I would like to start off by saying that I disagree so fervently with this position that it made me angry to just read the Zack's words on the page. I am personally of the opinion that people frequently blame all sorts of things that are really under their control on a medical "condition" in order to escape culpability for their actions. Some common examples are: Tiger Woods and his "sex addiction", the millions of people who all of a sudden need adderal in order to do school work, etc. I would also like to say that these things certainly are real conditions, but in my opinion only exist in a fraction of those people who claim to suffer from the illness. Call me an existentialist.
Because of my VERY strong opinion on the issue of free will, I was enraged when I read the account of racism as a pathology that runs from the bottom of pages 47 to the top of page 48 in Thinking About Race. ("If racists are judged to be emotionally disturbed simply because they are racists, this lifts their moral responsibility for the harm done . . .). However, this reminded me of a cartoon a friend, who knows my nearly cathartic opinion on the topic of moral responsibility, sent to me.
Well to shake your opinion on free will, not that I am a determinist, but take the following experiment:
ReplyDeleteA scenario is set up at a phone-booth where a dime is placed in the coin dispenser. The subjects enter the phone-booth, make a call etc, and when they leave, an "actor" drops a bag of groceries on the sidewalk. Now the study was focused on revealing how influential our environment can be on our actions, namely to see if people would act differently if they found the dime or not. The results were astonishing: While nearly 100% of people who found the dime stopped to help pick up the groceries, only a handful of those who didn't find the dime decided to help. These experiments are repeated under different circumstances (most famous is the Milgram), and challenge our assumptions of autonomy and free will. Are we merely a product of external pressure that we may not be aware of. More difficult to get around is the more metaphysical question of where is the room for free will if, at a subatomic level, we are simply a bundle of firing neurons?
Something to think about...