In practice I live in only one world. My position is that I couldn't have done otherwise and any other very-nearly-mes in other worlds also couldn't have.

> The basis for society's legal system is founded on the idea that we need to hold people accountable for their actions,

Could contest that, that's merely an enlightenment rationalization. Mainly carceral treatment and punishment is meant to suppress destabilizing elements first and foremost.

That "could have done otherwise" means there's a possible world in which a different choice was made, not that determinism is false.

Sure it is, by having to make an extra term, implies it needed to be clarified.

Do you meditate? The experience you describe is explicit in that state. The term "free will" seems useful in situations involving the law. Otherwise, everyone would get an insanity plea. But I do agree with you.

I just started practicing this in more than action/effort alone. I try to make no plans in life or work. I admittedly am fortunate enough to have been married to my best friend for the last 17 yrs. This makes it much easier, but somehow, I have still gotten a raise and a quasi-promotion since I started this. I figured since it's not a lot more work than I already do and that I didn't ask for it, it will be ok.

I don’t think you should be so quick to reject the possibility that value could be objective. But if you want to go with the assumption that value is subjective, you might want to look at how subjectivists about value have tried to incorporate values into their moral theories.

Some of the disagreement between relativists and non-relativists might be due to a failure to adequately distinguish morals from mores; that is, genuine moral principles from social custom and expectation.

I think it would be helpful if you clarified what falls within the moral sphere and what doesn’t. I worry that you’re position excludes things that should be part of morality, but it’s hard to say for sure at this point.

My main philosophy in life is a variant of optimistic nihilism. What I mean by that, it that I make decisions in life based on the idea that when I am laying on my deathbed, I want to be able to reflect on my life and be satisfied. I believe that life is pointless and meaningless, but we are here anyways, so we might as well do what will make us satisfied when our lives come to an end.

Thanks for the review!

I'll probably write more about my thoughts on value, but I do come in with the assumption that value isn't intrinsic but a creation by free, conscious beings. And if value isn't intrinsic but subjective, it can't be publicly examined and judged. There's no point of reference to say that one value is right due to X property and the other is wrong
due to Y property. These values might give our lives meaning, but are not reason based the way that morality is (which is a product of certain values).

If you think there is a better way to capture the dispute between realists and relativists, I'd appreciate any insight. My writing is only my perspective and the reason I share it is so I can get feedback like this.

I wouldn't say any controversy makes an issue personal, but only ones where there are reasonable enough arguments on both sides that choosing one or the other would be acceptable. I do think this is the case for the Trolley Problem so that its not a duty to pull the lever.

As I said regarding one of your previous pieces, I am very sympathetic to the idea that morality is closely connected with what we could all reasonably agree to in principle. But, I have some issues with what you say here.

You say that morality only concerns issues of right and wrong, and does not concern good and bad, or value. You also say that good/bad/value is subjective. I think there is a substantive debate as to whether good/bad/value is subjective or objective. Maybe more importantly, it seems like good, bad, and value are a part of morality, just as much as right and wrong.

I see that you want to use the distinction between right and wrong, on the one hand, and good and bad on the other, to try to show that relativists and non-relativists are talking past one another. To the extent that they are, I think there’s probably a better way of capturing this than removing good and bad from the sphere of moral consideration.

I also worry about how limited the moral sphere seems to be on your view. It seems like if there’s any sort or controversy about an issue, it turns out to be a personal issue and not a moral one. But, surely part of the point of moral philosophy is to try to find answers where there is controversy. A moral theory that only applies in cases of universal agreement is impotent.

I get absolute vs. relative, but I treat agent-relative and agent independent the same as objective and subjective. If you have time, could you explain what I'm missing or point me in the right direction? If there is a distinction, I'll have to re-work my writing.

So there's something special about calculators that produce correct answers using virtually indistinguishable physical processes from calculators that produce incorrect answers.

Explain what significance that "higher level" actually has when we're trying to figure out what's going in the real, physical world.

Before you do, you might want to remember that analogies relying upon things that everybody already concedes are true are weak and shady.

Maybe you should think about two calculators that give two different answers to a math problem that absolutely nobody and nothing knows the correct answer to - and, possibly, can never.

Hmm yeah, I guess it’s too hard for me to truly explain my pov. But to put it another way, while the concept of objective truths might exist in this universe, I don’t believe we could ever know them, since we’re always bound by the confines of our brains, and our perspective. Your experience and subjective opinion is just as valid is mine, I just argue that “being along for the ride” is the same as what compatibilists call “free will”. Because this “ride” isn’t one you know or can wholly predict, and it also feels the same as if it weren’t a ride. The difference is unknowable imo.

I believe free will is a gradient that increases with awareness, experience, power, and control. At what point when you die do you lose your free will?

If you compared a baby to a rock, that baby has more free will. If you compare a baby to an adult, some would probably say the baby has none. Just depends what you compare it to.

Great point, i understand what you mean in terms of your ‘free will’ will always be dictated on the past events and actions so in term it can’t be free will.

What about from the moment you were born? Do you believe you had free will at that point?

I believe free will is an emergent property/illusion. I personally subscribe to hard determinism. I don’t think there’s nothing stopping up from feeling we have free will, but how we feel about the universe and how the universe actually is can be different.

Similar to what the other person said, I believe the free will we feel is past oriented free will. If you took a moment in your life and you made a save point, in hard determinism, the event that occur after that point will always be the same even if you loaded that moment an infinite amount of times.

Let’s say you wanna go to the past to change something. You failed your math test. If you went back to that moment without any recollection of the present, the events would always be same. But if you could go back to the past with new knowledge, then sure you can finally change that. But that wouldn’t happen since you have didn’t experience failing the test which would force you to add/change your methods.

Let’s now say you have another chaise to take the test. What do you do? You learn from your experience and change. If you didn’t change, you be in the same position when you took the test the first time.

There’s benefits to believe you have free will, but your free will is compromised of past experiences. If you want to change your path, experience more or simulate experiences.

Some people subscribe to the idea that subatomic particles add a level of randomness which potentially create a different permutation, but I personally still think there’s no randomness. There appears to be randomness to us, but it’s also possible these particles are still following a predetermined path which we currently cannot fully observe and understand.

I understand the motivation and what you say but can't agree. IMHO the object/subjective distinction is indispensable, without it you cannot understand metaethical positions that talk about agent-relative, objective values. For example, if someone is an extrovert and likes meeting people, then it can be objectively good for them to have the opportunity to do so (notwithstanding conflicts with other values or reasons against it). But the value is clearly agent-relative, since there are also introverts with other needs. Many human needs are like that.

The attribute "subjective" is a bit special in my opinion, however, since it is better to speak of personal preferences instead of subjective values. These reflect what people like and what they prefer at a time. We do not generally talk about these as values, although sometimes we'd call some of them "personal values."

Orthogonal to these distinctions is in my opinion the agent-relative vs. agent-independent axis. Basically any kind of value that concerns a human is agent-relative.

To cut a long story short, agent-relative vs. agent-independent is one axis, subjective vs. object another axis, and absolute vs. relative yet another axis. I accept all distinctions, it's just is part of my personal view that talking about subjective values is a bit of a misnomer.

I should let you know that I am not anti-utilitarian, far from it. I'm just providing some devil's advocate arguments which are important to reckon with.

a) In an election of substantial size, the likelihood your vote will make a difference is beyond miniscule. Therefore your time would be better spent elsewhere.

b) and c) I edited my post to add more critiques and changed the order, so I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to. If you're talking about the problem of needing to devote your life to making money and then giving it all to charity, then there are a few counterpoints to your defences. Firstly, it's not great for an ethical theory to say "it's not my fault I don't work, it's the global economy's fault". Alternative approaches like virtue and deontological ethics purport to provide answers as to how to live in this unjust world without being asked to do the impossible. Secondly, a utilitarian will only be able to sit back and enjoy their life once humanity lives in a utopia; until then, they must give up their lives toiling away for the betterment of any who suffer, assuming that the suffer the utilitarian feels from toiling is less than the difference they can make to others' lives, a fact which does not depend on any economic system. Thirdly, Singer's defence of one's own wellbeing as a tool to help spread goodness might be seen more cynically as an excuse for not doing more. Singer is a great philanthropist, but he only gives away around 40% of his wealth, not 90%. He isn't surviving on the bare minimum, which he could achieve by living in the cheapest possible accommodation, eating the cheapest foods, using next to no utilities, moving to a country with the cheapest cost of living while maintaining enough sanity and geographical connection to continue bringing in income. If you pressed him, I expect he would admit that taking care of his family to a decent standard of living comes first.

There are things that are immoral that cause no suffering to anyone. For example: hypothetically, a man who delights in imagining pedophilc acts only in his mind, but never acts on them. Would that be a moral man? I think not.

I wouldn't say morality is divorced from ethics either. To have normative reasons, you need values that create those reasons, which I argue are freedom and reason. However, there are objective reasons to act given those values, which belong in the reason core (along with logic and mathematics). Value themselves, since they are agent-relative, would be in the freedom-residual.

In this case, what I am distinguishing are concepts that are either agent-independent or agent-relative, since we might be getting lost on objective/subjective.

I think you might be right, I wrote from memory and would have to re-read the relevant passages. I've always been skeptic of intrinsic values, so maybe I too easily thought Scanlon provides an example of it. Scanlon discusses the example primarily as an example against consequentialism, though, which is another matter.

But there might be another terminological misunderstanding here because in my opinion the question whether there are intrinsic values or not is irrelevant to the value realism I hinted at. There can objective (or, at least intersubjective) agent-relative values regardless of whether they count as intrinsic or not. For instance, you can be a utilitarian and consider utility a type of agent-relative, objective value. What is best for each person depends on that person in this view, yet it's not a subjective matter what is best and people are frequently wrong about it.

>Of course there are options. They way you're thinking about choice here would render commonplace statements like "I could climb that fence but I don't feel like it" incoherent nonsense, because there wasn't any future in which I would have chosen to do so. That's a strong indication that you're operating with a notion of choice that doesn't line up with the what people generally mean by choice.

Nobody, or at least certainly not me, is going to deny that there is a strong subjective perception of choice in some situations. It seems like you choose whether to go to a party or not, or how much you think you need to study to pass an exam.

It's also obviously true that there are mental states which we are consciously aware of not choosing. People generally don't choose to be sexually attracted or not sexually attracted to someone. They don't choose whether they "click" with someone and become friends. They don't choose whether they prefer to stay in all night watching Netflix or go out to bars.

I think the obvious truth that we generally don't choose our preferences is inherently problematic for the common concept of free will.

>Choices are morally relevant where they give information about the decision maker, and that's where there are a number of options to take under a quite mundane sense of "option". There's a difference between jumping a fence because I wanted to and jumping one at gunpoint regardless of whether the universe is deterministic or not.

That's a weird definition of morally relevant. When I choose to eat vanilla ice cream instead of peanut butter, you're getting information about my preferences. When I choose to murder somebody or refrain from murdering them, you're getting information about my preferences. But most people would say that my ice cream choice isn't morally relevant but my murder choice is. Can you explain what makes you think your definition is sensible?

>A deterministic universe doesn't forbid mental processes from affecting physical processes when mental processes are understood as physical process. But really, you didn't answer my question here. I don't see how even a dualistic universe helps allow free will to exist. What additional factor into a choice does it allow for that wasn't already there?

If it is true that the universe is entirely physically deterministic, then there is no way to distinguish between the processes of the brain which give rise to mental states, including thoughts and choices, and simpler deterministic mechanical systems like internal combustion engines or computers. We do not have the intuition that an internal combustion engine is morally responsible for its actions, or that it is making any choices at all. The same is generally true of computers, at least until we developed computer programs sophisticated enough to trick people's pattern recognition algorithms into interpreting stimulus from a computer as stimulus from a mind. But even where that trick is effective, people are generally at least intellectually aware that everything that's coming out of the computer is predetermined by the motion of electrons and other purely mechanical processes, and by analogy to other machines, that's a pretty convincing argument to most people that chatGPT isn't actually a mind.

>Again, you seem to be saying that for a choice to be free it must be made on the basis of something other than your character, experiences, beliefs, facts of the situation, and random chance. What else needs to influence it for it to be free and how does a nondeterministic universe allow for that when a deterministic one doesn't? So far you've just said that it means mental processes can be nondeterministic but why's that supposed to help?

Most people conceive of free will as existing in the universe where there is a possible counterfactual to a choice. If I choose to eat broccoli instead of cauliflower, the word "choose" only makes sense if there is a possible world in which I ate cauliflower, but based on my mental processes, I influenced the world to become one where I ate broccoli. If there was never a possibility that I would "choose" cauliflower, I didn't make a choice. All that happened was the universe evolved as it was always going to. My mental processes didn't have any effect on the outcome.

In other words, a choice is the ability to actually change the future state of the universe via internal mental processes.

If the universe is entirely physical and deterministic, that's impossible to do. Everything that happens was fundamentally determined by the initial state of the universe and the rules that the universe follows. It is impossible for me to change the universe through choice, precisely because the outcome of my mental processes, which are instantiated in my brain, are entirely physical and predetermined by everything else. There is no "me" to "choose" for the same reasons that we don't think of water choosing to flow downhill or an engine choosing to run.

The only time it is possible for free will to exist is if my mental processes are not entirely predetermined the history of the universe up to the current point. Only that allows me to change the pattern of activation of neurons in my brain and central nervous system and muscles so that I can effectuate my genuine preference. Otherwise my body is a mechanism and everything that happens in the mechanism is fully automatic.

>I think that an nondeterministic universe poses problems for free will, because it means a less strong connection between beliefs/experiences and deliberation, as well as deliberation and action. Of course someone would make the exact same decision every time in the exact same situation: that decision is a reflection of who they were at the time. Why would we ever expect anything else? And to the extent a decision isn't reflective of who they are, it's less morally relevant!

As I said above, if the universe is fully physical and fully deterministic, its evolution in time is predetermined and therefore there is no choice by anyone about anything. People are just like any other composition of matter, and their activities are just like the activities of processes we generally don't consider conscious or mental, like atoms bonding with each other, or water flowing downhill. Only if our actions are somehow not fully determined by the physical universe, but rather can actually be changed by our conscious control of our mental state, can we make choices. You're right that free will then requires our mental processes to be fully determinative of our bodily actions.

>I lean towards what's sometimes called "hard compatibility": that far from being incompatible with determinism, free will in fact might require it.

Free will obviously requires that we, at at least some times and in at least some ways, be able to affect the physical universe through our mental processes, including and especially conscious choices. Otherwise, at best, we would be consciousnesses trapped in our bodies.

But in the sense that people commonly understand it, it also requires that the universe not predetermine our choices. It requires that we make choices of our own volition and not simply because a particular subatomic particle was close to another particular subatomic particle at the attosecond after the Big Bang.

My reading of Scanlon's account of value would still be that they are agent-relative, and have reason-creating power. Friendship wouldn't be inherently valuable independent of our judgments of it being so. Yet given our judgments of it being valuable, it provides reasons for certain actions.

Yes, there are two important levels where things are outside of my control: first, i didn't choose my place of birth, language, parents, schools, upbringing, and what ideas I was exposed to. Second, I conceive of my self as a subset of my brain and body, and at a deep level I don't believe that part of me is in control. I'm along for the ride, and I experience stories about why things happen, some of those stories involving the idea of choices, but I don't believe all of those stories.

Hmm. Then let me ask you some, since I am not sure how to relate to incompatibilists. Are you at all times aware that whatever you choose to do (and chose to do) is outside of your control?? Because for the life of me I have never felt that I wasn't free in my actions. And while this might be an illusion (I am a determinist after all) I will never and don't believe I ever can be aware of how this changes anything in my life. (since I simply am not given this information)

What do you think about that ^ ?