If moral behaviour exists without free will, is it irrational to praise it? [closed]

Question

If moral behaviour exists without free will, is it irrational to praise it?

Intuitively the fact that you have a high IQ is praiseworthy indepedent of whether you have free will, but then by analogy I feel it is not irrational to praise you for your moral behaviour, given the latter still exists.

I think that even without free will we must have some way to order values (e.g. moral behaviour is better than calender counting), else there are no values (e.g. being quicker at calender counting is no better than being slow). In which case, why would moral praise be irrational?

I just don't get what moral weight 'free will' truly has.

Answer 1

Here one has to be careful about what is meant by "to praise".

In a libertarian free will world view, we praise or blame people for making a conscious choice to act virtuously or badly. Sacrifices were made to act morally, and we attribute some merit to it.

On the other hand people don't make a conscious choice to be beautiful or clever (actually those traits can be developed to a point by making choices, but I guess you mean the innate part of it, i.e. being born with a good brain or a nice face). So what we express by praising them can't be that we consider they have merit, but rather that we like them, like hearing their opinions if they are clever or looking at their face if they are beautiful.

In a deterministic world view, the former kind of praise doesn't make sense, since no choices are really made. But the latter form does still make sense, and can be applied to morality as well. Even if people don't chose to act morally, it remains that some people are disposed to act according to our values and some are not (for example through their upbringing, or natural disposition).

In the same way that we like being around beautiful people, we like being around polite, honest or hard working people (rather than rude lazy thieves, I think that much is obvious). This is the feeling we express by praising them.

See Spinoza's Ethics for the moral implications of a completely deterministic world view.

Answer 2

To praise: to express admiration or approval of the achievements or characteristics of a person or thing

In all these cases, the person giving the praise is making a factual statement about THEMSELVES. They are saying "I, in my mind, am in a state of admiration of approval, when I am considering your ..."

Whether there is free will of either the praiser or the praisee does not matter as long as the praiser just expresses whatever they feel themselves.

Similarly, when we observe a behavior of a person, we can praise that behavior as being moral or approve of it regardless of whether that behavior was done by an agent having free will or not. Thus we can also praise the behaviors of book characters, saying the behavior of a fantasy knight in a fantasy world is morally perfect, even though that fantasy knight never existed and also never had free will. We make a statement about an observable (or imaginable) behavior, not about the physical nature of the agent.

"Praising a person" is philosophically still praising a characteristics of the person, such as praising the way they have used their free will to cause a better future than would have happened otherwise. This obviously does not make sense when that person had no free will to start with and had to do what they did in any case.

That would like holding a gun to the head a person and say "Give me your money or I shoot you", and then after receiving the money praise the person for their charitability of giving away all their money selflessly.

That does not mean that we cannot judge ways to apply free will, it just means that in that case of a person without free will, praising the way they used their free will is absurd. Praising other aspects of them is still valid.

Answer 3

If we don't have free will, then our behaviors are simply determined by our previous states. But those states are influenced by the behaviors of others around us. As a simple example, a boss tells an employee to do something, and they do it -- in a free will paradigm, the employee chooses to obey the boss, while in a deterministic paradigm the order causes the employee to take that action.

Praise from others can be seen as just another of those behaviors that influences people's actions. In general, people tend to take actions that result in praise rather than actions that result in condemnation or punishment. So giving praise is rational because it will increase the amount of praiseworthy actions that take place.

Of course, if free will doesn't really exist, then we don't really choose whether to give praise in the first place. It's just another automatic reaction to people doing praiseworthy things. It's not clear that "is it rational?" is even a meaningful question when there's no free will, since you're not actually making decisions.

Answer 4

Yes, we can praise and blame people for being moral, assuming such a thing as moral behaviour exists, but not single them out for what is unique about moral responsibility proper.

Answer 5

In a compatibilist account of "free will" -- which I will try to follow here -- the compatibilist may believe that human beings (at least some of them) become responsible human beings by being held accountable for their behavior or their actions.

Moral behavior can only be asked from moral agents. Humans don't start out as moral agents - but as helpless infants who require moral behavior from their caregivers; they become moral agents, very gradually, by being treated as such, both by being challenged, being held accountable for moral failures and by being praised. (Some cannot do so. There are psychopaths. Some are traumatised by terrible events. Some are abused. There is a huge assumption of unspecified, ill-defined "normalcy" in philosophical talk.)

Determinism seems an overly simplistic, very improbable Theory of Everything. There is just too much randomness in the world and it's not inconceivable that at the quantum-level some events are just purely random events - events that are unpredictable in principle.

But at the level of human interactions -- the level of biology, psychology or sociology --, there are many processes that do exhibit some order and predictability (at least for a while, at least in some regions of space). We want and need to be able to predict events, to some extent, in order to survive as individuals. In other words, we need some form of determinism in our interactions with other humans, other creatures, and with the physical environment we move around in. Moral behavior both presupposes this form of predictability and creates it (or tries to create it). For instance, when I promise to do something, the promise presupposes that I have some control over my future actions. To the extent that I have reliable control, and am a reliable person, that promise makes the future more reliable for the other. -- Any form of relevant indeterminism at this level would be something that undermines this process and the assumptions we generally make.

For example -- If you promise something and I don't know if I can trust you -- since you might be a serial liar, or since you're a fluttery kind of person who changes their actions on a whim--, the promise won't "mean" as much. In this case, I may still blame you, if you don't keep your promise, but my action may not be much more than venting my own anger and frustration - at least it won't be, if I cannot believe that you'll adjust your future behavior.

In short, in a compatibilist account of "free will", "free will" means (or assumes) (1) having agency and (2) having some level of control (over one's own actions and over the environment). Both (1) and (2) presuppose some level of predictability (of the subject's own actions, and of human behavior in general). Having "free will" does not require, in this account, to be able to arbitrarily realize each possible option that one might have in a choice scenario. It does not require any assumptions about one's actual choices not being caused by past events, or not being predictable by others. In fact, in many situations, in particular in moral ones, it's good that we're predictable and we want to make ourselves predictable to others by giving them relevant information (or predictions).

In this account, praise and blame can and will have multiple functions. They express attitude and emotions of the one who gives praise or blame, but an essential function, I think, at least in an educational setting, is simply to give positive/negative feedback. They presuppose that the praised/blamed subject had some level of control over the actions, but also trigger pleasure or pride/shame or remorse which can reinforce the behavior or make it less likely to occur. They are both backward and forward looking speech acts. So, even when assuming a form of relevant determinism, and even if we assume that the agent did not have full control, they may help the agent develop more control in the future.

(It seems relevant to me that when children are praised for something they did well, the praise itself can be given in a sort of playful way, with just a tinge of irony - which doesn't make it insincere or non-genuine :) It's just that we adults know that the child didn't all do it by themselves, or that the little bike had training wheels... This may go "over their heads" a lot of time, but sometimes children can also pick this up, and be a bit puzzled by it. The praise itself can then become part of a more general playful interaction...)

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Praise and blame can of course also have the opposite of the intended effect. If you're praised a lot as child for having certain qualities, you could become vain and insecure, always craving praise, or it could have the opposite effect of making you distrustful of any praise and flattery. Admiring someone else for their moral courage can also have different effects: it can either depress you, since you fail to match up, or stimulate you to try to match up. It's not easy -- belonging to the family of Hominidae. Not being cursed with self-consciousness, just being a happy fish in a world without philosophers mumbling above your heads, might be preferable.

Answer 6

If we take it that detereminism is, for the purpose of this discussion, correct, then free will abates as a consequence. Without free will, the results "achieved" by an agent holds no value, as the agent, technically speaking, did nothing to bring it about. So, praising someone for their IQ is equivalent to praising their shoe size. Both are outside the control of the agent, and so there is no praise to be given, as there were nothing done to achieve it.

When it comes to moral behaviour, the answer depends on your intention of choosing the words "moral behaviour", as behaviour should be the focus when there is no free will, let me explain: When removing free will, the question of how to facilitate positive human interactions still remains(at least if we are to engage in society), but the previously used common apporach(praising results), becomes useless. This makes it necessary to shift from praising the results to praising behaviour. Whether free will exists or not, does not change the premise of human animals, because we are social animals that necessarily interact to survive, regardless of free will. We have a set of predefined, limited functions as we come out of this world, and unless there is a defect compared to the average, the social animal will engage in social activity.

So, for example, when raising a child, you would not praise "getting an A on a math test", you would instead praise "the act of studying for the test" regardless of the result, as studying is what you want to enforce. As the result of a math test is more akin to the result of your IQ (based on your parents), than it is reflective of the effort put in to succeed on a test. (I will grant you that you could argue that "effort put in" is as determined as IQ, but I would counter, arguing that the different factors affecting "effort put in" is similar to nurture than nature, and so, how we treat the behaviour affects it.)

But the biggest shift in perspective that comes from accepting the standpoint of "no free will", is that moral behaviour is represented in society as a whole, not in the individuals powerless to alter themselves. This means your confusion about what moral weight "free will" has, is appropriate, as individual actions are simply a reflection of the morals of the society the individual finds itself in.

Lastly, so as to not drag this on for too long, you will always have some way to order values(as we have not yet had a society without them). But the difference, in my opinion, between values with or without free will is that the former actually gives you insight in to what the actual values are(since without free will we collapse into "simple" animals, and just as you can make a beaver prosper, you can make humans do the same), while the latter gives rise to different ways of expressing moral behaviour (deontology, contractualism, etc.), where the ways of expressing morality that receive recognition holds a piece of the total puzzle. But it is only by removing free will we get to see what the puzzle is about.

Answer 7

Determinism is the idea of a system where every event is completely determined by the previous event.

Determinism does not "rule out" anything, but some things are excluded from determinism:

• Randomness, every event is completely (=with infinite precision) determined.
• Cognitive functions, no event is determined by a non-event (knowledge, feelings, beliefs, wants or plans).

Morality, praise and blame are mental phenomena that are excluded from the concept of determinism.