Fascinating topic.
re:Voltairine de Cleyre
He says: Our ancestors had one idea about what we are and moderns have another, and they're both sort of stupid. Of course, it depends on the condition these ideas reach us and how interested we are. But this is a common habit of intellectuals: to say every suggestion pretends to be the ultimate answer.
I like the way he says it
Treated as a narrative problem I would in principle state all the relevant options and if they contradicted I would suggest that my mind is probably too limited to figure it out exactly. We have ideas. Ideas are tools. A shovel isn't a pitch-fork, but they both have their uses. In law people need to be held accountable, even if it's rather tragic, but there are limits to what anyone can expect. I'm reminded of the scene in Gladiator:
Maximus: You don't find it hard to do your duty?
Cicero: Sometimes I do what I want to do. The rest of the time, I do what I have to.
It isn't Free Will vs. Determinism its Free Will
and Determinism
and whatever else you've got; fate, justice, virtue, spirit-possessions, holism and chaos. But we're just talking about ideas based on a question about causation though and I have my own line too. Which brings me to Stranger's comment, "I'm with Schopenhauer here, so no free will." That's not my understanding of Shopenhauer's ideas on the matter. As far as I recall he would agree with this:
Everything has a will and the will's potency in the world is its form.
Daktoria wrote:(prisoner's dilemma etc etc)...determinists are making an excuse for their own bad behavior...
A dialect wouldn't be fully functional if it didn't accommodate a tendency to rationalize. The capacity to rationalize has its limits too - regardless if its, "My genes made me do it" or "My sinful nature made me do it" - - people have deeper intuitions and the world has a greater variety of ways of expressing justice than what our calculating minds can grasp.
TCR wrote:The discovery that choices are made before we're even aware of them acts in favour of the determinist argument. However, even if we don't have free will in the sense of the mind/body duality, we still experience the effects of existing - the debate is (in my opinion) quite inconsequential with respect to ethics.
I don't know which discovery you refer to but I don't think that's always the case, it can be the case. It needn't pass through the deliberating part of my brain - what I am - - fate doesn't have mass or location. I think that's what this means.
omh wrote:Actions function without thought.
I think probably it depends on what we're talking about and what we hope to achieve by our talking - whether will or fate is the more useful paradigm. If you want a more technical assessment of the nature of things at that level I would suggest that it seems like as a person grows up and as a people progress they become aware of more and this gives their will greater leverage. That determinism and will are just words for the world and the self. That there are natural limits to will (as I said above, because there are many wills), and expanding these limits is essentially heroic and spirited - fun things while they last but generally dangerous as a matter of setting an example. Every cow has its fence, its easier to be the right size for one's field than it is to assimilate the neighbor's lands, but the latter makes better theater.