[naasking]

> Someone kidnapped my wife so I stole a car is not a valid legal defense

That's not the scenario I posed, although perhaps the presentation wasn't clear. So to be perfectly clear so there are no misunderstandings, the thief was told to steal your car or his wife would be executed.

Clearly he's morally culpable for stealing the car in one scenario and not in the other. This distinction can be clearly made using free will. You claim you don't need free will to make this distinction, so I'd like to hear how you do so.

[ajuc]

He is responsible for stealing the car in both situations. He has an excuse in one, but excuse doesn't stop responsibility, and both doesn't require a free will to exist.

To provide better example - one guy blackmails you to kill me, or he will kill your whole family. You still have a choice.

You make your choice or it's predetermined cause no free will - it doesn't matter.

You are responsible for your choice, and the blackmailer is responsible for the blackmail. You have an excuse why you choose the way you did, and it may be decided to be a good thing to do or evil, depending on the morality of particular person (basically the trolley problem).

With car the responsibility for stealing compared to the responsibility for a murder is negligible, so people focus on the second one. But both are still there, they don't cancel out.

[naasking]

> He is responsible for stealing the car in both situations.

He's causally responsible yes, free will is about assigning moral responsibility. The validity of various reasons for acting immorally is precisely the question that free will addresses.

[ajuc]

> free will is about assigning moral responsibility

Moral responsibility seems to me to be the same as the casual responsibility in these cases?

There's the famous "goal does/does not justify means" - if blackmail removed your moral responsibility then it's meaningless because there's nothing to justify. I don't think it's the case.

I think moral responsibility is still there, it's just negligible compared to the alternatives.

And I still don't see how it requires free will (except for the useless definition "anything that learns and can make a choice" - then by definition we have a free will, but that was never in question, why even waste a word on such a concept?).

[dragonwriter]

> He's causally responsible yes

On one case, only as inevitable intermediary in the chain of causation, in the other as a necessary part of the ultimate, uncaused causation.

These are very different senses of “causally responsible”.

> free will is about assigning moral responsibility.

Only indirectly, in the context of it being assumed axiomatically that having ones will be a necessary uncaused cause of the outcome is required for moral responsibility; it's directly about assigning root cause.

[naasking]

> These are very different senses of “causally responsible”.

The posters I'm engaging here don't believe in uncaused causation (nor do I), so there's little difference in the causal character of the thief's actions here in either case.

[dragonwriter]

> The posters I'm engaging here don't believe in uncaused causation

Free will is, by definition, both uncaused and a cause of other actions. If you don't believe in uncaused causation, you don't believe in free will, but you can't discuss the meaning and implication of free will in any meaningful way while ignoring the entirety of it's definition whether or not you believe in free will (or the broader conceptual class of uncaused causes of which free will is a part.)

[naasking]

> Free will is, by definition, both uncaused and a cause of other actions.

No it's not. The free will debate is about defining what free will actually means so that we can assign moral responsibility.

The scientific meaning of "free will" as experimenters being able to setup their instruments free from influence of that which they're measuring is not what's being discussed here.

[cthalupa]

I get your point - where does the distinction lie? At what point does responsibility shift? And I understand that you argue free will is necessary to make that distinction.

But you don't need free will to do that. You need a system of inputs that result in an output, with that output being the decision. It's still all a matter of causality. We've evolved in such a way that we want to stay alive, and that the vast majority of people value being alive over having a replaceable object. Or, I suppose in this example, their spouse being alive. Our collective morality is the result of that system of inputs.

If you get right down to it, it's a value judgment on life vs. property. Those values are shaped based off of our past.

[naasking]

You still haven't answered the question. You can't claim that we don't need free will to address these questions while simultaneously refusing to provide even a single alternative concept or process that could do so equally well.

Clearly some quality leads people to make a distinction between the scenarios I presented. Compatibilism calls this quality the free will of the agent in question. This is not an earth-shattering concept and does not violate any scientific principles, and it matches how people talk and reason about these scenarios.

[cthalupa]

>You can't claim that we don't need free will to address these questions while simultaneously refusing to provide even a single alternative concept or process that could do so equally well.

You keep saying this, but it's simply not true. I've specifically explained how it is a matter of making value judgments based on our past. That's all it is. This same system of judgments also equally explains people's beliefs when it comes to morals as well.

[naasking]

> I've specifically explained how it is a matter of making value judgments based on our past.

This is not an explanation. In your approach, is the thief morally responsible for their actions in neither case, in one but not the other case, or in both cases? And why?

[cthalupa]

If they just steal a car: Responsible

If they steal a car because someone has a gun to they or their spouse's head: Not responsible

Why: Because the causal chain of events that have gotten us to modern humanity have resulted in our cognitive functions valuing human life over physical objects. These are the inputs to the system. These are all causal, products of evolution, etc, and deterministic. The output, the lack of moral responsibility when it's a matter of a human life, is just as causal and deterministic. Free will is not a requirement to come to these conclusions.

If we had evolved in such a way that we kill and eat our spouses after mating like some other species on Earth, but vehicles were a scarce and irreplaceable resource, our morality would be quite different and the thief would likely be morally responsible in both cases. (For what it's worth, I much prefer that we do not live in such a reality ;))

[naasking]

> If they just steal a car: Responsible > > If they steal a car because someone has a gun to they or their spouse's head: Not responsible > > Why: Because the causal chain of events that have gotten us to modern humanity have resulted in our cognitive functions valuing human life over physical objects

Our values have little to do with the question of free will. A value system determines what we consider to be good or bad, it does not determine who is responsible for a specific good or bad outcome.

So if the thief is not responsible for stealing the car in the hostage scenario, then I assume that you agree that the hostage taker is responsible. And the reason you reach this conclusion is because you assign moral agency to the thief when he's acting alone, and you acknowledge that he has no moral agency when he's being coerced. In other words, he's acting of his own free will in one circumstance, but not the other.

Simply saying "we value life over property" does not enable you to absolve the thief for his immoral act.