FREE WILL GIVES NO CLEAR ANSWERS AT ALL
If free will, as in the ability
to make a good act or evil act your own, is real that does not tell us much.
Human nature is far more interested in doling out rewards/praise
and punishment/condemnation anyway than it is in free will. Free will ends up
being a hook to hang things on and the hook is largely forgotten.
Free
will could mean that praise and condemnation matter more than actual rewards
or punishments.
It could mean that approval disapproval alone matter.
It does not necessarily mean you earn or deserve anything more than that. And
if it does it does not tell anybody how much or who should decide and why.
Just because somebody has to, does not mean they are accurate or it is their
place.
Straightforward free will does not really answer questions – it
raises a plethora of new ones. The notion that a choice is never just a choice
and other forces are at work, deterministic ones, so that you are only broadly
freely but never exactly free adds a new complication. We may not have the
kind of ultimate control required to truly deserve rewards or punishments - to
the degree that we want to believe people deserve rewards and punishments in
our society. Strong notions of “deserving” are not guaranteed.
There
is no way to, with authority, tell a person what their free will is “for”.
People want to believe morality is more than just a yes or no. But even if it
is, that does not mean that free will is meant to be about that kind of
morality.
FREE WILL – WHAT IF MORALITY IS BINARY?
The idea
of free will (often discussed in philosophy) is about whether we have genuine
choice or control over our actions. But the concept of desert—whether someone
earns or deserves outcomes—is a separate moral question. And we have learned
that desert may mean, “You should have done what you did” or, “You should not
have done what you did.” Or that and more. It is just not simple.
Some
philosophical traditions connect free will and desert tightly. For example,
thinkers like Immanuel Kant argued that moral responsibility (and thus
deserving praise or blame) depends on our capacity for rational, free choice.
If you freely choose, you can be held accountable.
Another view is that
if morality is binary the person may only deserve to be acknowledged as
harming or helping but nothing more. Desert can shrink down to something very
minimal i.e. a person doesn’t deserve reward or punishment, only accurate
moral recognition. Some say that that being told is your reward or punishment
and that is that. They may even add that once an act is done you cannot undo
it so you are best to move on as if nothing happened. That means while you are
not a victim when you do harm, you become one the very second after for you
cannot reverse the act.
Reducing morality to acknowledging
harm/help—naturally pushes toward prioritizing freedom and outcomes over
desert, because once desert is minimized, what’s left is how actions affect
people and what we do next.
OBJECTION:
I said that being
free does not mean your free will is inherently orientated to objective
morality whatever that morality might be – whether graded or binary. Now I am
saying that if morality is not graded, that it is binary, free will cannot be
naturally orientated to graded morality.
SOLUTION:
A calculator
may calculate but that does not mean it is right. A calculator is not
inherently about the real math so free will is not inhernety about the “real”
morality.
And if graded morality is a fake, and morality is binary,
free will has no hope of being inherently connected to graded morality.
One point is about how free will isn’t necessarily about real morals and
the second is that it couldn’t be anyway.