What I'd say is that morality is about making decisions.
Our concept of "making decisions" implies free will.
So us having "free will" is necessary in order for us to be "making decisions" which is in turn necessary for morality.

That's my 2c anyhow.

Strafio:  Do decisions really hinge on "free will"?  Doesn't an ant that loses its trail make a "decision," even if it's the same decision all other ants would make in the same place?  The ant has multiple options, and does one of them.  Its brain determined which it would do.

But they don't use it for decisions like 'coffee or tea for breakfast?'. It's decisions that involve their interactions with others. Moral standards are used create the 'Us vs. Them' paradigm. As in they don't behave in ways we want.

Which is why I stated to find no connection between free will and morals.

That's a difficult question to answer because people seem to mean different things when they say "free will". Would free will require that one could have done otherwise? Because I read an interesting essay the other day by Daniel Dennett titled "I Could Not Have Done Otherwise-So What?" that raised some interesting objections to the idea that believing an agent could have refrained from performing an act is a necessary condition for holding the agent responsible for that act.

But yeah, I don't know; it's a really open-ended question.

Yep. That's why I said "effectively."

Did you really expect the thread poster to define
"free will" when this thread started! lol

I haven't read that article, but I suspect I know Dennett's position on the matter.

So... why is the question open ended?  You pick a definition of free will and run with it.  Does believing an agent could have done otherwise change the agent's accountability for its actions?

For the definition of Free Will I define it as controlling one's natural urges and thinking it through.

For example, you may really want to do something [you get this nagging feeling to do it] and yet you don't, against your feelings.

As for what this has to do with morality [ie making the decision based on your own moral codes, for example the benifit of society]?

Not really much, since it will benifit, hinder  the society or be neutral regardless of whether or not the person "chose" to do it.

I think however that free will will come into play as to deciding what's moral or deriving our moral code.

That's not an argument, unless you're appealing to fear. 

There are no inherently good or bad choices. The whole concept is manmade.

I just meant it's open-ended in the sense that it allows for an indefinite and unstructured yet entirely appropriate response.

Not necessarily. If a person says that they were compelled by their conscience to do such and such, and they could not have done otherwise, whether their actions appeared to be praiseworthy or blameworthy I would still think they were accountable to other people.

Sure.

I think that's pretty much it. If one's decisions are ultimately based on broader, more carefully thought through, societal considerations, ie the desire to live in a more friendly, less threatening, social group, we call them 'moral'. 'Free will' is still irrelevant, except in the relative sense of decisions less obviously determined by immediate and 'instinctive' reactions to situations.

Holding someone 'accountable' is still valid if the purpose is to discourage certain types of behavior, by generating negative feelings or even actual pain/suffering in the person offending. In fact, the idea that all decisions are ultimately determined by your expectations of the likely consequences of your actions, among other  things, justifies punishment as much as, if not more  than, the idea of 'free will'.

No 'free will' would seem to exclude the typical Theist view of morality, absolute or not.

Back in the real world, the illusion of 'free will' is irrelevant to the possibility of rationality, although it may well be part of what you feel when consciously applying reasoning.

Rationality has value in deciding strategy, whatever one's aim is, whether short or long term maximizing of positive feelings, whether or not that involves enjoying the more abstract feeling of having helped one's friends, or made a positive, lasting contribution to friends and/or society, or just a more direct, personal, hedonistic pleasure. It allows us to recognize that excessive concentration on immediate pleasure, may be ultimately less rewarding than the probably less intense but much longer-lasting 'highs' of achievement and creativity.

It happens that our concepts of mind are useful to us as social beings so we will continue to use these mental concepts, regardless of how scientific they are.

To sum up what I'm saying here, we are either giving a scientific account of human action and behaviour or we are using the pragmatic Folk Psychology that we use in everyday life.
In the former there is no free will, no morality, just a mechanical universe that follows the laws of physics.
In the latter has a different purpose to giving a scientifically accurate picture of how things are.

I disagree that "Free Will" and "Morality" are illusions because an illusion is when something is pretending to be something it isn't.
Our Folk Psychology is what it is and does what it does.

Pain can be pleasure, too.

When you say people must be accountable, it's to what? It seems like accountablity is to some imaginary concept like conscience or morality. You believe morality is a real thing, I believe the lack of free will makes it an illusionary(imaginary) concept.

But morality also a kind of "divine command" that is political or is a socially acceptable behavior. For example, patriotism, being polite and being a good citizen are a kind of moral concepts, where one should be good just for the sake of being good. Society expects to behave these ways even if we don't get a reward for doing so. It's the 'you'll feel good about doing the right thing' imaginary reward.

Then it should be clear who we are accountable to and why, and they must be real entities. Accountablity can't be treated like an end in itself, right? In that case, so called morality just reduces to fullfilling the terms of contracts one makes with others.

 

There's the heart of our disageement. You seem to have bought into the idea of 'accountablity' being an end in itself. It's accountablity to something real with whom you have an agreement, otherwise it's BS.

Computers don't have free will, yet they buy and trade currencies, stocks, etc... How are they able to fulfill the terms of contracts without human intervention, human 'free will' making choices for them?

The horse and buggy was useful for tranportation until science was applied to give us more efficient and better means of transportation. To me these concepts are all outmoded based on our current understanding.

 Strafio, forgive me, but have you defined free will yet?  

Part of the point of this thread was to demonstrate just how convoluted discussions can get when multiple people are discussing free will.  Everybody is happy to jump on board the discussion, but very few people bother to make sure they're talking about the same thing as anybody else.

I've actually got what I believe is a pretty straightforward and easy to grasp explanation of what people think they mean when they talk about free will.  (Of course, you know that I don't believe in free will.)  I want to know what you think first, though.

This is basically a synonym.  Free will and choice are the same thing, at least if we're not regarding the choice an ant makes as a real "choice."

Then I contend that your definition is not a definition at all, but a sleight of hand.  True, in the strictest sense of the word, a "definition" can be a synonym, but in this case, we are looking for a description of the ontological reality of free will.  If I define a "glarblefark" as a "blitzenforb," I have not given you any useful knowledge, since you don't have an understanding of either word.  This, I contend, is the problem with most free will discussions.  People just shift from one ill-defined word to another as if it solves a problem.  It does not.  It just gives the illusion of doing so.

My definition of Free Will would be - the capacity to act with intent. Here, even where the capacity for intent and the action are wholly deterministic, the intent still has validity as the freedom of the individual; the individual and its intent are contained in each other.

Even when determined by external reality (for arguments sake) you cannot separate an individual from its intent, so then contrary to theotherguy, I'm going to say, even in a wholly deterministic universe where someone could not have "chosen otherwise", an individual is as responsible for their moral intent as they are responsible to their identity. 

OTOH, like theotherguy, I'm going to say that there is no morality without free will, but only in the sense that morality presupposes the capacity for intent.

Now, not forgetting that morality also presupposes the existence of two (or more) forms of intent which oppose and contrast each other; Then we must say, by the first consideration of intent and individuality being contained in each other, that there is no morality without two (or more) individuals. That is, no individual can have morality of itself, an individual has the capacity for intent, but no capacity for contrast. So an individual in the strictest sense has free will but no morality.

Yet morality presupposes that forms of intent oppose and contrast each other within the deterministic faculty of a single individual. This is not possible since two or more individuals are required for contrast. So, basically, just in defining free will we've reduced individual morality to an absurdity.

Aside*We can repair this by introducing the concept of multiple individuals in one, however, for now I'll just stick to the strictest definition of an individual...

So in the case that we have a set of two or more individuals, forms of intent can be contrasted and compared and thus we acquire morality. We need intent (the freedom of individual will) in order for there to be morality, but if we have individuals then we have intent by definition, thus all we need are the individuals. Then we can have morality.

So ultimately, to my mind the connection between free will and morality, reduces to the connection between individuals and morality. In questions of morality, free will can be ignored and is not needed, it's just doubling up on the axiom of freedom implied in the required premise of two or more individuals.

Beg your pardon, Bob, but are you responding to me, here?

I'd say that sometimes we have reasons for our choices, sometimes we are spontaneous, but even when people have reasons and thereby behave as we'd predict, I still wouldn't consider their choice "determined".
I think this is because the Folk Psychology concepts are a bit looser than those of physics.
In physics we have laws that give absolute descriptions.
If A happens then B will definitely happen.
E.g. We let go of a ball, it is garaunteed by the laws of physics to accelerate at 9.8m/s/s
The effect is clearly determined by the cause.
If we know the starting conditions, the next step only has one possibility.

Folk Psychology concepts don't have such a strict cause-effect relationship.
Beliefs and desires make certain outcomes more likely, but there is always the possibility for a completely spontaneous decision.
So starting conditions A (e.g. a set of beliefs and desires) don't determine decision B, they just make it more likely - there will always be the possibility of a random decision.
That's why I don't consider decisions to be determined.

It might be that I'm having double standards here.
I say that if we know the starting conditions A in physics then B is determined, this requires us to know all of the starting conditions which might be a lot of information.
Perhaps my opposing examples in mind omit information that could be considered part of the "starting condition"
Although I say that no matter how much we know about a person's beliefs and desires, there's always the chance of a random decision, perhaps there is other information that predict this so-called random event...
But I think that our Folk Psychology language generally allows for an element of randomness that makes prevents a proper "pre-determining" of decisions.

Interesting.

It seems to me that your 'Folk Psychology' ideas are fully describable in scientific terms.

'Spontaneous' would apply to those decisions where in all the categories of factors (mood, memory, sensory perception, etc) contributing to a decision, no specific item or two were felt to be dominant, so that actual decision would be quasi-random, sort of like a chaotic 'butterfly effect' Such decisions would be effectively unpredictable.

It is not so much 'strict cause-effect relationships' which are the distinguishing feature of the physical examples you give, but situations where there is a single very clear and dominant 'cause' identifiable, such as the force of gravity acting on a falling object.

Many 'events' in the real world are the result of such a complex set of interacting contributing factors that strict prediction is often impossible in any practical sense, even if everything is strictly determined. I think the lack of understanding of this reality, and concentrating on the abstract idea of a pure isolated cause and effect, is what leads both 'ordinary' people and many philosophers to think of 'determinism' as implying something 'mechanical', with events following on clearly defined and predictable paths.

There are two yardsticks in this definition by which to judge a free will in an individual. The first is the capacity to act, we don't require the individual to act in order to judge that this definition of free will applies, we only need to assume that the capacity to act is a characteristic of the individual.  The concept of action, incidentally, requires an underlying framework relative to which it can be defined, that is, action implies its context, it is defined by its context so there is no way to avoid this. Having noted that, lets assume the context that we are accustomed to using, the ordering of events in the universe which accord with the scope of a human psyche. It is easy in this case for us to relate the concept of an act to an individual in this context because it is our context. From this position we can say definitively that certain entities are possessed of the capacity to act, so it is from there we can proceed to test these entities against the next qualification, intent.

I have seen intent defined as a preference or inclination which comes from anticipating a future. I would put that forward as how I am defining it here. So an entity that has the capacity to act with intent requires two explicit senses, a probabilistic sense, and a spatial sense (let's call it the sense of a future). From this we can look again to our familiar framework and easily identify which of the things which naturally relate in the context that we comfortably understand, that they are possessed of sensory abilities.

so then...

Given the above, from this list we can quickly mark down Humans, Chimpanzees and mice as evidently possessing the two characteristics as we readily understand them.

Viruses and small clusters of nerve cells clearly have an ability to act, and to some extent within our context seem individually responsive to sensory stimuli. So these we should note as possessing interesting potential for free will, but if it exists it exists in a way that falls outside the context familiar to a human psyche and we'd need to understand a great deal more about that context.

Supercomputers, calculators and rocks fail the first test applied in our psychological context. They do not, in any way which we readily understand, possess individual ability to act. There's no need to test them against the second criteria until such time as we were perhaps able to conceive of a context in which individual action on their own behalf made sense.

Atoms on the other hand, are somewhat more interesting in their potential than, even, viruses. We have seen the microscopic world demonstrate an intriguing level of individual action when tested against the context readily available to our psyche. Strangely enough the bit world also eludes to a responsiveness which rings familiar to our human context. However, the reality is that these characteristics have exactly that, a ring of familiarity to the context which supports the human psyche. It is not, as such, demonstrated that the eventful life of an atom or it's constituent parts is correspondent to action and intent within the framework that we understand it. So for the time being, although interesting, atoms are not marked down as freely willing entities by the proposed definition.

 I'm going to jump in and make another suggestion that might clear up all this confusion regarding "intent" and "decision."

It strikes me as interesting that humans are the only animals who demonstrate consistent ability to think about themselves thinking about things.  We, unlike any other animal we know of, are able to contemplate the significance of our thoughts.  Other animals, it seems, simply think thoughts and then act on them.

I submit, then, that what we consider free will is really the ability to think about the decisions we make.  For this to make sense, we need to make sure we are talking about exactly the same things:

All free-moving, autonomous animals make decisions.  That is, if an animal moves through the environment of its own volition, responding dynamically to the environment, and is faced with physical situations in which it can react in one of multiple ways, it makes decisions.

I don't think we can deny that for all animals, decisions occur in real time.  That is, we make decisions when we make them, as we are experiencing the knowledge of options.  When I began thinking of free will, it was tempting to define it simply as the conscious awareness of multiple options.  I doubt, for instance, that a roach has the capability to think about which way it should run when someone turns the lights on.  I think it pretty much just reacts to its environment.  Dogs, on the other hand, appear to be able to contemplate their actions at times.  Chimpanzees certainly can.  We've demonstrated that empirically.

Even so, I was interested in figuring out if humans are uniquely able to act or think in a way that other animals cannot.  The only thing I can think of that falls into this category is the ability to think about thinking.  So, it goes like this:

I think.

I think about thinking.

I think about thinking about thinking.

****

Thinking about thinking, I believe, is free will, or more precisely, what people think they mean when they talk about free will.  As Bob and I (and others) have compellingly argued, there really isn't a possibility of something "outside" of our brain that is somehow free of the physical reality of our present state.  There is no genuinely free will.  However, when I am faced with multiple options, I can, as part of my brain's normal function, form a mental concept of my own thought processes.  Ironically, I cannot control my thoughts about my thoughts, any more than I can control my thoughts...  But, I am making a decision on a "higher" level than any other animal.

No, it's not free will, but it is a genuine difference between human actions and animal actions, and it is what must be the case if we are to have a concept of "accountability" for our actions. 

Okay. It seems that we more or less agree for practical purposes, but philosophy being the pedantic subject it is, I still have a couple of last points to put across.
You're saying that for all practical purposes, there is an element of randomness in human decision due to complexity of the underlying laws.
However, I think that Folk Psychology goes one step further.

I'm not qualified to say.  I know jack shit about AI.

I do know that for the purpose of analogy, the physical pathways in our brain which are analogous to steps in an algorithm are constantly "self-modifying."  I must be very careful in making this statement, however, because this whole discussion revolves around the fact that we are dynamically responding to our environment, which can be viewed as the "cause" of the modifications in our brains.

I really don't like the concepts of cause and effect in regard to dynamic interactions with environments.  If I say that my brain causes me to be in a state of disbelief in god, I can just as accurately say that my environment caused my brain to put me in a state of disbelief in god.

I suppose (though I don't know) that we could say the same thing about a self-modifying code in a computer.  Without some external input, what would be modified?  The environment, which is enormous, complex, and unpredictable, is the causal agent for the series of events in my brain caused by my perception of the environment.

I have to be pedantic here.  Yes, we have the ability to examine both how and what we think, although it's rather shocking to some people how little control we have over what we think.  Our thoughts about our thoughts are data, and data is what our brains process, so my "self-modified state" at any given moment is a product of both my external environment and my thoughts about my thoughts about my external environment.

My point with regard to free will is that the distinction is an artificial one that seems very relevant to us, but is not different in reality.  That is, all animals have brains which put them in states of action or thought, and no animal can control its own brain.  Brains control animals.  Animals do not control brains.  That is, I cannot make the decision to alter this or that neural pathway.  I can only do what I believe or feel at any given instant, and that belief or feeling was determined for me by my brain before I became conscious of it.  My thoughts about my thoughts existed before I became aware that they exist.  I am just as much a "slave" to my meta-thoughts as to my thoughts.

I am led to believe that the complexity of this ability is staggering, even to the most optimistic AI scientists, but there seems no particular reason that given enough time, we won't work out something quite similar in machines.  I think that if we don't, it will be because of practical limitations, not theoretical ones.