Thomas_More
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You must elaborate on “holding people accountable.” Are you suggesting more than restraint? Are you suggesting punishment?
The necessarian can hold people accountable without accepting they have free will.
People’s desires and feelings are just as much part of the chain of causation as are their actions.
One may be motivated more to hold back from punching someone in the face than motivated to do so. It feels thereby that your will was faced with a choice. In fact, it could but yield to the motive which proved the strongest.
There need be no contradiction here.
Morality is a social construct. The morality of a socialist society would be to leave everyone free to do what is not harmful to another.
You pick Hitler (but you may equally pick Truman or Pol Pot or any other notorious person). While recognising someone has become what they are from a multitude of social and personal factors, one still hates and despises them and would have the moral duty to restrain them.
We know capitalism produces war, and produces tyrants. If we turn down a notch to lower the profile to, say,an average person … If someone in a socialist society were to run rampage, killing people etc., we would know they are sick. That does not mean we let them rampage. If they cannot be stopped without violence, then we would use violence. But the object of our violence would be to stop them, not to punish them.
If someone is motivated to hurt others then that should motivate us to render that impossible by restraining them. We don’t pass moral judgment and sentence them. Once they are restrained and rendered harmless, that would be it. If they need to be restrained indefinitely, so be it. But that does not mean we take vengeance on them.
” .. the most vital argument that the Socialist advances against free will is that its acceptance precludes the possibility of a science of sociology. The Socialist expounds the principle of laws acting behind social causation. If man, individually and en masse, is a creature of caprice, if he thinks and acts independently of his heredity and social milieu, then the search for laws supposed to govern human history, economics and social relations is forever doomed to futility. The acceptance of free will is a flat denial of social science.”
THE WESTERN SOCIALIST.
Nothing new is being offered here; just repetition, forcing me too into repetition of what has already been said, over and over, on this thread.
Please go back and read Cde. Currey’s article again, instead of just showing a desperate determination to rescue the ridiculous notion of free will. Why socialists are so desperate to do so really puzzles me.
These exchanges seem to have the one object of scoring points rather than thinking about the matter, or even bothering to read the messages on the thread, which, of course, explains the endless repetition of the same questions and answers.
Which only, again, shows the absurdity of any free will.
One will not know that which is subconscious, but one can trace the rise of conscious feelings and thoughts from immediate antecedents. In therapy it is done all the time, and what is subconscious can be rendered conscious.
Anyone would think free will is a valid subject for debate, because the notion offers no substance. And, as i have said time and time again, complexity only proves even more the fallacy of the free will myth.
Concerning God, freewill and destiny: Of all that earth has been or yet may be, all that vain men imagine or believe, or hope can paint or suffering may achieve, we descanted.
Percy Bysshe Shelley.
I’m referring to proponents here of a free will, not expecting people generally to retrace their thoughts and feelings.
One can only retrace for a little bit anyway. It is sufficient to admit that every feeling and thought springs from what precedes it. That’s easy enough.Needless to say, a fragrance or a piece of music can elicit the same feelings they accompanied decades previously, and bring back the memory immediately to mind of a particular moment.
I have no problem with a Christian believing in free will, because i know they are obliged to. I would wonder why they are a Christian if they did not.
My problem is with inconsistency, such as avowed materialists ignorantly standing by idealist concepts.All true. And there are many who think they are materialists but are not. They do not analyse their own feelings and thoughts and what lies behind them. If you have a thought or feeling, you should be able to follow it back, for a while, through its antecedents.
Nothing springs from nothing.
All Christians, including Calvinists, affirm free will, since without it the entire Christian doctrine and fable is irrelevant. The whole Christian concept of redemption is based on human free will creating Original Sin. No Original Sin, no need for redemption, no need for Christ.
But, uninformed as usual, you will retort, “What about predestination?”
I repeat again, Calvinism, by “predestination”, is referring to a particular doctrine of its own, that it is predestined who is going to Heaven and who to Hell. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the Necessity vs Free Will debate. (Which debate was settled, btw, in the 18th century, where materialist thinkers are concerned. Advances in the study of organisms, beyond mechanics, only make, i repeat, free will more absurd, by comprehending complexity and its infinite multiplication, beyond mere mechanical physics,of antecedents, causes, effects, motives, subconscious as well as conscious. Free will is an absurdity).” But the plainest common garden use of “free will” just means something like an uncoerced choice made from alternative possibilities.”
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No one can choose other than as s/he chooses, and every choice is a yielding to the motive that weighs most heavily on the will.
One cannot choose in accord with the weakest motive, but only in accord with the strongest. The strongest motive isn’t necessarily the most rational.
Using the term “free will” out of its historical context in the history of thought is just further debasement of and loose use of language, damaging coherence and rendering terms meaningless. Free choice is as foolish as free will. Choice and will, minus the idealist adjective, are however fully consistent with a materialist understanding. There is no First Cause, without being itself an effect, not even the Big Bang, which was surely an effect as well as a cause.
A believer in free will is applying deism to “Man” and to him/herself. Free will is idealist, deistic thought. It is the negation too of historical materialism, which is based on the analysis of social cause and effect, and its application to the human mind too; social movement and psychological changes being all part of the dynamic.But then, since you believe in free will, why not save yourself the frustration and anger of being a socialist and just stop being one? Abracadabra!😄
Since science deals with matter, and motion is integral to matter, any scientist seemingly believing in free will is either interpreting the term differently from the materialist philosophers or else is trying to unite science with religious dogma (and many scientists are avowedly deists). Materialist philosophy has already disproven free will by means of reason.
