Month: July 2018

In his new book, Things that Bother Me, Galen Strawson argues against ultimate moral responsibility (or free will) as follows:

(1) You do what you do—in the circumstances in which you find yourself—because of the way you are.
(2) So if you’re going to be ultimately responsible for what you do, you’re going to have to be ultimately responsible for the way you are—at least in certain mental respects.
(3) But you can’t be ultimately responsible for the way you are. [I will say something about his reasons for this below.]
(4) So you can’t be ultimately responsible for what you do. (p. 113)

This argument goes wrong at the first premise, which is only half the truth. You do what you do because of the way you are, AND you are the way you are because of what you do.  And this explains why premise 3 is also wrong.

Strawson says, “Sometimes people explain why number 3 is true by saying that you can’t be causa sui—you can’t be the cause of yourself. You can’t be truly or ultimately self-made in any way.” The unqualified (“in any way”) claim here contrasts with the qualification he added in number 2: “you’re going to have to be ultimately responsible for the way you are—at least in certain mental respects.” (Emphasis added by me) Why can’t you be truly or ultimately self-made, not in all ways, but in certain mental respects, and thus ultimately responsible for what you do?

I agree that I am not ultimately responsible for being a human with certain physical and biological features, who is male or female, or short or tall, who is subject to physical laws and biological needs and desires. I just find myself in that situation. But we don’t hold someone responsible for being male or female, short or tall, or for being subject to the law of gravity or for needing to eat food, drink water, and breathe air to stay alive. The question is whether I or anyone else is ultimately responsible for the kind of choice as in Strawson’s example of choosing on a particular occasion between buying a cake for a party or, instead, giving the money to a person in obvious need outside the cake store. True, I or someone else could explain the choice I make in that situation as the effect of the way I am in terms of what I most want. I choose to buy the cake because I want the party to be a success more than I want to help someone who wants and needs my help. Or vice-versa. So, we could say that I made the choice I made because of the way I am. But it would take a pattern of such choices to justify the claim that this is the way I am. At any rate, we could say that I am the kind of person who made this choice on this occasion. But what does that add to saying more simply that I made this choice on this occasion? The only thing it could add is the claim that this choice is part of a pattern of similar choices, and that whatever caused the pattern of past choices is what determined this choice and will determine future choices in relevantly similar situations. Unless determinism is true—and Strawson said that his argument is independent of whether or not determinism is true—this leaves it open that I am what caused the pattern of past choices by making those choices. When it comes to what counts for believing someone is ultimately responsible, the kind of person I am = what I do. So yes, it’s true that in order to be ultimately responsible for what I do I would have to be ultimately responsible for the way I am, because what I do = the way I am. This leaves it open that I can do something different from what I have done in the past, so the way I am does not have to be the same as the way I was in the past. That is why, in regards to the kinds of situations in which we normally believe someone is ultimately responsible, I am ultimately responsible both for what I do and for the way I am.

In addition to simply finding myself being a human who is subject to physical laws and biological necessities for which I am not responsible at all, there is another, deeper fact about who I am for which I am not ultimately responsible, and that is which person, out of all the persons there are, that I am. I am not responsible for which person I am. That is just given. This is the sense in which I can’t be the cause of myself. But given which person I am out of all the persons there are, I am ultimately responsible for what kind of person I am = what I do. I am the cause of myself in this way: I am the cause of the kind of person I am.

 

Spinoza asks us to imagine a stone that is moving through the air (say, because someone has thrown it or it has been dislodged and is falling over a cliff) and says that if that stone were self-conscious, it would be convinced that it was moving of its own accord. (And Einstein, following Spinoza, used a similar example involving the moon being self-conscious and believing it had freely decided to orbit the earth.) And this is supposed to help convince us that we are similarly deluded when we think we can freely decide to raise an arm, for example. But when we are pushed by someone else or trip and fall, we don’t think we freely decided to move. And we clearly conceive the difference between, for example,  1) freely deciding to lie down on the ground, and 2) tripping and falling and finding ourselves lying on the ground. Furthermore, if we imagine a stone being self-conscious, we can easily imagine two alternatives in which it is not deluded: 1) it, the magically self-conscious stone, realizes it can never move on its own; 2) it, the magically self-conscious stone, can freely decide to move on its own and also knows that it isn’t moving on its own when someone has picked it up and thrown it or when it has been dislodged and is falling over a cliff. Spinoza’s (and Einstien’s) example should convince no one that free will is an illusion.

What Nietzsche is right about

Selflessness is a bad ideal. (He explains it as cruelty turned inward.)

Morality motivated by resentment is bad.

Rejecting life and longing for nothingness is bad.

If Christianity holds selflessness as the moral ideal, motivated by resentment of the powerful, and rejecting the only life and world as one has known it in the unrealistic hope for an afterworld that is better; then it should be rejected.

It is good, not bad, to want to have more power over one’s own life.

Antisemitism is stupid and boring and born of the resentment of a feeling of inferiority.

What he is wrong about

The will to power is the only real motivation in all living things, including humans. Master morality celebrates the will to power and directs outward the cruelty that it necessarily involves. Slave morality condemns the will to power as immoral, even though it is just as motivated by the will to power as master morality is. It directs inward the cruelty required by the will to power and hence promotes the false ideal of selflessness.

Christianity holds selflessness as the moral ideal, motivated by resentment of the powerful, and rejecting the only life and world as one has known it in the unrealistic hope for an afterworld that is better. Hence, Christianity should be rejected.

God is dead, and we have killed him.

The goal is to overcome oneself as one now is and to become Superman, like the god Dionysus.

Pity is bad.

There is only one world, and we each have only one life, although this same world and life in every detail recurs eternally.

Considerations in support of the claim that he is wrong about those things

From a subjective point of view, there is no discernible difference between living your life only once and never again and living your life over and over again eternally in exactly the same way each time.

If God is dead, that means that what you previously thought to be of ultimate value you no longer believe to be so. But as long as you believe there is something of ultimate value, you believe in God, whether you use that word or not. Thus, to be an atheist is to deny that there is anything of ultimate value. But that is contrary to experience.

Jesus said that the supreme commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind and all your strength and that a second command that is like it is to love your neighbor as yourself. This implies that you should love yourself, because if you don’t love yourself, then loving your neighbor as you love yourself would mean not loving your neighbor. It also implies that loving God with all your heart and all your mind and all your strength and loving yourself are like each other.

Loving God also means loving your life as it has been given to you, with all its limitations on your ability to control things, such as unavoidable suffering, grief, and loss. Thus, your having power over those things is not what is of ultimate value, and the will to power is not the ultimate motivation for everything you do.

There is no good line of reasoning, either deductive or inductive, to believe that you will ever be permanently unconscious, even though there are plenty of good reasons to believe you will die at the end of this life. You have never been permanently unconscious, since you are conscious now, so first-person experience could never show that permanent unconsciousness is a likely outcome; and the nightly and daily transitions from being awake to dreaming and from dreaming to waking up constitute a strong inductive base for the conclusion that the transition from being alive to being dead is probably experienced subjectively as something similar. Therefore, you have good reason to believe you will have other lives besides this one in other worlds besides this one, even though the life you live will always just be your life, and whatever world you find yourself in will always be the one you call “this world.” Alternatively, we may say that this world consists of many worlds and your life consists of many lives. Either way, it is perfectly rational to hope that sufferings you have to endure will be compensated by future as well as past joys, even when the suffering takes the form of sickness leading to death.

There is nothing condescending about true pity, which recognizes in the suffering of someone else the same thing as one’s own suffering. We should all feel pity for each other because we all suffer and die and see loved ones suffer and die. But we should also feel a brotherhood and sisterhood of joy, because it is a good and joyful thing to be alive, and none of us is going to die utterly into nothingness ever.