| | Tibor writes, Anytime we hold people responsible, or urge that they alter their conduct, resist a temptation, battle some bad habit, and so forth, the free will idea lurks in the background. The criminal and even tort law, of course, assumes people could have done otherwise than they did, all things being equal. Politics, with all of its blaming and praising, is in the same situation, as is personal morality where none of it would make sense unless we had the capacity to choose how we act and thus can be faulted for failing to do what’s right. As the famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant said, "ought" implies "can." To be sure, "ought" implies "can," but "can" doesn't imply free will, at least not the libertarian kind that Objectivism endorses. For example, I can say that you "ought" to hold a certain set of beliefs, which of course implies that you "can" hold them, but it doesn't imply that you're free to choose them in the sense that, all things being equal, you could have chosen otherwise. All it implies is that you're capable of adopting those beliefs, given a certain level of knowledge and understanding, which you may not presently possess. I can say, for example, that you "ought" to have chosen a different answer on a test, even though you thought it was the wrong answer and therefore could not have chosen it, given your knowledge and understanding at the time.
Do criminal and tort law assume that people could have done otherwise, all things being equal? I don't see how. Suppose a Christian fundamentalist is so committed to defending innocent human life that he bombs an abortion clinic. Does the fact that he saw no reason to abstain from committing the crime and therefore could not have done otherwise absolve him of responsibility under the law? I don't think so. All that is required to hold him liable for the crime is that he deliberately chose it. That he could not have chosen otherwise, because he saw no reason to is not enough to get him off the hook. The rationale of punishment is deterrence; its purpose is to send a message to the criminal and others like him that if one commits the crime, then one will suffer the consequences. Thus, punishment is motivational; its goal is to provide a would-be criminal with a sufficient reason not to do what he would otherwise have a reason to do in the absence of the punishment.
Granted, a person cannot be held responsible unless he could have chosen otherwise if he had wanted to. So if he was coerced at gunpoint into committing the crime, then his will was not involved, and he cannot be held liable. But if he chose the action without being coerced, then even though he could not have chosen otherwise given his value judgments, he can still be held accountable for the act and punished accordingly.
As for praising and blaming, we praise people for making choices that we approve of and blame them for making choices we disapprove of, even though they may have had no reason to choose otherwise, given their value judgments. [T]oday there is widespread consensus among both the scientists and philosophers that the determinism that says all of what we do has to happen as it does and our minds are not in control of our actions seem to carry the day. To say that all of what we do has to happen as it does is not to say that our minds are not in control of our actions. Our minds are indeed in control of our actions in the sense of determining what those actions will be, but that does not mean that we could have chosen otherwise. I may be in control of my car in the sense of keeping it in the righthand lane, but that does not mean that I could just as well have chosen to drive it into oncoming traffic, an action which would surely be suicidal and one which I have no desire to perform. Too much in our lives is unpredictable quite apart from free will and how we will act in light of such events then could hardly be predicted. I agree, but determinism does not imply predictability. Human action is far too complicated to be capable of the kind of prediction that we apply to the behavior of inanimate objects, but that does not mean that it is not subject to the law of causal necessity. The necessity is simply too sophisticated to predict with any kind of precision. Still, a certain amount of prediction is possible. If I know someone's value judgments, I can (within certain limits) predict what choices he or she will make. And I can predict how people in general will behave. For example, I can predict that, with very few exceptions, they will stop at stoplights; they will open their stores at a certain time and close them at a certain time, and so on. Human action is not an exception to the principle of necessity in causation, but that does not mean that we must jettison the concepts of choice, moral responsibility or criminal liability.
- Bill
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