Dawkins on free will

Gintas J. writes:

I bring this up because one of the issues in the discussion you’re having is free will vs. determinism. It’s astonishing just how deterministic Richard Dawkins is:

Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software…

But doesn’t a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused’s physiology, heredity and environment. Don’t judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?

Here’s an 18-minute debate between Dawkins and one David Quinn, an Irish Catholic commentator.

Quinn zeroes in on free will, and Dawkins isn’t interested. Before Darwin, it was a mystery, but it’s all solved now.

LA replies:

If, as Dawkins goes on to say, “[A] truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system [makes] nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not,” what is his basis for believing in liberal rights?

Also, he believes we should have no more anger at murderers and rapists than we do at a malfunctioning car, and that we are ridiculous for wanting to assign responsibility to criminals and punish them. He keeps saying such attitudes are as laughable as that of a man punishing his car. But he also admits that such attitudes are formed by evolution, meaning that anger at murderers, belief in individuals’ responsibilty for their actions, and desire to punish malefactors are naturally selected traits which help the human race thrive. Why then does he treat these belief with contempt? I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a perverse and unpleasant individual.

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Vivek writes from India:

I am reminded of a story that we heard as children. A saint was talking to an audience, and he mentioned: “Everything happens by God’s will.” A person got up and shot a question: “If everything happens by God’s will, then why are we punished for our crimes?” Then the saint replied with equanimity: “The punishment also happens by God’s will.”

A person who claims that crime is a consequence of evolution must be willing to concede that punishment too is a consequence of the same evolution.

Carl A writes:

“But he also admits that such attitudes are formed by evolution, meaning that anger at murderers, belief in individuals” responsibility for their actions, and desire to punish malefactors are naturally selected traits which help the human race thrive. Why then does he treat these belief with contempt?”

Simple: Because he is a liberal, and Liberal doctrine has many problems with evolutionary implications (Liberals have always found punishing criminals iffy).

Of course, there is a far weaker argument to be made in favour of restraining the human urge for retribution in the context of the modern violence monopoly ( i.e. avoiding vigilantism), but Dawkins goes far beyond that point. So, yup—this was Dawkins at his very worst (and I speak as one of those evolution-minded atheists).

Derek C. writes:

As an unbeliever myself, I’ve always found Dawkins’s arguments tremendously shallow and ill-considered. Take this analogy, for example:

“When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software.”

Well, yes, sometimes we do. However, if the cost isn’t worth the bother, we throw it away. Why not apply the same principle to murderers? And why just stop at murderers? Instead of limiting capital punishment to murderers, why not expand it to thieves? In purely material terms, one can certainly justify the cost savings in prevented future thefts and imprisonment costs. If a man is guilty of some crime, and there’s no prospect of profitable reform, let’s humanely “put him to sleep.” And since Dawkins has done us the courtesy of robbing crime of its moral content, let’s look at other cost savings: the crippled, the retarded, the anti-social and reactionary, which in the view of many “New Atheists” certainly includes the religious…well, you see where this is going.

Naturally, Dawkins would be repulsed at the thought of doing these things, but that’s just his atavistic prejudice. Once he gets over his hang-ups, I’m sure he’ll come around, and if not…well, we can only waste so much time and money on broken and obsolete appliances.

LA replies:

Derek doesn’t need to infer that conclusion from Dawkins’s logic; Dawkins himself says it outright in the linked article (which is shocking and which I recommend that everyone read, it’s just a few paragraphs). Dawkins writes:

“Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing?”

Here he’s not just talking about replacing a defective part, say, a neuron in a criminal’s brain (which he’s suggesting could be fixed—and what if it couldn’t be fixed?). No, he’s talking about “replacing” the child murderer and thuggish vandal. Meaning eliminating that person. So he wants society to eliminate bad actors, he just wants all moral judgment to be removed from the process. Instead of society trying a murderer, with a jury of his peers finding him guilty, a determination that requires a finding of criminal intent (a concept Dawkins dismisses), and then executing him by due process of law, Dawkins wants the murderer handed over to a board of scientists who will simply take his life with all the ceremony of throwing out a defective tv set. Yet Dawkins, who would have humans discarded like broken machines, is utterly contemptuous of society for its supposed harshness in expressing moral indignation against malefactors!

I repeat, I’ve never seen a human being simultaneously so confused and so vicious as Dawkins.

Derek replies:

Ooofff. You’re right. How could I have missed that?

LA replies:

Probably because when he initially used the word “replace” he was speaking of replacing a defective part, in idea he repeated a couple of times; so when he later used “replace” in a different sense you assumed he meant it in the same sense as earlier times. Tricky on his part.

James D. writes:

Has anyone asked Dawkins what his car believes about the free will vs determinism question?

LA replies:

That’s great! LOL.

What James has said is not just a clever line, but goes to the heart of Dawkins’s position. On one hand, Dawkins says that humans are no more responsible, choosing, conscious agents than automobiles are. On the other hand, Dawkins, who is a human, has all kinds of opinions about responsibility, choice, and consciousness. So why shouldn’t Dawkins’s car have opinions too?

Kristor writes:

It goes even deeper. If as Dawkins argues it is simply inapposite to ascribe moral blame to murderers, what then could justify disapprobation of murder? If nothing that happens is really truly evil, and therefore ideally ought to be corrected, then how does it make sense to say that a broken TV is “broken”? How can it make sense to call something broken or wrong or mistaken, except in respect to some purpose to achieve a truly valuable objective? If murderers are not evil, why waste resources on either fixing or killing them? After all, when murderers do their thing, that’s just natural selection at work, right? No problem!

Finally, if everything we do and think is just random meaningless hustling about of dead pebbles, how can Dawkins justify his ire at those who disagree with him? Under his hypothesis, both his hypotheses and those of his intellectual adversaries are meaningless noise. Why should he then care what anyone thinks? What could then ground his passionate interest in the cultural success of atheism?

LA replies:

Yes, by what standard do we think that child murder is bad and should be prevented by fixing the murderers? Because evolution tells us so? But that’s the same evolution that makes us want to punish the murderers, and Dawkins thinks people are contemptible and laughable for wanting to punish murderers. So by what standard does Dawkins embrace some results of evolution, and despise others?

Kristor replies:

Lawrence writes: “By what standard does Dawkins embrace some results of evolution, and despise others?”

Yes, exactly. If Dawkins is right, he can’t even justify reaching out for a sip of coffee, or not reaching out. By his own account, he can’t justify or explain anything he does, because it’s all deterministic noise (never mind that “deterministic noise” is an oxymoron). In other words, Dawkins is loudly insisting that he is spewing nonsense.

Glad he cleared that up!

LA writes:

This goes back to my discussion in “The intellectual fraud that is Darwinism” thread. According to Darwinism, every single thing about us originated in a random mutation which was then naturally selected because the mutation helped the organism live longer and have more offspring than other organisms of the same species. There is NO PLACE in the Darwinian process for intentionality, purpose and choice, neither in the direction of the evolutionary process as a whole, nor in the individual organisms that are produced by the evolutionary process. Everything that exists in the biological universe is there because it accidentally appeared and then survived because it helped an organism live longer and have more offspring.

The only way that intentionality, purposiveness, and the capacity for moral and rational choice could have entered this situation would be if the capacity for moral and rational choice came into existence by a random mutation, and then individuals who had that capacity had more offspring and so the moral and rational capacity spread through the human species. But if the capacity for moral and rational choice is now a part of our human nature, then we are not the deterministic entities that Dawkins says we are. If humans have the capacity for moral and rational choice, then a murderer IS responsible for what he did, and people ARE justified in being indignant at him and wanting to punish him.

In other words, for Dawkins to have the right to be indignant at people for being indignant at murderers, it can only be because people have the capacity for moral and rational judgment: they are making a gross mistake about the nature of reality for which they deserve Dawkins’s censure. But if people have the capacity for moral and rational judgment, then murderers are responsible for their murders, and people have the right to be indignant at them for committing murder. Dawkin’s contempt for other people’s moral judgmentalism refutes itself, since it is itself a form of moral judgmentalism.

LA continues:

By the way, I’m aware that I haven’t dealt with sexual selection, as distinct from natural selection, which some readers tell me I need to take into account. Some people even call sexual selection, which Darwin discussed in The Descent of Man, to be an alternative theory of evolution. Sexual selection does seem to introduce an element of choice into the proceess that is lacking with natural selection, since hominids in choosing mates with certain qualities are choosing to reproduce the qualities they prefer. However, there are two problems with this idea. First, sexual selection only affects the nature of the selection, not the nature of the change that is being selected; the change still occurs by a random process. Second, in order for female hominids to want to select, say, males with broad shoulders and continually growing hair on top of their head, or for male hominids to want to select, say, females without a pelt of fur covering their bodies and with high cheekbones, the desire for those things must itself have been the product of a chance mutation in the past which was then selected because the bearers of it lived longer and had more offspring. So even with sexual selection, there really is no intentionality in the process of evolution.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 14, 2007 01:34 AM | Send