Posted: Jan 16, 2014 7:57 pm
Chrisw wrote:
Of course we have to have laws and punishments, and on a more mundane scale, social rules and the associated games of praising and blaming that we all play. We use these to manipulate each others' behaviour because we are social animals who have evolved to behave in this way, and it is hard to imagine a successful human society that didn't rely on these mechanisms. Nonetheless, philosophically, we should be able to see beyond this and acknowledge that there is not and could not actually be the sort of free will that would make one genuinely morally responsible for ones actions. Such free will is the myth on which our practices of morally judging each other are founded, but it is just a myth.
I agree with this. I think personal moral responsibility is a myth - an absurd and incoherent notion. But this does not imply that we ought to abandon the enforcement of laws. As a society, we need to discourage certain kinds of behavior in order to enjoy some degree of freedom and safety.