Bryan’s Comments
“BC” indicates Bryan’s comments; “MH” is me (from the book).
1. Argument from Design
MH: Even if you’d never seen a watch before, you would immediately know that this thing had to have been designed by someone. It’s too intricately ordered to have just happened.
BC: The reason why we infer a watch-maker from a watch is not that the watch is “intricately ordered,” but that we have independent reason to believe that watches are not naturally occurring.
The “even if you’d never seen a watch before” is meant to exclude that. I.e., if you showed the watch to a person who had never seen (or heard of) a watch before, they’d still immediately know that it was an artefact. I assume that’s clear. That excludes the possibility that the conclusion is based on background knowledge about watches.
Maybe Bryan thinks they actually wouldn’t know this? Or he thinks there is some other reason for believing that watches are not naturally occurring? But I have no idea what this would be (?).
BC: Consider this rock formation: [image of Bryce Canyon]
Now compare it to this rock carving: [image of rock with heart carved in it]
The former is far more “intricately ordered” than the latter. But the latter shows design, and the former does not. Why? Because we have independent knowledge that only intelligent beings create rocks with little hearts on them.
Bryce Canyon is not really very ordered (though admittedly more ordered than just a big junk pile); you could move large parts of it around in lots of ways and not upset any salient pattern or activity. This is very unlike a watch: If you move parts of the watch around, for almost all ways of doing so, it stops working.
The rock carving has a simple order. But I don’t understand how Bryan thinks we know that it was carved by a person. I don’t know what “independent knowledge” he’s referring to. Maybe it’s the knowledge that a lot of people like heart shapes? Maybe it consists of having seen people drawing such shapes in the past?
Suppose it was a rock with a different shape on it, one that you had never seen before. Like this:
I’ve never seen that shape before I found it on the internet just now. I bet a lot of readers haven’t either. I also have not looked up what that is, or whether it is natural or man-made. This one object is my entire sample of surfaces with that shape etched into them.
Q: Can I tell whether that’s man made? Yes, I can. I have zero doubt. This doesn’t rest on background knowledge about instances of that shape.
BC: But would it not be even more implausible to think that God just appeared by chance?
Theists standardly say that God either always existed or exists “outside time” (whatever that means), and often claim that God exists necessarily. They wouldn’t say that God appeared by chance.
Btw, I didn’t address this in the book, but sometimes people say, “But isn’t God himself even more intricately ordered than living things?” No; I have no idea why people say that. Theists typically think that God is a single, simple entity. God is not supposed to have organs arranged in a body, etc., the way you do.
2. Fine Tuning
MH: [W]hy does the universe in fact have life-friendly parameters? The theist says: Because an intelligent, benevolent, and immensely powerful being set the parameters of the universe that way, in order to make life possible.
BC: I say this is an obviously terrible argument, and I don’t say such things lightly. Why? Because we have zero evidence that the anyone can “set the parameters of the universe”!
I don’t know why Bryan thinks we have no evidence of that. The theist cited the evidence: the fact that the universe has life-friendly parameters. To say that we have no evidence of anyone being able to set the parameters of the universe, you have to assume that the evidence the theist just cited is not in fact evidence of what the theist says it is evidence of. That begs the question.
I note that this type of evidence is common, and it is not in general controversial that it counts as evidence (at least when we’re talking about things other than God). I.e., the fact that a seemingly improbable phenomenon exists, and that some theory would explain that phenomenon, is standardly accepted as evidence for that theory. That is in general how we have evidence for unobserved, theoretical phenomena (atoms, magnetic fields, quarks, etc.) And you don’t have to have some other evidence for those phenomena, independent of the inference to the best explanation.
I don’t know what view of evidence Bryan is assuming or why he claims that there’s no evidence in this case, so it’s hard for me to say more.
MH: [“Made by God” example]
BC: I’d say this is excellent evidence for intelligent English-speaking life on Mars, but zero evidence for God’s existence.
Zero evidence? So the probability of God doesn’t go up at all? How can that be? God isn’t even a possible explanation of the evidence in the story? The prior probability of God existing is zero?
I deliberately designed the example to be absurdly heavy-handed evidence pointing to God (theists can only dream of finding evidence so powerful and so obvious). I didn’t think anyone would have a problem with saying that ridiculous story would count as evidence for God if it happened.
BC: After all, everything on Earth labelled “made by God” is made by garden-variety intelligent English-speaking life, so why shouldn’t we make a parallel inference on Mars?
I’ve never seen anything labelled “made by God”, so I’m not sure what things Bryan is referring to. Of course, if I saw an ordinary object, like a shirt, labelled “made by God”, I would think it was made by a human being.
This, however, was not a plausible explanation in my example, because (i) there are no people on Mars before the astronauts go there, (ii) it was stipulated that the formations are consequences of the laws of nature. Human beings do not have the ability to design the laws of nature. If there is a being with the ability to design laws of nature, I would say that being has some fairly godlike powers. I suppose it could still be incredibly advanced aliens, but I don’t know why that theory would completely overwhelm the theistic theory.
3. The Anthropic Principle
MH: [Firing squad example]
BC: My reply: Entertaining such hypotheses only makes sense because we have independent reason to believe that people normally don’t survive fifty-man firing squads.
Again, I don’t know what independent reason Bryan is talking about. Explain it to me like I’m a baby.
I think it makes sense to entertain hypotheses for how you survived, because it is initially extremely improbable that you would survive the 50-man firing squad. Is that the independent reason Bryan is referring to? Or is that not enough, and you need some other reason? If so, I don’t know why Bryan thinks that you need some other reason.
BC: In contrast, it’s not weird for humans to exist on [a] planet hospitable to human life. And if you ask, “How did this happen?,” saying, “If the universe were very different, we wouldn’t be here [to] ask such questions” is illuminating.
I don’t understand at all why Bryan says either of those things, so I can’t respond to this other than to repeat what I said in the book.
It is weird for us to exist, once you know about the incredibly specific conditions required for us to exist. It’s weird because, well, it’s extremely improbable. Also, it’s true in the Firing Squad example that if the shooters hadn’t all missed, you wouldn’t be there to ask questions about it; yet that comment is not at all illuminating about why the shooters missed. Similarly, therefore, the statement “If the universe were very different, we wouldn’t be here to ask questions” is unilluminating about why the universe is the way it is.
BC: In any case, if you take fine tuning seriously, why can’t you just ask, “How did we happen to be in a universe where a divine being fine-tunes the laws of nature to allow our survival?”
You can ask that, but there’s nothing at all odd on its face about a conscious being deciding to create a universe that would have intelligent life.
This question strikes me as being no better motivated than the parallel question one could raise for any explanation. Someone posits X to explain evidence E. You can always say, “Why can’t you just ask, ‘How did it happen that X was the case?’” Well, sometimes you can ask that (perhaps always), but (a) this doesn’t mean that X doesn’t explain E, or that we should never make inferences to the best explanation, and (b) often X is less weird or more understandable on its face than E was.
4. Burden of Proof
BC: If X has a low prior probability of existing, and there’s no evidence of X’s existence, we should conclude that X has a very low posterior probability of existing. What gives X “a low prior probability of existing”? Many things, including (a) being very specific (e.g. X=”a guy with a feathered hat named Josephus who likes pickle-flavored ice cream and has exactly 19 hairs on his head”), and (b) being fantastical (e.g. X=Superman).
I note that Bryan is not defending the burden of proof principle as it is usually formulated, because the standard burden-of-proof principle claims that there is a burden of proof for any assertion of existence; it’s not limited to things with specially low prior probabilities (or it claims that every hypothesized entity has a low prior probability).
Anyway, I agree that the more specific the description of X is, the lower is the probability that X exists. But I’m not sure what counts as “fantastical”. In particular, I’m not sure whether the idea of a conscious being that can adjust the parameters of the universe is fantastical. If it is, then I’m not sure why we should think all “fantastical” things have a low prior probability.
5. Free Will
BC: My position, which I warrant Huemer would also accept: Libertarian free will and behavioral predictability are totally compatible. […]
I’m going to continue taking care of my kids. Still, this doesn’t show that I can’t do otherwise, only that I won’t.
Agreed. And that’s a good example. If you think that predictability (with high probability) rules out free will, then you’d have to say that when people do stuff that is obviously the only sensible thing to do, they’re not acting freely. Which is counter-intuitive.
Another example: I find someone living in a penthouse in Denver worth $3 million. I offer that person 50 bucks for the condo. I can predict, with very high probability, that the owner is going to turn down my offer. Surely that doesn’t mean that the owner’s decision to reject my offer is not free.
6. Degrees of Freedom
BC: I say, for example, that alcoholics are fully free to stop drinking. They rarely do, but they absolutely can. Indeed, there is strong empirical evidence that I’m right, because changing incentives changes alcoholics behavior; and if changing incentives changes behavior, that is strong evidence that you were capable of changing your behavior all along.
I would say that changing the incentives changes how difficult it is to stop drinking. The more difficult it is to stop, the less free the alcoholic is. The extreme of difficulty (the maximum level) is impossibility, and that is where the person is not free at all. Being “fully free”, or “maximally free” would be at the opposite extreme, where it is completely easy to stop drinking.
I think that view coheres with the fact that changing incentives sometimes alters the alcoholic’s behavior. It also explains why we blame someone less for bad actions that were, as we say, “more difficult” to resist.
BC: We condemn a starving man for stealing bread much less than a well-fed man for doing the same. The reason, though, [is] not because the latter choice is “freer” than the other, but because the latter choice is less morally justified than the [former].
Indeed, the starving man’s action sounds like it’s not wrong at all!
But not all cases are like that. You can imagine a pair of cases in which the action is equally justified objectively, but it was more psychologically difficult for one person to do the right thing than the other. E.g., maybe it was harder for A to do the right thing than B because A is a child and hasn’t yet developed good habits, or A was drunk, or A was very emotional at the time, or A didn’t have enough time to think about it, etc. Whereas B, faced with the same options with the same consequences, didn’t have any of those problems.
Then we’d blame B more. By stipulation, the reason can’t be found in a difference in the actions or the external conditions. It has to be about degree of responsibility for the action.
7. “The Soul”
Terminological note: Yes, you can basically write “mind” for “soul” if you prefer, and many people like that better. However, I take the term “soul” to be more specific. The term “mind” is neutral between physicalist and dualist (and idealist) views. The term “soul”, however, is not; it basically means “the mind on a Cartesian conception of it”. So most physicalists are happy to say that we have minds, but no physicalist would say that we have souls.
8. Hard Determinism
BC: In other words, determinism is a supremely unscientific theory that begins by throwing away ubiquitous conflicting evidence that each of us experiences in our every waking moment.
Yep.
Reader Comments
There are a lot of these, so I’m going to be really brief.
(a)
why huemer thinks the standard multiverse argument doesn’t solve this
I said that the multiverse is a viable explanation at the end of that chapter.
(b)
Sabine Hossenfelder argues that the fine tuning argument begs the question because it assumes a probability distribution that makes the constants of the universe unlikely…
The “Made by God” example was designed to (and does) refute precisely this view.
(c)
How does one really disagree with the idea that all human behavior can be traced to physical causes?
Partly by being a mind-body dualist!
(d)
The soul theory is subject to plenty of devastating reductio arguments as well.
I don’t think there are any devastating arguments there at all.
(e)
To know what we seem to observe, wouldn’t we first have to know what the options would look like? If both theories predicts the same observation, we can’t tell if we seem to observe theory 1 or theory 2.
I think this question conflates observation with inference or theory. You don’t observe a theory, and you don’t have to know anything about any theory to know what you seemingly observed.
(f)
…portrayals of Jesus in the Gospels aren’t implausibly specific.
Agreed. But I don’t think many people (and surely not either Bryan or me) doubt that Jesus existed. The issue is whether there is an intelligent designer of the universe.
(g)
“God did it” is not an explanation at all; it’s a declaration that no explanation is possible.
I don’t understand why the commenter said either of those things. Both are false on their face; “God did it” is an explanation, and it’s certainly not a declaration that no explanation is possible.
(h)
But the Wagerer must also make herself forget that she is going through the motions, instrumentally, in the hope of acquiring belief. She must act to forget-and-believe.
I don’t see why she would have to do that. There seem to be many people who do the sort of things I described, and they don’t have to forget doing them. E.g., many people only watch “news” sources that support their ideology, they don’t forget that they’re doing this, and they have no trouble believing their ideology.
(i)
why does Philosophy accept the descriptions of Gods given by the worshippers? They are almost certainly inflated. […] If God is as great as the believers make him out to be, humans are probably an unimportant side-show.
Fair points.
If God made the universe, there are probably many other planets with life out there, so God would not be focused on Earth in particular.
(j)
If Determinism is established, then we will continue to do what we have (and will) be doing.
This assumes that the establishment of determinism would not itself have any causal powers. But it would (just like all the other events in the world).
READER COMMENTS
John Alcorn
Jun 28 2021 at 12:57pm
Re:
The person who only watches ‘news’ that supports her ideology isn’t like the unbeliever who prudently attends church in order to come to believe in god.
The former (the ideologue) seeks ‘news’ that confirms her priors. The latter (the wagerer) wants to make herself change her beliefs (from disbelief in god to belief in god), in order to acquire beliefs that most probably serve her long-term self-interest.
The former consumes ideology. By contrast, the wagerer invests in a long-term effort at prudential belief-formation.
The wagerer faces a psychological difficulty. It’s hard for her to believe in god, if she remembers two facts:
(a) She didn’t find persuasive any evidence or argument for god.
(b) She decided to go through the motions of religious behavior for purely instrumental reasons.
The wagerer’s investment involves also a plan to forget the plan.
Michael Huemer
Jun 29 2021 at 9:56pm
Part of the plan was to listen to arguments for the existence of God, etc. If you do that, and don’t listen to any counter-arguments, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ll be convinced.
Mark Young
Jun 28 2021 at 2:15pm
MH: Then we’d blame B more. By stipulation, the reason can’t be found in a difference in the actions or the external conditions. It has to be about degree of responsibility for the action.
It doesn’t have to be about the degree of responsibility for the action. We can likewise think of cases where the degree of responsibility is the same (same options, same amount of time and resources to invest in coming to a decision), but where the morally appropriate response differs.
This is most obvious in a case where some people have “no standing” to blame. Hypocrisy is rightly considered an offence in itself. A thief has no standing to blame someone else for thieving; an adulterer no standing to blame an adulteress. Different people may be be allowed to blame more or less depending on their moral status.
But there’s more than just moral status involved. Morality is about making the world a better place — if everyone behaved morally all of the time, the world would be a better place. When deciding how to respond to a violation of moral norms, the moral agent is not restricted to considering only the degrees of freedom or responsibility of the malefactor. The agent must determine what actions best help to make the world a better place. Whether that is by achieving the best consequences, following most closely the Word of God, displaying the most virtue, or whatever.
The agent responding to a moral infraction is still a moral agent, and their response is still covered by the rules of morality. Do the right amount of blaming based on the circumstances of the infraction. If appropriate, forego blaming altogether and substitute moral guidance. Blaming is only as good as the good it does.
Michael Huemer
Jun 29 2021 at 9:59pm
I don’t really agree with either of those points — I don’t think it’s wrong for thieves to morally blame other thieves, etc., and I don’t think we should blame or refuse to blame people purely for utilitarian reasons.
But even if those points are correct, they aren’t what was going on in my example. So I still think my example illustrates that you can have diminished responsibility.
Mark Young
Jun 30 2021 at 9:48am
To be clear, I didn’t say it couldn’t be diminished responsibility; I said it didn’t have to be.
Your hypothetical was that it was harder for A to do the right thing than for B, where A and B both end up doing the same wrong thing. You said that A might be a child, or drunk, or emotional, or rushed. And it’s certainly arguable that those As would be “less responsible” for their actions than the corresponding B. But I submit that that’s not the only possibility.
Suppose A/B purposely smash someone’s window. Person A might have done it as a child, as a drunk, in anger, or in a hurry, but B did it as an adult after long and sober deliberation. Breaking the window is equally (un)justified in each case. They are morally obliged to make recompense for that broken window regardless. (Heck, they are morally obliged to make recompense even if it’s an accident.)
I say that each of these people (A, B, and C – the accidental breaker) are morally responsible for breaking the window. I say that because of the moral obligation to make recompense, which would not be there if they weren’t morally responsible for breaking the window. I don’t see why we need to say that they are “not equally morally responsible” for breaking the window. I don’t see why the difference in how we respond to them must be cashed out in that way.
Yes, there is a difference in how we respond to them. The further action we take depends very much on which of those cases they were in. We, as respondents to the action, are morally obliged to “make the punishment fit the crime”. And B’s crime is the greatest. This is what I took you to mean when you said, “we’d blame B more”, and what I intended when I said that we should do the right amount of blaming based on the circumstances. Not utilitarian considerations; moral ones. Not a matter of the “degree of moral responsibility” for that action; a matter of there being more to take offense at in the leadup to B’s action. I think that’s a better explanation for the differences in our responses.
PS: I should have used “condemnation” instead of “blame” in my earlier message. I didn’t mean to imply that we shouldn’t make moral judgements at all, but only that we should be considerate in how we make them visible.
KevinDC
Jun 30 2021 at 9:53am
I’m not sure I see any force behind the “no standing” idea as you describe it. It’s not obvious to me why one needs to have “standing” to be able to make correct statements, or why one should refrain from saying true things without such “standing,” or whatever.
To think of an extreme case – the Golden State Killer, who was responsible for a number of horrible crimes, was caught a few years back due to DNA evidence. It turns out he was a cop. Presumably in his business as a cop, he went around being critical of people who committed deeds as vile as his, and even for committing lesser acts of wrongdoing. More than simply being critical, he no doubt arrested people for such wrongdoings! Hypocritical of him, I guess. But so what? It’s not obvious to me that he should have turned a blind eye towards, or kept silent about, the wrongdoings of others because he himself was guilty of wrongdoing. We can think of 4 possible world states regarding him:
1: He commits no bad deeds, and intervenes against the bad deeds of others.
2: He commits no bad deeds, and ignores the bad deeds of others.
3. He commits bad deeds, and intervenes against the bad deeds of others.
4. He commits bad deeds, and ignores the bad deeds of others.
I think we both agree that 1 is the best among these different states. But you seem to be arguing that if we were only given the choice between 3 and 4, we should think 4 is better. That seems really implausible to me.
Mark Young
Jul 1 2021 at 12:35pm
First off, let me agree with your statement that everyone should have standing to make correct statements. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. Mea culpa.
I was thinking along the lines of the Gospel story of men bringing an adulteress to Jesus for condemnation. What Jesus does is ask that her punishment be started by someone who has not sinned. After a while they have all left without punishing her. Seeing them gone, Jesus likewise refuses to punish her, while still recognizing that she is morally responsible for her action (“sin no more”).
Clearly the men did not leave because they decided that stoning the woman was morally inappropriate (tho’ they should have). They left because they decided that it was morally inappropriate for them to carry out that punishment.
The charge of hypocrisy is laid against people who criticize action that they themselves undertake. Consider two people, A and B, who criticize homosexuality. A is straight, but B is (secretly) homosexual. Both A and B are performing the same morally wrong act (criticizing homosexuality), but when B’s hypocrisy comes to light, B is judged more harshly. This even tho’ there is nothing wrong with being homosexual. It’s not the simple fact of homosexuality that’s earning the extra disapprobation; it’s his hypocrisy in criticizing it while engaging in it.
So, these are what I had in mind with my brief statement about “no standing”. It was just a quick introduction to my main point of there being moral constraints on how people deal with bad actors, and that these constraints can explain things MH chooses to explain by appeal to degrees of moral responsibility.
Getting to your argument, I did not have in mind people intervening to stop bad deeds. That is still a good thing, regardless of the other actions of the intervener. Murderer stops robbery? Good job, murderer, for stopping that robbery; now, go to jail for murder. So, I agree that (3) is better than (4). The murderous cop’s lack of moral standing to criticize murder is reflected in a (very small) increase in disapprobation when the cop’s murders come to light.
KevinDC
Jul 1 2021 at 3:41pm
I appreciate the clarification, but I’m still not sure I agree on the issue of hypocrisy. Take the stoning-for-adultery example you cite. You said that the would-be executioners left “because they decided that it was morally inappropriate for them to carry out that punishment.” I just don’t see why that makes a difference. You also indicate that you think execution isn’t an appropriate penalty for adultery, as do I, of course, so lets move the thought experiment in a slightly different direction. Imagine there was a parallel world where Ted Bundy completed his law degree and ended up becoming a judge, but also kept up his more reprehensible activities while avoiding detection. Suppose this version of Bundy presides over a trial where someone is justly convicted of doing something awful, and the trial is at the sentencing stage. By hypothesis, the person is justly deserving punishment. I wouldn’t say that Bundy should drop his gavel and set the offender free, because it would be “inappropriate for him” to carry out a righteous judgment. To do so would simply add to the amount of injustice in the world – letting the criminal go free would simply be another of Bundy’s sins.
In your first post you said “A thief has no standing to blame someone else for thieving; an adulterer no standing to blame an adulteress.” I don’t see why. If someone led an after school program to discourage troubled youths from shoplifting but later turned out to be a kleptomaniac – it was still good for them to have discouraged people from shoplifting! This also seems relevantly different from the scenario you describe with someone who wrongly morally condemns homosexuality while secretly engaging in it. Doing something that’s perfectly okay while wrongly condemning it in others does seem bad. Doing something that’s bad while correctly condemning it doesn’t seem the same – obviously it’s bad to do the action, but the condemnation of it still seems correct.
Hypocrisy of the second sort is bad because it comes about when a persons low moral actions don’t match with their high moral pronouncements. But the proper way to eliminate hypocrisy is by raising a person’s actions to match their words. If instead they lower their pronouncements to the level of their actions, or stay silent about what is morally correct, sure, the hypocrisy goes away, but I fail to see how anything is meaningfully improved by that.
I guess I think of hypocrisy as bad in the way that Caplan once described corruption:
When policy is bad, corruption can be good – especially when policy is outright evil. After all, that’s why when we describe something as “pure evil,” the “pure” modifier isn’t meant as some sort of praise! I guess in the same way, I don’t see “hypocrisy” as a poison that makes everything worse. Bad actions are plausibly made worse by hypocrisy, but I don’t see how good actions or good words should be left undone or unspoken for the sole sake of preventing hypocrisy as such.
Mark Young
Jul 1 2021 at 4:39pm
When policy is bad, corruption can be good – especially when policy is outright evil.
I think we could agree on the f0llowing ordering from worst to best:
Evil policy implemented with no corruption.
Evil policy implemented with corruption.
Good policy implemented with corruption.
Good policy implemented with no corruption.
I’d still hesitate to call corruption “good” in case 2. It ameliorates badness overall (so, greater overall utility), but it’s still costing innocents harms that they should not have to suffer. It’s smaller evil. It’s like “I used to be a murderer, but now I’m just a thief! I’m good now!”
I’d contrast this with resistance, where resistance to evil policy might ameliorate those harms equally. Even if the resistor is getting paid by innocents, I think. I’m not willing to completely discount intent as a moral factor.
I’m unhappy with the cops and judges examples. Cops and judges are not (in theory) acting on their own moral judgements, but as agents of a larger society. They don’t get to exercise the full range of options open to other moral actors. They should be acting morally at all times, of course, but their situation imposes more moral constraints on them. For example, I’m of the opinion that forgiveness is a free moral action — victims may forgive their transgressors without reason. Cops and judges are not allowed to do that in their public roles. Even their private expressions of moral (dis)approbation are morally constrained by the necessity of justice being seen to be done.
I have to agree that the kleptomaniac counsellor’s encouragement of virtue is a good thing — like the murderer stopping a robbery. But again, I think it’s slightly different than what I had in mind. Would you hire someone as an anti-theft counsellor if you knew they were a active thief? Probably not, and I suspect your reasoning would be along the lines of their actions undercutting their message. But why should their actions undercut their message? Isn’t it because the students are morally offended by the message coming from someone who doesn’t practice what they preach?
My position is that hypocrisy is a bad thing, regardless of whether the (hypocritical) criticisms themselves are good or bad, tho’ I will grant that the goodness of the criticisms themselves might outweigh the badness of the hypocrisy on some reasonable measures. That was definitely not clear in my original statement, and I apologize for that.
Jan
Jun 28 2021 at 2:24pm
Yes you did, but you also Said it only works in conjuction with souls. That’s *not* the standard mutiverse argument.
Michael Huemer
Jun 29 2021 at 9:50pm
Right, you need non-material souls in order to avoid the “this Universe” objection, which was what the coin flip example was supposed to illustrate.
nobody.really
Jun 29 2021 at 3:45pm
Can we check some definitions here?
I sense “determinism is established” does not refer to the state of human BELIEF, but to the truth or falsity of the premise that everything is predetermined. That premise would obtain, or not, from the dawn of time (or perhaps from shortly after the Big Bang). So if we agree for the sake of argument that “determinism is established,” I don’t think this creates a triggering event that might cause something.
But maybe I have misunderstood, and “determinism is established” refers to the idea that people come to embrace the view that their lives/actions/thoughts/beliefs are predetermined. That change in people’s belief might indeed trigger a change in behavior. But would that change have “causal powers”?
Yes–in this sense: Imagine links in a chain. If for some reason Link A pulls to the left with sufficient force, perhaps we could say that Link A has “causal powers” to pull the other links to the left. But we would not attribute volition or moral responsibility to Link A; Link A would merely be the conduit by which the force applied to Link A gets transmitted to Link B, Link C, etc.
Likewise, if many people began to embrace a deterministic mindset, this new mindset might alter their behavior relative to a HYPOTHETICAL world in which they did not embrace that mindset. This is akin to saying that Link B altered its behavior and moved to the left relative to a HYPOTHETICAL world in which Link A did not convey a leftward pull on Link B. But I emphasize HYPOTHETICAL because, if we assume that everything in the world is governed by determinism, then by definition the world could not be other than it is at any given point in time. The world might be in a constant state of change, but the changes would be utterly determined by forces beyond anyone’s control. We’re all just links in a chain, being dragged along by the link ahead of us, and dragging along the links behind us. That’s determinism.
Michael Huemer
Jun 29 2021 at 9:54pm
I was referring to the state of human belief, which I assume is what the other commenter was referring to. Just making the point that beliefs about determinism have effects, just like all other events.
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