Separate morality from free will

All I'm getting from this is "the term 'morality' is hopelessly confused."

Talking about morality causes much confusion, because most philosophers - and most people - do not have a distinct concept of morality. ...

I think - and have, for as long as I can remember - that morality is about doing the right thing. But this is not what most people think morality is about!

And more in this vein. I really dislike this post. The author proclaims that he is shocked, shocked that other people are wrong, even though he himself is right. Then he proceeds to analyze why almost everyone else got it wrong, without once trying to justify his own position using any argument other than professed astonishment that any thinking person could disagree.

Downvoted.

There was a case in my local area where a teenager beat another teeanger to death with a bat. On another blog, some commenters were saying that since his brain wasn't fully developed yet (based on full brain development being attained close to 30), he shouldn't be held to adult standards (namely sentencing standards). This was troubling to me, because while I don't advocate the cruelty of our current prison system, I do worry about the message that lax sentencing sends. The commenets seem to naturally allow for adult freedom (the kids were all unsupervised, and no one said that was problem), then plead biological determinism. To me, morality is about how communities react to transgressions. "Ought not to" has no utility outside of consequences. Those may be social, like the experience of shame, to physical, like imprisonment. I think discussing morality as being solely a quality within individual agents is a dead end.

And thanks for starting this discussion. This is the type of rationality that I find not just interesting but important.

When you see free will being made a precondition for moral behavior, it means that the speaker is not concerned with doing the right thing. They are concerned with winning virtue points.

I think that "free will" can be understood as either itself an everyday concept, or else a philosopher's way of talking about and possibly distorting an everyday concept. The term has two components which we can talk about separately.

A "willed" act is a deliberate act, done consciously, intentionally. It is consciously chosen from among other possible acts. Examples of acts which are not willed are accidental acts, such as bumping into someone because you didn't know they were there, taking someone else's purse because you confused it with your own, etc.

A "free" act is uncoerced. A coerced act is one that is done under compulsion. For example if a mugger points his gun at you, giving him your wallet is a coerced act.

We are more likely to judge acts immoral if they are both willed and free. We are less likely to frown on accidents. If someone took your purse on purpose, because they wanted your money, you would probably think badly of them. But if they took your purse by accident because it looked just like their purse, then you would be much less likely to be upset with them once they had returned the purse apologetically. And similarly, if someone has done you some harm but it turns out they only did it because they were being coerced, then you are more likely to forgive them and not to hold it against them, than if they did it freely, e.g. out of personal malice toward you.

This is all very earthly, very everyday and practical, and has no special relationship to religion or God. There are good practical reasons for letting harms slide if they are accidental or coerced, and for not letting harms slide if they are deliberate and uncoerced.

The upshot is that we are much less likely to consider actions immoral if they are unwilled or unfree - i.e., accidental or coerced.

Whether an agent is moral and whether an action is moral are fundamentally different questions, operating on different types. There are three domains in which we can ask moral questions: outcomes, actions, and agents. Whether actions are moral is about doing the right thing, as we originally thought. Whether a person or agent is moral, on the other hand, is a prediction of whether that agent will make moral decisions in the future.

An immoral decision is evidence that the agent who made it is immoral. However, there are some things that might screen off this evidence, which is what Kant was (confusedly) talking about. For example, if Dr. Evil points a mind-control ray at someone and makes them do evil things, and the mind control ray is then destroyed, then the things they did while under its influence have no bearing on whether they're a moral or immoral person, because they have no predictive value. On the other hand, if someone did something bad because the atoms in their brain were arranged in the wrong way, and their atoms are still arranged that way, that's evidence that they're immoral; but if they were to volunteer for a procedure that rearranges their brain such that they won't do bad things anymore, then after the procedure they'll be a moral person.

Strengthening a moral agent or weakening an immoral agent has positive outcome-utility. Good actions by an agent and good outcomes causally connected to an agent's actions are evidence that they're agent-moral, and conversely bad actions and bad outcomes causally connected to an agent's actions are evidence that they're agent-immoral. But these are only evidence; they are not agent-morality itself.

Ultimately, your claim appears to be, "The punitive part of morality is inappropriate. It is based on free will. Therefore, free will is irrelevant to morality." I admit you don't phrase it that way, but with your only concern being lack of literal coercion and likelihood of reoffense, your sense of morality seems to be inconsistent with people's actual beliefs.

You will find very few people who will say that a soldier acting in response to PTSD deserves the exact same sentence as a sociopath acting out of a sadistic desire to kill, even if each is equally likely to reoffend. Unless I misunderstand you, and you don't get that result, it seems like a serious problem for your morality.

On that note, the law recognizes 5 levels of intent (deliberate, grossly reckless, reckless, grossly negligent, negligent). So you may have erred in reducing intent to a binary. These levels make sense even without "philosophical" free will, which I think is basically a red herring in its entirety, though I still believe in diminished culpability.

Most people think that being moral means acting in a way that will earn you credit with God.

That, but I think there's some reciprocal after-effects that also come into play. What I mean is that when you view what being moral implies with respect to one's religion, you get what you suggested -- being moral entails an increase in heaven (or whatever) being likely.

A very interesting effect I've noticed going the other way, is that religion lets you discuss morality in far, far, far more "lofty" terms that what a non-theistic individual might come up with. The "worldly" discussions are about utility, catagorical imperatives, maxims, means/ends, etc... but "common-talk" religious morality involves "being Christ-like," "being a light to others," "showing them Christ's love," "being a witness," "acting as a suffering servant" and the like.

These just plain sound amazingly magical while [to a religious person especially] the other discussion about morality can sound cold and calculating. It reinforces the notion of doing something supremely fantastic in one's quest to be "moral" via the religious lens.

Now, I think all of these basically translate to:

act so amazingly awesome according to social standards that my observer will think that the only possible way to be thaaaat good is if god himself is infusing me with supernatural spirit powers to do so; thus... god exists and you should convert

But it's an interesting point not unrelated to your theory.

Having an inoperable brain condition would not affect how we used a person's actions to predict whether they were likely to do similar things in the future

I've always viewed there as being a third theory of morality: People who do bad things, are more likely to do other bad things. If my friend lies to me, they're more likely to lie to me in the future. But they're also more likely to steal from me, assault me, etc..

A brain defect (such as compulsive lying) therefor needs to be accounted for - the person is likely to commit domain-specific actions like lying, but this doesn't generalize out to other domains. So, I might not believe my friend who is a compulsive liar when says anything outrageous, but I won't be worried that he's going to rob my house or blackmail me.

It's questionable how valid this metric is, but I'll confess it feels "intuitive right" and emotionally satisfying to me, as long as one is able to identify and adjust for domain-specific flaws.

I'd just like to point out a little flaw in your construction of other people's morality, and offer what I think is a better model for understanding this issue.

First, I wouldn't say that people have a morality that agrees with God. They have a God that agrees with their morality. Reading bible passages to people is unlikely to wobble their moral compass; they'll just say those no longer apply or you're taking them too literally or some such. God isn't so much of a source of morality as a post hoc rationalization of a deeper impulse.

Second, this whole system makes a lot of sense if you think of it in terms of "how likely is it for me to do that?" Kind of like a Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance. If the defendant is a sociopath who killed people for fun, I have a pretty easy time saying, "I can easily restrain myself from killing people for fun. He should have done that. Let him burn!" Conversely, when the defendant is a soldier who has PTSD, I think, "You know, if I'd been through what he'd been through, I may very well have done the same thing, even though it was wrong. We should go easy on him."

This also explains various problems the law had back when people were exceedingly racist or sexist, as people would not have though, "I could just as easily have been of a different race."

I admit I haven't fleshed this out fully, but it seems to agree with the end results more consistently than most other theories.

Without Kant's "nonsensical" detour through rationality, you don't understand his position at all. There is no particular agreement on what "free will" means, and Kant chose to stick fairly closely to one particular line of thought on the subject. He maintained that you're only really free when you act rationally, which means that you're only really free when you do the right thing. Kant also held that a being with the capacity for rationality should be treated as if free even if you had little reason to think they were being rational (and so were free) at the moment (as, indeed, was the usual course of things). Hence his stance on how to treat wrong-doers; you treat, say, a murderer (murder is definitely irrational for Kant!) as if he's being rational, that is, as if killing someone were a reasonable response in certain circumstances, by applying this principle to your treatment of him; by executing him. All very convoluted, to be sure, but while I am not going to insist that it all works (since I don't think it does), it certainly does link freedom and morality very closely together without having any absurd implication that morality isn't concerned with doing the right thing.

As I see it, there are:

1. Actions which do not lead to the best outcome for everyone
2. Actions which need to be punished in order to lead to the best outcome for everyone
3. (other suggestions welcome)

I have used one taboo word here: "best". But we'll assume everyone at least broadly agrees on its definition (least death and pain, most fun etc).

People can then start applying other taboo-able words, which may arbitrarily apply to one of the above concepts, or to a confused mixture of them.

• Morality
• The right thing
• Intending to do the right thing
• Should
• Ought

So asking whether morality is about "doing the right thing" or "intending to do the right thing" or "oughtness" is just going to lead to confusion - different people comparing one fuzzy macro against another.

The connection to free will as I see it comes from 2 - punishing an agent's actions won't achieve anything if the agent lacks sufficient free will. Again, asking what its connection is to morality etc. is probably a question which should be dissolved.

Right on. Free will is nonsense but morality is important. I see moral questions as questions that do not have a clear cut answer that can be found be consulting some rules (religious or not). We have to figure out what is the right thing to do. And we will be judged by how well we do it.

I believe the "free will" thing is because without it, you could talk about whether or not a rock is moral. You could just say whether or not the universe is moral.

I consider morality to be an aspect of the universe (a universe with happier people is better, even if nobody's responsible), so I don't see any importance of free will.

A cognitive agent with intentions sounds like it's at least in the same conceptual neighborhood as free will. Perhaps free will has roughly the same role in their models of moral action as intentions do in your model.

If a tornado kills someone we don't say that it acted immorally but if a man does we do (typically). What's the difference between the man and the tornado? While the tornado was just a force of nature, it seems like there's some sense in which the man was an active agent, some way in which the man (unlike the tornado) had control of his actions, chose to kill, or willed the consequences of his actions.

One approach, which many philosophers have taken, is to give the label "free will" to that meaning of agency/control/choice/will/whatever which allows the man to have moral responsibility while the tornado does not, and then work to define what exactly it consists of. That might not be the best move to make, given the many existing definitions and connotations of the term "free will" and all of the attachments and confusions they create, but it's not an inexplicable one.

That's because morality is a property of a cognitive agent, not a holistic property of the agent and its environment.

I don't understand this sentence. Morality is a property of a system that can be explained in terms of its parts. A cognitive agent is also a system of parts, parts which on their own do not exhibit morality.

If something is judged to be beautiful then the pattern that identifies beauty is in the mind of the agent and exhibited by the object that is deemed beautiful. If the agent ceases to be then the beautiful object does still exhibit the same pattern. Likewise if a human loses its ability to proclaim that the object is beautiful, it is still beautiful. If you continued to remove certain brain areas, or one neuron at a time, at what point does beauty cease to exist?

So you (or perhaps some extrapolated version of you) would say that a thermostat in a human's house set to 65 degrees F is moral, because it does the right thing, while a thermostat set to 115 is immoral because it does the wrong thing. Meanwhile one of those free will people would say that a thermostat is neither moral nor immoral, it is just a thermostat.

The main difference seems to be the importance of "moral responsibility," which, yes, is mixed up with god, but more importantly is a key part of human emotions, mostly emotions dealing with punishment and reward. It is entirely possible to imagine a picture of morality that only makes sense in light of some agents being morally responsible, and that picture seems to be all over the place in our culture. Free will, nebulous though it is, certainly is linked to moral responsibility because "only you are ultimately responsible for your actions" is one of the many partial definitions of free will.

If you want an alternative to the word 'morality' that means what you want 'morality' to mean, I have found good results using the phrase "right-and-wrong-ness".

Do note that this often takes a turn through intuitionism, and it can be hard to drag less-clear thinkers out of that mire.

While morality seems closely related to (a) signaling to other people that you have the same values and are trustworthy and won't defect or (b) being good to earn "points", neither of these definitions feel right to me.

I hesitate to take (a) because morality feels more like a personal, internal institution that operates for the interests of the agent. Even if the outcome is for the interests of society, and that this is some explanation for why it evolved, that doesn't seem to reflect how it works.

I feel that (b) seems to miss the point: we aren't good to pragmatically "get points" for something, with a use of a 'morality' term separate from pragmatism or cooperation, we're acknowledging that points are given based on something more subtle and complex than pragmatism or cooperation (e.g., 'God's preferences' is a handle). (I mean, we're good because we want to be, and 'getting points' is just a way of describing this. We wouldn't do anything unless it meant getting some kind of points, either real or abstract.)

I wrote down a hypothesis for morality a week ago and decided I would think about it later.

Nazgulnarsil wrote:

to me, morality means not disastrously/majorly subverting another's utility function for a trivial increase in my own utility.

I'm considering that moral means not subverting one's own utility function.

Humans seems to have a lot of plasticity in choosing what their values and what their values are about. We can think about things a certain way and develop perspectives that lead to values and actions that are extremely different from our initial ideas of what moral is. (For example, people presumably just like myself have torn children from their parents and sent them to starve in death camps.) It stands to reason we would need a strong internal protection system -- some system of checks and balances -- to keep our values intact.

Suppose we consider that we should always do whatever is pragmatically correct (pragmatic behavior includes altruistic, cooperative behavior) except when an action is suspected to subvert our utility function. I imagine that our utility function could be subverted if an action makes us feel hypocritical, and thus forces us to devalue a value that we had.

For example, we all value other people (especially particular people). But if we would kill someone for pragmatic reasons (that is, we have some set of reasons for wanting to do so that outweigh reasons for not wanting to), we can still decide we wouldn't kill them for this one other reason: we want to value not killing other people.

This is very subtle. Already, we do value not killing other people, but this has already been weighted in the decision and we still decide we would -- pragmatically -- commit the murder. But we realize that if we commit the murder for these pragmatic reasons,even though it seems for the best given our current utility function, we can no longer pretend that we value life so much and we may view a slippery slope where it will be easier to kill someone in the future because now we know this value isn't so strong.

If we do commit the murder anyway, because we are pragmatic rather than moral, then the role of guilt could be to realign and reset our values. "I killed him because I had to but I feel really bad about it; this means I really do value life."

So finally, morality could be about protecting values we have that aren't inherently stable.

I think I'm on the same page with you re kant. Tell me if I've understood the other ideas you're advancing in this post:

1. The problem of understanding morality just is the problem of understanding which actions are moral.

2. An action is moral only if (but not if and only if) it was intended to be moral.

Did I miss the point?

But computers, machines, even thermostats, can have intentions ascribed to them

Can you spell out what you mean by this? Are intentions something a thermostat has intrinsically, or something that I can ascribe to it?

Reading Kant (okay, mostly reading about Kant), it seemed to me that he was not even interested in the question, "What is the right thing to do?" What he was interested in was really, "How can I get into heaven?"

I don't think Kant thought about getting to the afterlife. My impression of Kant is that he was essentially agnostic about both God and the afterlife (although he considered them to be a very interrelated pair of questions) but thought it was healthier for individuals and society to believe in them.

Yet people see the practical question of whether the criminal is likely to commit the same crime again, as being in conflict with the "moral" question of whether the criminal had free will. If you have no free will, they say, you can do the wrong thing, and be moral; or you can do the right thing, and not be moral.

The only way this can make sense, is if morality does not mean doing the right thing.

"Moral" and "legal" mean different things anyway. It makes sense that someone did the legally wrong thing, but were not culpable. We regularly make such decisions where some is exonerated on grounds of being a minor, insane, etc. There is a link between legality and morality; if it is expressed as something like "illegal acts are those acts which are morally wrong when committed by a moral agent"

We only change our credit assignment due to a brain condition if we are trying to assign credit to the non-physical part of a person (their soul).

I don't see how that follows. If we believe that intentions and volitions exist, and have naturalistic roots in certain brain mechanisms, then their possessing a brain condition could affect our credit assignment. Naturalists can be libertarians too

It isn't parsimonious. It confuses the question of figuring out what values are good, and what behaviors are good, with the philosophical problem of free will. Each of these problems is difficult enough on its own!.

That is to beg the question against the idea that morality is in fact dependent on philosophical free will. The point remains that practical/legal ethics can and should be considered separately from philosophical free will (but not from practical FW of the kind removed by having a gun-pointed-at-your-head). However practical/legal/social ethics already are considered largely separately from the philosophical questions. It might be the case that the two constelations of issues are merged in the thinking of the general public. but that is not greatly impactful since actual law and philosophy are written by different groups of differently trained specialists.

they end up believing there are no objective morals - not necessarily because they've thought it through logically, but because their conflicting definitions make them incapable of coherent thought on the subject.

There are quite a lot of people who think there are no objective capital-m Morals, in the philosophical sense. Noticeably, they don't go around eating babies, or behaving much differently to everyone else. Presumably they have settled for small-m practical morals. So, again, something very like the distinction you are calling for is already in place.

When questions of blame and credit take center stage, people lose the capacity to think about values.

I don't see any evidence for that.

For morality to be about oughtness, so that we are able to reason about values, we need to divorce it completely from free will.

Meaning philosophical free will? Surely having a gun pointed at one's head is quite relevant to the issue of why one did not do as one ought.

ETA In summary: it is not FW versus morality. There is a link between FW and morality at the level or philosophical discourse, and another link between (another version of) FW and (another version of) morality at the pragmatic/legal level. Goetz's requirements can be satisfied by sticking at the legal/practical level. However, that is not novel. The stuff about God and the soul is largely irrelevant.

This is the preferred theory under, um, Goetz's Cognitive Razor: Prefer the explanation for someone's behavior that supposes the least internal complexity of them.

This problem with Goetz's Cognitive Razor, is that humans are internally complex.

It seems like the right perspective to think about things goes something like this:

Facts about the world can be good or bad. It is good, for instance, when people are happy and healthy, and bad when they are not.

1. It is bad that Alice fell and hit her head.
2. It is bad that Bob, due to dizziness, stumbled and hit his head.
3. It is bad that Carol, due to a sudden bout of violent behavior, momentarily decided to punch Dan in the head.
4. It is bad that Erin carried out a plan over a period of weeks to punch Fred in the head.

These are all pretty much equally bad, but 4 and possibly 3 are also someone's responsibility, and therefore morality is involved.

Some facts about the world are some people's responsibility. These seem to be some fraction of the facts that are true about their brain - yes 4 but not 2. Good things that are people's responsibility are moral in a different sense than good things that are not people's responsibility.

but this responsibility is philosophically very fuzzy and mostly isn't a useful concept.

Separating concepts is itself a moral action. Moral actions should relate to moral agents. Most of the moral agents who use these concepts aren't here on lesswrong. They include the kind of people who hear ''free will is an illusion'' from a subjectively credible source and mope around for the rest of their lives.

"What happens then when agents’ self-efficacy is undermined? It is not that their basic desires and drives are defeated. It is rather, I suggest, that they become skeptical that they can control those desires; and in the face of that skepticism, they fail to apply the effort that is needed even to try. If they were tempted to behave badly, then coming to believe in fatalism makes them less likely to resist that temptation.

“

”

—Richard Holton[210]

Baumeister and colleagues found that provoking disbelief in free will seems to cause various negative effects. The authors concluded, in their paper, that it is belief in determinism that causes those negative effects.[205] This may not be a very justified conclusion, however.[210] First of all, free will can at least refer to either libertarian (indeterministic) free will or compatibilistic (deterministic) free will. Having participants read articles that simply “disprove free will” is unlikely to increase their understanding of determinism, or the compatibilistic free will that it still permits.[210]

In other words, “provoking disbelief in free will” probably causes a belief in fatalism. As discussed earlier in this article, compatibilistic free will is illustrated by statements like "my choices have causes, and an effect – so I affect my future", whereas fatalism is more like "my choices have causes, but no effect – I am powerless". Fatalism, then, may be what threatens people’s sense of self-efficacy. Lay people should not confuse fatalism with determinism, and yet even professional philosophers occasionally confuse the two. It is thus likely that the negative consequences below can be accounted for by participants developing a belief in fatalism when experiments attack belief in “free will”.[210] To test the effects of belief in determinism, future studies would need to provide articles that do not simply “attack free will”, but instead focus on explaining determinism and compatibilism. Some studies have been conducted indicating that people react strongly to the way in which mental determinism is described, when reconciling it with moral responsibility. Eddy Nahmias has noted that when peoples actions are framed with respect to their beliefs and desires (rather than their neurological underpinnings) they are more likely to dissociate determinism from moral responsibility.[211]

Various social behavioural traits have been correlated with the belief in deterministic models of mind, some of which involved the experimental subjection of individuals to libertarian and deterministic perspectives.

After researchers provoked volunteers to disbelieve in free will, participants lied, cheated, and stole more. Kathleen Vohs has found that those whose belief in free will had been eroded were more likely to cheat.[212] In a study conducted by Roy Baumeister, after participants read an article arguing against free will, they were more likely to lie about their performance on a test where they would be rewarded with cash.[213] Provoking a rejection of free will has also been associated with increased aggression and less helpful behaviour[214][215] as well as mindless conformity.[216] Disbelief in free will can even cause people to feel less guilt about transgressions against others.[217]

Baumeister and colleagues also note that volunteers disbelieving in free will are less capable of counterfactual thinking.[205][218] This is worrying because counterfactual thinking (“If I had done something different…”) is an important part of learning from one’s choices, including those that harmed others.[219] Again, this cannot be taken to mean that belief in determinism is to blame; these are the results we would expect from increasing people’s belief in fatalism.[210]

Along similar lines, Tyler Stillman has found that belief in free will predicts better job performance.[220]"

to me, morality means not disastrously/majorly subverting another's utility function for a trivial increase in my own utility.

edit: wish the downvoters would give me some concrete objections.

Suppose I program a robot to enumerate many possible courses of action, determine how each one will affect every person involved, take a weighted average and then carry out the course of action which produces the most overall happiness. But I deliberately select a formula which will decide to kill you. Suppose the robot is sophisticated enough to suffer. Is it right to make the robot suffer? Is it right to make me suffer? Does it make a difference whether the key to the formula is a weird weighting or an integer underflow?