Separating concepts is itself a moral action. Moral actions should relate to moral agents. Most of the moral agents who use these concepts aren't here on lesswrong. They include the kind of people who hear ''free will is an illusion'' from a subjectively credible source and mope around for the rest of their lives.
"What happens then when agents’ self-efficacy is undermined? It is not that their basic desires and drives are defeated. It is rather, I suggest, that they become skeptical that they can control those desires; and in the face of that skepticism, they fail to apply the effort that is needed even to try. If they were tempted to behave badly, then coming to believe in fatalism makes them less likely to resist that temptation.
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—Richard Holton[210]
Baumeister and colleagues found that provoking disbelief in free will seems to cause various negative effects. The authors concluded, in their paper, that it is belief in determinism that causes those negative effects.[205] This may not be a very justified conclusion, however.[210] First of all, free will can at least refer to either libertarian (indeterministic) free will or compatibilistic (deterministic) free will. Having participants read articles that simply “disprove free will” is unlikely to increase their understanding of determinism, or the compatibilistic free will that it still permits.[210]
In other words, “provoking disbelief in free will” probably causes a belief in fatalism. As discussed earlier in this article, compatibilistic free will is illustrated by statements like "my choices have causes, and an effect – so I affect my future", whereas fatalism is more like "my choices have causes, but no effect – I am powerless". Fatalism, then, may be what threatens people’s sense of self-efficacy. Lay people should not confuse fatalism with determinism, and yet even professional philosophers occasionally confuse the two. It is thus likely that the negative consequences below can be accounted for by participants developing a belief in fatalism when experiments attack belief in “free will”.[210] To test the effects of belief in determinism, future studies would need to provide articles that do not simply “attack free will”, but instead focus on explaining determinism and compatibilism. Some studies have been conducted indicating that people react strongly to the way in which mental determinism is described, when reconciling it with moral responsibility. Eddy Nahmias has noted that when peoples actions are framed with respect to their beliefs and desires (rather than their neurological underpinnings) they are more likely to dissociate determinism from moral responsibility.[211]
Various social behavioural traits have been correlated with the belief in deterministic models of mind, some of which involved the experimental subjection of individuals to libertarian and deterministic perspectives.
After researchers provoked volunteers to disbelieve in free will, participants lied, cheated, and stole more. Kathleen Vohs has found that those whose belief in free will had been eroded were more likely to cheat.[212] In a study conducted by Roy Baumeister, after participants read an article arguing against free will, they were more likely to lie about their performance on a test where they would be rewarded with cash.[213] Provoking a rejection of free will has also been associated with increased aggression and less helpful behaviour[214][215] as well as mindless conformity.[216] Disbelief in free will can even cause people to feel less guilt about transgressions against others.[217]
Baumeister and colleagues also note that volunteers disbelieving in free will are less capable of counterfactual thinking.[205][218] This is worrying because counterfactual thinking (“If I had done something different…”) is an important part of learning from one’s choices, including those that harmed others.[219] Again, this cannot be taken to mean that belief in determinism is to blame; these are the results we would expect from increasing people’s belief in fatalism.[210]
Along similar lines, Tyler Stillman has found that belief in free will predicts better job performance.[220]"
[I made significant edits when moving this to the main page - so if you read it in Discussion, it's different now. It's clearer about the distinction between two different meanings of "free", and why linking one meaning of "free" with morality implies a focus on an otherworldly soul.]
It was funny to me that many people thought Crime and Punishment was advocating outcome-based justice. If you read the post carefully, nothing in it advocates outcome-based justice. I only wanted to show how people think, so I could write this post.
Talking about morality causes much confusion, because most philosophers - and most people - do not have a distinct concept of morality. At best, they have just one word that composes two different concepts. At worst, their "morality" doesn't contain any new primitive concepts at all; it's just a macro: a shorthand for a combination of other ideas.
I think - and have, for as long as I can remember - that morality is about doing the right thing. But this is not what most people think morality is about!
Free will and morality
Kant argued that the existence of morality implies the existence of free will. Roughly: If you don't have free will, you can't be moral, because you can't be responsible for your actions.1
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says: "Most philosophers suppose that the concept of free will is very closely connected to the concept of moral responsibility. Acting with free will, on such views, is just to satisfy the metaphysical requirement on being responsible for one's action." ("Free will" in this context refers to a mysterious philosophical phenomenological concept related to consciousness - not to whether someone pointed a gun at the agent's head.)
I was thrown for a loop when I first came across people saying that morality has something to do with free will. If morality is about doing the right thing, then free will has nothing to do with it. Yet we find Kant, and others, going on about how choices can be moral only if they are free.
The pervasive attitudes I described in Crime and Punishment threw me for the exact same loop. Committing a crime is, generally, regarded as immoral. (I am not claiming that it is immoral. I'm talking descriptively about general beliefs.) Yet people see the practical question of whether the criminal is likely to commit the same crime again, as being in conflict with the "moral" question of whether the criminal had free will. If you have no free will, they say, you can do the wrong thing, and be moral; or you can do the right thing, and not be moral.
The only way this can make sense, is if morality does not mean doing the right thing. I need the term "morality" to mean a set of values, so that I can talk to people about values without confusing both of us. But Kant and company say that, without free will, implementing a set of values is not moral behavior. For them, the question of what is moral is not merely the question of what values to choose (although that may be part of it). So what is this morality thing?
Don't judge my body - judge my soul
My theory #1: Most people think that being moral means acting in a way that will earn you credit with God.
When theory #1 holds, "being moral" is shorthand for "acting in your own long-term self-interest". Which is pretty much the opposite of what we usually pretend being moral means.
My less-catchy but more-general theory #2, which includes #1 as a special case: Most people conceive of morality in a way that assumes soul-body duality. This also includes people who don't believe in a God who rewards and punishes in the afterlife, but still believe in a soul that can be virtuous or unvirtuous independent of how virtuous the body it is encased in is.
Moral behavior is intentional, but need not be free
Why we should separate the concepts of "morality" and "free will"
- It isn't parsimonious. It confuses the question of figuring out what values are good, and what behaviors are good, with the philosophical problem of free will. Each of these problems is difficult enough on its own!
- It is inconsistent with our other definitions. People map questions about what is right and wrong onto questions about morality. They will get garbage out of their thinking if that concept, internally, is about something different. They end up believing there are no objective morals - not necessarily because they've thought it through logically, but because their conflicting definitions make them incapable of coherent thought on the subject.
- It implies that morality is impossible without free will. Since a lot of people on LW don't believe in free will, they would conclude that they don't believe in morality if they subscribed to Kant's view.
- When questions of blame and credit take center stage, people lose the capacity to think about values. This is demonstrated by some Christians who talk a lot about morality, but assume, without even noticing they're doing it, that "moral" is a macro for "God said do this". They failed to notice that they had encoded two concepts into one word, and never got past the first concept.
For morality to be about oughtness, so that we are able to reason about values, we need to divorce it completely from free will. Free will is still an interesting and possibly important problem. But we shouldn't mix it in together with the already-difficult-enough problem of what actions and values are moral.1. I am making the most-favorable re-interpretation. Kant's argument is worse, as it takes a nonsensical detour from morality, through rationality, back to free will.
2. This is the preferred theory under, um, Goetz's Cognitive Razor: Prefer the explanation for someone's behavior that supposes the least internal complexity of them.