Wow, what a thoughtful and interesting post, Ken. I kind of worried we were all Martians, especially the people who live in my neighborhood in Southern California...
Anyway, yes, even in our own rather paltry world, we use certain criteria to impute responsibility, moral and legal, which are similar to what you describe as certain "cognitive and volitional capacities". We do not inquire into metaphysics, when we are spanking our children (gently, of course--maybe I should have said "scolding"), or deliberating as jurors say in the Scott Peterson case (or the Michael Ross case, and so forth). But I think that as philosophers we can and should step back from these practices and try to figure out what lies behind them, as it were--what warrants or justifies the everyday invocation of facts about our psychology in ascriptions of responsibility. And, in my view, when we "step back" we are not giving up commonsense, but relying on parts of it (as in any good philosophy). My contention is that from this sort of more expansive perspective, we can see that our ordinary ascriptions of responsibility (moral and/or criminal) are bound up with free will or "control" in a certain way.
Think of it this way. We use certain relatively superficial criteria--such as appearance, spatial location, and so forth--to warrant identifications and re-identifications of objects (tables, chairs) and even persons. But, whereas these may be the criteria we typically use, they need to be evaluated and philosophically scrutinized. Upon such scrutiny, we may find what's "really" behind identify--or perhaps less pretentiously, what can be justified from a philosophical point of view as being the real basis for (say) persistence of objects over time. Presumably this will in some suitable way be related to our ordinary practices.

Actually, determinism is entirely irrelevant. If determinism is true, then there is no meaning to any action. Indeed, there is not even action - there is merely "the way things are", including all the future and past.
如果决定论是正确的，那么我们“应该”做什么就没有意义了，只会发生什么。所有的生命都变得毫无意义，因为生命本身并不比冰冷的真空空间更有趣，也同样不可避免。
If determinism is true, people will continue for a long time in the belief that it is false, and eventually some belief will prevail, just as in the long term the entropy of any system increases. Instead of moral responsibility, you have only system dynamics, and our beliefs are only states of existence. There are no implications for justice, because there is no justice. There is no change to what is morally true, because moral beliefs are simple states of being which rise and fall according to the equations of physics playing out under us.
To suggest that a true belief in determinism would change what any of us "should" do is to mis-understand determinism. Full determinism is nothing more or less than irrelevant. Partial determinism is however far more interesting.
-T

为了解决洛克的问题?现在的问题是，你必须考察知识和自由意志之间的关系。我有自由意志吗?只要我不知道?如果我不知道任何东西会与“自由意志”相抵触，那么我可以假设我有“自由意志”，但这并不意味着我最终拥有它。没有人能证明自由意志不存在，尽管他们有因果决定这样的理论。在洛克?it’’问题是，房间里的人不知道房间是锁着的，就像任何一个人都不知道他们真的没有自由意志一样。唯一知道这一点的人就是上帝，或者说是从0点之后所有其他事物的源头。永远不会有答案，因为我们不可能回到0点。
David Hume would not agree with the whole idea of causal determination, was he not against the whole idea of the link between cause and effects. Has anyone ever said that there could be such things that would fall under causal determination such as physical objects, and things such as the Human Spirit that would not fall under it?

John, Ken, and John (Fischer),
感谢你今天的自由意志节目，好东西。肯在上面写道，火星科学家在实际实践中似乎没有发现任何与人类是否自由有关的东西。在某种形而上学的深层意义上。也许吧，但似乎我们的一些实践在很大程度上依赖于我们的“信仰”，我们拥有形而上学的深层多样性的自由意志主义自由。例如，最近在马萨诸塞州的一起谋杀案审判中，被告被判有罪并被判处死刑，一位陪审员说:“如果我能对(凶手)说什么，我唯一要说的就是，为什么?”归根结底，你是有选择的。他没有?我们必须做他所做的。了吗?他选择做什么? Some jurors, if they came to believe we don?t have libertarian freedom, might be less likely to vote for capital punishment because moral desert is sometimes (perhaps often, the data aren?t in yet) thought to depend on such freedom: the killer could have done otherwise in the exact situation as it arose, but didn?t, so he deserves to die. As you know, Clarence Darrow exploited these intuitions in his defense of Leopold and Loeb, who were spared the death penalty.
这与约翰·费舍尔的一个问题有关。你在今天的节目中说，在你的半兼容主义观点中，我们所拥有的那种自由和控制意味着我们有强大的道德责任，有时真的“应该”受到惩罚，我们在某种程度上应该受到惩罚?独立于它在改变行为中的角色。在你看来，为什么像我们这样的正常的、理性的、对原因敏感的人应该因为他们的罪行而遭受痛苦(甚至是死亡，有些人认为)，而不受这种痛苦可能改变他们的行为，或阻止他人，或其他可能的后果的影响?

Ken,
I think that some of what I say is related to John's good posting.
正如你自己注意到的，火星科学家可能会被他观察到的东西弄糊涂。有些人认为某个人负有道德责任。但其他人可能不会让同一个人承担道德责任，因为他们担心相关能力是否像你说的那样“正常”。
What is the Martian Scientist to do? Well, he could just give up on trying to understand humans (I'm tempted toward this on some days). Or he could think something like the following: "Both, those screwy humans sure are messed up. Humans number 1 through 187 find person S morally responsible for action A, while humans 188 through 365 don't. Sure S can't be both morally responsible and not morally responsible for A. So which is it? Which group gets it right?" And once the Martian Scientist embarks on answering this question, he's begun a project that--it seems to me--is going to have to involve a serious dose of metaphysics and ethics. For he'll have to answer "what has to be the case for somehold to be justifiably held morally responsible?"

Tom,
Thanks for the very kind words. I don't have a nice answer to you. I guess I just believe that there is a residual, ineliminable "retributivism" in our intuitions about punishment. I believe that when one knowingly, voluntarily, and freely acts in a way that harms someone else, one deserves punishment. The punishment is, in my view, part of a "conversation". The criminal "makes a statement" in freely doing something that is hostile or indifferent to someone else--he says, in essence, that the other person does not matter, or does not matter as much as he does, or something like this. In reply, the state says that this is false--that the victim matters just as much as anyone else. This is an "expressive" view of punishment, in which the state expresses the fundamental equality of citizens and "plants a flag for morality". But the conversational model is only part of the story. I believe that the harsh treatment which is part of punishment must "fit" or "match" the crime, and that in virtue of FREELY harming someone else, the criminal DESERVES this sort of treatment. I do not know how to prove or even further explain what seems to me to be a rock-bottom intuition, but of course I would welcome help from anyone!!

I don't think punishment should be seen as something the guilty party deserves. Imprisonment is not primarily a punishment to the offender. It is a means to generate a feeling of safety amidst the public. I think each culture finds a norm for what constitutes good character and orients people toward it. I think this dynamic underlies most law. The more people deviate from this norm, the more effort the society takes to bring them into conformity. The feeling that criminals deserve punishment is a mask for the real intuition that people should strive to develop good character. The reality behind imprisonment is that we remove the incontinent and vicious from the circumstances that enable them to slide further into their self-enslavement.

John,
谢谢你的坦诚回复。我也?认为它吗?最难解释的谷底报应直觉(让?S称之为)，是一种本能的感觉，即人们“应该”为他们所遭受的任何不合理的痛苦而遭受痛苦。对伤害过你或你爱的人进行报复无疑是为了阻止或挫败攻击，所以报复的倾向体现在报复情绪中，如怨恨和愤怒，是社会生物进化的一个基本特征。从大自然中看出来的?在S的观点中，这或多或少是一种结果主义的理论基础，因为报应直觉的自然功能基本上是威慑和保护，加上惩罚作弊者和搭便车者(显然这过于简化了事情，但类似这个故事的事情可能就是这样)。从我们个人的角度来看，我们不知道?报应直觉是作为结果主义的，但只是作为施加给攻击者痛苦的强大冲动。
But of course there still remains the issue of how to *justify* acting on our retributive impulses. The expressive theory of punishment that ?plants a flag for morality? can I think be assimilated to a consequentialist view, since expressing moral norms via punishment functions to publicize and enforce the norm, and thus guide behavior. But, as you acknowledge, there isn?t a further basis on which to justify acting on the intuition that people just deserve to suffer, independent of any behavior guiding function. If there is no such basis, perhaps we should conclude that *we shouldn?t act on that intuition* if it brings no consequential goods. This conclusion gets reinforced when we consider the often very negative consequences of retribution, e.g., the brutalization of offenders in unnecessarily punitive prison conditions, that the death penalty models killing as a response to injustice, the murderous cycles of tit-for-tat retaliation in ethnic/religious conflict, etc. etc. Once the retributive impulse is shorn of its metaphysical justification in libertarian freedom, then acting on it can only be justified if the suffering we inflict serves ends that we can in good conscience endorse and that can?t be achieved in less punitive, damaging ways. And this of course is to eliminate retributivism per se as a rationale for punishment. These points get discussed more fully in a review of law professor Michael Moore?s book, Placing Blame, athttp://www.naturalism.org/criminal.htm#AgainstRetribution.

I'm not sure my Martian Anthropologist would be helped by the debate on this thread. John Fischer started out by the comparing what the ordinary folk do in ascriptions of moral responsibility with the identification of ordinary objects on the basis of "superficial" properties. He said, "We use certain relatively superficial criteria--such as appearance, spatial location, and so forth--to warrant identifications and re-identifications of objects (tables, chairs) and even persons." So far, so good. The Martian notices the circumstances in which actual people make or withhold or withdraw ascriptions of moral responsibility. But then he takes the inquiry much deeper -- into the actual cognitive and volitional innards of a mature, intact, human being who is by the lights of the ordinary folk morally responsible. He finds some deep, systematic regularities there. He comes up with a comprehensive scientific story of mature, intact, human volition and cognition. So he's done something like the second step that John recommends -- except he's done it scientifically rather than philosophically.
But he now does a third thing. He scrutinizes the tomes of philosophy and theology and finds debates that seem to be conducted at a pretty far remove from what he has found about the cognitive and volitional dynamics of both those who are held responsible and those who hold them responsible. He's especially puzzled because he thinks he has found what systematic and deep regularities that do in fact support in real practice the ascriptions of moral responsibility. And they strike him as very little like what he finds suggested in many of the tomes of philosophy. He sees human beings as complex natural animals. He sees their cognitive and volitional capacities as part of the causal order.
He knows that he was engaged in a descriptive task -- but a deep task that got beneath the surface. He hears the philosophers and theologians talking about the justificatory task. But upon confronting questions about justification of the practices of the folk and the need for libertarian freedom or some more gentle variety of freedom, he agai goes back to the folk practices and sees how ascriptions are justified in practice. Where else should he go? He notices that there is what he decides to call a "practice-internal" set of moves that the folk make when making their ascriptions. He finds that these practice internal justificatory moves also track nicely with certain robust psychological properties of mature, intact, volitional and cognitive capacities -- both in the ascribers and the ascribees.
He realizes, though, that many philosophers apparently think there is a practice-external justificatory question to be asked. And they apparently think that it is at this practice-external level that issues about freedom and determinism get their deathgrip on questions about moral responsibility.
我们的火星人类学家真的很困惑。他不能确切地弄清楚这些“外部”的正当要求从何而来，或它们会产生什么。他怀疑它们来自地球文化深处。这就是他准备花更多时间的原因。作为一个非常优秀的科学家，他希望以事实和证据为指导，他准备发现这些是他可能还没有充分掌握的实践的合法和关键部分。但他也准备发现它们是小说和虚构的，是后期文化的覆盖。这些后期的文化覆盖，现在只是对地球人掩盖了集体事业的真实性质，而集体事业显然在他们的共同生活中扮演着、已经扮演着并且将会扮演如此中心的角色。

Even though the Martian discovers ?systematic and deep regularities [in human beings] that do in fact support in real practice the ascriptions of moral responsibility,? he doesn?t discover a unique, agreed-upon set of responsibility practices on Earth. Although people generally agree on who counts as responsible, what they do with those found guilty varies widely, e.g., Denmark vs. Texas. The Martian finds that the variability in responsibility practices depends partially on the theory of human nature that humans hold, namely whether people are causal exceptions to nature (have libertarian freedom) or not. Humans are sometimes killed by the state because it?s supposed they deserve to die since they could have done otherwise. This supposition and other commonsense notions about human agency, some truer than others, are an integral part of Earthlings? ?cognitive dynamics.?
火星人发现，这些关于人性的相同的概念和理论，或多或少就是哲学家们在自由意志辩论中所争论的问题(例如，是否存在?S是一种独特的人类原因)，所以没有?实践内部的理由和实践外部的理由之间有明确的区别。区别是普通语言与专业语言的区别和范围，而不是本质内容。他发现，对于人类的因果例外论，哲学家们通常比非哲学家们要少得多的迷惑，但一些兼容论者却倾向于保留只有在自由意志主义观点上才合理的惩罚实践(例如，施加痛苦或死亡而不考虑后果的实践)。这真的让他很疑惑。但他很快就发现了他们的信仰、态度和行为背后的因果关系，明白他们为什么不能?因此，当他从人类学家转变为道德工程师时，他能控制住自己的烦恼。一旦地球人(在科学的光线下)理解了他们的形而上学，并停止假设他们的反应态度总是正义的良好指导*，那么他们的实践可能会获得某种程度的启蒙，以火星人的标准。他们是否会，完美无缺?连火星人都不知道。
* "...if we understand that there are good evolutionary reasons for our wanting people to suffer when they have done direct or indirect harm to us, then we can account for our strong feelings about the appropriateness of retribution without presuming they are a guide to moral truth.... We may be able to recognize our retributivist feelings as a deep and important aspect of our character - and take them seriously to that extent - without endorsing them as a guide to truth, and start rethinking our attitudes toward punishment on that basis." ---Janet Radcliffe Richards, Human Nature After Darwin, p. 210.

Ken, I'm not sure I am tracking your discussion of the Martian Anthropologist. I think we may be in agreement about much. So, for example, I think that the sort of control that grounds responsibility is a naturalistic property or set of properties that emerge from human moral education and functioning in response to reasons in our environment. There is nothing esoteric or excessively "external".
我确实认为，对决定论的担忧来自于一些非常普通的东西——我们的常识和直觉判断，即过去和自然规律是固定的，不受我们控制。根据这些判断，我们可以构建一个怀疑论的论点，如果因果决定论是正确的，那么我们就缺乏我们通常认为自己拥有的那种自由(“后果论”——它的各种版本已经以这样或那样的形式存在了几千年)。所以，就像任何好的怀疑论一样，驱动怀疑论担忧的因素或引擎来自非常普通的、常识性的来源——而不是来自“左领域”。考虑到怀疑论担忧的力量，经过适当的反思，我试图对我们的日常实践真正承诺给我们的东西进行更细致的分析。
This should be cool for an anthropologist, Martian or otherwise, right?

John:
I don't agree that the worries about determinism come from "commonsense" whatever exactly that means. Whatever commonsense is, it surely isn't fixed once and for all for all humans everywhere and in all times. What you think of commonsense is probably something like the "wisdom" of this or that age. Put another way, I think that what you are calling commonsense is really a late cultural overlay, peculiar to a fairly recent epoch in human history. By contrast I suspect that the practice of holding one another responsible is as ancient as homo sapiens and pretty much universal in all human cultures. I do suspect that the practice was, at its inception, more or less in order as it stood long before philosophy and theology entered the scene. What's grown up since is a philosophical/theological lore that purports to look at the deep roots of the practice. Not only does the practice antedate the philosophical and theological lore, I suspect that much of the philosophy and theology just gets the practice more or less completely wrong.
这是为什么呢?因为当哲学和神学第一次抓住这个问题时，他们两个一起误解了整个自然秩序，对自然界中的人类究竟是什么根本没有非常深刻的概念。哲学和神学把对人类的错误理解引入我们的集体文化中。与此同时，他们也引入了错误的观念，认为我们在做什么，当我们做非常普通的事情时，比如把责任推给别人。整个文化的形成都是建立在这些虚构和谎言之上的。在过去的几百年里，我们才刚刚开始系统地摆脱哲学和神学有时一起，有时分开引入我们的自我理解的盲区。我认为，这就是在自由意志的辩论中逐渐发生的事情。
现在，我认为，这场战斗是按照那些从一开始就完全误解了事物秩序的人输入的条件进行的。所以我才说你出轨了。你的控制是一个很好的概念。但我不知道你为什么要称之为自由。在我看来，你这样做，似乎对那些首先把自由意志主义自由的虚构引入我们自我认识的人让步了太多。
In a way, htough, it's no big deal. Who needs to engage in a fight over words? The real issue is what in the natural order of things is mature intact human volition and cognition and what role do they play in rendering us responsible for our actins. I very much doubt that a theory of that will have much use for some weak-kneed version of libertarian freedom -- which isn't so much an illusion, as a philosophical and theological fiction.
这就是为什么我说整个问题需要重画。这就是《火星人类学家》的观点。把人类想象成社会性动物。把人类的认知和意志看作自然因果秩序的一部分。把负责任和负责任想象成自然动物做的和正在做的事情。不要担心用古老的被误导的哲学和神学的词汇来描述这些自然现象。只是重新开始!

I'm too old to start (entirely) over!
And it is too late (for me) to say much. Except by "commonsense" I mean something like the Rawlsian idea of reflective, considered judgments in a modern western democracy. But actually I think it is pretty pervasive to think that the past is fixed and the laws of nature are fixed. These aren't too culturally dependent, are they? But even if so, so be it: I'm in the "Rawlsian" tradition of trying to systematize "our" considered intuitions. Even this is hard enough, and the intuitions are not uncontentious.
More tomorrow, I hope! Thanks again for your thoughtful and probing critique(s)!

Ken,
There is increasingly some work at the intersection of "neuroscience" and "free will". I take it that you are suggesting that we immerse ourselves in neuroscience, cognitive science, and related fields, in order better to understand the scientific basis of our behavior. Perhaps you are saying something different, but I'm not sure.
I certainly think this is a promising and important area of research. I'm not sure in the end that it will lead to the sort of illumiantion we would all hope for. Also, I'm not so confident as you that "theology and philosophy" has been barking up the wrong tree, as it were.
It would be very interesting to me if somehow neuroscience could show that there were some family of neurophysiological processes that were present in all and only those creatures who act from their own, suitably reasons-responsive mechanisms. I don't know if this could ever happen, and I'm not waiting with baited breath...
我确实认为，我们这些对自由意志和道德责任感兴趣的人，应该对大脑研究以及更广泛的认知科学和“信息”科学的潜在见解持开放态度。但是，我不会如此草率地忽略关于这些话题的神学和哲学思考的历史，我也不会对从“独家”科学资源中获得启示的前景过于乐观。

Tom Clark wonders how one can be a naturalist but also believe in a retributivist approach to moral responsibility and punsihment. That's what I am, so he wonders how I can be! (Well, sort of...)
I'm not sure what exactly the problem is. I'm a naturalist (whatever that is). So, I don't believe in any supernatural entities, I'm a materialist about the mind, and so forth: there is just the physical world, and what supervenes on it (whatever that means!), and abtracta such as sets, numbers, and so forth.
I do however believe in the existence of morality, aesthetics, and so forth. So I believe there are moral reasons to do certain things, and some things are beautiful, etc. This even in a physical universe. Moral reasons are presumably considerations that count in favor of an action; one might ask what (ontologically) these are, and how they can exist in a physical world. Similarly for the truth-makers of claims about right, wrong, permissibility, impermissibility, duty, obligation, beauty, and so forth. Does Tom or do other naturalists contend that there cannot be moral reasons, or beauty, or truths about what ought to be done, if physicalism is true? I don't think so; in any case, this would be implausible.
那么，为什么关于“沙漠”的说法会有所不同呢?我承认，许多哲学家，包括罗尔斯和舍弗勒等著名伦理学家，都对沙漠这一非宗教概念及其在责任归因中的作用持怀疑态度。但我一直不明白为什么沙漠与其他可以在自然环境中实例化的概念有什么不同。

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John,
There of course can be, and are, moral reasons in a physical universe, and naturalists are trying to develop a coherent picture of how our moral sensibilities fit into this universe. One project is to explain how our moral sense developed, and there?s lots of empirical work being done on that score. Another is the normative project of making a case for certain sets of values without appealing to supernatural foundations (which don?t work anyway). How do we justify our moral intuitions, e.g., the retributive intuition that people should be made to suffer for their wrongdoings even if no behavior-guiding consequences or other benefits follow?
对甜点持怀疑态度的人要求报应主义者解释，如果没有相应的利益积累，人们为什么要受苦。这似乎是一个合理的问题，考虑到其他强烈的道德直觉，我们应该尽量减少人类的痛苦，除非有?这是一个令人信服的理由。如果惩罚没有带来任何好处，那么有什么道德上的理由让罪犯遭受惩罚呢?
我也?我不认为相容的报应主义者有这个问题的答案，而自由主义者可以指出最终负责任的，反向因果自由的自我，他应该遭受痛苦，因为他可以选择不冒犯。自然主义通过从我们的世界图景中减去那个自我，对这种正当性提出了质疑。
在进化过程中，我们对沙漠的直觉已经成为我们行为的重要组成部分，因为它们促使我们惩罚欺骗者，阻止侵略者，等等。但一旦我们看到这样的直觉是简单而自然的功能，并且可以吗?诉诸自由意志主义的自由是不合理的，那么我们只能证明让人们受苦是合理的，如果确实存在的话?这是一些功能上的好处，在我们其他价值观的背景下得到认可。这是归化沙漠，归化的，功能性的沙漠，去掉形而上学的伪装，作为一种深层的义务论原则，意味着我们在放纵报应欲之前应该三思。这吗?祝一切顺利。
Btw, I?ve written this up in considerable detail in a review of Michael Moore?s book Placing Blame, seehttp://www.naturalism.org/criminal.htm#AgainstRetribution, and again just recently athttp://www.naturalism.org/maximizing_liberty.htm. The bottom line is that unless you can supply good reasons for being a compatibilist retributivist, you should stop being one.

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