Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

In the comments section of a post I wrote many moons ago, I've been engaging in some back and forth with a reader, Marvin Edwards.  Our discussion involved determinism and indeterminism in human action. I'm going to highlight the discussion here, because I think I put an important point quite well and am tired of patting myself on the back in private.  "Christopher, if I am alone in a room with a bowl of a pples, and I'm feeling hungry, and I decide to go ahead and eat an apple, then I am the meaningful and relevant cause of the apple being eaten. Do any of the authors you mention suggest that it was 'some thing' other than me that caused the apple to be eaten?" Each of the four authors I had mentioned [James, Popper, Berlin, Kane] would agree with the following observations about eating apples. First, self-preservation is the deepest instinct, so of course we aren't free to get hungry or not to get hungry. In that sense, the matter is determin...

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 ju...

Most readers will surely know by now that I am what is known as an "incompatibilist." I believe that determinism as to human behavior is incompatible with moral judgment.  Today, though, I would like to simply quote a gentleman who recently made the case for compatibilism in the comment section of another blog. It is a very well put statement of the point, and I'll quote it today without further comment or contention.  -------------------------- A woman goes into a restaurant, sits down, peruses the menu for a minute, and then calls the waiter over to give him her order. We cannot see what is going on in her head. But, assuming she has a normal brain, we expect it to be similar to what happens when we do the same thing, read a menu, evaluate our options, and place an order. We call this empirical event “choosing”. Options are presented, evaluated by some comparative criteria, and a choice is output. So, we know what happened (a choice was made) and we know ...

Someone on yahoo!answers indicated recently that he is preparing to take part in some sort of debate of fatalism versus free will. He wants to take the "free will side" and he wants to know what argument he has to be most prepared to meet and how he might meet it.  I'm happy that inquiring minds want to know. Here's how I responded. --------------------- Let us conceive of "free will" in "incompatibilist" fashion. The basic idea is that the necessity of my actions is logically incompatible with responsibility for credit or blame --- if I robbed the bank from causes that were already implicit a second after the Big Bang, then I could not have done otherwise and am not responsible, in an intuitively powerful sense, for robbing the bank. So, we WANT to believe in free will (indeterminism) because it will make sense out of what we're going to do anyway -- punish bank robbers.  That isn't yet an argument in its favor. But you can create...