Morality is a problem. The concept of morality now creates greater harm than good. Whereas it was once a useful transparent drive—something we are not aware of—now it has become harmfully deceptive. It masquerades as something that is real aside from our instincts and gives the appearance of fact that is not there. It forcibly asserts its own truth and commands its realness apart from the person—when in fact it is nothing more than the person’s constitution moving the person and that person’s feelings.
Morality requires free-will. If you don’t require free-will, then what you call morality is simply a mistake of action no different from turning on the wrong road. For instance, If I kill my neighbor because he was standing in the road and I didn’t see him, I haven’t done anything immoral. However, if I walk into his front door and kill him by shooting him after planning the assault for days, most people would say I have done something immoral.
In one case I had no intention to kill; in the other I intended to kill. So the immoral act seems to be wrapped up in intention. But, a person who kills another cannot choose their reasons for killing—they simply acted on them. The intention is the beginning of an action. They also cannot will an intention strong enough to stop if they do not have that intention. It is a logical impossibility and a cognitive impossibility that a person wills or intends what they would will or intend. In the case of intending an intention, they would have to intend their first intention.
If I have had no choice in any meaningful sense, because my reasons have been determined, then I have only acted by necessity. If I have acted by necessity, then I have not intended an immoral action; I have simply acted while being aware of an aspect of my own internal causation [This also has drastic consequences for our conceptions of will and action]. If this is the case, then referencing intention is superfluous. The action of killing with or without intent is meaningless in a moral sense because it is no different from an accident. “Moral” simply doesn’t exist as anything.
We feel moral or immoral. Things strike us as right or wrong. It seems to be a built in category to people. We see this, it has certain qualities, it gets put into this natural, empty category with a valence of “morality (good, bad)” attached. It is a feeling with a compulsion attached. However, it doesn’t exist as a real existant thing qua morality.
There is a problem though. Intention doesn’t seem to be a meaningless aspect of what we call “morality” or life. There is something important about it. So why would we have this mechanism—whether built-in, learned or both—that pushes such import on a “moral” agent and on agents intent? Why is there the difference between an intentional action and an unintentional action?
The answer is simple. An intentional action reveals intent which, in turn, reveals the reasons for the action: the stable disposition of the actor. An accident reveals little; an intentional action reveals a complex, thinking entity which is actively seeking harm. It is greater likelihood that Bob, a serial killer, is going to actively seek out a gun and shoot me than it is that Frank, a meek accountant friend of mine, is going to accidentally shoot me because he happend to find a gun in his desk (Bobs prank).
When I go hiking and camping, I’m not afraid of a deer accidentally running me over and breaking my bones. Its unlikely. However, I am concerned about wolves. They are actively seeking a prey. Their internal disposition is to hunt, kill and eat—and eating me is a distinct possibility. Now, lets say that I am a primal man, or a hippy (who hunts), with a wife, children and chickens. If I see a wolf, I am likely to kill it. It represents an active source of danger to my wife (she’s petite and weak.The anti feminist ideal), my children and has already killed several of my chickens. My first response is to kill that wolf because I know its dispositions towards violence. Its intent is to kill as a stable disposition. Not only that, but I will probably actively seek to kill wolves, especially the ones that cross my path, because this reduces the likelihood that I will loose a kid, my hot lady or a meal.
We do the same same kind of mental calculations when we see someone who intentionally has done something wrong, like murder. He is fundamentally dangerous, at his core. He is wrong because he is unsafe to let be loose around us and our children. We condemn any person, or it is adaptive to do so, that reveals such a dangerous character because one we can stop their characters progression towards danger through disapproval or we can end their threat by getting rid of that person.
In addition, you might say that we call lots of things immoral that aren’t directly dangerous, like certain sexual improprieties. How does this fit into the development of need for an idea of objectively moral. However, these people still represent dangers for two reasons: they are not social constrained, and they are not predictable. Immorality, as conceived by many cultures, typically revolves around acts which if left unconstrained would result in danger. And they reveal a lack of inhibition. If a person can’t keep it in his pants, like he has sex with any one he meets who is willing, he shows that he is not able to regulate his sexual desires—which could lead to incest, rape, hurt emotions (like jealousy) or a break down of certain social constructions, like marriage (which in times past was necessary for raising children and giving the male reproductive rights).
When a person violates social constructions, they reveal this lack of inhibition for one, and they reveal that they might not care about the constraints that the people find safety, reward and significance in. We consider them morally wrong because they break down our ability to make stable social structures. For instance, we may call a liar immoral because he always intends (acts out of his personality) to lie and that lying will be consistant. He is completely unpredictable. He may not directly harm you, but he can indirectly harm you by giving you bad information, violating a contract or slandering you. He is a threat to a stable culture.
This has many implications for justice. We are sentencing prisoners to death or imprisonment because some of us believe they deserve it and this is the natural reciprocity of justice. However, if we saw them as flawed, we might seek to fix the flaw rather than cage or eliminate it. Our methods would be different. If a prisoner is metaphysically immoral in a sense we cannot ever even have access to, because it is part of free will for he is evil, then we will seek to completely destroy him from our midst. If he is not constituted right for the context of the culture and the autonomy of other people, but the reasons for this failure are things we can address, we would look for ways to fix that person and head off others who would develop like him.
Believing in an objective morality was once highly beneficial and adaptive; however, now it may not be. The above example shows that a clear elucidation of what we are talking about when we talk morals can change the ways we look at a situation. If I keep looking wolves in the same old way, I might wipe them out and destroy the food-chain destroy my sustenance; If I see one person as moral or immoral objectively, then I might kill off someone that reveals a solution to the overal problem; or I might accidentally confuse something as wrong and dangerous that is not and destroy it. Many wars have been fought on the grounds of objective morality. This side believes that that side is wrong, vile, objectively immoral and the other side feels the same about that side. They cannot fix the issue, to have peace, because they cannot see the other side as being something that they can integrate: for that side is fundamentally bad. If something is fundamentally bad, in a way that is out there somewhere in free-will-land, and hence not fixable, then the only way to solve the issue is to dominate or destroy the other side.
If we see problems as reconcilable within the objective modifiable world, then we will, given our general human constitution, seek fix that problem. For we wouldn’t see a person or nation as fundamentally bad, but, instead, as a problem with reasons that can be fixed. To see our world outside of the moral instinct, allows us to see it in the larger context and solve problems that are problems and ignore what are only apparent problems. We’ll seek to understand wolves as wolves and see their greater part of the ecosystem or as our potential and useful pets. And, if it turns out, we simply cannot survive with certain wolves, like serial killers, we can always destroy that threat—but, we need to make sure we are not creating a bigger one.
The problem of placing intrinsic qualities, like morally good or morally bad, is that they are not fixable except by elimination—which could create greater atrocities to human flourishing—because you simply cannot chose to compromise with evil. It is intrinsically bad, completely un-choice worthy. However, if we bring moral down to the level of pragmatic in the context of human empathy, we will see problems that have far more solutions than an either/or choice. Morality presents us with false dichotomies. We need more than dichotomous thinking in a complex society, where we have evolved in or structure and even biology, beyond the day to day living of a simple forager or pre-modern. We simply can’t deal with macro problems with micro concepts.
Joel:
Before I decide to fully engage, since we both know how long and time-consuming they can be, I have a few questions for you; both questions will be yes or no questions.
(ONE) Do you believe the following statement?
The type of facts that science gathers are the only type of facts that exist.
(TWO) And do you believe the next statement?
Actions are determined, even if one feels that s/he wills them.
Let me know when it’s convenient. Thanks.
Nick
One: No and Yes. No, Science can’t give you access to knowledge of phenomenological entities. There is a whole realm of facts within the qualitative can’t be put into scientific facts, like “I exist”. That is true or false. I can assert it, but that isn’t something that science can discover or even categorize. It is meaningful and only accessed first person. Scientific inquiry is necessarily 3rd. Science, however, gives us reasons for beliefs about the world (aside from qualitative, intentional entities) and without those facts we have no reason to believe something out there in the world is true or false. We can not make any meaningful judgement at all.
Two: This is slippery. Yes, they are determined, as in the agent doesn’t determine her own reasons; however, the agent makes decisions out of the agent herself, out of the reasons that are constitutive of the agent, and is conscious of them, so in some sense she is free. She operates out of reasons and feels the process. She is process and physcially autonomous with a sense of that autonomy. She knows that the reasons come from within.
However, say we made a analogue computer conscious of its own processess: As its processes built up and coalesced towards a unified image that stimulated another process of moving a printer bar, which it felt, it would feel that it had made its choice to move that bar. But, this machine would not be able to have a free will—though it willed from its nature—in any morally relevant sense.
There’s a lot going on here. What’s your thesis?
Join me here for a focused question:
“There is a problem though. Intention doesn’t seem to be a meaningless aspect of what we call “morality” or life. There is something important about it. So why would we have this mechanism—whether built-in, learned or both—that pushes such import on a “moral” agent and on agents intent? Why is there the difference between an intentional action and an unintentional action?
The answer is simple. An intentional action reveals intent which, in turn, reveals the reasons for the action: the stable disposition of the actor. An accident reveals little; an intentional action reveals a complex, thinking entity which is actively seeking harm. It is greater likelihood that Bob, a serial killer, is going to actively seek out a gun and shoot me than it is that Frank, a meek accountant friend of mine, is going to accidentally shoot me because he happend to find a gun in his desk (Bobs prank).”
An intentional action reveals intent [?] which reveals the reason for action [?]…and, in cases marked by some sort of intent, the reason for the action is the stable dispositional of the agent? Are you sure that’s right? Please explain this further.
Paul:
Actually, I meant to keep this for a little while longer. I didn’t want to post it so soon. but, since my time is limited and I accidentally posted this post prematurely, I figured I would leave it. You are right—there is too much going without expanding it to a larger paper and allot of editing. However, the point you mentioned is an important one. And it is one I want to explore.
Clarification: Ok this isn’t perfect for many times people don’t reveal so much about dispositions as about life events and context. However, most of the time the populace will still consider this as a stable disposition. By in large most people would consider a man who walked in and found his wife cheating and then killed the cheaters as less of a disposition towards violent actions than they would someone who walks in and finds a married couple in bed and kills them.
We may not know what stimuli stimulated the intention, but if we did, we could know something about the way that being processes information and acts on it. It wouldn’t be a perfect match between our predictions of their stable nature, but it would be a functional one. Input and output says something about the processor. So, it is statistical: we have a greater likelihood of eliminating danger if we assume that the output isn’t a random blip in the function of the agent but is a part of the stable dispositions—especially in cases like murder.
And as a logical point, we wouldn’t talk about actions (rather than reflex or sleepwalking) if they didn’t have intentional reasons a priori in action. there wouldn’t be an action without the intention, and the intention wouldn’t be the agent’s intention if it didn’t reveal some stable state of the agent and therefore it wouldn’t be the agents action.
Thanks for your response.
I don’t understand your use of “a priori” here. I’m not saying that the claim is invalid, but rather that I don’t understand the claim…i.e., I don’t know what it means. It looks to me that your claim is something like:
“We would not talk about conscious, deliberate actions if they did not have intentional reasons.”
…and I think that’s fine. Is that what you mean, though?
You write that:
“[T]here wouldn’t be an action without the intention, and the intention wouldn’t be the agent’s intention if it didn’t reveal some stable state of the agent and therefore it wouldn’t be the agents action.”
The first claim (in this second quotation found immediately above) looks fine since you’ve made clear that you aren’t thinking of actions that are reflexive or subconscious, like sleepwalking. But what do you have to say about actions that are consciously performed but the agent “did not meant to do it”? Are such claims on the part of the agent mere lies? In other words, what do we render as accidental? If you’ve covered this point elsewhere on the page, I do apologize — please direct me there.
Now, is your second point in this (second) quote right, though? Do all intentions reveal stable states? That’s one of the real “hooks” of your claim. The structure of the claim rides on that sole piece. I won’t contest your point that an agent’s intention needs to refer to her…because that seems self-evident.
Paul:
I’m sorry I didn’t see this comment for a while. I’ve been lost in comments and work.
“A priori” is just to show that it is part of the necessary conditions of action to have intention. It is a precondition for an action. And, you need go no farther than the concept of “act” to find that intention is necessary. The actual correspondence of intention with action, barring some sort of confounding, intervening factor, is what separates action from mere movements.
So, yeah, I get your paraphrase is correct.
As far as purely accidental “actions” that happen while conscious, I’m not sure I entirely understand what you mean. I think that you can act on an intention without accomplishing your goal. But, this in no way effects the nature of the action. In that case you would look, if you had that kind of access, to the original intent, the agents original desired outcome.
If you are talking about something like a genuine crime of passion (as a concept), well, that’s complicated. I don’t think crimes of passion, where a person seems to fall into some sort of proto agency, they are full operating out of their internal reasons. Learning in human beings in highly contextual and in psychology they have something called strong situations. If you fall outside of the context of your learning, such as finding your wife with another man, you may not have access or time to access the entirety of your cognitive faculties. So the agent is operating out of primal motivations without trained inhibitions.
And, do all intentions reveal stable states? Bar a wild binge on LSD, I would say yes. However, what that reveals would be difficult to answer. Real access problem. Like in strong situations, it reveals something about the agent, like the limits of their full agency.
But, is it necessary, logically, that it reveal a stable state of the agent. Yes, if it didn’t it wouldn’t be the person intending. If you intend something and it is your intention, then you do it qua you. You needs some stable “I” or it wouldn’t be you. So if it is your intention, then this intention is out of your nature. If it is out of your stable nature, then it reveals you (again, access interpretation problem). Stability is key. If I said well she intended such and such, but this reveals nothing about her—this would sound really strange. If for instance, it didn’t reveal some stable nature, it would be more like random chance, a seizure, from an external stimuli than her intention, and thus not really her intention.
Oh, and, Paul, I’m aware there are some personal identity problems here. But, it is not necessary that stable means that the person has to be static, completely non-changing. Stable is more like dispositional through time and embodied in the moment.
Sorry — correction: “stable dispositional STATE of the agent”
Joel:
It sounds, then, like the agent does not “make decisions” (your words) so much as “experience” or “witness” decisions from the first-person perspective. (I suppose you could also say one is “conscious of” their decision…but that might imply they have authority over the decision…which does not seem to be the case in your reply).
If this is the case, then the only things unique about your decisions as opposed to, say, mine are (a) that you “witness/experience” your decisions first-person and (b) your organic matter — ‘in’ which the decision takes place — is not identical to my organic matter.
Fair enough. I could accept this as possible. If I accept this is actual though, I should give up philosophy. After all, everything I say or argue would merely be determined. Philosophy would be not so much as people trying to make cases for things as much as cases flowing deterministically (in some form of language) from organic matter.
The only value of it might be entertainment — “What will flow determinedly from the philosophers’ organic matter next?!”
Am I wrong?
Yeah, you’re wrong—kinda. I don’t think it changes anything in daily living to say what I have said. I am still doing something out of my nature. I am still thinking, acting and seeking stimulations. I think that free-will as required by moral responsibility is a stronger sense than we require in real life. I don’t have a problem with the fact that underlying processes, or reasons, determine my actions. I am acting out of my nature—some of which I have been conscious off—some of which a can have access to. I am still an autonomous (spatially and consciously sperate) entity operating to fulfill my own desires, and conscious of the fact they are my desires. I see myself in my intention (building to action or conscious representation) and I can see my unique intention embodied in my action and its effects. I can see desire build to intent to action, build to action, and action build to effect—all of which represent my internal processes and feed back into them in a conscious and unconscious way.
We are still always going to seek our desires and needs or we are going to go extinct. I don’t think you can accept that your are simply a flow of necessity. It think it is rather impossible. You always have a sense that you are acting. You are hardwired to sense your own freedom. And in one way that freedom in correct: you are your own person, operating out of your own constitutive reasons, your own instantiation. But in reality, you are consciousness constrained by the necessity of being an actor: you will always have reason out of which you will—or else you willed your first intention. Any actor, in all possible worlds, will necessarily be like this. It is the precondition of being an agent; although it certainly isn’t an agent in the free-will, morally relevant sense. Unless, you redefine the concept of morality.
No matter how many words you use, it still seems like you are saying [free will] and ~[free will]. I concede that this could be a result of me not being nuanced in my understanding of the topic.
Could it be that you are saying [this type of free will] and ~[that type of free will]? If so, I am not quite seeing the distinction yet. Again, this might be my shortcoming.
Could it be [determined will] and ~[free will]?
Would this not mean [will] and ~[responsibility]?
I drew out a big argument, but I am not going to post it here. I will wait for a bit and write it well because it is a little crazy and I am not comfortable with my use of formal logic, yet.
But, its more like this: Will in the common sense, the way we feel it, is that we act because we want to. We don’t question our reasons we simply do what we desire (omit confounding circumstances). We don’t question the reasons out of which we desire and will; we simply move in that direction.
So to them, when not talking about morality, will is just reasons in change, or a changing conscious process that is represented as theirs. There will, all of our will is [I determine (action)], but free-will demands [I determine (the reasons out of which I determine)]. So free-demands an impossibility, so ~[freewill]. However, there could be a common notion of will that is correct: I desire a thing and move in that direction. But, even this seems to imply a separation between the willing and the reasons.
This seems wrong. Willing is probably best described as reasons in activity. I believe that reasons are logically prior to willing, but willing is epistemically prior to reasons. And, that willing is just activated reasons and simple reasons are simply inactive a priori conditions. So there isn’t anything such as our common conception of will: it is just the process with quality leading towards outcome.
So: ~[will] and ~[freewill] and ~[responsibility]
But we are process of material and qualitative (conscious) change where the agent is partially aware of certain underlying reasons for what they do through conscious representation that proceeds towards action. We are only free in a sense that we are separate, in form, motion and consciousness, and conscious of that separation. [I determine (action)] as a unity of reasons in process and conscious awareness of aspect of that process out of the separated entity is what counts as willing to me (redefined by me), but there is an unnatural separation of these implied in the term will. So there is a will as I newly defined it (if that is a new distinction–probably not), and the term will as commonly used requires an unreal, deceptive distinction, so ~[will as common term] but [will as conscious process], where it is a logical impossibility that the “willer” has control over the reasons for willing.
This still may not be clear—if so I am sorry—I’m a little rushed.
I see that the other responses are focusing on “intent” and “free will”. My comment takes a different tangent.
Here is a quote from Joel Marks in the Philosophy Now magazine issue 81:
“I am still for the elimination of morality, even though I approve the idea of bounded codes. I wouldn’t want to call them ‘morality’ because of the heavy baggage that terminology lugs along with it.”
In an interview (I heard) an author was asked if her books had a moral theme (or something like that). She said that she didn’t like to use the word moral because people have tended to use that word to be less loving. She expressed it a lot better than I am paraphrasing. After that, I wanted to quit using the word “moral.” I think the group that calls themselves the “moral majority” gave the word a bad name since that group seems not so loving. BUT…maybe it isn’t just recently. I think of the Salem witch trials and the inquisition etc.
Life without love isn’t worth living. Love of nature. Love of literature. I am using the word “love” to mean that spark that gives us a pleasant feeling. Morality (or as Joel Marks says “bounded codes”) are just good manners whose goal is to allow everyone in one’s society (or community) to find and enjoy his/her version of love.
Of course, the philosophical question is how do we define “everyone.” Do animals qualify? Do humans that seem to have evolved with NO empathy qualify? When two citizens of the society have conflicting desires, how is it decided what is to be done? Certainly the wolf has conflicting desires to the farmer. Certainly the banker that wants to take huge risks to make huge money has conflicting desires to the taxpayer that bailed out his “too big to fail” bank. Was the banker’s greed immoral?
I like your conclusion or at least how I understood it. The false dichotomy should be avoided. Some things don’t have easy answers but it doesn’t mean we should quit trying.
What does it mean when you put ~ ?
Usually a negation.
which is prior..thinking and controlling of course should be!
https://unfspb.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/moral-responsibility-vs-moral-judgement/#comment-9591