[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.
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.
Whether an agent is moral and whether an action is moral are fundamentally different questions, operating on different types. There are three domains in which we can ask moral questions: outcomes, actions, and agents. Whether actions are moral is about doing the right thing, as we originally thought. Whether a person or agent is moral, on the other hand, is a prediction of whether that agent will make moral decisions in the future.
An immoral decision is evidence that the agent who made it is immoral. However, there are some things that might screen off this evidence, which is what Kant was (confusedly) talking about. For example, if Dr. Evil points a mind-control ray at someone and makes them do evil things, and the mind control ray is then destroyed, then the things they did while under its influence have no bearing on whether they're a moral or immoral person, because they have no predictive value. On the other hand, if someone did something bad because the atoms in their brain were arranged in the wrong way, and their atoms are still arranged that way, that's evidence that they're immoral; but if they were to volunteer for a procedure that rearranges their brain such that they won't do bad things anymore, then after the procedure they'll be a moral person.
Strengthening a moral agent or weakening an immoral agent has positive outcome-utility. Good actions by an agent and good outcomes causally connected to an agent's actions are evidence that they're agent-moral, and conversely bad actions and bad outcomes causally connected to an agent's actions are evidence that they're agent-immoral. But these are only evidence; they are not agent-morality itself.
They're not as different as the majority view makes them out to be. A moral agent is one that uses decision processes that systematically produce moral actions. Period. Whereas the majority view is that a moral agent is not one whose decision processes are structured to produce moral actions, but one who has a virtuous free will. A rational extension of this view would be to say that someone who has a decision process that con... (read more)