Wrong. But if thats your basis for the arguement; well, there isnt really any arguement.
Free will does exist. So does personal choice and responsibility in life. No one is 'doomed' to be a murderer. Sorry, I just aint buying that one.
There is a simple way out of this. I'll put it in the form of a joke:
A man, having stolen from a shop, was brought in front of a judge. Having a superficial knowledge of philosophy and evolutionary psychology, he defends himself thus, "Your Honour, I wasn't responsible for my actions. Free will doesn't exist, and I acted as my genes, experiences, and circumstances would have made me act." The judge replied, "I agree. In fact, I actually completely buy your argument. You're right, there's no way you could have acted otherwise. And by the same standard, of course, I sentence you to a fine of $1500, and one month of community service. Why? Because that is what my genes, experiences, and circumstances make me do. You see, there really is no way that I can act otherwise."
Anyway - what you've stated isn't really much of an argument. It's like saying, "If X is true, then bad things will happen. I don't want bad things to happen. Therefore, I don't want X to be true. So X is not true." Just because Judaeo-Christian notions of morality would completely collapse, and so would our current concepts of justice with it, if this idea became widespread, does not in fact mean that the idea isn't true.
To quote Nietzsche on this (from his
The Twilight of the Idols):
The Error of Free Will: Today we no longer have any tolerance for the idea of "free will": we see it only too clearly for what it really is the foulest of all theological fictions, intended to make mankind "responsible" in a religious sense that is, dependent upon priests. Here I simply analyze the psychological assumptions behind any attempt at "making responsible."
Whenever responsibility is assigned, it is usually so that judgment and punishment may follow. Becoming has been deprived of its innocence when any acting-the-way-you-did is traced back to will, to motives, to responsible choices: the doctrine of the will has been invented essentially to justify punishment through the pretext of assigning guilt. All primitive psychology, the psychology of will, arises from the fact that its interpreters, the priests at the head of ancient communities, wanted to create for themselves the right to punish or wanted to create this right for their God. Men were considered "free" only so that they might be considered guilty could be judged and punished: consequently, every act had to be considered as willed, and the origin of every act had to be considered as lying within the consciousness (and thus the most fundamental psychological deception was made the principle of psychology itself).
Today, we immoralists have embarked on a counter movement and are trying with all our strength to take the concepts of guilt and punishment out of the world to cleanse psychology, history, nature, and social institutions and sanctions of these ideas. And there is in our eyes no more radical opposition than that of the theologians, who continue to infect the innocence of becoming by means of the concepts of a "moral world-order," "guilt," and "punishment." Christianity is religion for the executioner.
What alone can be our doctrine? That no one gives a man his qualities neither God, nor society, nor his parents and ancestors, nor he himself. (The nonsense of the last idea was taught as "intelligible freedom" by Kant and perhaps by Plato.) No one is responsible for a man's being here at all, for his being such-and-such, or for his being in these circumstances or in this environment. The fatality of his existence is not to be disentangled from the fatality of all that has been and will be. Human beings are not the effect of some special purpose, or will, or end; nor are they a medium through which society can realize an "ideal of humanity" or an "ideal of happiness" or an "ideal of morality." It is absurd to wish to devolve one's essence on some end or other. We have invented the concept of "end": in reality there is no end.
A man is necessary, a man is a piece of fatefulness, a man belongs to the whole, a man is in the whole; there is nothing that could judge, measure, compare, or sentence his being, for that would mean judging, measuring, comparing, or sentencing the whole. But there is nothing besides the whole. That nobody is held responsible any longer, that the mode of being may not be traced back to a primary cause, that the world does not form a unity either as a sensorium or as "spirit" that alone is the great liberation. With that idea alone we absolve our becoming of any guilt. The concept of "God" was until now the greatest objection to existence. We deny God, we deny the responsibility that originates from God: and thereby we redeem the world.
We do? I thought this was a highly debated point among philosopher's and neuroscientists. And doesn't that contrast with your second sentence, "we can choose our actions to a degree"?
I don't think anyone believes that we have ABSOLUTE free will, that our decisions aren't impacted by anything but our other choices. But if we truly can choose are actions to any degree, then we have a least a little free will. So your post is contradictory, and needs to be better explained.
It's either all-or-nothing, Elrohir.
Either we have some acausal entity which is in some way "deciding" what to do independently of the laws of physics and the universe, and independent of laws and rules in general, or there is a causal entity which is bound to the laws of the universe. Free will either exists or does not exist, because the problem of its existence can be reduced to the debate between monism, dualism, and materialism, and the three are mutually exclusive. Only in the first case (pure monism of consciousness) can true free will exist. The second (dualism) is far too logically inconsistent to be seriously considered today. The third, of course, denies free will entirely.
Personally, I lean to the side of "does not exist". The illusion of free will arises from the fact that our consciousness of ourselves is limited to only a small part of the brain/mind, so that most of our impulses and moral judgements appear acausal, because we are not conscious of the mechanisms underlying them. Most of our "reasons" for our moral judgements are, in fact,
post hoc rationalisations for what our impulses instinctively tell us is "right" or "wrong". This idea is substrate-neutral, by the way - it does not matter whether the illusion arises from the pure monism of consciousness, or whether consciousness arises as an emergent property of matter.
