Affirmative Action for Conservative Professors

[Whaleboy]

Its an absolutely awful idea. Keeping equal conservative and liberal professors are like keeping 50/50 male/female fire fighters!! . What suffers there is the fire service... see where I'm going with this? .

The whole point of conservatism is absense of a general, underlying philosophy (just an observation), or if there is a philosophy, it consists of a paradoxical pramatism .

You ever notice how so many of these new conservative "think tanks" are set up because one thing liberalism has over conservatism is the greater philosophical and intellectual backing? I'm not the only one it seems *as Whaleboy searches for article* http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-thinktank.htm

[Fake Boris]

Originally posted by skywalker
1. science is, by definition, not a priori, since it deals with EMPIRICAL fact

That depends on the definition of science you use. Most would believe maths to be a science.

2. free will can be deduced a priori, thus it is a priori, as much as math

It can't. No one ever was able to put a definite, rational argument to prove it. Even Kant admitted it. The only thing we can know is that we have to ASSUME we have free will if we are somehow to act.

Your caps are not helping you. No philosophy teacher would ever say that 'making a decision' is sufficient to believe in free will. I won't argue that we are 'making decisions'- that is a truism anyway.

Say there are two parallel universes, at the state of day 0 (big bang). They are exactly identical. Do they evolve in a different way?

(BTW, I know there can't be two universes. This a mere abstract hypothesis).

3. free will != immortal soul! Why do I have to keeps saying this! Free will = I make my own decisions.

The whole point was to say that since free will appeared at a time where humanity had no idea at all of the brain functions, it first originated as a religious concept, which stipulated we had a metaphysical, immortal soul.

No one believes in that anymore. You can still try to defend free will from a scientific, physical perspective, but most scientists are not wasting time doing it, because determinism is becoming increasingly plausible.

[Whaleboy]

OB:

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by skywalker


READ MY FRIGGING POSTS - I'VE F***ING PROVED THAT I HAVE FREE WILL

FREE WILL = I MAKE MY OWN DECISIONS

I MAKE MY OWN DECICISIONS

I HAVE FREE WILL

HOW F***KING HARD IS THAT TO UNDERSTAND?

Stop yelling.

No, you have proved nothing. Freewill is the concept that we humans can somehow make decisions contrary to (deterministic) physical laws. Mainstream Christian theologicans since Thomas Aquinas have been arguing for freewill because that is the only way to make the idea of "sin" stick*.

Let me explain this a bit further. There is no reason not to believe that your decisions cannot be predicted with sufficient knowledge of you. For example, you probably can guess what sort of decisions your friends are going to make, and the better you know them, the more accurate these predictions are.

Ultimately, then, with a 100% knowledge of somebody and all the sensory inputs this person receives at any moment in time, a sufficiently fast computer can predict, with 100% accuracy, what this person is going to do the right moment.

In other words, your decisions are determined by your phyiscal self and the aggregate of your sensory inputs. Thus, you are just a very sophisticated computer running a very complex algorithm.

Where is this freewill?

* If this world is entirely deterministic, with the Christian god as the first mover, all our actions would be completely out of our control. Without the ability to hold humans responsible for our actions, we cannot commit any sin whatsoever.

[Whaleboy]

UR: You're only going to push his blood pressure even higher...

And I completely concur with you.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by skywalker
Since law requires responsibility, does that make any proponents of law inherently religious?

The basis of law is that of practicality, not any deep philosophical musings. Laws will be utterly senseless without assuming that people must be held responsible for their own actions. Without laws, there will be no society, no civilisation -- even very primitive tribes have some form of law.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Whaleboy
UR: You're only going to push his blood pressure even higher...

Oh, I was his age once, and I know completely how this sense of infallability can be overwhelming.

[Whaleboy]

The basis of law is that of practicality, not any deep philosophical musings.

Not sure about that. Law has traditionally been based upon religion, and it is possible to now formulate a system of law making that is based upon a cerebral logical principle, or indeed, one of the myriad interpretations of "practicality"

Oh, I was his age once, and I know completely how this sense of infallability can be overwhelming.

What age is that? Unfortunately my position precludes infallability, which is nice. I have a free house for the week and half an ounce of skunk. I feel profound...

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Whaleboy
Not sure about that. Law has traditionally been based upon religion, and it is possible to now formulate a system of law making that is based upon a cerebral logical principle, or indeed, one of the myriad interpretations of "practicality"

For a very long stretch of time law was closely associated with religion, yes. Though IIRC the first codified set of law, from that Babaylonian king (I forgot his name at the moment), was not based on religion.

I think that very early tribal laws were probably not based on religion either. Also, Chinese (probably also East Asia) laws had never been based on religion.

Originally posted by Whaleboy
What age is that?

18.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by skywalker

Originally posted by Agathon
Don't be deliberately obtuse. If we want to know how an idea came into being and reached its present form we look at its history.

Free will doesn't make sense given the scientific world view. We can have a view of free will where my decisions are caused by my beliefs and desires, but that's not the kind of freedom most people associate with free will. Historically, some people have posited an immaterial soul to explain why our desires and decisions are not subject to ordinary causality.

Well, that's pointless, because ANYTHING is either subject to causality or not subject to causality. If it isn't subject to causality, it is probabilistic, if it is subject to causality, it is deterministic. I don't understand how my definition of free will isn't the one most people hold - making their own decisions.

But making free will probabalistic doesn't solve the problem either, because then you are no more free than a radioactive particle as I pointed out in a previous post. Your decision making is still subject to physical laws. Most Free will theorists think that having free will is incompatible with any sort of deterministic physical theory, even a probabilistic one.

However, there are others, like Aristotle, who are compatibilists. They believe that free will is compatible with determinism because we mean by Free will a certain kind of causal determination rather than a lack of causality.

And ordinarily that means punishing the person whose beliefs and desires caused him to commit the crime rather than someone who did it out of ignorance or under duress. It's valuable to be able to distinguish causes in this way because we don't end up killing or locking up people who are not likely to do bad things in future.

If you say so...

Don't be a cretin. This is the best explanation of how the notion of responsibility came into being. It is beneficial to the community to be able to sort out cases of bad character from accidental cases. Anything else requires appeal to mysterious entities or transcendent forces like free will.

It is one thing to give that account and another to suppose there is some magical thing called free will which removes my decisions and mental states from causality.

Where have I stated that free will is not subject to causality? In fact, I believe I specifically stated that it was...

Then you, like me are a compatibilist, And that means that you reject the incompatibilist view of free will which is that which religious people hold.

The former is consistent with a "deterrence" view of punishment, the latter with a "retributivist" view of punishment. Conservatives are almost all retributivists.

That's a stupid, blanket statement, but it brings up a good question - what's wrong with retribution?

It doesn't make any sense. That's what's wrong with it. Have a look at the last death penalty thread to see why. Retributivism requires incompatibilist free will to work. That's why most retributivists are Kantians, because Kant correctly surmised that you needed free will (in the incompatibilist fashion) to make it work, because you, and only you cause your decisions(as I said before, he also pointed out that this view of human agency required God to make sense of it - he was a smart guy).

On the compatibilist view, your beliefs cause your decisions and your beliefs are in turn caused by perception, thinking (a causal process), and social conditioning (a causal process). That is anathema to retributivists because their justification of punishment is that the criminal chose to do his crime freely and without any external cause and that is what entitles us to do the same to him. Without an incompatibilist account of free will, this justification of punishment cannot be mounted since there are many things which cause people to commit crimes. The deterrence theorist doesn't have to worry about this, since he only cares about the consequences (as I pointed out the in the previous post.

No. I argue that they came up with it because it is required to solve certain problems that theism creates. That is not an ad hominem argument.

You are using it to say that free will is religious (which is an attack on free will and the arguments supporting it, IMO ) by attacking those who posited it.

No. I've pointed out that Free Will in the sense in which most modern people think of it, only really became of concern with the Christian notion of divine judgement. Earlier worries along similar lines (i.e. the Stoics) were also caused by problems with God; but these weren't as pressing since they didn't have any practical import, whereas the matter of divine judgement does for Christians. Ben got this straightaway, why didn't you.

Secondly, I've argued here and elsewhere, that conservative attitudes towards responsibility implicitly accept the Christian view of free will. But that view rests on some sort of metaphysical extravagance (the idea of supernatural causes, souls, or exceptions to the physical laws of the universe) which is at odds with contemporary science.

So I'm pointing out two things. (1) Incompatibilist Free Will (i.e. what conservatives assume about it) is not compatible with the contemporary scientific world view.

(2) It is compatible with the Christian world view and developed historically from that view. So whether they know it or not, conservatives are using a concept that really only makes sense within the religious world view.

Now Ben picked up on this immediately and sees that it is a double edged sword. He can now use free will to argue for the Christian world view. So both Christians and atheists benefit from this argument.

A subsequent argument is that, because we live in a secular state, religious doctrine should not in any fashion infect the law. Hence certain kinds of laws that rest on the essentially religious view of free will, should be repealed. Of course, Ben will disagree on this one.

Ok, I don't know about that. A lot of my knowledge of philosophy comes from Sophie's World and philosophypages.com

And it shows.

Do your beliefs and desires determine your actions? If so, what determines them? Are you a physical creature subject to causal laws? If so, how do you fit free will in (the old Quantum mechanics argument doesn't work because then your free will is no more under your control than the decay of a radioactive particle is under its control).

Yes, physical laws, yes, my mind is controlling my actions.

Then you are a compatibilist - conservative views of free will are incompatibilist.

Free will is a ridiculous concept. If our will really is free then why aren't we surprised by our own decisions? How is it that we can largely predict what other people are going to do?

Free will != spontaneity. Free will = control over your own actions.

But if your actions are the result of physical processes in your brain and these processes are determined by physical laws, then your decisions are subject to physical laws and there is no real spontenaity, other than possibly the same sort of spontenaity that radioactive particles have, and we do not call that free will.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui

that is possibly the STUPIDEST argument I've ever heard.

I agree... I guess everything metaphysical is 'religious'. I'm sure Nietszche and Kant would love to know how religious they were.

Nietzsche? The most anti metaphysical philosopher in history?

You shame yourself and your family with that statement, Imran.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by skywalker
In fact, by his definition, Democritus, essentially the first reductionist/mechanist/materialist (and one of the main founders of atomism) would be religious, as well, since the "void" (empty space) is "nonphysical"... and Democritus was a staunch atheist.

Oh lord....

The Stoics reject metaphysics too.

Democritus and Leucippus posit the void as a being because they want to avoid Parmenides' prohibition on non being.

They aren't metaphysicans because they think that void is a constituent of the natural world just as much as the atoms.

You are on shaky ground here as the term metaphysics was not even coined until after their deaths. It is generally used to indicate principles or entities that transcend the physical realm (like God), are ontologically prior to it (like God), and are not subject to its laws (like God).

Please stop reading these dime store summaries of philosophical beliefs and read the people themselves, it would save so much trouble.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Oncle Boris


It can't. No one ever was able to put a definite, rational argument to prove it. Even Kant admitted it. The only thing we can know is that we have to ASSUME we have free will if we are somehow to act.

OB is spot on here, that's exactly what Kant says.

[Odin]

Ben, Dualism is a scientifically dead idea. Get over it.

BTW, I am an Identity Monist (mind is the same as the brain)

[Caligastia]

Re: Affirmative Action for Conservative Professors

Originally posted by Agathon
What happened to the "free marketplace of ideas"?

That's just it - it's not a free marketplace. Conservative groups are discriminated against by college administrators.