Free will and determinism: reading about compatibilism

Hitting the bar, thinking about incompatibilism, compatibilism, libertarianism, and free will, I have just read a compatibilist's argument against libertarianism. While I am an incompatibilist "nihilist," to use a phrase I read, surely intended to be derogatory to those with my philosophical belief in incompatibilist pessimism -- I have enjoyed the article, because it slams libertarians. And libertarians, like my father and his father before him, and so on, and probably you, dear reader, are a laughingstock or would be if there wasn't such a consensus in your/their favor. It is a farce, as it was in "The Village," a recent movie.

Libertarianism is a farce for more than just the following reasons. First, libertarians say that people are morally responsible, and have free will, and they say this in different ways but it all amounts to basing moral responsibility on our undetermined free will. My first objection to any such undetermined free will is that there has not been any event known to science that was uncaused. All events are caused -- even libertarians will probably accept this. We cause our own actions; but their thinking seems to break down at that very point, unable to look beyond our knowledge of our actions to seek the causes of our actions. There must be magic at work, that is their argument in a nutshell. It has not been explained yet, but just wait and someday science will have advanced far enough to explain it. I used to believe this; but I had never given the subject much thought, beyond the occassional asking of myself Do I believe in free will? question. Perhaps you have asked this question of yourself. What was your answer? And why do you believe in free will? If you believe in a god, you surely have reasons for that. I press you: what of your belief in free will, does it have any basis in reality? Any at all?

Libertarianism insists that free will can only be had if our choices are undetermined. But why would our choices, unlike most events in the universe, be undetermined? Does not the evidence point to our being like everything else in the world in important ways? Are we not descended from apes? Did not the planets coalesce out of the solar nebula? Are we not born like all mammals? When we look at the things that make us different from the rest of the world, we see that it comes down to our subjective opinions that we are different, that SURELY we MUST be different. We have values, and dreams, and religious belief. But is the anteater not like other mammals, and not completely different from them only because of its particular adaptations for eating ants? We pick a few dreamy, "deep" things to mention when we speak of what makes us human. But do not the things that make us of this world make us human also? Humans are of this world, completely. I give this long introduction because the libertarians are insisting that we have a quality that nothing else we know of, in the entire universe, has. Free will is supposed to be one of the core characteristics of humans. But what evidence is there for free will? I see only a majority of people who believe in it as the only evidence, and that is scant evidence indeed.

An important argument in the paper was that libertarians hold a position based on little but their personal opinions. In fact, libertarianism is the status quo arguing for its preservation. They hold people responsible for what they do because they like to, and any arguments made in their favor are almost always going to be mere rationalizations for what they believe without sufficient reason. "Because I think so," is their argument for free will, and "because I think so" is childish holdover, an instance of our childhood map of the world being carried over into adult life.
If you are libertarian, I forgive you. I am soft-hearted. And you, you are hard-hearted to support the infliction of punishment upon people whose desert of it is questionable at best.

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Now, this is also a good article! Dennett and Taylor have an argument in favor of compatibilism that bends the mind, pushes it to its limit in considering "possible worlds," whatever it might mean to have a "possible" world other than what is. That was in thoughts, that there are in fact no other possible worlds than what is. If determinism is true, and this is the assumption compatibilists address, then there can only be this one world, and so "possible" other worlds are just world-play. The appeal to common sense is just playing with words, in the case of Dennett and Taylor. I found these two articles on Ted Honderich's "Determinism and Freedom Philosophy Website." It has a page rich with arguments for and against free will. Whatever else Honderich is involved in ideologically, these papers were not written by him and do seem to represent important authors of works on the subject of free will. (I believe Honderich to be an incurable leftist, solely because he sides with the Palestinians in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Someday, however, I may be just such a leftist, and I will make no moral claims about his position; what am I but an ignorant student?)

Alas, my control bar has disappeared on my Macintosh GUI. How I will fix this I have no idea. I hope someone at the computing center at Mines can shed some light on the problem. Well, see here now, a little look into the help center on my computer has shed some light, and I have fixed the problem. I am sure I did not change the settings on the control strip settings dialogue page before switching it back to the way it is frigkin supposed to be. I did change to multiple users, and this was almost certainly the cause.

Speaking of cause, the central issue in Thesis 2 of Dennett and Taylor's paper was the distinction between "sufficient" and "necessary" causes. No philosopher, I; but I think there is not very much in this paper except word-play. I must leave the case open for there being something to the distinction between necessary and sufficient causes, because I am not a philosopher; but Dennett and Taylor admitted the vagueness of the notion of cause, and so how important is it to distinguish between necessary and sufficient when the very definition of cause is under scrutiny?