Compatibilism

I thank kasmic for pardoning my unwanted forfeiture. In the following I want to stick to Con's format. A: Con says he does not find my arguments convincing. Fair enough. That, however, does not free my opponent from the burden of responding to them. Surely, if they aren’t convincing, to a degree that legitimizes appealing to the same intuition every single round (“free will requires the ability to do otherwise”), then we should expect him to be able to give some reason to think my arguments and objections are mistaken. My opponent opened with the of course intuitive notion of freedom of will requiring the ability to do otherwise. From round 2 “It seems reasonable to recall that a person is only acting freely if they could have acted in some other way” I objected to that and presented a compatibilist account of how we can have free will without this condition, to which he responded by appealing to the notion I objected to. From round 3 “determinism entails that what we do is the only thing we can do, and that because of this we never really have a choice about anything.” In response I used W. T. Stace’s argument for compatibilism, a genuine argument, not a reiteration of what I had already said before, to which he, once again, responds by appealing to the very notion I objected to. From round 4 “[It does not] seem reasonable to assign moral responsibility to an “agent” who did not have the ability to do otherwise” “Not determining your desires which cause your so called “choices” makes it unreasonable to hold one morally accountable” “If Gandhi’s actions where determined by things outside his control than he is not their causer and cannot be held responsible for their repercussions”As such he is committing either the proof by assertion or ad nauseam fallacy, that is, repeating the same claim over and over again as if that in and of itself constitutes proof for his position. B: I can see nothing new here, as I responded to the claim of merely assuming Allison to have free will whilst the dog does not in the preceding round. In fact, I take it to be an intuitive appeal of this desire-based account that it explains why only humans can be free agents, whilst dogs, for example, cannot. Not all, but only humans are able to reflect on their desires. Animals, small children and severely mentally handicapped people do not possess this ability. We can, again, see that my account gives the intuitively correct verdict in such cases, which is, of course, one of its virtues. C: Con states “Determinism implies human action being guided much like a puppet by strings”. He says he does not intend to scare people with this analogy. However, comparing humans to puppets suggests that 1) humans are inanimate, that is without any desires or other psychological states of their own 2) there is a puppeteer, another intentional agent who just does whatever he wants with the puppet, without any regards for the desires and other psychological states the puppet has (should it have any at all, see point 1) All of this, whether or not he intended to, does, if not scare people, trigger some other kind of negative emotional response towards determinism, a response not in the slightest supported by reason. I have already explained why it is precisely the immediate psychological states in humans this analogy does not account for, which are so very important for the freedom of will. Further, determinism clearly is not an agent of its own, but I dealt with that last round. I conclude, once more, that this analogy is misleading at best. D: He appeals, again, to the idea of moral responsibility requiring the ability to do otherwise and even treats it as if this criterion was an established fact. It is not and besides its intuitive appeal, he has not argued for why we should accept this criterion in any way. As such, I have nothing to add here. E: Con, again, appeals to the ability to do otherwise, just like with A, C and D, and is perhaps even, in case I interpret this correctly, begging the question against compatibilism when he says: “You could argue Gandhi exercised free will here. But you could not do say and say that determinism is true” (I read this as “You could argue Gandhi exercised free will here. But you could not say that while also saying that determinism is true”) As such there is nothing for me to say that I have not said earlier in this round or a preceding one. Conclusion My opponent argued (under determinism) we 1) cannot cause our actions in the right kind of way and 2) cannot do otherwise. I objected these are essentially one and the same argument. In the following rounds he merely talked about the later argument. Thus, I conclude he either dropped the first one or concedes my objection. Unfortunately, he does not advance or defend his other argument to any satisfactory degree, which I have explained in detail earlier this round. His only defense consisted in drawing an analogy to the dog, even though dogs are clearly excluded both from my and other accounts of free will. He has thus failed to establish anything actually analogous.Sadly, he claims I have given no solid reason to think we could assign moral responsibility to someone if he could not have done otherwise. This is to ignore the compatibilist account I have given in the very beginning in its entirety, even if he is not convinced by it. As for my own arguments, I do not believe they are entirely unobjectionable or even close to being the last substantial thing there is to say about free will. Indeed, the compatibilist account I have presented in this debate is almost identical to Harry Frankfurt’s. He presented it about 45 years ago and you can imagine how many strong objections philosophers can and have come up with during such a long time. There are innumerable thought experiments involving, for example, some kind of manipulation of an agent’s brain which aim to show how this desire based account fails at distinguishing morally responsible and irresponsible agents. Con did not present any such or other objection that in some way shows the inadequacy of the account at hand. He merely kept pressing on the importance of doing otherwise, which is insufficient since for many examples, like the ones given by W. T. Stace, my account does give the correct answer as to whether some agent is acting freely or not. I regret that I was unable to convince kasmic of the compatibilist position. But I thank him for this debate, it was a lot of fun and wish him good luck in the voting period