April 12, 2011

• Deterministic Moral Responsibility?

  Intro:

  In the debate with William Lane Craig on the ontology of moral realism, Sam Harris seemed to ignore the issue of free will and how that relates to coherent concepts of moral responsibility.  He even seemed to go as far as to say that Craig misquoted him in his book, "The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values."  I've listened to Harris' book as an audiobook on my ipod and Harris does indeed cover the topic.  I couldn't pick out from memory a misquote, though Harris seemed to say that Craig was quoting Harris quote others or maybe he wasn't saying that about these quotes on this topic...  Not really sure what's going on there.  Perhaps it was a debate tactic to not have to deal with the subject and move on to what he wanted to emphasis or perhaps he mashed Craig's derived argument with those quotes in a defensive brain fart kind of way.  Not sure.  

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  I thought I'd take a moment to address the issue directly.

  1: First off, it doesn't matter if determinism negates moral responsibility.  One has to actually address the arguments for and against determinism that Harris presents in his book or else in any event theistic or not, certain conceptions of moral responsibility are negated.  Plenty of popular theistic worldviews are deterministic anyway and pretty much the same concepts have to be worked out to attempt to absolve the morally perfect god from the responsibility of everything that transpires if he is the ultimate cause of everything.  (Naturally, I think even if successful, it still fails:  see argument map on "The Logical Problem of Evil.")

  2: Secondly Craig, with his framing, attempted to blow off the responsibilities of his entire worldview.  He wanted to frame things so narrowly as to not have to deal with the existence of the Christian god or the problem of evil, or any of the practical epistemic problems that stick us in the same boat in any event when it comes to trying to figure out what moral facts are actually facts.  A difficult-to-process-abstraction in terms of "well being" (as Harris conceives of it @ 11:55) is just as difficult to deal with as a god's invisible nature with divine mandates recorded under layers of "cultural context" which even theologians of all stripes struggle to pin down.  If Craig is allowed to disown this wing of the debate, then why can't Harris disown the free will issue as I've argued above and just point to his book (as Craig specifically did with Paul Copan's apologetics for evil, which liberal Christian scholar, Thom Stark, takes quite to task)?

  3A: Third, there are two things about moral responsibility that matter and one that does not.  There is the type of responsibility that is merely a matter of cause.  And in a brute sense we say that a tidal wave is "responsible" for killing lots of Japanese people (incidentally, see Craig's, um, "interesting" take on it in terms of his worldview).  But that's not a moral claim right?  But it does matter, since sometimes evil comes from moral agents who couldn't have done otherwise at the time.  We still need to describe accurately the picture of how things go down and often mere cause is a necessary piece of any moral picture at some level to some degree no matter what you think philosophically. 

  3B: The second element of moral responsibility is the ability to be literally "response" + "able" in the future.  We can't go reason with that water that made up the tidal wave and tell it why it shouldn't kill Japanese people in the future.  But, no matter which conception of moral philosophy is true, everyone knows we can in fact do this with human moral agents (through reason/praise/shame/etc.).  It may be in fact the case that in hindsight, in that first sense, that person could not have even hoped to do otherwise.  Their activities were predetermined by physics to play out just as they did.  But that doesn't stop physics from striking again and allowing for a mental conversion of persuasion any more than it stops us from reprogramming computers (or from computers installing software on each other).  Hindsight can merely be a hypothetical framework that is productive and healthy for understanding future scenarios that may play out similarly.  And it simply doesn't matter if the past can never have been otherwise. 

  Before I get into the final aspect (the imaginary one), it is important to note that even if we know for a fact that determinism is true, that doesn't mean we know what the response to moral persuasion will be for any given moral agent.  As biological computers, we simply aren't capable of judging each other to that precise degree.  We may guess at levels of particular stubbornness or credulity, but we never really know for sure.  That doesn't make it magic and unpredictable in principle (like some sort of libertarian free will tourettes), but it does make us ignorant and the objection to determinism meaningless, practically speaking.

  3C: The third element is that element of entitlement.  People often feel overly morally entitled to be able to always reign down judgment on others even if that person couldn't have known any better or couldn't have done otherwise.  We don't like it as victims when it seems like the criminal has some kind of metaphysical excuse.  It seems undermining if determinism blocks some of our judgie-ness, but upon careful consideration, it isn't taking away anything that we actually need (see 3A and 3B).  The past doesn't change for anyone or any philosophy.  The obligation to be consistent as determinists just prevents us from being sloppy with our moral claims and relinquish what was never within our control to begin with. 

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  Outro:

  Overall, I think Harris made some pretty good debate/presentation choices and that the misunderstandings, misapprehensions, and accusations of having not established his case are the fault of the listeners.  I will continue to show this as I review more reactions to the debate.  Harris was sensitive to the idea (@9:42) that many people would be particularly let down if he blew the debate with Craig, and I have to say, imo, Harris did great.

  Ben

  • 1:01 pm
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