[autoexec]

If free will is an illusion then racists have no choice but to be racist, and our system of systemic violence, poverty, and oppression can never be changed as a result of our will because (as evidenced by its existence) no one has any ability to make the choice to change it. If it ever does change, it will happen for reasons entirely outside of our control and therefore there's no point spending time worrying about it.

You seem to be saying that its wrong for us (white people) to hold a single domino (black people) responsible for falling on those in front of it, after we've spent centuries laying out the dominoes behind it that caused it to tip forward, but certainly those white people laying out those previous dominoes were themselves tipped forward by the dominoes behind them stretching back to the earliest humans. Every domino is as culpable as the one before it or the ones centuries ahead of it.

I'd reject the idea that we should ignore the issue of black on black crime, or that it's pointless to try to improve that situation, or that there's nothing black people can do themselves to further that effort.

I'd rather trust that people can make their own choices, while acknowledging that those choices will be significantly limited and influenced by a person's circumstances. We're all influenced by our pasts, our environment, and our abilities, but there's still room enough there for choice most of time I think. It's better to look into why and how people make the choices they do and to try to help people make the best choices for the situations they're in, than to throw up our hands in despair over choices we're powerless to change.

Either way, it seems we can still hold black people who commit murder to the same standard as racists who commit lynchings. In the end, it doesn't matter if they made that choice or it was made for them by a deterministic universe and the simple law of cause and effect. Either way we have no choice but to acknowledge the reality of what they've done and try to limit their potential to harm others in the future.

If you're correct that a person's biology and their circumstances can make it impossible for them to do anything except murder others, once we know how to identify the set of conditions that invariably lead to that result we could justify punishing people for crimes they haven't yet committed, but I think we'd need a whole lot more evidence before we go down that terrifying path. Right now the available evidence would suggest it'd result in a lot of marching into black neighborhoods and rounding up black children so they can't grow up and murder other black people.

[feet]

You're right, many racists will just continue to be racists because they won't encounter the environment or ideas to change. Just like there will be some people who are murderers.

I think you're misunderstanding what it means that free will doesn't exist. We still exist as part of a complex system and encountering new information and changing environments can alter how we think about things and the decisions that we make. Some of us will change how we think and behave in some ways and some in others. We can be aware of these systemic effects and try to manipulate them in the right way.

Now I know what you might be thinking, if we don't have free will how can we change anything? We, our individual selves, exist as nodes in this system and we can communicate with others our ideas on how we might be able to change things, we can try to analyze the systemic effects of behaviors and policies in an effort to change the system in a way that, based on our experiences and information that we've learned, we see as being beneficial toward future progress.

I know, it almost sounds like I just described free will, right? The point of this is that we can't make decisions on information we haven't encountered or learned. We can't understand the perspective of a situation we haven't encountered or learned about. The system is far more complex than we consider on a daily basis, what we regularly encounter. This goes for all people and its why education is important, its why communication with people who are different than ourselves with different perspectives is important.

Most people, even if they don't think so, have extremely limited perspectives including myself. I should note that I'm using the concept of "decision making" as a black box idea for the information processing that we do.

Think about it like biology. The systems are extremely complex, many things interact with each other in such a way that many different changes in the system could be root causes to the same set of changes in behavior or symptoms. If we identify a problem, going directly at that symptom is like taking cough medicine when you have a cold. Maybe you'll stop coughing a bit, but you haven't done anything to cure the cold itself

[autoexec]

I agree that we can't easily make the best choices without a better understanding of the system we seek to change and that each of us has a very limited perspective.

I do think it's hard to make a case that we lack free will if we also want to hold ourselves and each other accountable for the actions we take and for making the kinds of choices that either bring us closer to a more harmonious system or drive us further into disorder.

We must have free will in order to choose to try to consciously shape the system we live in into one that promotes our desired outcomes. We may not understand the universe from all perspectives, but as you say, we can work to learn about perspectives other than our own and the systems we're a part of.

In the case of inner city violence amongst black people, the shooters and victims each have a unique perspective on the situation which gives them a valuable role in helping to solve the problem. That alone means they aren't powerless or absolved from responsibility in being a part of the solution. I'll also agree I think that whatever the solution is, it will involve wider changes than any one of them will be capable of putting into action on their own.

I just worry when I see anyone who broaches the topic get dismissed or accused of racism. In fairness, racists really do love to bring it up, but you can't solve a problem if no one is allowed to mention it and the more we look like we're ignoring it, or pretending the problem isn't real, or that it cannot be solved, or that black people themselves have no role in that solution, the more fuel it lends to racist's arguments.

Generally we need to be more forthcoming about inconvenient truths than we are so they lose power as "gotchas". I think we can do that in this case while still addressing that the problem is more involved than "black people should just stop shooting each other". Because racists tend to be conservative and conservatives obsess over responsibility and punishment, it's good to acknowledge that murders are responsible for their actions (at least to the extent that any of us are) and that the people in those situations have a responsibility to help solve it, just as the rest of us have a responsibility to do our part, as our society has them backed them into a corner.

It doesn't help that racists aren't generally fans of nuance, but I think it's better to meet them halfway by not giving murders a pass, while also trying to let them know that black people aren't the only ones with responsibility for the situation.

[feet]

>We must have free will in order to choose to try to consciously shape the system we live in into one that promotes our desired outcomes

Not necessarily. You have to remember that all human knowledge is standing on the shoulders of those that came before us. It took us such an insanely long time to learn about systems and apply the knowledge to systems that are larger and more complex, including making out own systems that accomplish something for us.

It was only a matter of time that we started realizing that we exist as part of a deterministic system, based on the deterministic laws of the pieces that underlie our material existence.

Applying that knowledge of systems analysis can have greater impact than just making nice tools for us, we can shape the direction of humanity if we communicate and work together.

It's a natural process that has been developing for an incredibly long time, which is something that we generally lack the perspective to appreciate.

The system includes far more than just our actions as humans, more than our politics and its impact on human society. We have the rest of the natural world to contend and reach balance with as well. Our policy interacts with that as well.

When it comes to the way we organize to accomplish things as humans, including government and corporations, the way we have designed these systems excludes certain people based on arbitrary characteristics such as location, language, culture, or wealth/resources. We do have the ability to change these systems so that everyone has a more even say so that more perspectives are taken into account.

That means ensuring everyone have access to equal educational and supportive resources to reduce stress. This is a systemic change that would make it easier for everyone to go about their lives without worrying about things like food and shelter, it lets them participate more fully in society.

If you want to know how another society is doing with holding people accountable when they harm others, the Nordic and Scandinavian countries are doing a great job with rehabilitation. From my understanding of behavior, I think what they're doing is a great step in the right direction that will help society at large.