Can retribution be justified without free will?

Question

Without free will, our behaviour would be no different from any other natural phenomenon, Sam Harris and other determinists claim: https://i.stack.imgur.com/DSVFq.jpg

“Compare the response to Hurricane Katrina,” Harris suggested, with “the response to the 9/11 act of terrorism.” For many Americans, the men who hijacked those planes are the embodiment of criminals who freely choose to do evil. But if we give up our notion of free will, then their behavior must be viewed like any other natural phenomenon—and this, Harris believes, would make us much more rational in our response

Although the scale of the two catastrophes was similar, the reactions were wildly different. Nobody was striving to exact revenge on tropical storms or declare a War on Weather, so responses to Katrina could simply focus on rebuilding and preventing future disasters. The response to 9/11, Harris argues, was clouded by outrage and the desire for vengeance, and has led to the unnecessary loss of countless more lives. Harris is not saying that we shouldn’t have reacted at all to 9/11, only that a coolheaded response would have looked very different and likely been much less wasteful. “Hatred is toxic,” he told me, “and can destabilize individual lives and whole societies. Losing belief in free will undercuts the rationale for ever hating anyone”

Are there philosophies that defend hatred and retribution even if "free will" didn't exist?

Answer 1

If free will is absent because of determinism, hatred and retribution - when they occur - occur inevitably. Any rationalisation and/or justification which takes place is also inevitable.

So, yes, hatred and retribution can be rationalised and justified in the absence of free will, but no-one has any say over whether or not this occurs.

If we talk about the experience of coming to believe that no free will exists, many people will as a consequence likely come to believe that hatred and retribution are irrational, as without free will there can be no moral responsibility.

Retribution and hatred however are deeply embedded human intuitions which have the capacity to exert themselves upon the psyche in the face of logic and reason.

It is quite possible - if not likely - to come to believe we have no free will whilst remaining prone to habitual/instinctive emotional responses which contradict this belief.

Answer 2

Clearly anger at the weather is pointless, but retribution against a (seemingly) self-aware individual may have the effect of changing the future behaviour of that individual, or those associated with them. Anger and vengeance are the emotions that lead us (rightly or wrongly) to exact retribution.

Answer 3

I mean at the risk of either playing captain obvious or saying something really stupid. But isn't he defeating his own statement? Like if you were to accept determinism and reject a free will and a personal agency, wouldn't that also mean that you lack the agency to act coolheaded? That the hatred and the retribution is also the only response that you were able to give? Because it was determined?

Answer 4

It's unlikely you'll find philosophical positions that rationalize hatred and retribution; I certainly can't think of any. Philosophy as a field aims at individual wisdom and social harmony. Those terms may be disputable and ill-defined, but few if any people would hold that hatred and retribution are wise and harmonious. People argue that these are natural human inclinations — a pragmatic realpolitik that we must acknowledge, control, and occasionally excuse — but no one assumes they are part of 'the good' that we strive for as individuals and communities.

When we get to Sam Harris and the other prominent secular determinists, we have to remember that they are pundits more than philosophers: they are not following reason to discover any underlying wisdom, they are yoking reason to a specific agenda and trying to drive it. Harris is notably intelligent by pundit standards, granted, but he's conflating issues here to get to the point he wants, and it doesn't really hold water. I mean, consider this passage by itself:

But if we give up our notion of free will, then their behavior must be viewed like any other natural phenomenon — and this, Harris believes, would make us much more rational in our response.

In effect, he's saying that if we think of the 9/11 attackers as objects without free will, no more evil or culpable for the destruction they caused than a major hurricane then we can have a 'rational response'. But what does 'rational response' mean here, except that:

1. we consciously choose (as an act of free will) to behave in more moral fashion, or...
2. our deterministic response to the event will be more 'rational' if we consciously choose (as an act of free will) to see the 9/11 attackers in this different light.

In fact, while i can see Harris trying to be kind here — he wants to encourage a less violent response by getting people to shift from the 'evil' model to the 'natural disaster' model — he's actually setting up the context for genocide. We endure natural disasters like hurricanes with grace and compassion because we don't believe we can do anything about them. But consider a natural disaster like a swarm of locusts. We don't think locusts are evil, and we are happy to assume that they are just deterministically doing what locusts do. But that understanding doesn't stop us from extirpating locusts as brutally and efficiently as possible. If we remove the concept of will from those who commit acts of terrorism, they become nothing more than a plague of vermin that we might 'rationally' stamp out without remorse.

What Harris misses — or possibly merely avoids as an inconvenience — is the point that hatred and retribution are de facto dehumanizing moments. The act of dehumanizations implies removing the capacity for choice and imputing a disposition to bad behavior. It makes no difference whether we conceive of that dehumanization as 'deterministic' or 'evil'; in either case the other becomes a robot-like cipher bent on doing what we consider wrong. Only by imputing the capacity for free choice to others can we ever hope to find non-violent solutions to such tragedies.

Answer 5

When anything is done to us, there will be a repertoire of possible reactions. We should pick the one that makes us feel best in the long term. Irrational hatred, or irrational fear, or stupidity, can restrict that repertoire and affect our choice of the best reaction.

Then it depends on the actual case. Shooting bullets at a hurricane is quite stupid (but may make us feel better). In the case of terrorism, looking for a peaceful solution may be better in the long term, maybe not. Blind hate might make us fight terrorism in a non-optimal way. And it may be rational to pretend to be full of hate and respond in an exaggerated way if the opponent doesn’t want to be at the receiving end of that response again.