JackDaydream wrote: ↑November 1st, 2022, 12:26 pm
I have often wondered about this ever since I wrote an essay at school on the question, are criminals born or made? To some extent, it involves the nature vs nurture debate alongside the issue of free will. Genes may be significant and hormones, alongside psychosocial aspects of life. Certain experiences, like trauma may lead to post traumatic stress disorder, as some 'damage.
However, the question of free will fits into this and, I have been reflecting on this after reading, 'Free Will', by Sam Harris (2012). He states,
'There is no question what human beings can imagine and plan for the future, weigh competing desires, etc. and losing this would greatly diminish this. External and internal pressures of various kinds can be present while a person plans and acts_ and such pressures determine our sense of whether he is morally responsible for his his behaviour. However, these factors have nothing to do with free will.'
This strikes me as a tricky area of how to view moral action?
So, I am wondering about the connection between free will and moral agency. I am posting it in the general philosophy section because it is about free will rather than simply about ethics and morality. The issue of free will is complex and Harris argues that it is abstract, saying,
'In the philosophical literature, one finds three approaches. Both determinism and libertarianism hold that if our behaviour is fully determined by background causes, free will is an illusion....Determinists believe that we live in such a world, while libertarians(no relation to the political philosophy that goes by its name) imagine that human agency can rise above the plane of physical causation'.
I find this issue difficult in terms of the nature of reflective agency and where the issue of moral responsibility fits into this. On one hand, it may be hard to see human beings as victims of circumstances but it is complex, because human agency arises in the context of those circumstances and the mental states which correspond. Any thoughts?
I think the first bridge we have to cross in understanding if free will exists, and what it might actually mean, lies in understanding the mind-body relationship.
Unfortunately we don't understand it. So we're left with what seems to make most sense bearing in mind that limitation.
There are arguments I find compelling on both sides about whether free will can exist.
Against free will is the issue of over-determinism. If the physical processes of our brains truely correlate with our experiential states, and if the physical processes alone can fully account for our behaviour, there doesn't seem to any room for mental choice or causation.
On the other hand, the functional correspondence of our experiential states in terms of utility are the sort of fit you'd expect to see if we did have mental agency. From our basic mental reward system which motivates us to stay alive and maintain homeostasis, to the ability to conceptualise abstractly, imagine consequences, weigh up pros and cons, plan, prioritise, control impulses and so on. Can it be mere epiphenomenal coincidence that our conscious experience looks incredibly useful? Seems unlikely to me.
Those two both look like knock out arguments, but appear to contradict each other, so I don't know if they get us any further.
Regardless, the thing is there's no real option of just switching off/ignoring your conscious experience and becoming an epiphenomenal passenger waiting for your physical brain to do stuff. In day to day life you have to at least act as if you have choice and agency. At that point you can take into account how much freedom psychological factors leave open, if any. As you say, genes, hormones and life experience will factor into our psychology (mirrored by patterns of neural connectivity, some of which will manifest as conscious experience, and some will remain unconscious, but might still play a part in our behaviour and choices, in a 'sub-conscious' way).
The conscious part we at least feel we have some agency over, and that has moral connotations. A responsibility to try to do the right thing. Bearing in mind, as you say, that moral culpability can be complicated in terms of the underlying influences at play.