We act based on the limited information we have. That doesn't mean that our thought processes are non-causal. — litewave

What I am arguing is that the limited information that we have regarding our present practical situations often (or at least sometimes) is sufficient for us to make sound rational of moral judgments. And in those cases where such knowledge is sufficient, any sort of information about the fundamental laws of physics (if there are any), or the distant historical past, generally is irrelevant to the correctness of our judgements. They may be relevant to the explanation how it came about that we acquired our abilities to think rationally, and to be swayed by moral considerations, but they don't have any relevance to our evaluation of the validity and soundness of our judgments.

I have no idea what you meant here. Computers - causal machines - can perform logical and mathematical operations, so why would humans need something non-causal to perform such operations? — litewave

I wasn't here arguing that human beings "need" something non-causal. I just pointed out what ought to be uncontroversial, but that you seemingly are overlooking: And this is the fact that knowledge of actual physical laws, or of past historical facts, isn't required for one to assess the soundness of a mathematical demonstration. Do you disagree with my example? Do you hold that our judgments regarding the soundness of a putative proof of Goldbach's conjecture ought to be held hostage to potential new discoveries about the laws of physics or about the distant historical past?

Intention is a mental state, a desire that stimulates and directs action. If the intention was not caused by an antecedent act of will then it was not intended - it formed in our minds without our intending to do so and thus without our control. — litewave

I can grant you that there does not occur an intention, or an intentional action (in progress), without an act of will. But the content of the act of will isn't any different than the content of the intention. If you intend to walk to the corner store in order to buy a dozen of eggs, then what might the content of your "act of will" be such that it would "stimulate" the intention? That seems confused. The intention and the act of will just are two names for the very same thing. Can you imagine an act of will that would somehow fail to constitute the corresponding intention?

This is from Wikipedia's entry on compatibilism: — litewave

This is clearly a simplification. This simplified definition is immediately followed by a quote from Schopenhauer. I had asked you if you knew a contemporary compatibilist philosopher who endorses such a simplistic conception of an act of free will. Wikipedia often offers fine explanations, but it is not an actual philosopher. It is a collection of articles written and edited by people like you and me.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is generally better source.

"It would be misleading to specify a strict definition of free will since in the philosophical work devoted to this notion there is probably no single concept of it. For the most part, what philosophers working on this issue have been hunting for is a feature of agency that is necessary for persons to be morally responsible for their conduct. Different attempts to articulate the conditions for moral responsibility will yield different accounts of the sort of agency required to satisfy those conditions. What we need as a starting point is a malleable notion that focuses upon special features of persons as agents. As a theory-neutral point of departure, then, free will can be defined as the unique ability of persons to exercise control over their conduct in the manner necessary for moral responsibility. Clearly, this definition is too lean when taken as an endpoint; the hard philosophical work is about how best to develop this special kind of control." -- From the SEP entry on Compatibilism

Evolution also allows random mutations - so we can have any values that can possibly happen to us. But natural selection will tend to remove those that are detrimental to survival, health or reproduction. — litewave

This hardly answers the charge of naturalistic fallacy. Some inherited agressive tendencies, which may contribute to explaining why some people commit murder or rape, may have had evolutionary advantages in the past and have been selected for that reason. That doesn't make rape or murder moral. Just because a form of behavior has a tendency to promote survival and reproduction doesn't make such behaviors moral.

How can you say this? The very title of the book you yourself have brought up a number of times, is 'the moral landscape'. The whole point of the analogy to a landscape is to show how its a complex system with multiple peaks and troughs, he explicitly says a number of times that there may be many equal peaks, there may be better or worse ways to get to a peak etc. — PeterPants

Yes, this is just one of the glaring contradictions in Harris's confused theory. To be fair, such inherent contradictions have a tendency to crop up within most efforts to account for the demands of ordinary principles of justice or morality within a strict consequentialist framework.

The trouble with this is that the measure of elevation at some point on the multi-dimensional "moral landscape" represents the aggregate state of wellbeing of all sentient creatures, according to Harris. It follows from this definition that there can't be better or worse ways to reach a given peak consistently with Harris's insistence that wellbeing exhausts the content of morality. If there were better and worse ways, then, presumably, reaching some slightly lower peak would be a better option than reaching a slightly higher neighboring peak, on account of the paths available and the worthiness of the paths. But if that's the case, that means that wellbeing (the elevation of the peaks) is not the only objective moral consideration. Harris's theory is thus self-contradictory.

1- wellbeing is being defined as 'everything that matters, everything of value, all past present and future facts that have any effect on the quality of life of all beings' — PeterPants

You might want to rethink this. Things that have a causal impact (positive or negative) on the wellbeing of sentient creatures aren't part of wellbeing anymore than than a thief or a robbery figure themselves among the stolen goods.

2- morality is about values, in order for anything to have value, it has to have value to something sentient, therefore morality is entirely about wellbeing (as defined above).

Morality keeps an eye on value; but it is also concerned with rights, obligations, justice, virtue, human dignity, human autonomy, personal relationships, etc.

3- If we desire more wellbeing, then we ought to try and understand how wellbeing works and how to effect it.

Oftentimes, doing what is right is done for its own sake rather than for the sake of making something "work". The idea that understanding what one ought to do (or what is right) amounts to understanding how something "works" confuses theoretical rationality with practical rationality. One can understand fairly well how things work and be quite in the dark regarding what to do. Were this not the case, Harris would have no need for his fundamental premise grounded on pure intuition. He rather would be able to demonstrate it through investigating how things work, but this is impossible to do by his own admission.

4- it is objectively better to improve wellbeing.

This can be construed rather tautologically as the claim that it is objectively better to do whatever ought to be done (which your definition of "wellbeing" suggests) or as the claim that when favoring someone's wellbeing (ordinarily construed) conflicts with something else then this something else (e.g. personal duty, respect for human dignity, or justice) must always be sacrificed for the sake of wellbeing.

The main thing people seem to argue against is the notion that we could objectively say some action or desire is better or worse. do you guys feel this way?

No. I am a moral realist as are very many philosophers who aren't utilitarians.

And i have no idea how anyone can doubt it. wellbeing is everything that could possibly matter, by definition. To say its 'simplistic' is to miss the point entirely. its defined as everything that could matter so it can hardly miss stuff out can it? — PeterPants

In that case it is also useless. In any given practical situation, a real human being -- as opposed to a God who contemplates the whole universe from outside of it, say, and could evaluates how high it ranks on the "moral landscape" -- is faced with several things that matter to her (and, indeed, that ought to matter to her) and that she can't all pursue or salvage at once. Hence she has to make choices.

Utilitarians believe that everything that matters can be ranked on one single scale of 'utility'. But if what matters extends over things that can't be valued on a single scale, then Harris's theory comes crashing down. It provides no guidance for action except in the very simple situations where everything that matters can be neatly quantified on a unique one-dimensional scale. (Classical utilitarians and their consequentialist descendants strive to address those problems, but Harris seems not to have given any thought to them.)

I think your missing the point of it.. You have said just before, that Sam Harris says that we ought to act like x, because of y, this is entirely false, he makes no claim that anyone ought to do anything. an ought cant just exist on its own, that makes no sense whatsoever.
An ought MUST be based on a goal. — PeterPants

It doesn't seem like you have read The Moral Landscape then. Or, if you have, you may not have paid sufficient attention. Harris is a moral realist. On his view, what it is that one ought morally to do is an objective fact. Furthermore, on his view, there is no distinction between empirical facts and moral imperatives; there is no is/ought distinction.

"For instance, to say that we ought to treat children with kindness seems identical to saying that everyone will tend to be better off if we do. The person who claims that he does not want to be better off is either wrong about what he does, in fact, want (i.e., he doesn’t know what he’s missing), or he is lying, or he is not making sense." -- Sam Harris, The Moral Landcape

So, sam is simply pointing out what is the best goal. the real thing he is doing though, is claiming that all of morality can be objectively studied, thats really where his point lies.
And i have no idea how anyone can doubt it. wellbeing is everything that could possibly matter, by definition. To say its 'simplistic' is to miss the point entirely. its defined as everything that could matter so it can hardly miss stuff out can it? — PeterPants

Since Harris denies the categorical distinction between facts and values, that would not make much sense for him to make values only rest on contingent goals. I've searched the few dozen instances of "goal" in The Moral Landscape and nowhere does he make moral values rest on goals. If anything, he seems to think contingent goals of human being ought to be aligned with objective values, although how this would come about he doesn't say. His epistemology of values is non-existent. If queried about the source of his knowledge that his fundamental moral premise is right, he simply asserts that it's a self-evident truth and anyone who disagrees must be confused. So, he's also an ethical intuitionist.

Evolution tends to arrange that that which is valued is useful for survival, health and reproduction, while that which is hated is the opposite. Thus our values are formed. — litewave

Evolution has its own agenda. Human beings have a different agenda. For sure, contingent features of our evolutionary history can account for some tendencies and general abilities that we have. The naturalistic fallacy is the fallacy of inferring what it is that one ought to do on the basis of what it is natural that one would be inclined to do.

If by principles of rationality you mean logic and mathematics then principles of rationality are pretty much features of the universe - that's why science is so successful in predicting the behavior of nature and in harnessing the behavior of nature in technology. — litewave

If you have a suitably abstract view of "the universe" such that numbers and other abstracta make up an integral part of it, then, maybe, you could argue that principles of theoretical and practical rationality are "parts" of the early universe. But they are not parts of physical laws or of the initial conditions of the universe as those two thing are generally conceived to jointly determine human behavior according to the standard deterministic picture. To view them as such would be patent nonsense. It would mean, for instance, that if a friend of yours purports to have proven Goldbach's conjecture, and ask you if her demonstration is sound, then it would make sense to say that you can't know for sure until such a time when physicists have discovered the fundamental laws of nature or what the past state of the universe precisely was. But surely, those two things simply are irrelevant to the question of the soundness of the mathematical proof. Principles of mathematical rationality, though, are quite relevant.

Likewise if someone would seek you advice over some moral dilemma that she is facing: She promised to return a gun that she borrowed from a friend who she suspects might make use of it to commit a crime, say. It wouldn't make any sense, in that case either, to claim that you can't know what is advisable to do until such a time when physicists have gained a more precise knowledge of the laws of nature or of the past state of the universe. The principles of morality, just like the principles of theoretical rationality, happily abstract away from such contingent facts about the laws of nature and the past "state" of the universe.

I don't think compatibilists have a problem with distinguishing the constitutive part of free agency - they think that free agency consists in the ability to satisfy desires, carry out intentions. — litewave

I don't know any contemporary compatibilist philosopher who endorses such a simplistic conception of compatibilist free will. Can you point me to one?

But libertarians surely have this problem because of their insistence on the incoherent concept of ultimate control.

Maybe most libertarian philosophers face some problems (such as the luck objection, or the problem of intelligibility) but you haven't shown that any specific libertarian proposal is incoherent. Rather, you have straddled all libertarians with a dilemma regarding the source of "intentions", but you have in the process misconstrued what it is for one to have an intention as if it were caused by an antecedent act of the will rather than its being itself an act of the will.

Sure, as I mentioned, humans have a higher level of consciousness than animals. This entails more capacity for compassion and more sophisticated intelligence, so we regard humans as more morally responsible than animals. Humans are also more free than animals in the sense that human intelligence enables them to find more ways or more effective ways to satisfy their desires and needs. — litewave

Finding ways to satisfy your needs and desires just is a small part of the function of practical reason and of the scope of human freedom. Human beings aren't merely more skilled than dogs are at finding food and shelter. They also have the ability of assessing what their needs are; when their needs of the needs of other take precedence, what habits and desires are worthy of being cultivated; and lastly, and most importantly: given the desires that they actually have, which ones among them are worthy of being satisfied in particular situations.

what Sam claims, what i believe, is that IF you desire wellbeing, then you should strive to improve it. which is admittedly a completely obvious point. — PeterPants

It certainly is quite obvious and there indeed is little reason for anyone to deny it. What is questionable is Harris's use of this commonplace assertions as a unique ground for building up an all encompassing moral theory. Just because pleasure is more fun than pain hardly proves utilitarianism right. Likewise, just because it's better to get your own stuff rather than steal it from someone else hardly means that Ayn Rand's libertarianism is right. This is another theory that is hopelessly simplistic because it strives to reduce all of morality to one single moral consideration.

I still entirely think your distinction between practical and theoretical reasoning is a distinction without a difference. or at least i fail to see how this argument about morality is diminished in the least due to this seemingly bizarre distinction. — PeterPants

If someone tells you that she believes the weather will be rainy tomorrow, you can ask her why she believes it. If she tells you that she intents to spend her next vacations in Pyongyang you can ask her why she intends to do so. Although in both cases you are expecting her do provide you with some reason, those reasons also are expected to have different forms. In the first case you expect to be given some form of evidence for her beliefs while in the second case you expect, in addition to evidence, to learn something about her values, preferences or prior commitments, and/or her abilities and opportunities. Those latter practical considerations, though, are generally irrelevant to the rasons why someone believes something. If she would tell you that she believes that the weather will be rainy tomorrow because she is fed up with the recent sunny weather, that would be irrational.

The distinction between practical and theoretical reasoning is very commonplace in philosophy (since, at least, Aristotle who has done much to articulate the distinctive forms of practical and theoretical syllogisms), as well as social sciences, economic modelling, mathematical game theory, rational choice theory, cognitive science etc. It is quite uncontroversial that there is such a distinction although the specific manner in which both forms of reasoning are related is a topic of great interest and controversy. I think the onus is on you to explain why you think there is no difference.

i STILL dont see the difference...

obviously no one has a perfect model of another human being, we certainly dont have that capacity yet.
so what? i dont see your point. — PeterPants

I just argued that *even if* you had a perfect predictive/causal model of the behavior of a human being, that still would not tell you how it is that you ought to behave towards her. And that's because knowing how your interactions with (or manipulations of) that human being will affect her doesn't tell you whether you should do it. To gain knowledge of the potential effects of your actions is a matter of theoretical reasoning. To arrive at a decision regarding what it is that you ought to do is a matter of practical reasoning.

You have read The Moral Landscape, right? In that book Harris takes as an unquestionable premise that it is morally better that every sentient creature experience well-being rather than that every sentient creature feel crappy. From this unique premise, Harris purports to derive his "moral landscape" utilitarian theory. But the premise can't be supported by empirical scientific investigation. Harris is the first to admit this. In fact he pretends that only intuition can support it and that he doesn't know how to respond to someone who would deny it. So, Harris himself recognizes that his utilitarian theory can not rest entirely on a predictive/causal model of the behavior of human beings (and other sentient creatures). You need, in addition to any such model, however perfect or imperfect it might be, some premise or principle about what it is best to do. But deciding what is best to do, or arguing for the validity of moral principles is traditionally regarded to be a topic for practical reason. Harris rather regards it as a matter of faith in his own intuition and he simply voices astonishment that anyone else's intuition could be different.

He does insist, though, that any moral system requires some unquestioned premise. But this is merely to assume moral foundationalism. Principles of morality need not be structured similarly to a mathematical axiomatic system. Practical reason need not rest on rules of deductive inference at all.

so, im really confused about this practical / theoretical understanding thing. Id appreciate if you could explain further.
The way i see it (this should help you set me straight) is that we all create models of other peoples behaviors in our minds (theoretical models) these models are based on our real world experiences of people (derived practically)...
I dont see the difference, practical reasoning seems to just be intuition? surely not... you surely are not appealing to intuition over reasoning. — PeterPants

Even if you could somehow acquire a perfect "model" of a fellow human being and thereby know exactly how different "interventions" on them would "produce" different behaviors and emotional responses, you would still not know what to do since this theoretical knowledge would not speak to the reasons why you should intervene in a way that produces such results. The aim of practical reason is to decide what to do and this is governed just as much by the evaluation of the desirability of the ends as it is with the effectiveness of the means (or their permissiveness). Theoretical reason is completely silent regarding both permissiveness (duties, commitments, responsibilities, etc.) and the valuation of ends.

reason is reason, there is no theoretical/practical reasoning, what are you talking about? — PeterPants

Deciding what to believe isn't the same as deciding what to do. Of course, both of those abilities rest on rational abilities, broadly construed, but they are still distinctive ways of making use of them.

if someone harms me, i hold them responsible, i expect them to apologize if they are a moral agent, i ask for them to make amends, all for pragmatic reasons, but i dont blame them, i blame their environment, their imperfect genes, the whole multitude of variables that led them to their current situation. — PeterPants

This is strange, and I doubt if you can really live up to this lofty (however misguided) ideal. Your pragmatism seems to be grounded on an utilitarian reconstruction of the pont of ordinary reactive attitudes. But you are claiming (as Harris does) some sort of detached, emotionally withdrawn, purely theoretical stance on your own daily social intercourses, rather on the likeness of Star Trek's Mr Spock.

It seems to me that Sam Harris often fails to distinguish practical from theoretical reason and thereby seeks to substitute to our practical understanding of our interactions with our fellow human beings a theoretical understanding of the causes of our behaviors. He wants us to treat each other like we were dogs. Hence, his utilitarianism, combined with this theoretical-instrumentalist stance, yields an understanding of the point of morality rather similar to what is depicted (critically) in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and (uncritically) in B. F. Skinner's Walden Two. (A Clockwork Orange also comes to mind)

Just because aliens have landed doesn't mean it's an "invasion". Endorse multiculturalism (and multispeciesm) and don't spoil your interstellar vacations.

my argument is more about blame, the only place i see a lack of free will having an effect on how we think, is in blame.
i dont blame anymore, i recognize that peoples flaws have reasons, reasons beyond their control. 'bad' people are sick people, they need help not hatred. — PeterPants

To praise and blame people just is to hold them responsible. When you are holding someone responsible for having acted badly, because in this instance her having acted badly wasn't purely accidental but rather reflects badly on her character, then you are blaming her. If the blame is merited, then it ought to be met by that person with some sense of shame or regret. Feeling ashamed or regretful just is for one to recognize that the blame is merited, and being on that account motivated in making amends and trying to do better in the future. The social configuration of those emotions and "reactive attitudes" (as Peter Strawson calls them) not only enable people to make progress on the path towards greater rational and moral autonomy, it is also in part constitutive of those rational and social abilities. She can't be rational who doesn't hold herself responsible (i.e. isn't happy or unhappy about herself) for her successes or mistakes in reasoning. She can't either display moral awareness who wouldn't feel any shame for her own misdeeds.

Rewards and punishments likewise can be social practices that scaffold autonomous abilities and partially constitute them. Parking tickets punish people who park illegally while respecting their autonomous choices to do so in some circumstances. (Sam Harris would probably see this as a second best solution to some form of brainwashing or brain surgery that would entirely remove people's abilities to park illegally in any circumstance.) And, of course, rewards and punishments are effective with dogs who can't be reasoned with, or with children who can't reason yet. But in the latter case, they also instill in them the more mature reactive attitudes that lead them on the path towards greater rational and moral autonomy.

what if we make a computer that changes its own program, put it in a robot and it ends up killing people, it it then personally responsible for its actions? was it not an unfortunate series of events originating in a lack of foresight on whoever originally made the robot? — PeterPants

Daniel Dennett says that we are "wet robots". He may be called a mechanicist-compatibilist since he endorses a view of the universe (and all the living things in it) being a set of complicated mechanisms. I don't personally endorse this metaphysical picture, but I think he has a point. The neural circuits inside of our brains (and inside of an intelligent robot's computer) could perfectly well run deterministic algorithms and this fact alone would not have any incidence on our freedom and responsibility. If a robot would become a killer robot then maybe its creators would share some of the blame. That would not necessarily absolve the robot. Likewise, if you hire a hit man to kill someone, then you are responsible for the murder just as much as the hit man is. Responsibility isn't a buck that must stop in just one single place. It is more a matter of social, moral and political decision to decide how responsibilities for rational actions must spread out among multiple agents (where some of the agents -- parents for instances -- hold some responsibility for raising or supervising other agents on their way to the acquisition of greater rational and moral autonomy).

People's being responsible for what they do therefore isn't independent of the way they are being held responsible according to (sometimes freely endorsed) social norms. But just because those two things are being created together doesn't mean that responsibility isn't real. It just means that it only exists withing a determinate social context. (And, analogously, it can also hold withing the practical perspective of a single rational agent -- on a desert island, say -- who choses to lead a rationally integrated life and to hold herself responsible for her own past shortcomings).

great then you agree with me, so why are you arguing against me?
wait... but you DID defend that sophomoric and ridiculous conception just before.. didnt you?
You implied that we could do multiple different things, based on our decisions entirely abstracted from determined reality... didnt you? — PeterPants

You misunderstand. I argued the exact opposite: that you ought not to construe the free human agent as an entity that can control the unfolding of the universe from some ethereal standpoint outside of it (and from outside of her own body and brain). It is from within the universe, as an integral part of it, that the embodied human agent exerts control over her own future. And you have not shown how the deterministic laws that govern physical systems (while abstracting away most of their significant functional features) preclude human beings from having such abilities to freely and responsibly determine their own futures.

No... straw man alert straw man alert! :P
no no, its just the choices bit, of course our actions are influenced by morality and rationality, just like a computers actions are influenced by energy states, logic circuitry etc. its a wonderful and beautiful phenomena. — PeterPants

Those are two rather different sorts of influences. The deterministic computer isn't responsible for the inputs that are provided to it and those inputs determine the outputs. Hence, we don't hold the computer responsible for having had any choice in churning out those outputs, given the inputs that it didn't have any choice being provided with.

The case where humans are being influenced by principles of rationality or morality is quite different. The principles of rationality are not part of the initial state of the universe or the laws of physics. Both the laws, or the initial state, could have been different and this might not have had any relevant impact on what the principles of rationality are. They would remain the same. If you are asked to evaluate whether modus ponens is a valid rule of inference, for instance (or whether its application to some specific bit of practical reasoning is relevant) then it is absolutely no use to inquire about the initial state of the universe or the laws of physics. It is also quite irrelevant to inquire about the causal impacts of the "inputs" to your brain. The principles of rationality aren't inputs to people's brains. This is not where to look for in order to understand why people make the choices that they make, in the case where they are acting rationally or morally.

In the specific case of morality, looking for its source in our evolutionary past, for instance, leads one straight to the commission of the naturalistic fallacy. What makes something worthy of being valued can not be reduced to any sort of causal explanation as to why you actually came to value it.

of course, but why would you assume thats the case, i see no evidence of this ability and thus see no reason to come up with explanations for it... — PeterPants

What ability don't you see any evidence of? The ability to make justified rational decisions or enlightened moral choices?

on your Sam Harris comments, i disagree, i dont think he is as ignorant of the more nuanced views as you think, i think he is arguing (as i am) against the only concept of free will worth arguing over, i see no reason to argue against more nuanced philosophical views of free will.
If you dont support this idea of free will, then whats the problem? so basically i dont understand this criticism you gave.

But the conception of free will you are arguing against just is sophomoric and ridiculous. No philosopher who I know endorses it. (And I've read papers by well over one hundred philosophers who have published on the topic). Maybe "ordinary people" who are being probed into coming up with explanations regarding the source of their abilities to act responsibly in a universe that is allegedly governed by impersonal forces come up with funny explanations. But just because the explanations aren't very good, or are overly simplistic, doesn't entail that what is explained doesn't exist!

quantum systems are not deterministic, they simply have variables that seem to be determined by randomness. :P

but none of that is here nor their, to claim that something on the scale of a human brain acts in an indeterministic way is absurd and baseless. — PeterPants

You ignored the second part of my comment. Even if human brains can be construed as deterministic systems, that doesn't mean that their functions, let alone the functions of the distributed systems that they are integral parts of (including human bodies, their environments and their cultures) are governed by principles that are reducible to the laws that deterministically govern the behaviors of neurons.

what IM saying, is that if you go to any MOMENT, a single moment, not a period of time, a single instant in time, and everything in the whole universe is a particular way, every atom, every quantum state, all of it (obviosly including your body and brain) then the thing that happens next is determined by the current setup, and we as agents have NO INFLUENCE over that whatsoever. and that is precicely what most people believe free will is, the capacity to overcome determanism, to break it, to do something outside of what is determined by the universe. — PeterPants

I am unsure if this is really what "most people" believe free will is. Sam Harris for sure seems to believe that this is the conception of free will that must be refuted. He seems to hold to this naive conception very dearly because that saves him the trouble of refuting (or of learning anything about) less philosophically naive conceptions of our ordinary concepts of agency freedom and moral or rational responsibility.

determinism is not an assumption, its all there is evidence for, to assume there is anything outside of determinism is the magical doctrinal assumption. — PeterPants

There are both deterministic and indeterministic systems in the world. From a quantum mechanical perspective, most physical systems are indeterministic although for some practical purposes the indeterminism can be abstracted away (e.g. as is the case for many macroscopic, non-chaotic systems). Maybe more importantly, for purpose of understanding the behavior of rational agents and other animals, the principles that govern them need not reduce to or be explained by the deterministic laws that govern their material constituents. It's usually more a matter of form and function: how those parts normally function together.

i fully understand that, and actually thought i had basically said it..
My point was that this rules out the notion that at a specific instance in time, any given person could do one thing OR another. Its simply not true, in a given situation (the situation includes your brain state etc) you can and will do one thing. — PeterPants

This is precisely what I think is a bit nonsensical. You yourself are not part of the practical situation where you are called to act. That would only make sense if you would picture yourself floating like a ghost alongside yourself at the time of acting and trying to figure out how to pull the strings that animate your own body. What rather constitutes your practical situation, at the time when you must make a responsible decision, are the opportunities open to you, the set of your practical abilities, and the rational considerations that may tell, by your own lights, what it is that it would make sense for you to do.

According to it, there is no source of action that is not an "external coercion" or "external impediment"; whether it is "felt" or not is really a matter of indifference. — John

Yes, I think most compatibilists, because of the metaphysical picture that comes bundled up with the uncritically accepted doctrine of universal determinism, generally have a hard time distinguishing what it is in the aetiology of human action that constitutes external constraint to our freedom from what it is that is a constitutive part of (internal to) our power of free agency. It is just very hard for them to see how it is that free agency comes to be constituted, what its biological and social/cultural "determinants" (or enabling conditions) really are.

'To say that you could have done otherwise, is simply to say that the universe could have been different at that exact point in time' — PeterPants

This claim seems to rest on a misconception regarding the way human beings, qua responsible agents, relate to "the universe". The universe simply is everything there is, including you. You are a flesh and blood animal; you are not a disembodied Cartesian ego: the mere passive spectator of epiphenomena being generated by your brain. So, of course, if you had done something else than you actually did, then the universe would have been different. That doesn't mean the "rest" of the universe would have made you do it or that you didn't have the opportunity and freedom to do it in the actual case where you didn't.

In my understanding of compatibilism, a compatibilist admits that all our actions are ultimately determined by factors over which we have no control but he also claims that we have control and thus free will in the sense that we can do what we want to do or what we intend to do without feeling coerced to do it. Thus a compatibilist denies ultimate free will and ultimate responsibility but accepts free will and responsibility in a limited sense. Yeah, it is a utilitarian and pragmatic approach but it does appeal to an important sense of the idea of freedom - freedom to do what we want. — litewave

Most contemporary compatibilists (I say "most", but I don't actually know of any actual exception) defend a view of compatibilist freedom and responsibility that requires more from an agent than her simply being free from the feeling of coercion when she acts. One of the main points of contention between compatibilists and hard determinists concerns the source or our desires, or of our wanting what we want, when we are indeed "doing what we want". Pretty much everyone agrees that, in cases where we don't have any sort of control over our own desires (or on our desires' effectiveness in making us acting on them) then we aren't free even if we don't feel being coerced.

The classical example concerns the nicotine addict who wishes that she would not desire to smoke but can't help but acting on this desire. If we imagine that she indeed is powerless in getting rid of her addiction (and may be blameless for her having acquired it, let us suppose) then, in a clear sense, her addiction constitutes a restriction on her freedom. And that is the case even if whenever that person lights up a cigarette nobody else is coercing her and she is doing what she most wants to do at that time.

Harry Frankfurt has famously developed a "Second Order Desire" theory of free will in order to deal with cases such as addiction. This theory ran into new problems so Frankfurt later patched it up into his more recent "Deep Self" view. You can looks those up; there is an abundant literature about them. (Many other compatibilists such as John Martin Fisher, Michael Smith, Susan Wolf and Kadri Vihvelin hold roughly similar views). I don't think any one of those compatibilist views is entirely successful, but the main point is that the mere absence of a feeling that one is being coerced by an external agent, or from external circumstances (e.g. from being locked up in a room) isn't sufficient for guaranteeing the sort of freedom that grounds rational and/or moral responsibility. And that this is the case is a point that compatibilist philosopher generally grant to the hard compatibilist.

Let me also mention another related reason why the simple form of compatibilism that would equate freedom of the will with the absence of felt external coercion, or of external impediments, is unsatisfactory: On such a simple account, mature human beings wouldn't be anymore or any less free than dogs and cows are. However, we don't hold dogs and cows morally responsible for what they do (although we may reward or punish then when this is effective). So, there ought to be something more to our own freedom on account of which we can hold ourselves responsible for what we do than merely being uncoerced by external agents or circumstances.

Well, your reasons include the information you have. A person who acts for wrong (detrimental) reasons should be corrected, through advice, education, therapy, blame or punishment, or his freedom to act should be restrained.

I'll come back to this at a later time.

Ultimately, we can't choose anything (because everything we do is ultimately determined by factors over which we have no control). If we have more time or opportunities to do something then there may be a greater probability that we will do it, but ultimately we can't choose it. — litewave

This sounds more like a hard determinist line than a compatibilist line. The sort of thing that a compatibilist might say -- someone like Daniel Dennett, for instance -- is that people can chose to perform specific actions, and avoid performing other actions, even though whenever they make such choices there wasn't any possibility for them to have done anything else. It is rather hard determinists who claim that the lack or an ability "to have done otherwise" precludes the ability to chose at all. (Although some compatibilists also assert that possession of the general ability to have done otherwise is consistent with the impossibility of its being exercised in the specific situation).

Hard determinists such as Galen Strawson or Derk Pereboom deny that free will and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism (and also with indeterminism!) but they maintain that praise and blame, reward and punishment, can nevertheless be justified on utilitarian grounds, which seems to be your position. Your position therefore seems to be identical with the position that philosophers who defend it qualify as hard determinism (or hard incompatibilism) but you would rather call it "compatibilism" for some reason.

Another option is to maintain that free will and responsibility don't require "ultimate responsibility". In order to defend such an option, you still need to contend with Strawson's Basic Argument, it seems to me. It would seem especially important that you would do so on account of the fact that your own regress argument is similar to Strawson's.

I say that the regress of intentions must be blocked at some point. If the first intention is caused by values, so be it.

Sure, this "blocks" the regress. (Rather: it terminates the regress at some point in the past where the agent wasn't responsible). But it block the regress in favor of the hard determinist, and not in favor of the the compatibilist. The compatibilist wishes to block the regress in such a manner that the agent's responsibility for her own actions isn't removed!

But reasons are causal factors too. Acting for a reason means being influenced by the reason

For sure. Whenever an agent acts intentionally in a context where she might be held (or hold herself) to be responsible for what she did, then her behavior is a manifestation of her being sensitive to some rational consideration or other. When the reason was bad, we may blame her and when the reason was good we may sometimes praise her (if there is some point in doing so). We blame her (or she feels remorse or expresses regrets) when her having had a bad reason for acting reflects badly on her character.

However, reasons thus construed as abstract features of the agent's practical situation that she might rightly or wrongly take to be justifying her behavior aren't antecedent causes of her action in the same way mental states such as beliefs and desires might be. It makes sense to say, retrospectively, that wrong beliefs or questionable motivations might have "caused" you to act badly and that they might, in some circumstances, absolve you in part of your responsibility. (You were not free to do the right thing on account of a lack of knowledge that you couldn't have had, or because of an addiction that clouds your judgement, say). But in the case where you are well informed and don't suffer (through no fault of your own) from some addiction, say, then to say that you had no choice in doing what you did because you were "influenced" by you reason for doing so doesn't seem to make sense. Freedom from rationality isn't freedom at all. It's just being unmoored.

I agree that the fact that the agent has been repeatedly engaged in an action says something about her character (her relatively stable properties) but it still doesn't give her ultimate control or responsibility for the action. We engage in the activity of breathing all the time and it doesn't give us ultimate control of our breaths even after many years of breathing. But it says something about our nature (namely that we are breathing creatures), which we cannot freely choose. — litewave

We can't choose not to breathe but we can chose not to lie or steal, for instance; at any rate, we can chose not to do those things unless we have some good overriding reasons not to refrain in specific instances. But although it might be begging the question against the ultimate-responsibility skeptic to say so, my only intent here was to dislodge the picture of responsible action according to which the responsibility of the agent only attaches to her momentary choice -- in the instant when she deliberates and act -- to behave badly and to yield to her bad impulse. We also typically are blaming her for having acquired the bad character that accounts for her having such bad impulses, and that also accounts for her lack of control over them. And this means that we also hold that she was free to choose a different path in the past and not indulge in the behaviors that molded her character in this fashion. That she was thus free to choose a better path in the past must also be argued for separately, of course. But it is important not to assume without argument that acting freely just means being able to make choices regardless of one's present character and motivations.

Of course we have different kinds of desires - for carnal pleasures, for compassionate love, for duty, etc. - but they are all motivators for the formation of our intentions and the performing of our actions, and all of those desires (and consequently intentions and actions) are ultimately determined by factors over which we have no control.

Yes, but I would argue that what normally terminates the chain of "why?" explanations of rational behavior need not be construed as a mental state that one had prior to deciding what to do, but rather one's ultimate reason for doing so. Hence, imagine that the house is burning and, as you escape, you have the opportunity to grab your sleeping child in her bed. If you are doing so it's because you are valuing her life, say. That would be a reasonable explanation of your action. Your intentional life-saving action is grounded on the value that you ascribe to your child's life. In order to start a regress argument, you would have to argue that you were only thus sensitive to this rational consideration because you are a person who values your children's lives. And you would also have to argue that your being such a person isn't something that you have any "ultimate" controls over.

It may be true that you don't have any such "ultimate" control over this in the sense that you were indeed lucky enough not to be raised in circumstances that would have turned you into some sort of a sociopath. A sociopath might be someone who suffers from some form of moral blindness. But it wouldn't make you any freer if you could have, in the past "freely" chosen evenhandedly between becoming a normal compassionate person or a sociopath. Hence, in order to block the regress, it is sufficient to point to the values that motivate you in acting and challenge the proponent of the regress argument to show you why your endorsing such values isn't a rational act.

If the skeptic about ultimate responsibility would rather argue that you weren't free to become such as to be motivated by those values, you can simply reply that you now are free to endorse them, or revise them, on the condition that good reasons might be offered for your doing so. And it is this ability to reassess your own values at each moment of your life (from the time when you became morally and rationally mature) that makes you free and ultimately responsible for your actions.

Sure, the questioner obviously assumes that the neighbor's action is intentional, so he is not interested to hear that the neighbor intended to perform the action. He is interested to hear what were the factors that caused/influenced the formation of the intention and consequently the performance of the action.

I was arguing that she wanted to hear the reasons why her neighbor was trimming her hedge. The question of the causal factors that were implicated in her becoming aware of those reasons is a different question. It may relate to the explanation of her having the ability to act intentionally, but not to the explanation why she exercised this ability in the present circumstances. When you ask someone why she is doing something, you don't normally mean to inquire why she had an ability to behave rationally. (That's just because she is a normal human being). You rather are assuming that she is rational and are inquiring about the specific reasons she may have in the present circumstances.

The article is behind a paywall, but honestly I don't see how the so-called agent causation can save libertarian free will. — litewave

That's unfortunate. However, if you google the four separate words: "Galen Strawson basic argument "(without quotes), then the top two results are (1) a link to The Information Philosopher's page on Galen Strawson, where his "Basic Argument" is summarized, and (2) a link to Strawson's own paper The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility where one version of his argument is developed. The reason why I am pointing you to Strawson's argument is because it seems to express the same worry that you are trying to express (in the form of a regress argument) but it doesn't suffer from the same flaw. It doesn't misconstrue an intentional action as a sort of action that must be controlled by a prior intention in order for it to be intentional. And also, as I mentioned already, if you accept Strawson's argument, then it threatens compatibilist free will just as much as it threatens libertarian free will, which is instructive and may motivate you in trying to figure out what's wrong with it.

(...) Incidentally I did participate in a debate on the topic of Free Will on the Dharmawheel forum not long back, and I maintained the view that Buddhism basically supports the idea of free will - it has to, because it defines 'karma' in terms of 'intentional action', so I can't see how it could possibly not. But, interestingly, there was quite a bit of dissent from other contributors. — Wayfarer

Thanks for those useful explanations. So, Harris's Buddhism really amounts to Pop Buddhism sprinkled with a fair amount of Cartesian prejudice.

Incase you haven't missed it, it can't be claimed to be who you are because YOU have no OWNERSHIP over it. I mean, sure you can influence it's decisions but you can influence your girlfriend/boyfriends decisions too, does that mean that they are part of who you are? I think not, just a part of your life.

And so by definition, anything that you are unaware of and can not control is therefore not you. Like your heart, or your cells, they form part of your body but they are not you. All YOU are is an awareness, an observer riding around in a body that you so naively and arrogantly call your own. The driver of the car is not the car, remember that. — intrapersona

I'm not sure why it should be regarded as arrogance to claim your body as your own. (Who else would more rightfully claim ownership over it?) In any case, the body and the brain that you allegedly are "riding in" are causally involved in the exercise of your capacities to perceive the world, to gain knowledge about it, and to act. The proper way to characterize those involvements, in my view, is as enabling conditions for the possession of your mental powers and their exercises. Likewise, your eyes enable you to see but they are not doing the seeing for you, your legs enable you to walk but aren't doing the walking for you, and your brain enables you to think but isn't doing the thinking for you.

P.S. Meditation is perhaps the clearest sense of attaining insight on the matter is it is primary. You can't claim physical activity anymore valuable in determining free will over self-observation. Self-observation is primary and comes before decision making. In anycase, it has already been observed by neurological studies that the unconscious mind makes the decisions.

I think you alluded to Libet's experiment earlier. The interpretation of this experiment has been widely criticized, and even Libet himself later came to temper his own conclusions. I commented on it just a few days ago.

Thanks, so has anyone ever asked him how something can be epiphenomenal and yet cause him to still generate an entire philosophy based around it? I'm sure he must have considered it at least once. — JupiterJess

Harris simply bites the bullet and acknowledges that he can't claim any responsibility for his own intellectual achievements. He is even handed about that. If people can't be held morally responsible for their bad deeds -- since they're mere puppets being moved around by the impersonal forces of the universe -- then they can't either be given any real credit for their positive accomplishments.

Of course, Harris's philosophy of powerlessness and irresponsibility is unstable and he attempts to patch it up with the caveat that although people are powerless to make choice among real alternatives, and although they can't be given any real credit for their actions, it still is useful to pretend that they are responsible, and praise and reward them accordingly, in order to manipulate them. People are powerless puppets but you can still use praise and blame (and rewards and punishment) as mere psychological tools for pulling on their strings. Harris is quick to add, though, that blaming or punishing someone who has intentionally done a very bad deed (a murderer, say) is terribly unfair to the criminal since he isn't responsible at all. Blaming or punishing the criminal can justifiably be done only if that's the only means for controlling him, but it would be much better, if possible, to tie him up and hack into his brain in order to remove the source of the criminal impulse.

Yep. But wouldn't this require a person/self to suffer to be correct? — JupiterJess

That's right, but Harris isn't arguing that the self is an illusion. It's rather the self's sense of her own freedom that is an illusion according to Harris. He believes that the mental phenomena that are being experienced by the self (including the sense of one's own power of free agency) are epiphenomena. They are not unreal but they don't have any causal efficacy according to him.

So, Harris's ethics (as expounded in The Moral Landscape) boils down to the affirmation of the intuition -- which he believes to be a self-evident a priori truth -- that it would be ethically good if all of the epiphenomenal "selves" being generated by biological brains in the universe were somehow being caused to have happy thoughts and pleasurable feelings. This is quite sophomoric, really.

EDIT: Free will and choice making ability are not connected in any real sense. — TheMadFool

You seem to be connecting, or equating, the very idea of "free will" with libertarian (incompatibilist) free will. This is the ability for agents to settle between various options that are metaphysically open, in a sense, prior to the time of action or decision. Also, what you are calling "choice making" seems to be an instance of the sort of ability that compatibilists deem to be sufficient for free will (or merely for moral responsibility). But you are not very explicit about that.

Hence, your thesis seems to boil down to the claim that compatibilist free will is possible even if libertarian free will isn't. This is rather common place, though not unworthy of discussion.