On the dangers of seeing human minds as predictive machines

I should have commented earlier in this discussion that you are presuming an awful lot of certainty about something where I don't think any such level of certainty is even possible. How could you possibly be so confident that some brain procedure would really, truly make a person incapable of murder? And would do so without impairing their capacities in any other respect? I can't even put myself in the position of imagining being in that kind of state of knowledge. So I'm not sure I can even respond to questions about what I would or wouldn't do in such a state.

Furthermore, my comments in this discussion about tyranny are based on historical knowledge about past societies where people have held beliefs like the ones you describe--where they really, truly, honestly believed, with certainty or even with what they thought was a high enough probability, that forcing other people to do something, or forcing some kind of treatment on them, would achieve some obviously desirable social goal. And in every single case in history that I know of, those people were wrong. Not just sort of wrong, not just a little bit off--terribly, horribly wrong; lots and lots of people dying wrong.

So when you describe a scenario in which you say you know, with certainty, or even with high probability (you threw out a figure of 90 percent in another part of this thread--I'll respond more specifically to that there), that you could change a person and make them incapable of murder, by some sort of brain surgery or some secret ray that they can't perceive, or by any means other than convincing that person, through discussion and argument, that murder is wrong, I simply don't believe that's actually possible. So I don't factor such impossibilities into my thinking about what I should or shouldn't do.

> Is it OK for a parent to have their child circumcised? Or have their ears pierced?

Personally, no, I would not force either of those things on a child without their consent.

Circumcision is an edge case because there was a time when circumcision was widely believed to be desirable for health reasons, but that belief is now thought to be false. If a parent sincerely believed it was necessary for health reasons, I would not say they were wrong to have a child circumcised. But such beliefs should be checked very carefully--more carefully than, from what I can gather, people checked the belief about circumcision during the time when that belief was widespread.

> Would you not elect to have your ability to murder removed?

As above, I am unable to even consider this as a real possibility.

Everything you're saying is old hat to anyone as familiar with the literature on free will and cognitive science as I am.

Nothing you are saying is in any way inconsistent with the view of free will I have been defending.

I don't see how this leads to your having to get my consent to make me like vanilla instead of chocolate. If you believed making that change in me would "make a better outcome" with 90 percent probability, by your logic as stated above, you would be justified in doing it without my consent. But you said that case requires consent "absolutely". I don't see how your stated rule does that.

Perhaps I should describe my position on this in more detail. My reason why you should not change my brain without my consent, whether it's to cure my brain cancer or make me like vanilla instead of chocolate (actually in my case it would be the other way around), is that you are not the one who has to live with the consequences; I am. So I should be the one to make the choice whether or not to do it. The only exception, which I have already stated, is if someone has already done harm to others and we are imposing consequences as an alternative to whatever the natural consequences of what they did would be (for example, trying someone for murder and imprisoning them if convicted, instead of letting the victim's family and friends take private vengeance). I'll assume we are not talking about a case where that exception applies in the rest of this post.

(Technically, there is a second exception, cases like the EMT resuscitating a person, since the person is incapable of giving consent. But I've already addressed that: there is a default presumption that the person would consent to being resuscitated if they could. And note that in our current legal system, a person can override that presumption by, for example, having a do not resuscitate order on file with their doctor.)

In the brain cancer example, I suspect you are imagining a case where you have some treatment that can be done easily from a distance without my perceiving it and without any side effects--it just makes the cancer vanish and leaves everything else the same. I have commented elsewhere in this discussion that I don't think such a thing is a real possibility; there's no way you could ever know that there are no side effects with such certainty. (And if you don't, if you're only 90 percent sure that there will be no side effects, then my rule above applies and you should let me make the choice since I'm the one that will suffer the side effects.) But let's assume for the sake of argument that you are certain there will be no side effects; let's say you have a mountain of evidence from past usages of the treatment, easily available and easily understandable by anyone.

But if that's the case, you have no need to do the treatment without my consent; you could just, you know, get my consent. After all, the treatment is a slam dunk from what you're saying; you have this mountain of easily understandable evidence that says it works great and has no side effects. So why not just show me the evidence? After I've seen it I have no reason not to consent, so I'd just consent. And then you wouldn't even have to worry about making a judgment and possibly being wrong. You wouldn't be making the judgment at all; I would.

In other words, your rule, which appears to be something like "if you're at least 90 percent sure that it will lead to a better outcome, you can do things to other people without their consent", requires you to make a judgment whose consequences you won't have to live with, someone else will, and all history shows that that is a very bad idea. What gives you the right to judge on my behalf that, say, 90 percent odds of curing my brain cancer is good enough? That's a judgment for me to make, not you, because I'm the one who has to live with the results. And in the truly slam dunk cases where the results are certain to be good ones, getting consent is also a slam dunk, so "always get consent" still covers those cases.

In short, "always get consent" (in cases where the exception I gave above doesn't apply) is a simpler rule that leads to better results than yours--it does the same thing in the easy cases, and puts the judgment in the hard cases where it belongs, with the person who will have to suffer the consequences of the judgment.