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From: arm@ihlpb.ATT.COM (Macalalad)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Free will and responsibility (was Re: Making fires...)
Message-ID: <10333@ihlpb.ATT.COM>
Date: 26 Apr 89 15:53:13 GMT
References: <10992@bcsaic.UUCP> <16878@cup.portal.com> <2792@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <17374@cup.portal.com> <10268@ihlpb.ATT.COM> <17473@cup.portal.com>
Reply-To: arm@ihlpb.UUCP (55528-Macalalad,A.R.)
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In article <17473@cup.portal.com> dan-hankins@cup.portal.com (Daniel B Hankins) writes:
>
>     This is one of the major reasons why the notion of free will is held
>onto so strongly by a great many people.  Without free will, responsibility
>(per se) goes out the window.  Unable to imagine any effective alternative
>to responsibility/recognition/punishment for controlling human behavior,
>many see a lack of the notion of free will as leading to fatalism and
>criminal anarchy.
>
>     Instead, what those who deny free will do is to point to the
>possibility of a science of human behavior as an alternative to those
>ancient and often ineffective methods of control.  Instead of punishing the
>criminal (which suppresses the behavior in the short term but reinforces
>the criminal tendencies), the determinist advocates finding ways to
>permanently modify that behavior, or remove the behavior's source (capital
>punishment/banishment).  Once in full swing, such approaches to suppressing
>behavior unwanted by society would lead to far more effective deterrents to
>crime.

This brings to mind a few books like A Clockwork Orange, Brave New World,
and 1984.  In all of these books, scientific advances enabled governments
to control and modify the behavior of its citizens.

That someone could even suggest that this is a good thing to do shocks
me.

Perhaps I wasn't clear in explaining the distinction I see between
free will and will.  Will is a function of who we are, whose input
is stimuli from the external world and whose output is our resulting
action.  Free will implies that we choose our will, and can change
our will, so that our resulting actions also change.  Will and
responsibility can exist in a deterministic universe; free will
cannot.  (I am not conceding that our universe is deterministic, but
for the sake of argument, let's suppose that it is.)

In controlling another's actions, you replace his will with another.
Who, then, is responsible for his actions?  He certainly isn't anymore,
since it isn't his will.  Of course, from your point of view,
responsibility is "out the window" and therefore a moot point.

There is more to responsibility, though, than assigning blame or
reward, and I certainly have never thought of responsibility as a
vehicle for controlling others.  (Perhaps you are a behaviorist at
heart? :-)  Responsibility is a concept intimately connected to
self-actualization and self-identity.  Taking away responsibility
also takes away any concept of the self.

On the other hand, I don't think that a science of behaviors is
completely incompatible with the idea of free will.  I can imagine
learning about different wills and the types of choices that are
made, and freely choosing to change my will to conform more
closely to who I am and who I want to be.  In fact, I think that
this is already happening to a degree in psychological therapy
sessions.  The difference, of course, is that one chooses his
will, while the other has his will chosen for him.

-Alex