Walker wrote: ↑Mon Sep 04, 2023 8:19 am
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Sep 01, 2023 5:57 pm
That's an assumption, not a truth. In practice, we all act as if it isn't true, and nobody lives as a Determinist. So the burden's on the Determinist to show why we're all crazy, and that Determinism, not our decisions, make everything happen. However, if he succeeds, he fails: for he would then have made us "change our minds," which we cannot do, if we are Determined.
So again, the whole idea of that falls apart right away.
One makes decisions because one must. One thinks, because one must. One edits and changes formatting because one must. It's the nature of the beast.
That's purely assumptive from the Determinist side. If one is not a Determinist, or is even prepared to question Determinism, that confidence falls apart immediately, because although Determinism cannot quite be disproved, it can never, ever be demonstrated either. This makes it a completely gratuitious and unscientific hypothesis...at best.
But the situation for Determinism gets one step worse, even than that: for the fact that no human being ever succeeds in living as if Determinism were true creates at least a first-glance doubt about the possibility of Determinism being true, if not a significant sociological argument against it, as well. And against these objections, Determinism, being unprovable, is powerless.
That is, for anybody who's willing to doubt Determinism. For those who are not, there is no cure.
The compulsion of morality is commonly called, conscience.
However, conscience doesn't "compel." It only
pleads. Our sociological experience of that is that we can choose to listen to conscience or violate it...as often as we wish, in fact. Very few phenomena are so commonly reported as that a human being felt the twinges of conscience about something, and then decided to do it anyway.
So conscience is obviously not Deterministic. If there is any Determinism involved, it would have to come purely from what has been called "antecedent conditions," meaning the physical-material arrangements of brain and body chemistry, not from the pronouncements of some ghostly urging known as "conscience."
I do know people for whom, I think, that is the chief attraction of Determinism. For example, I know one wife, now married to a dear friend, whose misspent youth has been reshaped by her into a story of "I couldn't help it, because Determinism." But I think such rationalizations are pretty evidently not rational. They're emotional.
Even though her need is to rationalize the past, she is still responsible for her actions, even though her need may not be consistent with an abstraction call Determinism.
No, that's not so.
Even in a human court, if a person simply had no other choice than to do what he/she did, there is no criminal possibility involved. The woman I know seems quite aware of this: and that's what she seems to find attractive in Determinism. If she could not help doing what she did, if there was no "otherwise" than there was, in fact, then she's off the hook. She can't be made responsibility for something she didn't choose to do, but "antecedent conditions" made it impossible not to happen.
Insanity, childhood, and ignorance are mitigating factors in the punishment of wrong doing and in the decision of what to do with the miscreant, however these factors, or mitigating circumstances, do not absolve responsibility for the doing.
Actually, yes, they do. They do so entirely. If you were insane, incapable of understanding, or completely unaware of what you were doing, then you don't only not go to jail; you don't even get charged. The insane go to a care facility, the incapable are put under the supervision of parents, and the completely unaware are let walk free. But none of them go to jail...and with good reason: it would be a gross injustice to blame somebody who had absolutely no volition in the matter...which is what Determinism requires us to think is true of every action that has ever taken place.
One cannot have any "responsibility" when one had no "response ability."
The woman would need at least the CHANCE to respond differently than she did, before anybody -- from a court to her husband -- could justly say, "She's responsible for it."
Determinism acknowledges no chances at all.
