On yesterday's post I wrote about Sabine Hossenfelder's claim that free will is an illusion. Whether one is persuaded by her argument or not, it seems to me that everyone, including Hossenfelder, should hope that she's wrong.
Ideas have consequences, and there are a number of reasons why the consequences of determinism being true, or at least the belief that determinism is true, are at best awkward and at worst corrosive to a healthily functioning society.
If determinism is true, i.e. if we really have no free will, if our choices are the inevitable product of our strongest motives which are themselves the product of the totality of influences that have acted upon us throughout our lives and/or our genetic inheritance, and if it is the case that at every moment there's only one possible future, then it would seem that several unfortunate consequences follow.
Some of these were mentioned in yesterday's post, but I'll reiterate:
1. Reward and punishment are never deserved. Imagine the most heinous crime you can think of. On determinism the perpetrator of that crime does not deserve punishment. Society may "choose" to punish him, but only to deter others from committing similar crimes and/or to protect the rest of us from the criminal who may commit such a crime again if he's not removed from society.
Reward and punishment can only be deserved if we are somehow responsible for choosing what we do, but if choice is an illusion and we could not have done otherwise than we've done then the idea that someone "deserves" something is an error.
2. There can be no moral obligations or duties. It makes no sense to say that someone "ought" to do X if he can only do Y. The words "ought" and "should" imply the ability to choose to do X. If determinism is true we can only do what we've been "programmed" to do by our environment and/or our genes.
Moral obligation is contingent upon free will. We can't have a duty to do what we simply cannot do.
3. If determinism is true there's no good reason to believe it's true. On determinism, our beliefs are determined by environmental and genetic influences that we're mostly unaware of, but if this is why we believe what we believe then truth and logic are largely irrelevant. They may have played some role in shaping our beliefs, but we have no way of knowing whether they did or how much of a role they played.
The determinist has been predestined by physical events occurring since the origin of the universe to believe in determinism. It's not a matter of weighing the evidence and choosing determinism because there is no genuine choice to be made. Further, the person who rejects determinism can't be criticized since she was determined to do so by all the influences that have acted upon her. She didn't really "choose" to reject anything.
4. Human dignity is contingent upon our ability to make significant choices. If that ability is illusory then we're little more than flesh and bone machines and there's no room in such a view for human dignity. This is why the 20th century psychologist B.F.Skinner, a determinist, wrote a book titled Beyond Freedom and Dignity.
His argument in the book is that we are little more than glorified laboratory mice responding to positive and negative reinforcers in our environment, and, that being so, we need to get beyond the notion that there's any special dignity in being human. There's no dignity, after all, in being a somewhat enhanced version of a mouse. It is instead rather degrading.
5. The belief in determinism is very difficult to live with consistently. Science writer John Horgan writes that, "No matter what my intellect decides, I'm compelled to believe in free will. Philosopher John Searle declares that, "We can't give up the conviction of our own freedom, even though there's no ground for it."
If we find that we can't live consistently with a belief we should interpret that as an indication that our belief is in some way deficient or incoherent and needs to be modified or abandoned.
