[tjoff]

I don't see how personal responsibility wouldn't be possible without free will.

Society decides the consequences for wrongdoing (and positive reinforcement). Free will or not an entity is affected by the consequences of ones action (if it is able to realize those consequences).

The desire to live in a society where people don't solely act in their own interests is by itself a driving force (not necessarily fueled by free will). There are other species that more or less do only act in their own interest but humans would not have survived if we did, our strength comes from collaboration.

Even our own, well behaved, developed software "understand" the concept of consequences and personal responsibility - because we program in that behavior. Just as evolution has programmed us not to be destructive (with varying success).

[coldtea]

>I don't see how personal responsibility wouldn't be possible without free will.

Responsibility is not about punishment or lack thereof. That is just a mechanism to encourage responsibility, not its manifestation.

Responsibility is about being able to do X or Y and choosing right.

A rock is not considered responsible because we don't think it has free will. If a rock falls on one's head and kills them, that's it. We don't jail it.

In most jurisdictions we don't even hold people that are mad as responsible for something they committed for the same reason (the US is kind of Old Testament backwater legally so this might be different there). They don't go to jail etc.

>Society decides the consequences for wrongdoing (and positive reinforcement). Free will or not an entity is affected by the consequences of ones action (if it is able to realize those consequences).

Without free will there is no "decides".

Everything is pre-decided.

It doesn't even matter if one is guilty or not -- the decision to jail them or not is already made before they committed anything and is independent of their actions.

[tjoff]

> In most jurisdictions we don't even hold people that are mad as responsible for something they committed for the same reason (the US is kind of Old Testament backwater legally so this might be different there). They don't go to jail etc.

It depends on your viewpoint, but the reason for why they don't go to jail etc. is because it doesn't match the intent with jail. Jail is meant as a deterrence as well as shielding the society. If it doesn't work as a deterrence and we have better ways to shield the society from it happening again (which is "easy" to argue in regards to a mad person) then it doesn't make sense to force it upon people where it will do more harm than good (we still do it do a large extent, but society also benefits from its inhabitants believing that the system is fair and that is a difficult balance).

> Without free will there is no "decides".

This also depends on your viewpoint. A computer takes tons of decisions but they are all based on a given set of inputs, as will society (regardless of whether free will exist or not).

[coldtea]

A computer doesn't take any "free will" decision of its own -- everything is determined at the time the program is written/loaded.

"Doing X if Y" is not a free will decision if it's already encoded. In a sense it's not a decision at all. When X, the computer will do Y, period.

(And this also applies if we add some stohastic elements in the mix).

[ajuc]

> everything is determined at the time the program is written/loaded

Computer can measure random event and do something basing on that.

> is not a free will decision if it's already encoded

Most probably so is our "free will".

[tjoff]

A computer doesn't take any "free will" decisions. But it does make decisions, based on rules that the programmer gave it. Everything about the program is determined, but the inputs to the program is not necessarily deterministic and is also completely orthogonal to free will. We can still have true random events, that doesn't imply that free will exist.

The actions of a computer making decisions based on a noisy, nondeterministic source, can not be predicted.

From your previous post: It doesn't even matter if one is guilty or not -- the decision to jail them or not is already made before they committed anything and is independent of their actions.

The decision to jail them depends on whether they are found guilty. Whether they are found guilty depends on the information available at that time. What information is available is not deterministic even in a world lacking free will.

[foldr]

>I don't see how personal responsibility wouldn't be possible without free will.

It's still possible to reward and punish people for their actions. The point is that the absence of free will seems to give everyone a rock solid excuse for anything bad that they do: "I could not have done otherwise". Thus, while you can still punish people, you can't actually hold them responsible.

[tjoff]

The free will equivalent of that rock solid excuse also exist: "Because I wanted to".

The the incentives are identical and the consequences are identical, why can't we hold one of the scenarios responsible?

Now if you subscribe to the lack of free will idea, you might come to the conclusion that. Okay, it isn't this individual that performed this action, it is the history led up to this point. But in the end nothing has changed. Given that belief you might adjust and realize that hey, maybe we could have prevented this. And we probably could.

But nothing in this reasoning is any different with or without free will. Our societies would most likely be much better if we had good techniques for detecting signs for bad behavior early and encouraging change (no force required), and I'm positive that would be the case both in a free will and in a lack of free will scenario.

[foldr]

I don't see how "because I wanted to" is an excuse at all. If you shouldn't have, and you needn't have, then it doesn't matter if you wanted to.

I mean, I am just talking about excuses as we ordinarily understand them here. Try using "because I wanted to" as an excuse in your daily life and see how that goes.

[tjoff]

> Try using "because I wanted to" as an excuse in your daily life and see how that goes.

Try using "I could not have done otherwise" as an excuse in your daily life and see how that goes.

The consequences will be equally bad, thus with or without free will you will be equally motivated to avoid it. And even if it doesn't hold up to some definition of being "held responsible" the outcomes are identical.

EDIT: Nothing stops you from, even in a free-will world, believing that free will doesn't exist (as many do). But I bet you don't see them using that excuse.

[foldr]

"I could not have done otherwise" is a great excuse when people agree that you could, indeed, not have done otherwise. Conversely, "because I wanted to" is a terrible excuse, even if people agree that you did indeed want to.

[tjoff]

I'm not meaning the excuse to be interpreted literally with all the social context it implies. I'm saying that whether the action is performed because of free will or not doesn't matter.

We as a society has come up with ways to direct the responsibility and the answer will be different depending on the viewpoint of who is asking it. But this is arbitrary, just something we as a society has decided is "fair", you have responsibility for your actions and the consequences you face should be in proportion to that responsibility.

You can argue that this reasoning is all based on the assumption that everyone has free will, because if you don't then the blame should be directed further up the chain (the hammer isn't responsible for the actions performed with it).

We still do this plenty today though, even with humans. If a rocket crashes because of one person installing a gyro the wrong way you don't necessarily put the blame squarely on him/her, the processes involved should have prevented that from being undetected and thus the responsibility and blame goes further.

(EDIT: the gyro example was a bad example as the person installed it didn't want to do it in the wrong direction. A better example would be the engineer implementing the code to cheat emission tests. But that is also a point, we do still blame people even when there is no intent (or will) to base it on)

But the reasoning is still arbitraty. A human would, free will or not, still react to the consequences (direct as well as risk assesment) of its actions. The concept of responsibility still works and doesn't need to change.

[nailuj]

This is a great point. Maybe there is a moral argument to be made here that we shouldn't punish people for actions they could not have prevented (since they don't have free will), but I see, my implicit assumption that transgression of social rules must be responded to by punishment that causes suffering for the offender is probably harmful as well.