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Humanity is going to face a reckoning about free will and agency at some point, I think. If the gambler is but a slave to their lizard brain, then isn't the mu

Humanity is going to face a reckoning about free will and agency at some point, I think. If the gambler is but a slave to their lizard brain, then isn't the murderer too? Surely no-one sits down and performs calculus and determines "I will gamble" or "I will murder", they both come from an impairment of our higher senses of reasoning by our baser instincts of rage or pleasure. I'm obviously not advocating for murder, to be clear. But maybe if we better understand our position philosophically, maybe we'll end up with less brutal prisons ("they're not in here because they are ontologically evil, but because their hardware predisposes them to harm others and we have to contain them for the good of the many") and more sympathetic/realistic laws that focus on controlling harm and are less caught up in vague notions of "freedom" (the freedom to have your hardware bugs exploited by gambling companies?) that are too shallow in the face of a better philosophical understanding of what free will and agency look like for creatures whose programming is primarily informed by a billion years of evolution to crave orgasms and sugar.

TimTheTinker 2y ago
I think a large cohort of western society is in active rebellion against the Christian values that came before. This is already resulting in a rejection of the notions of moral agency and accountability (which are not unique to monotheistic religions or cultures). I won't take either side here - just an observation. That aside, there's another dimension that is implicitly getting thrown out as well—and it's one that every well-developed civilization in history respected (including ours, until recently). That's the notion of wisdom as opposed to folly. That is, there are generally commendable and rewarding patterns of attitude and behavior; and there are patterns of attitude and behavior that lead to personal and corporate ruin. Chief among them is the golden rule ("treat others the way you'd want to be treated, and don't treat others the way you wouldn't want to be treated"), which is repeated in just about every ancient civilization's wisdom literature, and which is essential to civilizations and cultures surviving over the long term, not to mention building and keeping personal relationships. This "do what you will, just don't hurt anyone" contradicts thousands of years of wisdom and forgets that it's possible to live well and be remembered with honor.
dwighttk 2y ago
>Surely no-one sits down and performs calculus and determines "I will gamble" or "I will murder What? People do both all the time

TimTheTinker 2y ago

I think a large cohort of western society is in active rebellion against the Christian values that came before. This is already resulting in a rejection of the notions of moral agency and accountability (which are not unique to monotheistic religions or cultures). I won't take either side here - just an observation. That aside, there's another dimension that is implicitly getting thrown out as well—and it's one that every well-developed civilization in history respected (including ours, until recently). That's the notion of wisdom as opposed to folly. That is, there are generally commendable and rewarding patterns of attitude and behavior; and there are patterns of attitude and behavior that lead to personal and corporate ruin. Chief among them is the golden rule ("treat others the way you'd want to be treated, and don't treat others the way you wouldn't want to be treated"), which is repeated in just about every ancient civilization's wisdom literature, and which is essential to civilizations and cultures surviving over the long term, not to mention building and keeping personal relationships. This "do what you will, just don't hurt anyone" contradicts thousands of years of wisdom and forgets that it's possible to live well and be remembered with honor.

dwighttk 2y ago

>Surely no-one sits down and performs calculus and determines "I will gamble" or "I will murder What? People do both all the time