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To say someone did something wrong is to say they should have done something else. They important word is could not should. Yes, you are literally saying this

To say someone did something wrong is to say they should have done something else. They important word is could not should. Yes, you are literally saying this robot is to blame for the problem. I am saying the robot caused the issue - for which you can use the word blame if you want to - not that the robot is responsible or could have done otherwise - for which I would reserve the word blame most of the time - which he could not as the issue was caused by a lose cable. [...] than holding a dumb robot responsible. I don't think you can hold a robot responsible without stretching the definition of holding responsible quite far.

naasking 3y ago
> They important word is could not should. I disagree emphatically with the inclusion of "could" in the sense that you are using it. When a mother scolds her child for misbehaving, she's saying the child should have acted otherwise, not that the child could have chosen differently if you rewound time and presented the child with the same choice again. When laypeople agree that someone "could" have done otherwise, they're not agreeing with nondeterminism, they mean that any mentally competent person with common knowledge would have chosen differently given the same circumstances, ie. that there was no mental, health-related or coercive element that was forcing them to choose wrongly. And this should be obvious if you think about it: we have centuries of legal precedent based on exactly this reasoning, and most people find it perfectly reasonable. That's why free will in law will never be overturned, despite what some hard determinists think. Whether people are deterministic is simply irrelevant to such judgments. > not that the robot is responsible or could have done otherwise Frankfurt debunked the principle of alternate possibilities' relevance to responsibility more than 40 years ago. I don't know why people still think it's relevant. > I don't think you can hold a robot responsible without stretching the definition of holding responsible quite far. This sort of exchange is not at all uncommon: Frank: what was responsible for the server downtime? Alice: an update messed up the routing tables on our routers. The intended meaning is very clear: use "who" for blameworthy agents, and "what" for blameworthy non-agents. You can of course say this sort of informal dialogue is imprecise and not in line with formal definitions, but nobody would find it a stretch or confusing.
- danbruc 3y ago
  We are stuck fighting over the definitions of words. And I kind of lost sight of the initial issue. Even if everything is deterministic, human society can only function successfully with the illusion of free will. If we admit nobody can be blamed for their actions, we can't punish them and thus the incentives not to do bad things disappear and the whole shebang collapses. If you kill people, we will lock you up, because we think killing people is bad and we want to prevent you from doing it again. You could just implement and enforce [1] that rule, period. Doesn't even sound unreasonable to me, not even without further elaboration. So when you are saying If we admit nobody can be blamed for their actions, we can't punish them [...] then this can at most mean that we can not punish them with a reasonable justification, we obviously can just punish them. One thing another comment reminded me of is that we are no longer punishing people for what they did, at least not in the sense of some kind of revenge. Anyway, if free will or blame or whatever plays any role, then only for building a reasonable justification for our rules. [1] Ignoring for the moment that you could not actually decide to implement or enforce a rule like that in a deterministic universe - it would either appear out of the previous state at some time or not and enforcement would happen or not.

naasking 3y ago

> They important word is could not should. I disagree emphatically with the inclusion of "could" in the sense that you are using it. When a mother scolds her child for misbehaving, she's saying the child should have acted otherwise, not that the child could have chosen differently if you rewound time and presented the child with the same choice again. When laypeople agree that someone "could" have done otherwise, they're not agreeing with nondeterminism, they mean that any mentally competent person with common knowledge would have chosen differently given the same circumstances, ie. that there was no mental, health-related or coercive element that was forcing them to choose wrongly. And this should be obvious if you think about it: we have centuries of legal precedent based on exactly this reasoning, and most people find it perfectly reasonable. That's why free will in law will never be overturned, despite what some hard determinists think. Whether people are deterministic is simply irrelevant to such judgments. > not that the robot is responsible or could have done otherwise Frankfurt debunked the principle of alternate possibilities' relevance to responsibility more than 40 years ago. I don't know why people still think it's relevant. > I don't think you can hold a robot responsible without stretching the definition of holding responsible quite far. This sort of exchange is not at all uncommon: Frank: what was responsible for the server downtime? Alice: an update messed up the routing tables on our routers. The intended meaning is very clear: use "who" for blameworthy agents, and "what" for blameworthy non-agents. You can of course say this sort of informal dialogue is imprecise and not in line with formal definitions, but nobody would find it a stretch or confusing.

danbruc 3y ago
We are stuck fighting over the definitions of words. And I kind of lost sight of the initial issue. Even if everything is deterministic, human society can only function successfully with the illusion of free will. If we admit nobody can be blamed for their actions, we can't punish them and thus the incentives not to do bad things disappear and the whole shebang collapses. If you kill people, we will lock you up, because we think killing people is bad and we want to prevent you from doing it again. You could just implement and enforce [1] that rule, period. Doesn't even sound unreasonable to me, not even without further elaboration. So when you are saying If we admit nobody can be blamed for their actions, we can't punish them [...] then this can at most mean that we can not punish them with a reasonable justification, we obviously can just punish them. One thing another comment reminded me of is that we are no longer punishing people for what they did, at least not in the sense of some kind of revenge. Anyway, if free will or blame or whatever plays any role, then only for building a reasonable justification for our rules. [1] Ignoring for the moment that you could not actually decide to implement or enforce a rule like that in a deterministic universe - it would either appear out of the previous state at some time or not and enforcement would happen or not.