Grand Thumb Auto XVIII! -IGN.com

[miffy495]

I've hit my head up against that before too. It's not so much that we're going to criticize it though, more that it should be justified in some way.

[DanJW]

I can't remember where I read it, but one of the most enlightening things for me was "the human brain does not make decisions; it makes judgements".

In that model, punishment is good because even without choice, it still influences the judgements. It increases the risk of doing the bad thing, and so increases the chances of the brain judging it not worthwhile - a simple reaction to stimuli, in the end.

I sometimes wish my college had offered philosophy A-Level. Ah well. I loom forward to any of you thesis that you can show us; I will prepare my brain-cooler in advance.

[miffy495]

That's fairly close to where I want to start with all of this. Precisely because potential outcomes are weighed in our minds when determining our judgements, punishment does serve a very useful purpose. Of course, this is not quite the same as making it ethical, which is where I hope to go in the end, so it does get substantially more complicated. Even if you're a strict utilitarian, (probably the most likely group to take this as ethical) it may not be justifiable, as there are situations where utility could be negatively effected in this way. Deontology is founded on choice, so it doesn't really work so well either. Ethics is founded in so many cases on free will, so I think that trying to come up with a determinist ethic is a really interesting (and hopefully possible) endeavor.

[James]

If free will is an illusion, wouldn't that make ethics an illusion too, or perhaps a tool for the social contract?

On the subject of free will, as I see it, whilst free will may be an illusion, it's a mistake to think of this having less agency than we would otherwise. The alternative to having reasons for your actions is pretty much to act randomly, which, whilst free in a sense, is less connected to an individual's identity. It's tempting (for me at least) to assume that, if our actions are all caused by external influences, we are being denied something. But this is to assume that there's some sort of ideal "true self" that exists independent of the experiences that make us who we are. Our entire identities are formed by causal processes, so to imagine that we are external to this system and are being denied something by having our actions hijacked by it is a mistake. But perhaps it's only me who imagines that.

I don't know, I don't really get very far with all this stuff. Still, it's fun to try.

Anyway, good luck on your thesis. It sounds a lot better than my Philosophy dissertation, which was 5000 words of thrown-together claptrap. I don't really have a lot to show for doing that degree, other than a 2:1. Still, I enjoyed it and am glad I took it. I didn't do a great deal of this "reading" of "books" that you're talking about. I mainly just said what I thought and got OK marks because I'm some kind of brilliant mastermind but obviously not really.