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Whatever rationalizations people make, I think ultimately, a belief that some people are evil is what the death penalty hinges on. I don’t believe in free will,

Whatever rationalizations people make, I think ultimately, a belief that some people are evil is what the death penalty hinges on. I don’t believe in free will, thus I don’t believe in moral culpability, this I don’t believe in evil. From that vantage point it seems extremely barbaric to me to put anyone to death. They had no say in the circumstances that led up to who they became. I have similar feeling when I think of severely mentally disabled people being executed, which a lot of people probably share even if they do believe in free will.

kazinator 6y ago
OK, so you don't believe in "evil", but you believe in "barbaric". I believe that determinism and free will are entirely compatible. An algorithm has free will. More complicated algorithms have a more nuanced, richer free will. That's it. For instance, a coin-operated machine that gives you a bag of potato chips in exchange for a dollar has a form of free will. It does that because it wants to. It is just not capable of telling itself it wants to do anything else; it's a low grade form of free will encompassing a tiny number of states. (Killing evil is basically just terminating a buggy algorithm. If you don't like the baggage associated with "evil", maybe "defective" or "buggy" is better.) The question of free will and determinism is made complicated by the possibility that a deterministic free will (algorithm) operates in a world that isn't deterministic. Suppose that your mind is an algorithm which will make exactly the same decision for the same inputs (including, of course, its own state: that's one of the inputs). Even if you get your mind to be in exactly the same state as when a certain decision had been made, you also need the world to be in exactly the same state. Only then is the algorithmic mind guaranteed to think the same thing and make the decision. The world has so many states, and so does the mind, that the question of whether you are algorithmic or not makes practically no difference. Even if you are a FSM, your state space is so large, you will never be in the same state twice -- just due to the fact alone that you have life long memories that are are still accumulating, for one thing. And if you could rewind exactly a previous state, the surrounding world will not; and that has an even vaster state space.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  This is why we leave judging to the judicial system, and don't hand it over to developers who will try to treat life or death decisions as an undergraduate algorithm design exercise.
  - kazinator 6y ago
    Right, so we instead hand matters over to people who do things like hide phone call records that would prove that someone should not be put on death row.
hn8788 6y ago
If you think there's no free will, then how is it barbaric to execute people? No free will means the supporters of the death penalty didn't have a say in the circumstance that led to them supporting it, so there is no moral culpability to thinking some people should be executed. It's no more "barbaric" than thinking it's okay to kill rats and other pests for the good of society.
- nefitty 6y ago
  The realization that free will is an illusion ideally allows compassion to develop in an individual. If a society shed its belief in free will, then it would act more compassionately, eg the opposite of barbaric.
  - kazinator 6y ago
    That's an interesting hypothesis you have there, but it seems rather self-evident to me that there are many philosophical pathways toward compassion, not necessarily involving specific theories of free will. Not all pathways are heavily intellectual.

kazinator 6y ago

OK, so you don't believe in "evil", but you believe in "barbaric". I believe that determinism and free will are entirely compatible. An algorithm has free will. More complicated algorithms have a more nuanced, richer free will. That's it. For instance, a coin-operated machine that gives you a bag of potato chips in exchange for a dollar has a form of free will. It does that because it wants to. It is just not capable of telling itself it wants to do anything else; it's a low grade form of free will encompassing a tiny number of states. (Killing evil is basically just terminating a buggy algorithm. If you don't like the baggage associated with "evil", maybe "defective" or "buggy" is better.) The question of free will and determinism is made complicated by the possibility that a deterministic free will (algorithm) operates in a world that isn't deterministic. Suppose that your mind is an algorithm which will make exactly the same decision for the same inputs (including, of course, its own state: that's one of the inputs). Even if you get your mind to be in exactly the same state as when a certain decision had been made, you also need the world to be in exactly the same state. Only then is the algorithmic mind guaranteed to think the same thing and make the decision. The world has so many states, and so does the mind, that the question of whether you are algorithmic or not makes practically no difference. Even if you are a FSM, your state space is so large, you will never be in the same state twice -- just due to the fact alone that you have life long memories that are are still accumulating, for one thing. And if you could rewind exactly a previous state, the surrounding world will not; and that has an even vaster state space.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
This is why we leave judging to the judicial system, and don't hand it over to developers who will try to treat life or death decisions as an undergraduate algorithm design exercise.
- kazinator 6y ago
  Right, so we instead hand matters over to people who do things like hide phone call records that would prove that someone should not be put on death row.

hn8788 6y ago

If you think there's no free will, then how is it barbaric to execute people? No free will means the supporters of the death penalty didn't have a say in the circumstance that led to them supporting it, so there is no moral culpability to thinking some people should be executed. It's no more "barbaric" than thinking it's okay to kill rats and other pests for the good of society.

nefitty 6y ago
The realization that free will is an illusion ideally allows compassion to develop in an individual. If a society shed its belief in free will, then it would act more compassionately, eg the opposite of barbaric.
- kazinator 6y ago
  That's an interesting hypothesis you have there, but it seems rather self-evident to me that there are many philosophical pathways toward compassion, not necessarily involving specific theories of free will. Not all pathways are heavily intellectual.