that compatibilism is true, rather than abandon belief in free will. That is, he would give up his incompatibilism over the reality of moral responsibility. He believes the reality of moral responsibility is more clear and distinct than any theory about what moral responsibility requires. — Bartricks

I wasn't aware of that. Thanks for pointing it out. I'm going to read his 2008 paper How to Think about the Problem of Free Will in order to better understand his conception of the most plausible compatibilist account that he'd be willing to endorse if determinism were established to be true. I'll then come back to you to address the remainder of your post.

I mean maybe I will have to admit it exists — ToothyMaw

That's cool. In care you're interested, the published positive account that has seemed the most convincing to me so far, is Victoria McGeer's, in her recent paper Scaffolding agency: A proleptic account of the reactive attitudes

I mean if character is defined in that way I think it accounts for (1) and (2), but the ramifications it has for agency are pretty implausible, yes. — ToothyMaw

Yup!

I'm thinking if it's to be a general rule it's the first one. — ToothyMaw

I'm not sure I understand the second one. Since p and q are propositional variables, they can represent the conjunction of all the statements of 'fact' that are true at a time -- what is also called 'a past' or 'a future'. (or also, of course 'a past in conjunction with the laws of nature')

I have a reply to this, but first I'll fix my argument.

1. No one has power over the facts of the past and the laws of nature.
2. No one has power over the fact that the facts of the past and the laws of nature entail every fact of the future (i.e., determinism is true).
3. Therefore, no one has power over the facts of the future.

This is valid because of the following rule:

N(p)

N(p entails q)

N(q)

Where the operator N means "no one has any power over over"
p is the facts of the past and the laws of nature
q is the facts of the future

@Pierre-Normand Is this valid? — ToothyMaw

Yes, thank you. Now it is valid. It's a good starting point. It now remains to be elucidated what "having the power over..." means exactly in such a way that the two premises are true and this operator represents a plausible conception of the power of human agency. One question that can be asked is how very much your "power over" something is restricted when those past facts about yourself that you presently lack "power over" are both (1) partially constitutive of who you are and (2) contribute to the determination of the future. In other words, the argument may be trading on a equivocation between your "present self" (who allegedly lacks power over facts of the past) and yourself as an embodied animal characterised as having temporally protracted dispositions (and therefore whose very existence reaches into the past). Put yet in another way, even though the argument is sound in yielding the conclusion that your "present self" can't change the actual future into some alternative future, how does that imply anything about someone (i.e. an embodied agent who didn't exist exclusively in an instantaneous present moment) lacking the ability to set this future in accordance with her will?

Yes, but what it takes to be autonomous is what's at issue. My argument appears to demonstrate that it requires aseity and thus that one cannot 'become' autonomous. For to be autonomous in the way presupposed by moral responsibility requires that one's actions 'not' be the product of external causes (not wholly, anyway). Which they will be, of course, if one has come into being. So by suggesting that though one is not responsible for the way that one is, one can nevertheless 'become' autonomous is already to have begged the question. If there is no false premise in my argument, then the very idea of 'becoming' autonomous is confused. — Bartricks

Your argument, so far as I had understood it, basically amounts to a combination of van Inwagen's argument for incompatibilism and Galen Strawson's 'Basic Argument' (a regress argument) for the impossibility moral responsibility. You accept the validity of both (while qualifying the first) but deny the soundness of the second. You assert the existence of human responsibility (and hence also of free will) as a premise and then turn Strawson's modus ponens into your own modus tollens. Strawson's argument tacitly assumes the lack of aseity (since his regress stops at a time before the agent was morally autonomous) and concludes to the lack of moral responsibility. While you are accepting the validity of this argument, your are postulating the negation of his conclusion (to a lack of responsibility) to infer the falsity of his tacit premise (the lack of aseity). That is fine, as far as the logic of your argumentation goes. However, if we deny the implausibly thin conception of agency that both van Inwagen's and Strawson's arguments seem to be relying on, then you can't rely on their modus ponens to ground your modus tollens. If Q does not logically follow from P, then not(P) does not logically follow from not(Q) either. Aseity might still be able to ground free will and moral responsibility (although I'm still rather unclear how it does so) but it's not logically required to do so even on the assumption of physical determinism.

I actually make use of that argument. Check out one of my earlier posts. The argument I gave depends on the one in the SEP article. — ToothyMaw

Yes, I had read most of the post in this and in the previous thread. But in that case, if you rely on the idea of the fixity of the past to infer that agents lack power over present and future facts, you also have to justify some analogue to van Inwagen's Beta Rule in order that your argument not exemplify the modal (or fatalist) fallacy. When it is made explicit that you are reliant on such a rule, and you've explained the nature of the N operator that you are making use of, it may become apparent that you are tacitly assuming an implausibly thin conception of the power of human agency in the way @khaled had suggested.

But I don't see how my argument (...) is an instance of the modal fallacy, even if my serial killer example might not be absolute proof that we cannot choose to do otherwise if we have no power over the facts of the future. — ToothyMaw

I wonder why you are favoring this form of the argument for incompatibilism, starting with a premise denying control over facts of the future, over the more commonly encountered versions of van Inwagen's consequence argument, which rather start with the much more uncontroversial premise that no one has power over facts of the past. Van Inwagen then has to make use of the so called Rule Beta in order for his argument to carry through without relying on a modal fallacy (also called the fatalist fallacy, in this context: asserting that whatever was the case in the past necessarily was the case).

Rule Beta asserts that from N(p) and N(p implies q), we may infer N(q),

where the operator N signifies 'No one ever has any power over...'

You can refer to Kadri Vihvelin's SEP article for a detailed statement and discussion of van Inwagen's argument.

The manner in which you formulate your own argument appears to straddle the compatibilist with the burden of demonstrating not only that agents can have power over their own choices, and hence also over the future consequences of their choices, but that, in addition, they must demonstrate that such a power must somehow consist in an ability to make the future different than what it actually is. But that's not what (most) compatibilist ever have set out to demonstrate. They rather want to say that although what the future facts actually are may be fully determined by the actual past (and the laws of nature), this determination is mediated in part by the choices agents make unconstrained (or not fully constrained) by facts external to their own power agency. Furthermore, on a conditional reading of the principle of alternative possibilities, it remains true that if the agents had made different choices (counterfactually) then the future (and the past!) would have been different (still counterfactually).

It seems undeniable to me then that our own actions are facts of the future that we must not have control over unless we could could have acted differently then we did due to a factor that is not external. To presume that one could have acted differently due to a difference in character that is not external to the will, however, is to assume that determinism is false.

I think this misconstrues the compatibilist claim regarding PAP. When the compatibilist claims that, on her conditional reading of it, the PAP is satisfied by her (compatibilist) conception of free agency, she isn't claiming that the agent had the power to change her own character from what it actually was, at the time when she deliberated or acted. This would indeed involve a denial of determinism. The compatibilist rather is claiming that although facts of the actual past entail the actual facts about the character of an agent, and also entail that her power of agency was actualized in the specific way that is actually was, nevertheless, counterfactually, the agent's character could have been different and hence her power of agency could have been actualised differently. That may seem to be a distinction without a difference for an incompatibilist who assumes that agents have no power over 'the past' (and hence over the characters that they actually have when they start deliberating practically). But the incompatibilist conception of 'the past', and of the past 'circumstances' of an agent, violate the compatibilist conception of embodied agency. It seems to be relying on construing our own bodily and cognitive features and abilities as 'circumstances' externally constraining our actions, whereas the compatibilist insists that they are part of us. In other words, they aren't determining us to act in specific ways, they rather are us determining (not in an instantaneous present instant but in the fullness of time) how to act.

I do not follow you on this at all. If someone comes into existence, it really doesn't matter at all whether they came into existence gradually or all of a sudden, the fact will remain that they are the product of external causes. And that's sufficient to establish that they are not morally responsible for how they are. — Bartricks

Yes, I was not making anything hinge on the possibility of rational agency being gradually rather than suddenly acquired. My concern rather is about the way embodied rational agents relate themselves to time, in practical deliberation, after they have acquired rational autonomy. I am perfectly happy to grant you that they aren't responsible at all for the happy circumstance of their having been brought (either gradually or suddenly) into a state where they were first endowed with powers of rational deliberation. Only after they have become autonomous (to some degree) can they be held responsible for their actions. I may bring a caveat, though, since it also can be warranted to hold responsible children, who are not yet autonomous, as a matter of proleptic attitude, in order to help shape their behavioral dispositions in a way that favors their acquisition of rational autonomy.

If we have come into being, then there's a real question about exactly when 'we' come on the scene. But this doesn't in any way allow you to escape confronting the issue: which is that we will nevertheless have come into being as a product of causes for which we are in no way morally responsible.

Yes, this is granted. But when we blame people, we are blaming them for their choices, and for the characters that they have displayed through making those choices, when they already were in possession of some powers of rational agency. We are not blaming them for their having had flawed characters when they first became rational agents. I would also grant that we can sometimes be warranted in evoking unhappy initial character shaping circumstances as excuses, or partial excuses (and hence attenuation of personal responsibility), for subsequent unhappy life turns; but only in some cases, and to limited degrees.

It seems there is a confusion of "physical facts" and just "facts". A fact could entail that an action was performed, whereas a physical fact could be gravity's existence or a brain state.

What if a serial killer reflects upon his despicable acts and thus chooses to work towards redeeming himself? He is playing an ineliminable role in a causal chain in the act of reflecting on intelligible previous actions, but these actions are still fixed - as facts that he now has no power over - directly affecting a new, intelligible action (that is the result of an intent derived from previous facts). In this example his deliberation supervenes on previous facts; he is acting with the intent to redeem himself, but it doesn't change the facts of the past, which do not themselves change because of his deliberation. Thus his current intent, which results in an action, is resulting from a fact of the past that he cannot control. That seems to me to be external causation without any disembodiment.

Even if we must be the judges of what an intelligible action is, that doesn't mean that what we are judging to be an action isn't a small portion of a universe subject to the laws of cause and effect. — ToothyMaw

I was distinguishing facts from laws because of the way deterministic systems usually are defined. I took 'facts about the past' to include all the physical states of matter that, in conjunction with the laws of physics, would uniquely determine a future course of events. It's because higher level facts, or states, (such as biological, psychological or social facts) are taken to supervene on physical states that physical determinism is taken to entail universal determinism. (Facts about some level B are said to supervene on facts about some level A if there can't be any B-level difference without there also being some A-level difference. Furthermore, physicalists usually hold that all high level empirical domains supervene on the physical domain.)

Back to the serial killer: I am happy to grant you that, on the assumption that determinism is true, the serial killer couldn't possibly have done something different than what she actually did without there being something in her past (either in her environment or about herself) that would have been different. It doesn't logically follow from this statement that, therefore, she could not have done something different. Concluding this would be an instance of the modal fallacy. The modal fallacy takes the form:

1) necessarily(P implies Q)
2) P
3) therefore, necessarily(Q)

The conclusion (3) would logically follow if the second premise were replaced by (2b) "necessarily P".

So, is there something about the killer's rational or moral character, at the time when she readies herself to act, that in conjunction with the laws of nature, determine that she will kill someone and that is necessarily a feature of her character? Only on that condition is it possible to logically infer that she could not possibly have done otherwise than what she actually did.

I don't see how this would be different from some sort of indeterminism, which would have you going against the PAP. And even if you claim that that is question begging and that compatibilist ideas of free will sidestep the PAP, you have to come up with a positive account of agency compatible with determinism that gives us moral responsibility, not just a new definition for "free will". This seems impossible to me unless you can address the following two arguments:

1. No one has power over the facts of the past and the laws of nature.
2. No one has power over the fact that the facts of the past and the laws of nature entail every fact of the future (i.e., determinism is true).
3. Therefore, no one has power over the facts of the future.

1. We have free will only if we have power over the facts of the future.
2. No one has power over the facts of the future.
3. Therefore, we do not have free will. — ToothyMaw

The idea of "having power over the facts of the future" seems a little obscure to me. I would rather rely on the more straightforward definition that you gave in the opening post of your previous thread:

"Free will: the ability to both choose between different alternative courses of actions and to act free of external causes."

I think a thick embodied view of human agency doesn't comport well with the idea that past facts about you, your own body, character, cognitive abilities and dispositions, etc., all constitute 'external causes' of your actions just because they lay in your past. On closer analysis, the idea seems nonsensical. This was the thrust of @khaled's post and I quite agree with him. For an embodied human agent to act in the world doesn't consist in the agent stepping outside of her own embodiment, as it were, and for her to control the role her own body (and brain) plays in the causal chain of physical events. Acts of agency rather consist for an embodied person to play such an ineliminable causal role in the chain of intelligible events (i.e. intentional actions and their intended or foreseeable consequences).

So, it may be the case that past physical facts, and the laws of physics, determine all the future physical facts (let us suppose). That would not imply that the conjunction of those facts and those deterministic laws determine what intelligible human actions those future physical facts materially realize. If the human agent acts in the light of reasons that she has (or takes herself to have) for doing what she does, then the past facts that were obtaining before she deliberated what to do may have been constraining what the range of her opportunities were, and also constraining the limits of her deliberative abilities (as well as enabling them). But what determines what she intentionally does is her own act of practical deliberation. The specific nature of this action, described in high-level intentional terms, may supervene on some set of physical facts about her bodily movements and brain activity. But the higher level intentional action (which may or may not be praiseworthy or blameworthy) that those lower level physical facts happen to materialy realize isn't set by the laws of physics. That's because the laws of physics are silent regarding what bodily motions constitute intelligible actions, and what good or bad reasons for acting are.

And then they’re surprised at how it turns out they’re not responsible for anything. That’s because “They” themselves cause nothing in their own setup. Their bodies are “external” to “them” so what the heck does “them” do? When you externalize the source of your agency you’ll end up with the conclusion that you’re just a helpless watcher who has no control over anything that happens. But why would you externalize the source of your agency. “Your honor, I didn’t punch the man, it was my fist the punched him see? I had no choice in the matter!” — khaled

I quite agree with your diagnosis of the main problem but it seems to me that the underlying assumptions that yield this sort of externalization of the human power of agency are shared by @Bartricks and @ToothyMaw. See the latter's original post in the previous thread. This leads @ToothyMaw to conclude that moral responsibility couldn't be ascribed to agents if determinism turned out to be true. In the ensuing discussion, @Bartricks correctly points out that indeterminism wouldn't be of any help either. So, he proposes the ascription of aseity to human beings in order to make free will and responsibility compatible both with determinism and with indeterminism. Relaxing some of the causal assumptions that yield an implausible externalization of agency might be another way to achieve the same result.

This ancient conundrum has a modern variant that has been articulated by the American philosopher D. J. Trump. "If a Russian hoe who Rudy hired peed on me, why should it be me who foots the dry cleaning bill?"

Also, read last September, three excellent papers by Victoria McGeer:

Mindshaping is Inescapable, Social Injustice is not: Reflections on Haslanger’s Critical Social Theory, Australasian Philosophical Review, 3:1, 48-59, 2020

Intelligent Capacitie, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. cxviii, Part 3, 2018

Scaffolding agency: A proleptic account of the reactive attitudes, Eur J Philos. 2018;1–23.

Matthew McManus, The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism Neoliberalism, Post-Modern Culture, and Reactionary Politics, Palgrave MacMillan, 2020

Halfway through... Very good, so far.

Some of my favorite philosophers, of any gender, are Elizabeth Anscombe, Sabina Lovibond, Jennifer Hornsby, Sarah Broadie, Susan Hurley, Ruth Groff, Karen Crowther and Victoria McGeer.

That leaves entirely open the question of how to decide what the prescriptions to try to conform to are, which makes it sound like option 2 to me. — Pfhorrest

Option 2, that there exists only a descriptive domain? If there were only a descriptive domain, then this domain would be self-sufficient. What there is to be known would be quite independent from our pragmatic concerns. But the present approach denies that; although what it claims the descriptive domain to be dependent on for its constitution isn't a separate domain, or the existence of queer normative facts, but rather co-constituted rational practices and rational concerns.

That sounds to me like either the first of fourth options, depending on whether you think the application of theoretical reason and practical reason are starkly different from each other or very similar. (It sounds like you think they're pretty different, but I'm not completely clear). — Pfhorrest

On the present view, they're different applications of a deeply integrated set of rational skills -- involving both 'knowledge that' and 'knowing how'. Knowing what is (knowledge of the descriptive domain, so called) involves knowing what can be done with elements of this domain and knowing how (knowledge of the prescriptive domain, so called) involves knowing how to make use of what is in order to sensibly conform to contextually relevant prescriptions.

- Else, if an answer to one automatically gives you an answer to the other, is that:

- - because "ought" questions are just a subset of "is" questions (option 2), or

- - because every claim that something "is" inherently implies some "ought" as well (option 3)?

Answering questions to one rely on our also answering questions to the other. But that's neither because of simple relations of inclusion or implication. It's rather because of a relation of co-constitution. Objects in an empirical domain are constituted by us in the way that they are because of the pragmatic point of our constituting them in that way, and our practical concerns are what they are in the light or our historically and materially situated sets of opportunities and capabilities (what is). What is (empirically, for us) and what ought to be (according to our ethical/political/technical practices and standards) arise together, historically, but they're not the same thing since they correspond to movements of thought in opposite directions along the specific/general and particular/universal continua.

I don't think it fits into the middle options. Those options are two ways of collapsing the distinction to one pole, rather than undermining the theoretical apparatus that would make the distinction in the first place. eg pragmatist considerations regarding what it means for something to be a fact containing behavioural commitments for that fact, a reciprocal co-constitution thesis like you might find from a Heideggerian, or Anscombe's virtue-ethical attacks on the distinction. — fdrake

This would also constitute an option I would have voted for, had it been included in the poll. I like the idea of the co-constitution of the two "domains" (prescriptive and descriptive), which of course rather threatens their being meaningfully characterised as two distinct domains to begin with. I am not very well read in Heidegger, but his relevance to the issues of the relationship of (pragmatic) normativity to the constitution of "objective" empirical domains was made clearer to me by the work of John Haugeland (especially the last four essays included in his Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind) where he also draws heavily on Sellars and Sellars' Kantianism.

The connection with Anscombe's virtue-ethics also is suggestive to me since it's closely related to Putnam's own attack on the fact/value dichotomy, his pragmatism, and David Wiggins' own conceptualism (mostly developed in his Sameness and Substance: Renewed as well as several essays on theories of truth, Humean and Aristotelian ethics, and on the subjective/objective distinction.

That's a lot a references and name dropping but maybe I can highlight the gist of this broad line of thinking about facts/values, descriptions/prescriptions, objectivity/subjectivity, etc., by means of an appeal to the Kantian/Aristotelian distinction between theoretical reason and practical reason. Aristotle suggested (this may have been either in On the Soul, in Nichomachean Ethics, or both) that theoretical reason, which aims at knowing what is true, and practical reason, which aims at deciding what to do, are different employment of the (unique) faculty of reason that are distinguished by the direction of their employment, as it were, from the specific to the general, in the case of theoretical reason, and from the general to the specific, in the case of practical reason. Hence, theoretical sciences could be viewed as aiming to generate principles that find application in the development of general statement suitable as to serve as major premises in theoretical syllogisms. Practical wisdom, as well as virtue, on the other hand, enabling an agent to select both a general premise (pertaining to ends) and a particular premise (some statement regarding means and/or opportunity) for concluding in some more specific practical requirement and, ultimately, in a particular (concrete) action.

This view yields a rather pragmatic conception of theoretical sciences (and of the descriptive domains that they are concerned with) since their aim become inseparably linked to the general goal of rationally guiding action.

A second and related idea that I also owe to Wiggins consists in his employment of a distinction between two traditional distinction that are often being conflated: (1) the general/specific distinction and (2) the universal/particular distinction. Wiggins borrows this 'distinction between distinctions' from R. M. Hare who had first deployed it in the context of the philosophy of law. This distinction may help dissolve some puzzles that would stem from too crudely contrasting the employments or theoretical and practical reason in the way I have rather hastily sketched above. So, the main insight here is that although employments of practical reason that begin with some set of general requirements, ends, or desires, in order to arrive at (with the consideration of more local or specific means and opportunities) particular courses of action, the reasoning proceeds, dialectically, both from the general to the specific and from the particular to the universal. That is, in order to be successful, practical reasoning must not only aim at seizing (specific) opportunities suitable as to achieve pre-selected ends but must also contribute to select among the various ends and needs of the agent those that are rendered salient by the practical and moral demands of the current situation. This entails that the principles making a particular action rational (at some particular time and place) become universally applicable (by the light of practical reason) merely to the extend and on the condition that the ends being pursued have been selected in a manner that is sensitive to the specific requirement of the situation of the agent (and hence the role of practical wisdom, and of virtue, in sustaining rationality by making salient to the agent ends suitable as to being pursued in the right circumstances).

"My name isn't 'The Buddha'; it's 'Siddharta Gautama', dammit!"
-- The Buddha

(...) but with the pandemic the ground has shifted. Many protests are happening in various Russian cities (...) — The Opposite

Also, he suffered a big electoral blow recently. He lost the White House.

1. Accuses people of being intersectional feminists based on no evidence. — Kenosha Kid

What's wrong with intersectional feminism anyway? The new anti-woke warriors have a beef with identity politics, as crudely defined by them. But there are few social-intellectual movements that represent greater challenges to crude forms of identity politics than intersectional feminism does (although Marxism may come close!)

https://plan-international.org/girls-get-equal/intersectional-feminism

Maybe because "career women" can afford a shrink? — Benkei

When the issue is the empirical demonstration of a gender pay gap, our science guy is all about confounding variables. When it's about the empirical demonstration that women find their highest fulfillment in the kitchen, confounding variables aren't much of a concern anymore.