Yeah, I’m not massive on outlawing usury or anything. It’s just I hate a situation where we think a great move to help poor people is private sector money lending, and, in general I think if you find yourself wanting to write that pamphlet it’s time to step back and think again. That’s where I accept that Bentham may have been living in Different TimesTM, though.
E.g. There was a controversy about payday lenders in the UK a few years back. I wasn’t in favour of banning them but what frustrated me at the time was that it was cut adrift from the fact that the Tories had been slashing welfare for years at that point. It did seem like they needed more regulation but that definitely shouldn’t result in poor people having their options reduced, but the real debate was elsewhere.
I’ve been reading Joseph Campbell’s Myths to Live By. The most interesting one so far is The Separation of East and West. You can read the intro here:
The main boundary line separating the eastern from the western world can be regarded as the meridian line of the cultural divide, on both sides of which there is two creative matrix developed cultures to the east - India and the Far East (China and Japan), and to the west - the Levant (Middle East) and Europe. Throughout the history, of these four worlds, each retained its own unique characteristics - the mythology, religion, philosophy and ideals, not to mention the way of life, fashion and art, despite the differences, they still should be considered in pairs: India and the Far East, and Levant and Europe.
Eastern centers, fenced off from the West and each other endless deserts and mountains thousands of years of isolation, were deeply conservative. Levant and Europe, by contrast, constantly come into conflict and fruitful trade relations and were wide open as the major invasions, and the mutual exchange of goods and sturdy ideas. Amazing spiritual and material achievements of the current turbulent times is largely due to the fact that the once strong walls of India and the Far East were first covered with holes, and then destroyed (Barber, 85-88.). After that, however, the world is faced with a problem that in the mythology embodies the tradition of the biblical Tower of Babel when God confused the languages of the peoples so that they no longer build their eternal city, and scattered as it is written, “in the face of the earth” (Gen. 11:4). Today, however, there is no place where one could hide from each other, in this, of course, is the special complexity of our times.
This concept is exactly the opposite of the idea, imposed by all - even the great saints and sages - in the East, where reigns supreme confidence that the person must identify with the end of his …
Anyway it goes on about how in India and the Far East - it’s all about the system, and knowing one’s place. The highest a human can achieve is losing all ego and becoming one with the system, etc. Even the gods tend to be products of the system, not self-determinative entities.
Obviously this is some 1950s-era thinking. But I’m curious about this idea of self-determinative philosophies vs. collectivist philosophies. For my book this relates to the Mesoamerican civilizations - which seemed to start out extremely collectivist with god-kings, but then seemed to migrate to less so - to more council forms of govt - when the Spanish arrived.
The dividing lines are blurred and are cultural not geographical, so this seems a little simplistic because cultural values spread over time eg the Moorish influence over parts of Western Europe.
But as you say, that’s how people, even academics, thought generally until relatively recently. Race and nationality were everything.
As for Mesoamerica, your point of interest, I have nfi, but the Castilians influencing a change of values seems significant.
I am trying to nail down my core philosophy lately. I am atheist with nihilistic tendencies. I believe the universe(s) are random and we are extremely lucky to not only exist at all but to have sentience.
This sort of leads me to some sort of Taoism, which to grossly oversimplify teaches that existence itself is meaning.
I imagine nihilism and Taoism are basically incompatible. I don’t believe there is a natural order to the universe, but I do really like the idea of cherishing the act of existing and attempting to live in harmony with the “natural” order of things.
The closest thing I’ve ever found that comes close to how I feel about life and existence and meaning is a joke religion called dudeism- Dudeism - Wikipedia. This claims to be a stripped down form of taoism, but it seems like nihilism is probably in opposition to this philosophy as well.
Bottom line is nihilism compatible with any other philosophies? Am I just not really a nihilist?
“Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.”
– Schopenhauer
This is true and it’s rational to live your life as though you have free will. Where it matters is whether we should treat other people like they have free will or not.
Can you give concrete examples of how we should treat others in a deterministic universe vs. a free will universe (which again is a meaningless semantic to me)?
We’re a hyper-social species. How we treat others based on their behavior is literally in our DNA. Should an enlightened lion pride not exile a cub-killer?
If people don’t have free will then they don’t really have moral responsibility for anything they do, since they could not have done otherwise. This removes all justification for retributive justice, but not for justice based around deterrence or restraint from further wrongdoing. A lack of free will does not mean that people stop responding to incentives. Practically speaking, for law enforcement, this means a justice system like Norway’s, where people are imprisoned either to deter others from acting the same way or to remove them from the community, but conditions in prison are not any harsher than they need to be to provide an effective deterrent.
Outside of law enforcement, it just means recognising that people can’t ultimately help what they do. If you were them - body and brain and circumstances - you would do exactly what they do. It’s impossible to live all the time like free will doesn’t exist, but it enables one to step back and see evil or infuriating people as being like broken machines - which helps with being more compassionate, but also clarifies when you need to do things like set firmer boundaries.
This is the free will pessimist idea that free will is incoherent even in a nondeterministic universe. The argument can also be put like this:
The most radical a priori argument is that free will is not merely contingently absent but is impossible. In recent decades, this argument is most associated with Galen Strawson. Strawson associates free will with being ‘ultimately morally responsible’ for one’s actions. He argues that, because how one acts is a result of, or explained by, “how one is, mentally speaking” (M), for one to be responsible for that choice one must be responsible for M. To be responsible for M, one must have chosen to be M itself—and that not blindly, but deliberately, in accordance with some reasons r1. But for that choice to be a responsible one, one must have chosen to be such as to be moved by r1, requiring some further reasons r2 for such a choice. And so on, ad infinitum. Free choice requires an impossible infinite regress of choices to be the way one is in making choices.
This is also what Schopenhauer is getting at with “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.". If the source of my choices is reducible, ultimately, to either causal or random events, then in what sense are they my choices? If I am made to do something, deterministically, or if my choice is forced on me by the flip of a coin, then I’m not responsible for those choices. But the alternative is that I’m essentially God, in that I am a prime mover of causality in the universe. I make my choices totally independent of any causal mechanism and then - somehow - I work my will upon my brain and set electrons whizzing around in some totally new configuration. This is so implausible that the rest of free will philosophy consists of how best to redefine free will to avoid this problem. But if you go up to anyone on the street and ask “if someone’s choices are the inevitable result of extrinsic causes or random events, are they really choosing” they will say “what does extrinsic mean?”. Then after you explain, they will say “no”.
For law enforcement - isn’t every Western crime and punishment system ostensibly only about deterrence and public safety? Is there anywhere in the US penal code that it talks about retribution? Honestly asking because I don’t know. But I don’t think there is.
It feels more to me like the argument is just a matter of degrees - arguing about where deterrence and safety stops and retribution begins. Death penalty advocates will try to argue it’s about deterrence. I don’t agree with them, and the evidence doesn’t seem to bear that out. But I don’t think they ever put legal arguments forward that mention retribution. Obviously what the hoi polloi thinks is another matter.
I’m for a Norway-like system because I think people change, and I believe everyone* deserves a shot at redemption. I read about some study that found on various psychological metrics, you have no more in common with yourself of 20 years ago than a random person. And since this meshes with what I want to be true, I believe it! But I never really considered the retribution aspect, because I don’t think any justice system in a democracy is officially geared toward retribution.
* Everyone who isn’t beyond repair. I also am not an absolutist in anything. I’m fine with Anders Brevik never getting out, mostly because I think he’d just find a way to tell the doctors what they want to hear and then commit another atrocity. It seems reasonable to argue you can never be certain the risk to the public is zero for someone like that, who is very likely permanently broken with no hope of repair.
He’s a cub-killer. They don’t get second chances with the pride. I’m not being entirely flippant on this. I think denying our animal nature, or thinking we’re somehow above just being fancy monkeys, historically gets humans into all kinds of truly fucked-up situations. We have social needs that are just as vital and ingrained as eating and reproducing. Sometimes you just gotta exile a cub killer and not overthink things. Sometimes you just gotta back up and say nope to the thriving free market in children, even though logically it seemed to make sense at the time.
/ramble
Outside of law enforcement, sure. I guess it’s always been obvious to me that evil or infuriating people are broken machines, and I never really considered free will part of the equation. Because again, I think free will is a meaningless semantic argument. But obviously if someone just murdered my child it would take me a long long time to get to the point of not wanting retribution, as it would anyone.
No, it doesn’t say anywhere in the laws that they should be applied unequally against Black people either. Retributive justice is a cultural norm in the US (and other places, but particularly the US). Judges will sometimes talk about “community expectations” when setting sentences, by which is meant “the community expects me to impose retributive punishment here, so I will”. If you bring up Norway’s prisons, it’s an incredibly common refrain that criminals don’t deserve cushy conditions. For example:
I think the Norwegian system is much better than the American system when it comes to humane treatment of prisoners. Indeed, I think we could learn a lot not just about prisons from Scandinavian countries, but also on how to prevent crime in the first place by seriously combating poverty.
And yet:
But on the flipside, Norway’s “open prison” system strikes me as quite a bit too comfortable for violent offenders like murderers and rapists.
No prison system will be perfect, obviously, but we can always work toward a more humane criminal justice system, even if there are times when such a system may not be adequate to the crime.
The question here isn’t “does this provide enough of a deterrent”, it’s “are we being too nice to these people”.
What if they didn’t? If there was no possibility of rehabilitating anyone ever, would that make it a good idea to make prison conditions harsher? Do you want Breivik to suffer?
Let us imagine a man who, while standing on the street, would say to himself: “It is six o’clock in the evening, the working day is over. Now I can go for a walk, or I can go to the club; I can also climb up the tower to see the sun set; I can go to the theater; I can visit this friend or that one; indeed, I also can run out of this gate, into the wide world, and never return. All of this is strictly up to me, in this I have complete freedom. But still I shall do none of these things now, but with just as free a will I shall go home to my wife.” This is exactly as if water spoke to itself: “I can make high waves (yes! in the sea during a storm), I can rush down hill (yes! in the river bed), I can plunge down foaming and gushing (yes! in the waterfall), I can rise freely as a stream of water into the air (yes! in the fountain), I can, finally, boil away and disappear (yes! at certain temperature); but I am doing none of these things now, and am voluntarily remaining quiet and clear water in the reflecting pond.”
I agree the hoi polloi has different values about retribution. But I don’t know if we’re ever going to change their minds with discussions about free will. Unless the concern here is that retribution will sneak into the US penal code if we’re not vigilant about it.
Similarly - there is probably some reasonable argument to be made that prisons shouldn’t be too country-clubby, so as to be more effective as a deterrent, Norway notwithstanding. But I acknowledge that humans being humans, those arguments are almost always going to veer into retribution territory.
No I don’t want Brevik to suffer. Same as I don’t want Trump to suffer. I just want both of them to be completely neutralized.
Right, well cultural change is gradual. Ideas about retributive justice are intimately tied up with much else about US culture, the individualism and consequent emphasis on BOOTSTRAPS and PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY, the fact that the dominant religion is Christianity, etc.
Even on Unstuck though, people spend an inordinate amount of time trying to sort people into good and bad people, discussing what people do and don’t “deserve”, etc. I am not immune to this, as you might have seen in my post the other day fervently hoping that Kissinger dies soon. The source of my anger there is not really Kissinger himself, but the injustice of a system where people are lauded despite having been disastrously wrong. And it doesn’t in fact matter at all whether Kissinger dies soon or not. I’m still going to drink champagne when he dies, though, basically because it’s nice to pretend that the arc of the universe bends towards justice, even though I know that’s not really true.
I guess the part that bugs me about thinking free will is anything more than semantics - is if you take the flip side of the Anders Brevik situation.
Take some person who was horribly abused as a child. They almost inevitably go through a lost decade at least in their teens and twenties, often get hooked on drugs, bad relationships. At some point that person has to make a conscious decision to pull themselves out of the morass.
Yes it was pre-ordained that they would pull out of the morass if you had godlike predictive abilities. But it sure doesn’t feel pre-ordained to the person involved. If I was that person I’d want to be proud of myself, and have others proud of me, for finally getting myself together. I would hate to be in that pivotal moment of my life thinking, “Well whether I do or do not pull out of this is all pre-ordained by the experiences thrust upon me and the chemicals in my body.”
Conversely, if an abused person takes the dark path and becomes an abuser themselves, as sometimes happens - should we feel the same level of empathy for that person as we do for the abused person who took the light path? I feel like the second person deserves some kudos, which by definition means the first person deserves scorn (or at least not receive kudos). I think it’s unfair for society to have the same empathy to the non-abuser as the abuser. Although I guess having a decent life is its own reward.
Taking the zen “everyone just does whatever they’re going to do because it’s pre-ordained” kinda feels like when Al Qaeda would do the worst shit and say, “If we succeed it was god’s will.”
I guess it all comes back to my we’re just fancy monkeys take. Empathy is a vital construct in social creatures. Trying to circumvent our natural feelings of empathy with a philosophical idea seems like a terrible idea to me.
Although maybe there’s a world where we can dole out more empathy to people based on their decisions, without resorting to retribution for the people who make the wrong decisions. So we let our natural empathy run wild, but we try to check our natural antipathy when it comes to punishment. Maybe that works.
I have complicated thoughts about all that. Firstly, I don’t think in this culture we’re in any danger of having people divorce people’s actions from their results. Like your argument has the form of a slippery slope argument, but from where I’m sitting that slope is uphill. I also don’t think we’re in any danger of people not feeling satisfaction in their accomplishments. Again, I think we more often face the opposite problem of convincing people that if they succeed it wasn’t entirely their doing.
Secondly, I don’t agree that praise from others or even a sense of self-satisfaction are things we should be looking to as lodestones. But I have to draw a distinction here between feeling satisfied with one’s work and a more ego-centred self-satisfaction. You’re a programmer, so you know what I mean if I talk about the satisfaction of a really well-designed, well-written piece of code, and the pleasant flow state achieved while creating it. That’s satisfaction with oneself, in a way, but its not your ego being on full blast because you just won a poker tournament or something. Those sort of highs are nice once in a while, but not sustainable. If you look at organisations like AA, or religions, or other community groups which work to pull people out of the sorts of tough life spots you’re talking about, “use willpower and determination and grind it out” is the opposite of the advice. People are advised to downplay their egos, become part of a community, surrender control and help others.
The other thing is that the flipside of praise is blame. If people deserve praise for pulling themselves out of tough spots, they deserve blame for not doing it, however much we like to pretend otherwise. And while it’s dubious that praise and ego-stroking from others helps much in getting people to improve themselves, it’s pretty obvious that blaming and shaming is a huge hindrance to those who haven’t managed to get things together yet.
AA to me is a perfect example of using the enormous power of social bonds to overcome something that the individual has finally accepted they don’t have the power to overcome on their own. For that to work, yeah, you have to surrender your ego to the group. It’s the same dynamic that works with frats, the military, etc. It can work for good or evil.
But I guess I’m talking more about personal triumph, which does happen. I was a weekend warrior crackhead. I’ve been to the edge and stood and looked down, to quote Van Halen. The next step is becoming a weekday crackhead. Then you lose your job, house and car in fairly short order. I had to make a decision to pull back, which felt like the hardest thing I’d ever done in my life.
Now, I’ve always acknowledged that I think I have an impulsive but not addictive personality, and I had the privilege to have a safety net and not live in a neighborhood where crack was easy as walking a few houses down the block. But it still was damn hard. I see no reason to not be proud of myself for walking away from the edge, while not shaming others who may have been in a much rougher situation.
It’s not just addictive type stuff. Walking up the steps to SF City College to take my first programming classes in my late 20s was way scarier than it should have been. Changing your life is terrifying sometimes. Putting all my shit in the back of a pickup and driving to California was scary as hell. So was driving to Panama. A lot of people never do anything like that in their lives.
So I’m proud of those things in the same way that I described someone being proud of pulling out of the morass in the previous post. My point is I don’t think all scary life decisions are the kind where you have to strip away the ego and not be proud of yourself. Being proud of past successes helps breed more future successes. And yes shame can work the same way in reverse when it becomes debilitating. But a little shame isn’t always a bad thing.
If I think about how I was pre-ordained to do all the things I’ve accomplished, that takes the fun out it for me, even though I know it’s true on the cosmic scale. It’s not true on the inside-my-head scale. This to me makes the concept of free will vs. not free will a semantic distinction that I don’t see having much real world application.
I finally bough Chalmer’s The Conscious Mind yesterday, and it’s really been blowing my hair back. It seems like it could be the book that I wished Consciousness Explained would be, although I don’t think I had the background to understand it 20 years ago. Not that that everything is crystal clear for me right now: he uses a lot of technical terms, but the biggest headscratcher so far was hotchpotch.
Anyway, I feel like this is the first book to give the vocabulary to talk clearly about questions that I’ve had for a long time and shortcomings that I’ve found in other sources. For example, he distinguishes between the psychological mind, which in principal doesn’t present any challenges to materialism, and the phenomenal (or experiencial) mind, which has always mystified me.
But I never really considered the retribution aspect, because I don’t think any justice system in a democracy is officially geared toward retribution.