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Do you treat yourself and other people as being responsible for their actions? Say someone rear ends you at a stoplight because they were looking at their cellphone while driving. Do you think they are to blame? Do you get angry at them? Do you pursue an insurance claim against them?
Treating people as agentic is a fundamental basis of more or less all human interactions. Perhaps there are some ascetic monks up in the mountains somewhere who have really internalized that free will doesn't exist to the point that they actually behave as such. But in my experience nobody who says they don't believe in free will really acts like it (I'm including myself here, intellectually I think that it is clear that the universe is fully deterministic, but I don't live my life as if it were so).
But this system of laws and punishment clearly does influence outcomes, like a slope guides water downhill. And criminals are to blame in the same way as tsunami is to blame for its victims, I can get angry at both. Also our whole society does stand on the assumption of free will so you just learn to put up with thism
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Yes, responsibility isn't a function of free will. In a cosmic sense they were always going to rear end me and we've built up systems around responsibility to handle this that provide incentives that influence behavior ect. ect. I'm entitled to insurance whether or not it could have actually ever been different. You can built up all of society without the need for free will and I don't really see why anyone would act differently depending on whether they believe in it.
This is nonsensical. How can responsibility not require free will? Why be mad at someone when they have as much agency as a rock rolling down a hill?
I basically agree with you that the universe is probably deterministic, but trying to argue that people don't act like free will exists is ridiculous.
We're a razors edge away from arguing about definitions but at the risk of that. My air conditioner is responsible for keeping my house cool in the summer, a responsibility it failed at recently, and yet as far as I know it possesses no free will. The person who rear ended me has a responsibility to not rear end me and has failed much like my air conditioner. It's not as if the person chose with anything like free will to rear end me, very few people would ever choose to do such a thing.
Yeah, it does appear we are in definitions territory. I understand your point, but I think mine is obviously true.
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