Do moral theories like utilitarianism, deontology etc assume the existence of free will? Or do they work under determinism as well?

It depends. Got any examples of alignment or conflict between those outlooks you'd like to discuss?

Too many labels, not enough definitions. It's a false dichotomy as you may be able to make free choices from a limited range of possibilities, i.e. neither 'free will' nor 'deterministic'.

THWOTH wrote:Got any examples of alignment or conflict between those outlooks you'd like to discuss?

I have no examples. I was simply wondering if theories about what we should or should not do are compatible with determinism.

Edit: If I ought to do something, but if prior causes make me not do it, then what's the use of that moral ought? I was also wondering whether moral theories deal with this or if they simply assume that some form of free will exists. Or are moral theories unaffected by the existence or non-existence of free will?

A 'should' implies a command, obligation, or duty - where lies free-will there?
An 'ought' implies a choice - where lies determinism there?
Moral reasoning rests on justification.
A command rests on the authority of the one issuing it.
Strict determinism negates all reasoning, all duties, and all choices.
Some degree of determinism puts us right back where we started.
In principle free-will negates all commands - but it does depend upon the authority of the issuer and/or the justification upon which the command rests.
Generalisations are generally unhelpful.

Ought you obey a Should?

THWOTH wrote:A 'should' implies a command, obligation, or duty - where lies free-will there?
An 'ought' implies a choice - where lies determinism there?
Moral reasoning rests on justification.
A command rests on the authority of the one issuing it.
Strict determinism negates all reasoning, all duties, and all choices.
Some degree of determinism puts us right back where we started.
In principle free-will negates all commands - but it does depend upon the authority of the issuer and/or the justification upon which the command rests.
Generalisations are generally unhelpful.

Ought you obey a Should?

Dammit.

I came here for an argument.

No, you didn't!

$5 please.

THWOTH wrote:A 'should' implies a command, obligation, or duty - where lies free-will there?
An 'ought' implies a choice - where lies determinism there?
Moral reasoning rests on justification.
A command rests on the authority of the one issuing it.
Strict determinism negates all reasoning, all duties, and all choices.
Some degree of determinism puts us right back where we started.
In principle free-will negates all commands - but it does depend upon the authority of the issuer and/or the justification upon which the command rests.
Generalisations are generally unhelpful.

Ought you obey a Should?

I enjoyed that.

I think a 'should' also has a meaning similar to an 'ought', such as when the doctor says 'you should stop snorting sugar' - you don't have to stop, you can choose not to (mmm sugar), but it would be better for you to stop.

In theory, one can choose to reject a command, and the authority behind a command, although I think we've been furnished enough examples individually and as a species to show that this seems quite difficult in many situations.

I don't think that free will negates commands except in a linguistic sense. If I choose to become a soldier with everything that entails, then regardless of a command issued to me and whether I want to perform that command, I have made a decision already to be there and to accept a situation in which I can be given commands I might want to perform at that time.

My sense is that the thorniness of these problems are indicative of the fact that the paradigm is bullshit. Free will and determinism are not opposites, and neither exists as an absolute.

murshid wrote:Do moral theories like utilitarianism, deontology etc assume the existence of free will? Or do they work under determinism as well?

Utilitarianism requires that the will of most individuals within a State/Country/area consent to that region of authority representing most common individual's primary concerns/rights therein, by proclaiming laws/rights/freedoms that are only agreeable to most individuals. The irony is that the individual consents to giving up his/her own individual rights in the hope that The State has their best interests at heart. There's a trade-off here because The State has no power/authority without those individuals and devoid of The State the individual would probably be powerless to live freely, amidst anarchy.

However, Utilitarianism can exist within any political spectrum, including Marxism. Yet, in whichever political system you can imagine, the idea of The State preceding that of the individual is nonsensical and the notion of an individual is both farcical without reference to freedom of thought and will.

I'm not even sure what you mean by 'determinism', here, but there is no sense whatsoever in thinking that political/moral concepts can both arise and be meaningful if devoid of the individual's own self awareness.

That's exactly the problem.

From my experience talking to people here, the concept of 'free will' and 'determinism' cannot remain a label, but needs to be unpacked and clarified.

For example, I see people conflating free will with freedom to make decisions, to determine a course of action, rather than the more strict interpretation of freedom to choose from a selection of what is effectively a pre-determined and heavily constrained slice of all notional possibilities.

Then if the word determinism is employed indicating that the universe simply unfolds in an entirely predictable manner from start to finish, and thus we had no ability to make selections as those selections were themselves pre-determined, I find the entire conversation to be impossible and self-defeating. These binaries are abstractions - absolutes that are purely conceptual, not grounded in anything we can reference in 'the real world'. The map and the terrain here are horribly entangled and it seems to be because of English vocabulary more than anything else - fallen down semantic wells of our own making.

Spearthrower wrote:For example, I see people conflating free will with freedom to make decisions, to determine a course of action, rather than the more strict interpretation of freedom to choose from a selection of what is effectively a pre-determined and heavily constrained slice of all notional possibilities.

That is the kind of strict determinism I was asking about. If that kind of determinism is true, that is, if what I do is dependent on my present brain state, which in turn, is determined by previous brain states and other external forces beyond my conscious control, then does a moral ought/should even mean anything? What if my brain state doesn't let me maximize happiness or wellbeing despite what a proponent of utilitarianism tells me?

murshid wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:For example, I see people conflating free will with freedom to make decisions, to determine a course of action, rather than the more strict interpretation of freedom to choose from a selection of what is effectively a pre-determined and heavily constrained slice of all notional possibilities.

That is the kind of strict determinism I was asking about. If that kind of determinism is true, that is, if what I do is dependent on my present brain state, which in turn, is determined by previous brain states and other external forces beyond my conscious control, then does a moral ought/should even mean anything?

Of course it still does, because you're not constrained only to perform that moral crime, else it wouldn't be a moral crime, it would be seen as entirely normal and thus probably socially acceptable. A moral crime cannot be something that one has no control over doing.

Rather, there are a massive range of possible actions you can take, albeit restrained comparative to the entire suite of possible actions the universe may notionally offer, and you elect to take a given action that can be deemed morally right or wrong.

What you do may be dependent on your present brain state, but if your present brain state is rage and you elect to beat someone up, that's morally wrong because you were in no way constrained only to beat them up. You could, for example, have walked away and counted to 10, or you could have taken a bottle of water and poured it on your head, or you could have <insert absurd number of possibilities> rather than perform an act deemed by society to be morally wrong.

murshid wrote: What if my brain state doesn't let me maximize happiness or wellbeing despite what a proponent of utilitarianism tells me?

Bluntly, that'd just be tough titties. Your brain state may influence your feeling and consequently your decisions, but it doesn't constrain them through some kind of binary absolutist force. You'd have to change your brain state, i.e by relaxing or whatever, which thereby reinforces how neither determinism nor free will mean much at all.

Incidentally, a force beyond your control would be something like inertia. Were your fist to connect with someone's face as the result of being thrown forward after crashing your bike into a wall, you wouldn't be considered to have assaulted that person.

When you elect to engage the muscles in your arm to propel it forward and intentionally punch that person, the forces were all well within your control.

Spearthrower wrote:

THWOTH wrote:A 'should' implies a command, obligation, or duty - where lies free-will there?
An 'ought' implies a choice - where lies determinism there?
Moral reasoning rests on justification.
A command rests on the authority of the one issuing it.
Strict determinism negates all reasoning, all duties, and all choices.
Some degree of determinism puts us right back where we started.
In principle free-will negates all commands - but it does depend upon the authority of the issuer and/or the justification upon which the command rests.
Generalisations are generally unhelpful.

Ought you obey a Should?

I enjoyed that.

I think a 'should' also has a meaning similar to an 'ought', such as when the doctor says 'you should stop snorting sugar' - you don't have to stop, you can choose not to (mmm sugar), but it would be better for you to stop.

Well I did say a 'should' implies a command (obligation or duty etc), rather than constitutes a command.

Spearthrower wrote:In theory, one can choose to reject a command, and the authority behind a command, although I think we've been furnished enough examples individually and as a species to show that this seems quite difficult in many situations.

I guess that choice rests on the authority of the issuer. If they're going to shoot you in the nuts if you don't obey it's probably wise to fulfil the directive - if you value your nuts of course.

Spearthrower wrote:I don't think that free will negates commands except in a linguistic sense. If I choose to become a soldier with everything that entails, then regardless of a command issued to me and whether I want to perform that command, I have made a decision already to be there and to accept a situation in which I can be given commands I might want to perform at that time.

I guess, in this extreme instance, you've chosen to give up free will - even while recognising that you retain possession of the capacity for making choices, to some degree. But can you freely act upon those choices? No. Your acts are now determined by another person, or an institution. Your moral reasoning, conclusions, qualms etc are irrelevant, and indeed were put aside in your initial choice to sign up. You have become a moral automaton, where moral justification for you own action is now outsourced to the persons or body who commands you. Exercising your free will to disobey a command in effect negates that command - though there'll be a consequence for that no doubt.

Spearthrower wrote:My sense is that the thorniness of these problems are indicative of the fact that the paradigm is bullshit. Free will and determinism are not opposites, and neither exists as an absolute.

Indeed. One is not necessarily the anti-matter of the other.

murshid wrote:Do moral theories like utilitarianism, deontology etc assume the existence of free will? Or do they work under determinism as well?

I suspect some do, some don't.
Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape is an example where free will is not assumed and Harris spends about ten pages in the middle of the book arguing against free will.

Personally, I would drop the word 'moral' when talking about responsibility.

murshid wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:For example, I see people conflating free will with freedom to make decisions, to determine a course of action, rather than the more strict interpretation of freedom to choose from a selection of what is effectively a pre-determined and heavily constrained slice of all notional possibilities.

That is the kind of strict determinism I was asking about. If that kind of determinism is true, that is, if what I do is dependent on my present brain state, which in turn, is determined by previous brain states and other external forces beyond my conscious control, then does a moral ought/should even mean anything? What if my brain state doesn't let me maximize happiness or wellbeing despite what a proponent of utilitarianism tells me?

I think in this case a moral ought/should is meaningless, because all you actually have is will or won't. However that still doesn't stop you from defining things as good/bad/better/worse for some purpose that we could still describe as a moral. What happens is that the framing of the morality changes from judgment of individuals and there personal actions to a judgment of the systems that are driving their actions and how those systems then impact on us all.

murshid wrote:Do moral theories like utilitarianism, deontology etc assume the existence of free will? Or do they work under determinism as well?

Moral theories such as utilitarianism and deontology assume the existence of moral practice, where people in a group set up rules and then gang up on individuals or subgroups who break those rules. All functioning human groups, from hunter gatherers to modern nation states, manage cooperation at least partly in this way, it’s an effective means of keeping cheats in order and is almost certainly an evolved adaptation. Our ability to cooperate flexibly while deterring cheats brings massive advantages, it has enabled us to take over the planet.

Moral practice assumes that people are capable of altering their behaviour appropriately in response to the threat of social sanctions. Where people do not have that capability, they are said not to have free will, and moralistic social sanctions are not applied to them. For example, someone who is severely mentally ill, or who was coerced by someone else into a morally wrong action, would be held not to have been acting of their own free will; there would be no point in punishing them. (The mentally ill person would not be punished for a morally wrong action, but would not be allowed many of the freedoms which most people enjoy: to have free will is to be permitted freedom by the group as a default.) Taken in this way, practical morality does assume free will.

This approach to free will is entirely compatible with people being deterministic, and also with evolutionary theory. Moral systems, with social sanctions for rule breaking, are central to the high level of effective cooperation in human societies.

We have evolved to understand and predict each other by guessing that other people are like ourselves. These predictions enable a far higher level of cooperation between non-relatives for humans than is seen in any other animal (via the social sanctions of morality), but the predictions are still far from perfect. It seems to me entirely possible that artificial intelligence or some other technology may eventually enable us to predict each other more accurately than we can currently manage with our evolved guesswork. If that were to happen, social life might well change so that the concept of free will becomes redundant.

(To restate: even if we are deterministic, we cannot yet predict each other as deterministic objects. When we predict another person using evolved guesswork, we are treating that person as non-deterministic: we guess their goals and then guess what flexible methods they may use to achieve the goals. It is in this context that morality is useful, along with the concept of free will. If we discover how to predict each other more successfully by another route, social interactions may change so that moral systems and the concept of free will are no longer relevant.)

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dicti ... babilistic

Probabilistic actions, methods, or arguments are based on the idea that you cannot be certain about results or future events but you can judge whether or not they are likely, and act on the basis of this judgment.

Determinism is a spherical cow in a vacuum - it's a model intended to simplify the variables down to produce a coherent, finite answer. There are perfectly valid uses for such, for example in risk management where tests can be conducted using deterministic models to quantify variables in order to input those into wider probabilistic calculations.

But the idea that this is how the universe actually works is outdated by at least a century. The universe is not clockwork where the cogs' passages are restrained so as to repeatedly produce predictable results - perhaps a suitable metaphor for the industrial age, but it's not warranted or useful now. At no scale do we see such a pattern in nature. Everywhere we look, the view is best understood in probabilistic terms. Whether it's waterfalls, or decay rates, or people's behavior, conceiving of these as deterministic systems is making a M.O. out of reductionism, and frankly isn't much better in corresponding to what we see than the conceit of free-will being granted by a magical entity to set us apart from the rest of nature.

Determinism v free will is dead, meaningless, kicked the bucket, pushing up the daisies and so forth. With human behavior, what we have is history (evolutionary + personal) and the kind of intelligence that can conceive of potential outcomes. Am I free to eat cat poop? The universe is a-ok with it, but it seems likely that having sampled it once, the chance of you engaging in the consumption of feline faeces thereafter is greatly diminished, but never zero. Aside from the physical limitations the universe sets on our choices, aside from the physical limitations our evolutionary history sets on us, aside from the limitations our experiential history sets on us, we also have the all-crushing burden of society working incessantly to normalize us - but even with all these limitations, I could still decide to respond to your greeting by filling my shoe with whipped cream and singing Für Elise at the top of my lungs. Nothing could predict that I would do it, but nothing could predict that I wouldn't either - certainly nothing stops me from doing it even if no one has ever done it before. If it's possible, it's non-zero. That's not something you can model with determinism, or a paradigm in which free will can authentically operate. It's all bollocks, that's the best summation.

Moral theories assume that humans conceive of situations in moral contexts and may make decisions that will have, and that they perceive will have moral ramifications, but this does not assume that free will is or isn't, only that cows are not spherical and do not live in vacuums.

zoon wrote:(To restate: even if we are deterministic, we cannot yet predict each other as deterministic objects. When we predict another person using evolved guesswork, we are treating that person as non-deterministic: we guess their goals and then guess what flexible methods they may use to achieve the goals. It is in this context that morality is useful, along with the concept of free will. If we discover how to predict each other more successfully by another route, social interactions may change so that moral systems and the concept of free will are no longer relevant.)

Can you elaborate that a little? I'm not sure I'm getting your point here.

Spearthrower wrote:Everywhere we look, the view is best understood in probabilistic terms.

Is it probabilistic because our math/science aren't advanced enough? Or is nature truly random? And whether it's deterministic or probabilistic, are any part of the causal chain under our conscious control (and is this question even relevant? why or why not?)?

Inherently probabilistic, not just an artifact of our ability.

Probabilistic =/= random: there is no process or set of processes that can just result in anything at all happening - everything has a suite of constrained outcomes. In that view, true randomness is just one case of probability, one in which all outcomes are equally likely and thus the eventual outcome is inherently unpredictable.

Many of the actions we take are under our conscious control. You can readily observe this by comparing the actions taken by sleeping people (or corpses) comparative to conscious people. My hunger might be definable as a cause outside my volition, and it might drive me to seek food, but the actions I take to do so - such as walking downstairs, going to the fridge, collecting the items together, and then cooking into a final meal are not mechanistic or predetermined. The ghrelin made me hungry, but it didn't make me perform all those actions.