Hello all, I appreciated the feedback I got on my previous piece. This is a follow-up, and I'd be happy to respond to any additional feedback.

Summary: Since morality is those principles that can not be reasonably rejected based on public reasons, morality would exclude those principles that are motivated by private reasons. This includes one's conception of the good, sense of meaning, and personal values. While these values are what makes life worth living, they couldn't be reasonably accepted by others and therefore lack moral authority. They aren't objective properties that can be analyzed and judged, but are subjective properties that we impose on the world. They would be in the "freedom residual" of our lives, whereas morality is in the "reason core." Meta-ethics is about finding out what claims belong where. Additionally, given the "acceptance" condition of morality, the Repugnant Conclusion, utilitarianism, and libertarianism would also be excluded as ethical determinations.

I get that this is controversial, but this article only seeks to defend the current definition of morality that hopefully can be used more often in moral discourse.

>This isn't true. There's only three or four formulations of the CI depending on your interpretation.

Wdym by "four formulations of the CI"?

>Beside the point for Kant interpretation but why should I think the fact that most people would say you should do something as good evidence for doing it? People get moral judgments wrong all the time, especially when you introduce features that test their rational consistency.

I was just pointing out that most people would say yes. I wasn't using that as evidence

>Kant famously doesn't think animals are owed anything and that the value of people is always superior to the value of things (e.g. cats), and thus he would never say this.

Oh interesting, I didn't know that. I'll clarify that in the video then

>Given the above, I think you could really benefit from sitting down and reading Kant. More generally, if you find yourself saying something like "This extremely influential and well-respected philosopher is obviously wrong", the principle of charity would suggest you probably misunderstood them.

Fair, fair. Thanks for your response

> He thought that there was this big list of moral codes [list of rules that gets progressively sussier]

This isn't true. There's only three or four formulations of the CI depending on your interpretation.

>He uses the example of someone with a family opening the door after getting a knock. Standing there is a psycho axe murderer who asks him where his family is. Now the question is, should he lie? Well I think most people would say yes.

Beside the point for Kant interpretation but why should I think the fact that most people would say you should do something as good evidence for doing it? People get moral judgments wrong all the time, especially when you introduce features that test their rational consistency.

>While lying is usually wrong, doing it to save your family is ultimately good. But Kant would disagree. He says that if you were to lie and say they're not home, the psycho axe murderer would disappointedly turn around and walk away, thinking about how he's an embarrassment to his psycho axe murderer ancestors when all of a sudden, he sees your family climbing out of the window. Turns out they overheard the conversation and decided to escape, but if the guy had just told him the truth that they were in fact home, they would've had a chance to escape. Now, I've been keeping a veneer of objectivity in this video so far, but I've gotta say this is one of the dumbest ideas in philosophy I've ever heard.

Kant definitely doesn't say anything like this, and you haven't even attempted an explanation of why Kant thinks lying is morally wrong. Even if you disagree with Kant's reasons for thinking lying is morally wrong, he never claims that the axe murderer will act in this way.

> I mean, leaving aside that he's totally taking for granted that the family would overhear the killer and try to escape through a window that's conveniently in his line of sight, you're tellin' me if a billion people were strapped to a conveyer belt being dragged to the pits of Hell, and you can stop it all by slapping a kitten, he'd be like 'nah bruh it's still fucked up like you can't justify slapping a kitten over anything durrr"

Kant famously doesn't think animals are owed anything and that the value of people is always superior to the value of things (e.g. cats), and thus he would never say this.

Given the above, I think you could really benefit from sitting down and reading Kant. More generally, if you find yourself saying something like "This extremely influential and well-respected philosopher is obviously wrong", the principle of charity would suggest you probably misunderstood them.

My limited understanding of quantum stuff has led me to believe that there's multiple worlds out there due to the probabilistic nature of things. But then that seems to imply that the world is still deterministic, just now in infinite ways and the current "world" is still determined with factors outside of my control (luck/randomness).

I think that the acceptance definitely plays a part somewhere, I mean at the end of the day we are biologically programmed beings to live and have self-preservation so it makes sense that our minds come up with reasons for us to keep living.

I've pondered the idea of responsibility before as well. If you view the world deterministically then you can't hold people accountable. Even if the majority of society accepts determinism, we can't allow people who commit crimes to stay free for the benefit of the majority. If we want to act morally and put the blame on what caused someone to commit crimes, you kind of just start going down the rabbit hole of who/what to hold accountable? Do you blame someone's parents for their poor upbringing and as a result environment for growing up? Their DNA? For practicality, in society you kind of have to put the "responsibility" somewhere and its easiest to put the responsibility on the individual.

Determinism vs Free will relating to the rest of philosophy

If you believe in determinism, doesn’t this kind of ruin all other philosphical thoughts and theories? As in this case all of your life is pre determined anyway?

Can you elaborate on what I got wrong?

All I can say is you literally have no idea what you're talking about in either German or English.

"Here in Germany" ....Media Good....."I am not a German speaker."

Wirklcih? Ich spreche kleine Deutsch!....nur ein bischen ;)

Your explanation of Kant is so far off I can't imagine you've ever read him, any Kantians or any reputable introductory ethics text.

'Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"

The "better" method is many, many independently owned outlets, so that people have a wide variety of sources to draw their data set from in the first place. Relying on "International Groups" is Globalism, which is 100x worse that Statism. Yes, give me a "Truth Score" to go with my "Social Credit Score" and my "Gullible, Nanny Stater Dip Shit Score"!!!!!

I'm sorry you love the boot heel of your Government on your throat. Free Peoples do not. That's why "Modern Germany" has repeatedly conquered and is nothing more than an occupied puppet state of the US :)

Now, go run along and pay your government, which is really our government to lie to you and to "score" you for being the proper little Pleb that you so desperately want to be.

Vielen Dank!

Edit:2

>we're calling it free will but I might as well call it brain chemistry under incompatiblist determinism

I think you just have two different ways of describing the same thing. One is an emergent descriptions compared to the other. e.g. You could say that humans could be described simply as physics, but higher emergent descriptions using biology are more useful.

Free will is just a higher emergent concept above brain chemistry. Different sides of the same coin

Orig:

>Why do we have to call it "free will"? except to say that this naming might be convenient.

Isn't literally every word/definition just "convenient" naming conventions?

Studies show that most people have compatibilist intuitions, and most professional philosophers are outright compatibilists.

Most lay people, professional philosophers and criminal justice systems, call it "free will".

So it seems like society just calls it "free will". I don't think "should" or "have to" really comes into play.

You don't "have to" call it free will, but it just makes sense to call it free will, since it lines up to what people really mean by the term.

Edit: Some more studies you might be interested in

People have incoherent ideas around free will, but when properly probed the majority have compatibilist intutions.

>https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-moore-48/
>
>In the past decade, a number of empirical researchers have suggested that laypeople have compatibilist intuitions… In one of the first studies, Nahmias et al. (2006) asked participants to imagine that, in the next century, humans build a supercomputer able to accurately predict future human behavior on the basis of the current state of the world. Participants were then asked to imagine that, in this future, an agent has robbed a bank, as the supercomputer had predicted before he was even born. In this case, 76% of participants answered that this agent acted of his own free will, and 83% answered that he was morally blameworthy. These results suggest that most participants have compatibilist intuitions, since most answered that this agent could act freely and be morally responsible, despite living in a deterministic universe.
>
>https://philpapers.org/archive/ANDWCI-3.pdf

​

>Our results highlight some inconsistencies of lay beliefs in the general public, by showing explicit agreement with libertarian concepts of free will (especially in the US) and simultaneously showing behavior that is more consistent with compatibilist theories. If participants behaved in a way that was consistent with their libertarian beliefs, we would have expected a negative relation between free will and determinism, but instead we saw a positive relation that is hard to reconcile with libertarian views
>
>https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0221617
>
>Then when it comes to philosophy professors most are outright compatibilists.
>
>[https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/all)

I don’t want that. The author claims “people do”.

Tell me you don't understand Compatibilism without telling me you don't understand Compatibilism

It feels like there is something undescribable that causes people to do one thing or another and we're calling it free will but I might as well call it brain chemistry under incompatiblist determinism and the result is the same. Why do we have to call it "free will"? except to say that this naming might be convenient.

I'll check out those studies!

Thanks for the feedback mate!

Yeah the thing about people viewing morality through the lens of religion is admittedly very oversimplified, so I'll probably add some clarification in a text box.

And yeah I made the thing about the kitten up lol. Although I did mention the categorial imperative, so you might've read over that?

True, I was thinking about making a case for (act) utilitarianism although I wanna keep the video succinct.

You don't think the adoption of utilitarianism would help society? And the only criticisms of it I'm familiar with are that people could use utilitarianism to justify terrible things (like the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and that it's hard to quantify how much utility something has. Feel free to provide more though.

Exactly. When we say that such and such thing "is possible", what we really mean is "I imagine it may occur". This imagining is not metaphysically significant; it's just a physical phenomenon like any other, and so subject to the same laws of causality. Possibility and choice and freedom are products of the physical mind, and so are completely compatible with a deterministic metaphysical model of the universe.

I was talking about literal strings. (When people say they aren't monkeys or machines, they are also thinking about literal monkeys and machines with metal cogs.)

Some constraints are felt as restricting, for example literal strings attached to your limbs and other constraints, like scratching your head, because it's itching or listening to music you like, don't feel restricting. They are both 100% determined, but they make a pragmatic difference in life. (That was phrased weirdly...)

Your home can never be 100% clean, but it still makes sense to say that a home is clean. "Clean" means that you can stop cleaning.

Maybe you could say that "free will" in a juristic sense is defined by it's consequences. Whenever it makes sense to punish someone, you say they acted on "free will". Whenever a condition should be medically treated, you call it a "sickness".

Then you can't say that someone should be punished because they acted on free will, or that a condition should be treated because it is a sickness, because that would be circular reasoning.

I absolutely agree that you could very well define "free" as "not determined" and as it is determined, it's not free. There is just an alternative definition of free will, that makes sense.

>Why does it have to be described like that, though?

It's a useful and pragmatic way that we have to describe things with our current knowledge and technology.

>If someone commits a murder without coercion, we can decide that it's a problem with their brain chemistry and we can't fix that brain chemistry so we need to remove that brain chemistry from society so that it won't happen again.
>
>If the murder is committed under coercion then maybe the brain is fine it was just external circumstances. So we'd not imprison that brain but we might try to remedy the external circumstances.

We don't even know what the brain is supposed to look like, let alone the technology to do such a brain scan.

Also what if the person was coerced but there was also a chemical imbalance in the brain? Would you punish the person who really didn't do anything wrong?

So in the present day, the test for if the brain is good/bad is basically the compatibilist free will test.

​

>And I described the whole thing without even mentioning free will!

Maybe, I have two thoughts. First as I already mentioned, they aren't practical or might even be impossible alternatives, so in the meantime you have to use compatibilist free will.

Above you've described how to do things that are impossible. Imagine you were a judge in the present day and time, how would you be able to approach things without using the concept of compatibilist free will and coercion?

Secondly, I think you are just looking at the other side of the coin of free will. You could define free will as the concept/test that's useful for justice. So in effect you are just using it's definition even if you don't want to use the word.

​

>We can pretend that free will exists and attribute our justice system to that but we don't need the idea of free will to have the justice system that we already have.

Let's go back to the example above of someone being coerced into committing a crime. Using present day technology how would a justice system determine what to do without referring to the coercive element or the concept of compatibilist free will.

Anyway I just wanted to note, I like your train of thought, I recently had some very similar lines of thought.

>If anything, the idea of free will can remove our empathy. If free will exists then maybe people are choosing to be evil. But if free will doesn't exist then we can have compassion for the people who are unfortunately burdened with having no choice but to do evil acts.

I think most studies suggest the opposite, that reduce belief in free will results in people being more immoral and racist. I expect that also people would be less compassionate, since why be compassionate to someone inherently "bad"?

>These three studies suggest that endorsement of the belief in free will can lead to decreased ethnic/racial prejudice compared to denial of the belief in free will. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0091572#s1>
>
>For example, weakening free will belief led participants to behave less morally and responsibly (Baumeister et al., 2009; Protzko et al., 2016; Vohs & Schooler, 2008)

From https://www.ethicalpsychology.com/search?q=free+will

>A study suggests that when people are encouraged to believe their behavior is predetermined — by genes or by environment — they may be more likely to cheat. The report, in the January issue of Psychological Science, describes two studies by Kathleen D. Vohs of the University of Minnesota and Jonathan W. Schooler of the University of British Columbia.

From https://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/health/19beha.html?scp=5&sq=psychology%20jonathan%20schooler&st=cse

What a great argument

>If someone commits a crime freely, you want to put them in prison. But if someone if forced or coerced into the crime, then they will probably found not guilty and not put into prison.

Why does it have to be described like that, though?

If someone commits a murder without coercion, we can decide that it's a problem with their brain chemistry and we can't fix that brain chemistry so we need to remove that brain chemistry from society so that it won't happen again.

If the murder is committed under coercion then maybe the brain is fine it was just external circumstances. So we'd not imprison that brain but we might try to remedy the external circumstances.

This would lead us to exactly the outcome as you described, with harsher penalties for the first and not for the second.

And I described the whole thing without even mentioning free will!

We can pretend that free will exists and attribute our justice system to that but we don't need the idea of free will to have the justice system that we already have.

If anything, the idea of free will can remove our empathy. If free will exists then maybe people are choosing to be evil. But if free will doesn't exist then we can have compassion for the people who are unfortunately burdened with having no choice but to do evil acts.

(Can't believe that I'm defending Sam Harris but here we are!)

Nothing to do with free will, and yet the snippet I quoted still appeared in the free will article we are discussing…

I have one question. Why is preserving moral responsibility so important?

>What does voluntary mean?

We just use the medical definition. It's when you deliberately do something. So if you deliberately shake you hand that's voluntary. But if you try and keep you had still but it shakes because you have Parkinson's, that involuntary.

With sufficient technology you could scan someone's brain and differentiate between voluntary and involuntary actions.

>Why do we need free will for justice?

To determine the appropriate action or whether someone should be punished.

If someone commits a crime freely, you want to put them in prison. But if someone if forced or coerced into the crime, then they will probably found not guilty and not put into prison.

Any functional justice system would in practice need to have some kind of concept of compatibilist free will in order to determine whether to find someone guilty and the appropriate punishment.

​

>In the case of R. v. Ruzic
>
>It is a principle of fundamental justice that only voluntary conduct – behaviour that is the product of a free will and controlled body, unhindered by external constraints – should attract the penalty and stigma of criminal liability.
>
>The accused had been coerced by an individual in Colombia to smuggle cocaine into the United States. He was told that if he did not comply, his wife and child in Colombia would be harmed.
>
>https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/1861/index.do

Hence they were found not guilty since it wasn't of their own free will.

Is watching a movie for the first time, whose story you cannot control, any less enjoyable because of that fact? What is "worth wanting" then? Why does determinism feel oppressive if the illusion of free will is persistent? If we had everything we wanted in life, would we feel put upon by forces we cannot control or would we never question things as we do when we suffer? Shrug. Points to ponder.