On the Conflict Between Determ

The thesis of determinism seems to have dealt a crushing blow to the idea of free will and therefor to our notions of moral responsibility. If it can be shown that our actions are physically determined and therefor predictable (assuming one can be aware of all of the relevant causes and the laws determining them), then presumably our actions lack a kind of freedom necessary for our notions of moral responsibility to hold true. But in the course of this essay I want to show that the consequences of physical determinism have been misapplied to the sphere of ethics. While the truth of determinism might create the illusion that our freedom has been violated, the kind of freedom necessary for our moral practices to remain valid still exists.

Determinism is a somewhat vague concept, so in order to make any meaningful statements I would here like to define more clearly what I take to be the meaning of the thesis of determinism. Determinism requires that everything that exists exists in the physical realm. This argument therefor holds true only for the convinced materialist, the dualist won’t be convinced by this argument. But the dualist doesn’t suffer from t

There is another stance that we take; indeed really the only one we take towards another human being given our hopelessly limited capacity for understanding. This is the Intentional stance, and the benchmark we use when evaluating its applicability seems to be rationality, in other words, whether or not the agents will is free. It is only from this stance that we can evaluate a person’s action as being good or bad, right or wrong, and it is from this stance that we arrive at a reason for someone’s actions as opposed to a cause. Indeed even the word ‘reason’ belies the nature of this stance; the capacities of reason and rationality are so closely linked. Dennett points out that the Intentional stance isn’t necessarily a moral stance, and clearly this is the case, for there are many circumstances in which taking the Intentional stance would be more than appropriate but a moral stance may not be, for example, in trying to predict the behavior of a chess playing computer. Nonetheless, when we take this stance towards a person, it does take on a moral dimension that is inseparable from the stance that we have taken. The reason for this is that, once we have established a person as being a rational being, which is the only situation in which the Intentional stance is appropriate to take towards something, we naturally accept him into the human community (in addition when evaluating a particular action, in addition to assuming a free will, we also assume the action itself to be free as well). In essence, he becomes “one of us”. The consequence of this is that we assume that his behavior towards us is the result of rational deliberation, and that any injury we may suffer by him must either be the result of accident or deliberate malice. Until proved otherwise, we must assume any act of deliberate malice commited by a rational being was the result of a free will and free action

It has become necessary to define more precisely what I mean by rationality. It could be said that many things that people do are irrational, such as jumping off a bridge with a bungee cord strapped to one’s ankle. Or suppose a man walks into a liquor store, robs the clerk of the $100 dollars in the cash register, and then proceeds to kill the clerk. There may be those who can find no rational explanation to such a decision, and yet I still want to say that, barring certain circumstances, this was still a rational action. I want to say that, assuming the man doesn’t suffer from any physical affliction that has impaired his judgement (i.e. schizophrenia or some other mental illness), and that he is operating only upon what Daniel Dennett calls “rationally induced beliefs” (i.e. he hasn’t been hypnotized or had thoughts or beliefs implanted into his brain in some other fashion), then we have no choice but to consider the man’s actions as rational. This is because we have no other choice to assume that his actions were a result of his own beliefs, thoughts, feelings, etc. and thus, regardless of how flawed the reasoning may seem to us, the man still acted rationally with respect to his own particular situation. This may not sit well with some, but perhaps that is because they fail to see things from the robber’s perspective. Perhaps the thief believed that the clerk would be able to identify him as the robber, or perhaps he had some other motive, which might remain invisible to us. At any rate, it is sufficient to assuming rationality that the agent’s actions were a result only of his own rationally induced beliefs and that no physical malfunction exists. It is important to note, however, that to say that someone or something is rational is not to imply that they are perfectly rational (whatever that might mean) but only that they are sufficiently rational, by which I mean that their rationality has not been corrupted in any truly detrimental way.

It might here be objected that this conclusion is only valid under

Some topics in this essay:
Frisbee Suppose, Moral Responsibility, Dennett Intentional, Agent X’s, Gary Watson, Daniel Dennett’s, Daniel Dennett, intentional stance, physical stance, notion free, causal laws, moral responsibility, free action, causal chain, flight path, rationality compromised, notions moral, notions moral responsibility, flight path frisbee, rationality compromised due, governed causal laws, physical stance regard,