Now ... why, in the face of such arguments as that I quoted yesterday, am I an incompatibilist?
Here's why: the argument simply misses the point. What William James, and Isaiah Berlin, and more recently Robert Kane (the author of the volume pictured above) have been saying is that moral judgments with regard to action X (whatever it is) will come to seem meaningless unless we presume that there was a genuine possibility that X would not occur.
Take that woman in the restaurant. We see her look at the menu, we see her order a meal, and presume as empiricists that she has just made a choice. Is this a choice to which moral judgments apply? The naive but appealing answer is, "yes," or at least, "it might be." If you believe in animal rights you will think her decision morally better if she ordered tofu than if she ordered pork.
Aside from that, consider the possibility that she has a medical condition (we need not specify/stipulate further) and she has just ordered something that her physician has told her she "should not." Yes, the word "should" has different senses and her physician wasn't suggesting a moral judgment. Still: if you are a consequentialist you might think here of the possibility of an ER visit in her near future, and the costs that might impose on a number of parties, including the other patients left waiting while she is treated, the hospital itself, the insurance company, its other premium payors, and possibly a subsidizing government and its taxpayers. All might be impacted by this menu choice.
So it is a momentous matter for us to decide that there is or is not an alternative world if which she COULD HAVE ordered the meal of which her doc would have approved. It is a momentous decision if "could" and "should" are bound up with one another in the way they seem to be.
The term "free will" is an unfortunate one in this controversy. It isn't clear that "will" even means anything. The issue we should be debating, and might as well debate under that label if it is the only one around, is whether there is enough indeterminacy in human behavior to make any judgments of right and wrong tenable.
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ReplyDeleteWe should distinguish judging the morality of an action from judging a person for his or her decision to engage in that action. It is immoral to eat meat (unless the animal has died from natural or accidental causes). This is the case even if the woman in the restaurant has no ability to refrain from ordering meat. But, if we attempt to persuade her that it is immoral to eat meat, then, the next time she orders a meal, she might not order meat. This would not be because she has free will. It would be because her past experiences or her genes have provided her with a tendency to empathize with animals and to want to be a moral person, and the arguments and the knowledge that we have provided her cause her to empathize with the animals we eat and to conclude that refraining from eating meat will make her more moral. As a practical matter, however, she will likely continue to eat meat, even if we have persuaded her that it is immoral to do so. This is because, although our moral arguments may persuade her intellectually, they are less likely to do so emotionally, and we tend to overcome longstanding habits such as meat-eating only when we change emotionally.
ReplyDeleteI don't see how it can be immoral for her to eat meat if there is no possible world in which she would NOT have eaten meat. I don't grasp, in other words, the distinction you urge here. What I think you're saying is that, presumably in a largely vegetarian society, the broader community might try to shun or stigmatize, the few remaining meat eaters to improve their behavior, and for that purpose "judging a person for his or her decision" would have some utility. But that seems to me only to shift the problem about a bit, because any one's decision to participate in the shunning would itself be as thoroughly determined as her restaurant order. If all of it is thoroughly determined by the Big Bang, then no judgents apply to any of it, and the (mistaken) judgments that we of necessity reach are just part of the general tearfulness of things.
ReplyDeleteYou're right that my distinction fails, because, if no person can be morally condemned for eating meat, then it cannot be immoral to eat meat. Nevertheless, because we have the illusion of free will, we make moral judgments, and I believe that, according to any consequentialist or deontological system of morality, eating meat is wrong. Granted, I have no choice but to believe that, and that is because I have no choice but to be objective and to conclude on the basis of facts and logic that these systems of morality lead to the conclusion I've reached. Having reached that conclusion, I would try to persuade (I prefer that to shunning or stigmatizing) meat eaters to cease eating meat. I don't see how the percentage of vegetarians versus meat eaters is relevant.
ReplyDeleteMy praising myself for being objective was written tongue-in-cheek. I do believe that my conclusion about meat-eating is objective, but so does everyone generally believe that about his or her conclusions.
DeleteI'm afraid that on the issue of incompatibilism our gears just aren't catching, as if mine were made using Eng. measurements and yours were made using the metric system. But aside from the merits ... I kind of expected more of a rise out of you regarding the SECOND of my examples of a potentially immoral restaurant order. I expected you to explain to me how I had accepted a rather leftward set of premises even to formulate it. But you passed it by. Ah well ... onto other subjects we'll go.
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