Quote:
Originally Posted by durkadurka33
I'm not grounding moral responsibility in irrationality: I'm saying that a salient manifestation of our freedom seems to lie in our ability to act irrationally. Most people think that it's in our rationality that we demonstrate freedom of will: I think that's wrong. We can be pretty darn rational, in SOME contexts, when we're not consciously trying to reason, but we become highly irrational when we consciously try to be rational. I find that interesting.
Why do you think this? It seems very counter-intuitive to me. I would say that I feel most strongly that I exercise my "free will" when I overcome pre-existing dispositions and tendencies through rational deliberation. Conversely, I feel distinctly "unfree" when I know what the rational course of behavior is, but fail to perform it because of impulsivity, compulsion, bias, or coercion. In fact, I feel
most unfree when I end up acting in a way that I cannot predict or justify. In such cases it seems that the decision is generated outside of my conscious mind, by a process to which "I" have no access and over which I have no control. It helps me not at all if I know that this process is not deterministic.
Normally, when we assign blame or praise, the capacity for conscious rational deliberation is extremely important. In cases where this capacity is undermined, we say that there are "extenuating circumstances" or that the agent lacks "competence", and these factors mitigate his culpability.
Also, I'd just like to point out that once you start picking out observable phenomena as "salient manifestations of freedom", the door is wide open for empiricism. Not that this is a bad thing.