I'm taking a philosophy class as an elective (not my major),

>>18421326
Make that the basis of your answer. If we have no free will, then we "could" only do what we are programmed or God-directed to do, so the question would be one of statistics: assuming some are capable of punishing, then we "could" only if we were in that group. "Should" is a different question. It implies morality, and morality can only exist if there are options.........

>>18421326
>>"Imagine it is true that humans do not have free will and are not capable of choosing which actions they do and which actions they do not do. Could we continue punishing people who do bad things?"
Yes, of course, punishing trains them NOT to do it, regardless if there is free will or not, its like Pavlovs dog. Even if this choice isnt free will, if it is not beneficial and harmful, your body very soon stops craving to do it.
Dont see a discussion here.

>>18421341
if you don't have free will, you can't alter your behaviour to match it to extern circumstances.

>>18421338
this. the question is "could", so i would answer it like it's worded.
if he says he meant "should" later, then he would have to give you stellar grades because you actually read it correctly.

anyways, since that would imply that nobody has free will, then there would be people who could punish others IF their predestined path is to punish others.

>>18421357
>if you don't have free will, you can't alter your behaviour to match it to extern circumstances. Lets say monkeys dont have free will, but every time they grab a banana in a cage - they are showered with cold water. Soon they will stop grabbing bananas. Simple.
The point I am making, if bad (and good) behaviour is punished, it WILL change or adapt.

>>18421338
>>18421341
>>18421357
So to rephrase it: We would continue punishing criminals because we can't choose otherwise? Is there a more eloquent way to phrase this?

Am I meta enough?

>>18421370
E.g. If humans don't have free will and are not capable of choosing our actions, then we would have no choice but to continue punishing people who do bad things.

If people don't have free will, what is done to others in a forceful or painful manner is not punishment, but torture.

>>18421370
>We would continue punishing criminals because we can't choose otherwise?
Its not that we CANT choose, it is just that it wouldn't be beneficial to majority of people, so it won't happen. What you want to do is heavily influenced by circumstances, but in every situation you have many ways to deal and you chose one. Is this free will or not? Its both really.
Ying Yang.
Honestly, western philosophy is shit and too caught up in words compared to East Asian philosophy.

File: 1422506866448.jpg (638KB, 2560x1600px) Image search: [Google]

638KB, 2560x1600px

OP here, how's this,

>If humans don't have free will and are not capable of choosing our actions, then we would have no choice but to continue punishing those who do bad. If punishing bad behavior changes behavior, then free will isn't relevant. Whether the person doing bad can chose to do bad isn't relevant, only that they cease doing bad. Punishment is useful insofar as it's validity to correct behavior, i.e. Rehabilitation. Punishment with the assumption it cannot change behavior, is torture.

Anything you'd change or reword?

>>18421367
no it won't, since they can't CHOOSE to change their behaviour. you can argue that your instincts would automatically avoid behaviour that leads to punishment, since the drive to preserve and survive doesn't need to be choosen freely. but i'm not so sure about this. if you compare it to animals, the dip of them not being able to learn from punishment is pretty fast. as soon as it's not a cat or a rat anymore i don't think they can "learn" to avoid punishment. and if free will falls flat, all that's left is instincts. ofc it might still work since humans are rather highly developed "animals", comparable to apes, and apes can learn. but then again, animals from that calbre also have awarenes to some degree and thus it's hard to determine what they do because they can choose and what they do out of survival instinct.

>>18421370
only the people who are predetermined to punish. and then the question is who they would punish. since their actions are predetermined, it almost must also be predetermined WHO they punish, even before those people commit a crime. think of it as robots just working off the programm they are set to, without looking left or right.
>>18421374
in such a scenario, you can't say something is good or bad since there would just be "things people do". so the punishment would also be random.

>>18421378
exactly. and it would not be related to their behaviour.

>>18421400
you somehow need to also adress how the fact that there's no free will would change the idea of "good and bad behaviour".

>>18421411
I don't think I do, but I think it's important to make a distinction between rehabilitating and protecting, or just protecting. You would never punish if you can't change behavior. You'd only limit the criminal from doing harm.

Person X harms person Y.
Person X is "punished" and no longer harms.
If Person X was never punished, they would continue harming.
Person Y is now protected, or Person Y is now protected AND person X is rehabilitated.

Why does free will matter? We just need to change behavior, it doesn't matter if someone chooses to change their behavior, only that they do.

>>18421442
if they have no free will, how could they change their behaviour? whatever they do is predetermined, so punishing them would have zero influence on them doing something bad again or not.

let's say someone is predestined to best up a person on the 8.2.2045. they are also predetermined to beat someone up on the 7.6.2053. punishing them after the first incident would not change their predetermination. consequently, if they were only programmed to beat someone up on the 8.2.2045 and then never do it again, punishim them for it would not change that either. so if there's no free will, every punishment becomes torture.

>>18421467
>if they have no free will, how could they change their behaviour? whatever they do is predetermined, so punishing them would have zero influence on them doing something bad again or not.

Not true. You're arguing that learning must exist for free will to and vice versa.

If everything is predetermined, then how you get there can't rely on free will.

Op are you familiar with the stanford prison experiment?

I personally believe we don't have true free will there are limitations on what we can think based on what we have been exposed to.
http://www.prisonexp.org/

>>18421501
I am. If you haven't yet, you should look into the Milgram experiment and skinner box.

I don't think either disproves free will in humans, but that behaviors can be affected. Which goes back to my post
>>18421494

It's like the evolution-God debate. Evolution existing doesn't disprove the existence of God(s). It explains how but not why.

>>18421494
how is free will not linked to learning?

i mean, if somebody tells me i will get stoned for having the wrong religion then i can choose freely what i value more: living my own religious believes or not getting stoned.

if i don't have free will then i can't choose between values and so it would be pure coincidence if the way i live is in harmony with the laws that are in place.
to stay with that example, i would not be able to chose to give up my religion or not, so i also can't chose to endure the punishment or not.

>>18421467
Free will and predetermination are different concepts. You can believe that people have no free will because all their behavior is a direct result of genes, childhood/upbringing, past experiences etc. So we are essentially machines that data gets put into and we have no choice but to run that program, our mind only serves to make a story out of that and rationalize this to make it seem like we wanted to act like this. In this case there is no free will but no predetermination either.

@OP: I agree that it depends entirely on what you are trying to achieve with the punishment. Punishment as "revenge" for doing something wrong would lose its merit because it implies an agency that the criminal does not have.
You can still lock someone up to prevent other crimes from happening, isolate them from society.

Another thing is how you interpret this lack of free will. If you define it like I did above, then changing the "input" people get could still cause a change in them, just a change that they did not personally opt for or helped with but one that was forced upon them.

>>18421501
What would "true free will" even mean? Yes people are limited, your world view is always subjective and based on prior experience and the world view you grew up with and so on. But if people were 100% neutral we would not have unique perspectives and personalities anymore. For me free will is the possibility to react in the way we wish against the influences opposed upon us.

>>18421326
of course those people should be punished if they break the law. the law is made to protect us and to enable us to rightfully stop people who break the law. also the judge takes into consideration if the person who committed the crime is sane, and gives proper punishment. if someone is crazy and wants to kill or harm others which is his own truth then that person should be locked up or shot because he threatens others and our society. the law is the same for everyone and just because some special person cant think otherwise doesn't mean he may do whatever he pleases.

File: Tyq9Vya.gif (2MB, 306x223px) Image search: [Google]

2MB, 306x223px

>>18421527
Because learning is a means and means don't need to be choices. There's no paradox.

A kitten doesn't consider and conclude that mimicking its mother's behavior and cleaning itself is the best course of action. It does so because of the internal stimuli we call instincts. Maybe the kitten has different internal stimuli than a "healthy" kitten and doesn't clean itself, but it's still not choosing. You can never escape your own stimuli when making a choice, so every "choice" you make is going to be decided by factors acting on you.

If I made a perfect clone of you, with all your experiences, memories, feelings, mood, morals, etc. And placed you and your clone in identical mazes. You would both make the same choices, so those choices would be predictive. I could run you through the maze first, note what you do, then correctly predict what your clone will do.

>>18421553
if you look at it this way, that makes sense.
then the goal would be to "reprogramm" criminals or lock them away.
but is no free will and predetermination never the same? as in, is it clear that in the op question the situation is like you just described "no free will"?

>>18421568
yes, that's instinct. but you could also train the same kitten to not jump on the counter by repeatedly spray it with water if it does that. she could still jump on the counter but decides to not do so because she has learned that this results in getting sprayed with water and the benefits of jumping on the counter don't measure up to the disadvantages of getting sprayed. that would be free will, right?

>>18421585
Predetermination typically is spoken of within the context of God or fate, like the Greek tragedy with Oedipus where there was no way around him fucking his mom and killing his dad no matter how hard he tried to avoid it.

Even if you take the stance >>18421568 describes, where there's zero wriggle room between the experiences and genes you have had and your behavior, there is still no predetermination in the strict sense because you would still act differently depending on what situation you run into. In that case it's like a mathematical formula where if someone had all the context, they could accurately predict what behavior you will show. But the context is still a variable. Whereas if you go full predetermination, how your life pans out is set in stone. Of course this can be paired very well with a lack of free will. But they can exist separately.

Hope I explained it somewhat clearly here..

>>18421605
Thought I mentioned it at the beginning but just saw I didn't - full predetermination (so not "you are destined to act according to our genes/past" but "you are destined to act x way period") is never exactly the same as free will because it goes a step further, it does not just take your agency away but also implies that there is no such thing as chance, and not just people but also their surroundings can be accurately predicted (or be known) in advance.

File: 1422507915151.jpg (185KB, 1920x1080px) Image search: [Google]

185KB, 1920x1080px

>>18421597
No because the kitten is making the choice based on the positives and negatives of jumping on the counter. The kitten isn't choosing, it's being given a false choice and would always chose to jump on the counter with your example punishment.

The kitten wants to jump on the counter. You can decentralize it with a varying spectrum of punishments, but the kitten will always conclude whether taking that punishment is worth jumping on the counter and cannot make an uninformed and unbiased decision. It's a slave to the advantages and disadvantages of jumping on the counter, and if you knew how it valued each of those, you could correctly predict if the cat will jump or not. If you can predict the cat's every action with 100% certainty, can it be said that the cat has free will?

>>18421614
would NOT jump on the counter with your given example*

>>18421605
yes, that clarifies it. thanks a lot for taking the time to type it out. learned something new.

so lack of free will is only the asunption that we can not act against or genes/ i fleunces an the like. that's for example what people mean when they excuse bad behaviour with "that's just my character". they don't think they have a free will, they think they are a "victim" to the program that's running inside of them and that program is shaped by various variables like upbringing, social norms, etc?

>>18421326
Then is it our free will to punish them? If no one has a choice in what they do, wouldn't people who punish others also be doing what was predetermined for them to do?

File: 1497436335684.jpg (127KB, 1426x1655px) Image search: [Google]

127KB, 1426x1655px

>>18421326
The question is about what you think the purpose of punishment is. If you believe in redemption and rehabilitation, that criminals go to prison and learn from the experience, then punishing people is completely valid. Likewise if you are punishing people by excluding them from society so they don't hurt anyone else, then that's important too. If you're punishing people to make society "feel good" and to exact some sort of penance or retribution, then what a pointless and sadistic thing.

File: d11fa11a2601a74b0584f2bebf8cf8e0.jpg (108KB, 467x700px) Image search: [Google]

108KB, 467x700px

>>18421627
Yeah pretty much, that we are a slave to what "material" has been given to us to work with. Having said that, obviously in everyday life most people do hold others responsible for their actions, are proud of their accomplishments etc. The most mainstream way to think about it is that while people experience influence in the form of their genes, their childhood, their character and so on, they also have the possibility (and thus, for many, the responsibility) to push back and use their rational thinking and their will power to be an influence of their own and fight their negative tendencies, heal their trauma etc. See pic related, man as his own maker.

Also this is not the only outlook there is on lack of free will, just the most common one. If you look at the brain, you can apparently see (don't ask me how, I'm not a biologist) that a decision is taken moments before a respondent actually becomes aware that they made a choice. Some claim that this is proof that our brain responds to all kinds of cues that we are not consciously aware of, and makes the decision for us. This is less based on individual past and experience, and more on the environment. For example, if I ask you in a tone that is pleasing to your brain (because high, which people associate with vulnerable and loveable) if you want to do something, you say yes, if my tone of voice is off, you say no. This is a very simplistic example to illustrate it, but still. In that case your brain is constantly taking in surroundings and converting them into data, acting based on that, without you being aware... and the influence of genes and psychology is of somewhat lesser importance than in the former view I explained because our brains can be swayed by the smallest details (this -is- true and has often been shown).

I think I got my answer I kinda never asked for, but that's a good thing.

Thanks everyone!