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> To kill or imprison someone who had no choice about their actions would be unjust. That is not the problem under discussion. The question actually sits in th

> To kill or imprison someone who had no choice about their actions would be unjust. That is not the problem under discussion. The question actually sits in the definition of "choice". You seem to believe that something constitutes a (moral) choice only if the agent could do it or not without regard to its entire life of experiences up until that point. The more common notion of (moral) choice is that it constitutes any act which an agent takes without being coerced completely into it by some other agent. If my whole life up to this moment caused me to shoot you, that was a moral choice I made. If a dog bites my hand and pushes my finger into the trigger causing me to shoot you, then I didn't make a moral choice to shoot you (however, if someone is holding a knife to my throat and telling me they will kill me unless I shoot you, I'm still making a moral choice if I do so). I should also note that laws don't typically make any mention about whether you had a choice in your actions. A related but extremely different criterion, used in insanity defenses, is whether you understood the nature of your actions at the time of committing the act. This is obviously fully compatible with a deterministic universe: I can understand the consequences of my actions even if I am fully compelled by circumstance to do them. Conversely, a person who is suffering from severe hallucinations, even in a world with strong free will, might shoot you while believing, say, that they are choosing to shoot a water gun at a painting. They made an explicit choice by any definition, but it's not a morally evil act since they didn't understand what they were actually doing.

sanitycheck 3y ago
You say "choice", I say there is never a choice. There is no option, no decision to make, nothing you do is of your own volition, or your responsibility. You are indeed compelled to do everything you will ever do whether that's eating a bacon sandwich or drowning puppies in a bathtub. Understanding is irrelevant and perhaps much of "consciousness" is post-hoc justification. I've brought it back to justice because it's a central pillar of human civilisation, and just looking at the legal system (though my thought is much broader) there are such concepts as "the age of criminal responsibility". What if we say that nobody is responsible for anything? Would we have got where we are now? It's a license to act in an entirely selfish (in the same sense as genes) way.
- simiones 3y ago
  A decision is understood as any point where an agent takes a course of action based on: its perception of circumstances, its evaluation of available options, its evaluation of possible consequences of each option, and its given logic/values/morals. Nowhere in this kind of definition is there some expectation of a "free" choice (one that doesn't depend on the whole history of the agent so far). You can see this definition in contexts like "decision trees" (which no one believes have consciousness or free will), and in common language about algorithms/programs (where people say the algorithm decides or chooses what to show you, for example - again with no illusions that the algorithm has free will).

sanitycheck 3y ago

You say "choice", I say there is never a choice. There is no option, no decision to make, nothing you do is of your own volition, or your responsibility. You are indeed compelled to do everything you will ever do whether that's eating a bacon sandwich or drowning puppies in a bathtub. Understanding is irrelevant and perhaps much of "consciousness" is post-hoc justification. I've brought it back to justice because it's a central pillar of human civilisation, and just looking at the legal system (though my thought is much broader) there are such concepts as "the age of criminal responsibility". What if we say that nobody is responsible for anything? Would we have got where we are now? It's a license to act in an entirely selfish (in the same sense as genes) way.

simiones 3y ago
A decision is understood as any point where an agent takes a course of action based on: its perception of circumstances, its evaluation of available options, its evaluation of possible consequences of each option, and its given logic/values/morals. Nowhere in this kind of definition is there some expectation of a "free" choice (one that doesn't depend on the whole history of the agent so far). You can see this definition in contexts like "decision trees" (which no one believes have consciousness or free will), and in common language about algorithms/programs (where people say the algorithm decides or chooses what to show you, for example - again with no illusions that the algorithm has free will).