Regarding your last two questions: I don’t care for the binary framing. By framing these prescriptive questions as a matter of degree, we can get a lot further. I’d ask it this way:
To what degree is it reasonable to hold people to prescriptive standards given the presence of imperfect conscious awareness, limited volition, and constrained rationality?
When one keep these realities things in mind, it can challenge us to better talk about what we mean wrt accountability.
Some might suggest that “the buck stops” where free will begins. Such a statement requires a lot of unpacking.
I don’t have room to unpack even a small fraction of the ideas in play here. So I think I’ll end with a few things.
1. In the United States popular culture (for example) there is an assumed but unexamined belief in conscious free will. This does not hold up to philosophical nor scientific scrutiny.
2. Unfortunately, simplistic moral claims have a tendency to shift our thinking away from good analysis towards judgmentalism. Many people here on HN know how to reason under uncertainty wrt debugging or attack trees. That same level of rigor needs to be used when analyzing human behavior and ethics.
3. When I say accountability, I think
analyzing it in a consequentialist way might be the most useful.
For example, if someone drives particularly dangerously and puts others at risk, some interventions are justified. The calculus can be very complicated, and some of the key data may not be known with sufficient confidence. But I do think there are core principles that apply. I would say the dangerous driver might “deserve” a license suspension, for example, not because they had the free will to do otherwise, but because of the consequences.
There are lots of interesting ways to understand dangerous driver scenarios.
A. Take the exact same person and compare their behavior while seated in 150 hp vehicle as compared to a 400 hp vehicle. The latter environment provides more temptation and more opportunity for dangerous driving. Is an individual who opts for the quicker car thus morally culpable to some degree? Or does does it depend upon their levelheadedness and driving skills?
B. In some sense, our entire infrastructure in history that led up to incentivizing automobiles is a huge factor in predicting behavior patterns, vehicle and pedestrian accidents and deaths, inefficient land use, and more. How much blame should we “dole out” particular individuals over the course of history that led us here?
C. In some situations, it could be argued that driving is immoral, particularly when you have other options for transportation. This is kind of a raw deal for the individual who had nothing to do with how we got stuck in such a situation. But it also demonstrates that some people may hold individuals morally responsible even though one person are only a tiny part of the situation. This highlights how individualism run amok and unscientific views of free will can sometimes sabotage comprehensive rational thinking about ethics. To speak very loosely when I see an accident on the road, it is easy to point to the proximate causes such as a distracted driver or worn out tires. But we must not overlook the deeper systemic causal factors. If we want to progress as a society, we need to solve problems, not scapegoat.
## My Take
An unexpected benefit of dispensing with free will is that judgmentalism doesn’t get in the way of solving problems.
In this view, we justly lock up criminals not because they could’ve done otherwise. We lock them up for the exact opposite reason: their brains and bodies make the unacceptable behavior a predictable pattern at some level.
