You'll find that you are also in the minority in being a libertarian. Not sure how that matters as the popularity of a line of thinking doesn't tell you much about whether it is correct. My ideas are a bit more popular with other groups of thinkers in academia.

If you are claiming that there are no absolute, stand-alone normative concepts, you are correct.

However, right and wrong, good and bad, beauty and ugliness exist as human concepts. Freedom is not required. One can be ugly because of a shovel to the face. One can be good because of decent parenting and a well-functioning frontal lobe.

The decision making process still exists though. Determinism is not at all the same thing as knowing what will happen next.

People do make normative claims. These involve things such as character and some maleable behaviors. "That guy is a jerk" is a sensible claim, "stealing is wrong" is a sensible normative claim, and "you should be kind to strangers" is a sensible normative exhortation. None of those require that the jerk, thief or samaritan have ultimate freedom, only that their behavior is generated through internal processes rather than externally coerced.

That their internal clockwork was not self-created doesn't preclude sensible judgement about their value. It is silly to tell me that I should place equal value on a clock that doesn't tell time correctly as one that does.

Where we are in 100% agreement is that (given hard determinism) placing ultimate blame on someone for being ugly, bad or wrong is silly.

I'm not sure whether we agree on the following statements that I find completely consistent with HD: Noting that they are ugly, bad or wrong is not disallowed at all. Making value judgements on their relative beauty, goodness or rightness is as fine as making the same judgement on vegetables that are fresh or rotten. Punishment or praise (in the psychological sense) is also reasonable under many circumstances.

Nah, we disagree over whether the free will thesis is correct.

My claim is that, if determinism is true, it's not a "DECISION." "Decision" implies that there are multiple possible outcomes, which is false under determinism. I've already explained this.

I've also argued that "good" "bad" and all normative concepts require choice and alternate possibilities (ie, the falsity of the determinist thesis).

Disagree all you want, but at least engage with my arguments.

I accept that hard determinism is a possibility, but even if I was certain of its existence I would disagree with the above. Concepts like right, wrong, good, bad, beautiful, ugly are only relevant as they relate to states of human brains. And so such concepts can exist without choice because they arise in human brains whether it be somewhat random or determinism.

And from an ethical standpoint, choices can be "bad" if they bring about less desirable brain states in the human population than "less wrong" or "good" choices. If I choose to shoot heroin tomorrow, this is clearly a sub-optimal choice in terms of the outcomes that are likely to follow (or certain to follow in the case of determinism) in terms of my brain state and the brain states of others.

Whether determinism is true or not, we know that free will doesn't exist. This doesn't mean our brains don't make choices. Our brains constantly make choices. But these choices are a part of a causal chain (with or without some dice being rolled). And the choices our brains make can be truly good or bad with respect to the way they affect brain states of ourselves and others.

If we had, recorded somehow, all the choices Hitler ever made after deliberative thought (the choices that would be considered freely-willed by free will proponents), we could certainly find plenty of choices that were "bad" with respect to to the amount of pain and suffering they would cause.

Those choices would have been bad in a deterministic universe or bad in a non-deterministic one. The only sense in which they aren't "bad" choices is from the standpoint of something other than human values (which relate to brain states) and that standpoint really has nothing to do with anything that could possibly matter to any of us.

So can a brain have any affect on itself? Does our brain have any control over it's actions, whether consciously or unconsciously?

And I've argued that there is a plausible alternative that it is a decision because you must go through a deliberative decision making process and that part of the process is imagining multiple possible outcomes.

And I've argued that determinism doesn't preclude imagined alternatives or will. Imagined alternatives and will are sufficient substitutes for your free will as a requirement for most normative concepts.*

The above engages your arguments.

*I'm in complete agreement that formally assigning ultimate responsibility is incoherent with determinism.

Would you call the choices that a tornado makes "good" or "bad"?

Could you please elaborate on how we "know" that free will doesn't exist?

A tornado isn't sentient and doesn't have the capacity to alter its behavior. Humans are sentient and can alter our behavior (but we don't have free will). Still, the effect of tornadoes on human well-being is objectively bad.


Like anything else, we of course can't know with 100% certainty that it doesn't exist, but we are basically certain that it doesn't exist because we know our brains are made of of atoms like the rest of the universe and are not separate from causality in any way. A better question would be, "how in the heck could free will exist?"

A brain can have an effect on itself, but that effect, even if it as in the form of conscious thought, was never ultimately caused by the brain(whatever that could even mean). The brain is just a part of the rest of the interactions of the physical universe, which, if not deterministic, are still highly predictable.

If you actually think about it, the notion of free will makes absolutely no sense objectively or subjectively. Thoughts come and go, and even if we are as conscious as possible in any given moment, why are we in some moments and not others? We can't choose anything; even if we wanted to make no choices at all and just lay in bed and do nothing, that would be a choice. We make choices, but we have no control over them.

Sure. It's an incoherent concept (when we include our intuitions about moral responsibility), regardless of whether determinism is true or false.

So nothing can ever equal more than the sum of it's parts?

Correct.

Edit: Well, maybe something could equal more than the sum of its parts in some sense, but even if the brain was like that, I don't see how that leaves room for free will. There'd have to be a ghost in the machine.

What if all those parts separately are capable of little or nothing, but when together they are able to do something very significant?

It's HARDLY incoherent.

And I'm tired of this weak line of argument that is all too common: well how COULD free will like that work?

**** if I know...but that's never been a good argument.

"Space can bend? How could THAT possibly work?"
"Atoms are divisible? How could THAT possibly work?"
"Space is infinite? How could THAT possible work?"
"Space time started, and didn't always exist? How could THAT possibly work?"

This has always been offered against things we don't yet understand. The libertarian doesn't need to explain how free will works: we don't know. That's what's interesting: we're working on how it could work. But you can't demand that we already have an answer worked-out before you'll even entertain the possibility! That's not how this works.

But to show that it's incoherent, you need to show how there's a logical or physical impossibility. No one's done that. Even if we posit physicalism, it doesn't follow that libertarian free will is impossible: perhaps there's a physical mechanism we have yet to discover that isn't deterministic, but isn't merely "random" either. There's nothing incoherent about libertarian free will: stop pretending that it is as a cheap means of argument. It's not fooling anyone (except the gullible).

Do you know what BEGGING THE QUESTION means? You're really good at it.