Since rainstorms, blizzards, etc. don't usually have purposes (except to people who see God's purposes in them) they are happenings. But happenings and actions are not distinguished by happenings being caused and actions not. There are people who think that mentalistic concepts such as purpose, desire, intention, etc,. what are called folk psychology concepts would be banished in a truly scientific explanation of behaviour--just as phlogiston, ether, and elan vital have been banished from scientific discourse. I find that view hardly intelligible. Causal explanation will never adequately explain human behavior. As Socrates pointed out ages ago it would be ridiculous to explain why he was in jail awaiting his execution by citing prior physical causes that led to his limbs marching his body into prison or however you want to put it. But it is nevertheless the case that he is in jail because events in the environment caused certain things to happen in the brain that caused his limbs to move that landed him in the jail.
The fact that human agency is part of a causal chain does not mean human agency has no efficacy. You don't distinguish determinism from fatalism. A causal factor in a strike may be the perception that safety regulations are not being observed by the company. This may cause a wildcat strike. This is a group action and it may cause the company to mend its ways or call in the police or whatever depending on the circumstances. The strike caused the company action. The company action was not fated to happen. Indeed without the group action it would not happen at all. A blinding light may cause a truck driver to steer into the ditch. This is a happening rather than an action. In this case too there is no fate even though there is no action at least not the action of steering into the ditch. Without the driver steering as he or she did the truck might not have gone in the ditch.
I have no idea what you mean by not being able to distinguish between action and behavior if you are a hard determinist. I always thought that actions were a form of behavior for anyone, determinist or not. If you mean by behavior things that people do or at least cause to happen but that are not mediated by purposes, intention, etc., I have just given illustrations to explain the difference and the explanation does not depend upon happenings being part of a causal chain and actions not being such.
To think of oneself as more than a merely determined being does not mean that one has to reject the conception of yourself as a determined being. I think of myself as not merely x amount of chemicals, as a body weighing so much (now), as being a certain age etc.etc. I am not merely any of those but this does not mean I reject the idea that any of these descriptions are true. The same could be true of a hard determinist description of human action.
On consequences as justifying punishment: Rawls in his discussion of telishment in the article TWO CONCEPTS OF RULES, shows that institutionalization of the practice would have such bad consequences that no utilitarian would defend it. For example, one would never know when one might be picked up and telished for something you hadn't done just to deter people. And why would people be deterred if they might be punished (telished) whether they did it or not? True this would defend only a rule consequentialism but that is another matter. I actually don't think act utilitarianism is hurt by your critique but it would take some time to argue that.
I am not convinced that Marx was clearly a consequentialist or a retributivist although in his discussion of capital punishment he clearly seems to favor retributivism but only within a classless society As an ideal he applauds the retributivism of Kant and Hegel as justifying punishment.. His criticism of capital punishment however is often consequentialist. Capital punishment does bugger all to reduce murder rates as he points out. If Marx is a retributivist why does he argue this way? Why doesn't he say capital punishment is the only fitting punishment-- as Kant rants on about the lex talionis and Hegel goes along with the same old venerable bit of faeces I assume. Marx also cites protection. Society can protect itself by putting the person in jail etc it doesnt need to kill the criminal.But this is a consequentialist critique. A retributivist would say that Marx misses the point completely in these arguments. Of course Marx has some nasty things to say about Bentham but they are related to Bentham's values more than consequentialism per se.. Bentham has the values of British shopkeepers, I think it goes. And much of what Marx says about the inapplicability of retributivism seems to assume the sort of determinism you reject. For a retributivist such as Kant, the penniless person who steals to feed his or her family is equally as responsible as the rich kid who steals something just because he or she finds it attractive etc. Retributivism and the abstract concept of the free dignified human agent assumed by philosophers such as Kant ignores the causal influences at work entirely and Kant's views in particular are warped by his opinions on race and gender, and these in turn were no doubt determined by features of his own culture and upbringing.
Well this is long enough!
Cheers, Ken Hanly
JKSCHW at aol.com wrote:
> Sorry that this is longer than my usual, but I have answered several posts in
> one here.
>
> Jim F. esposes a sort of hard determinism, the view that we really are not
> responsible for our actions because if you accept determinism, responsibility
> makes no sense. He would justify punishment on the grounds that it can in
> fact affect behavior in ways that we might like, but according to Jim that
> has nothing to do with what anyone "deserves."
>
> Btw he attributes this view to Marx, which I think is doubly wrong. Marx
> would never have anything to do with this sort of metaphysics; ina ny case,
> as Jeff Reiman has shown in patient detail in his wonderful paper Marx and
> Retributivism (I think that is the title), Marx is a retributivist who
> believes in responsibility. Of course he thinks that responsibility operates
> differently in different sorts of societies.
>
> I am well aware of the antimonies of "free will," and I don't have plausible
> answers to hard determinist arguments. I react to them as Rousseau did. In
> writing about freedom, he commented that he was saying nothing about the
> metaphysics of freedom, which gave him a headache. I don't use the term
> "free will" myself. And, like Rousseau, I don't attempt the metaphysics of
> the problem.
>
> I reject hard determinism, however, because I don't believe that we can think
> of ourselves as people who are capable of action, as opposed to mere
> behavior, under a hard determinist description. I don't think that makes
> sense as a way of understanding action. Man makes his own history, although
> not just as he pleases, as someone said. But we cannot be understood to make
> our our history if we are just causal links. If we are, history just happens,
> like the weather. It would not then be something we do. It is true that we
> might get rid of the vocabulary of action and come to conceive of ourselves
> differently, as merely determined beings, but I submit that we do not so
> think of ourselves and wouldn't know how to think ourselves like that.
>
> I also find that I am some sort of retributivist, who thinks that people
> should get what they deserve, and am not merely a consequentialist. Of course
> we take consequences into account because we are not crazy. (So I am
> susceptible to arguments that sometimes we should not punish the guilty as
> they deserrve if that would have bad effects, e.g., if jailing Pinochet would
> make it easier to go after Castro, as Jim argues. (I don't say it would.)
>
> But I am persuaded, and I think in his heart of hearts Jim believes this
> too, that it would be unspeakably wrong to punish the innocent merely because
> doing that happened to have good consequences. (Or to punish them worse than
> they deserve, e.g., it miight deter theft to cut off hands, but, in the
> immortal words of John Dean, that would be wrong.) And it may be right to
> punish the guilty even if doing so has no such consequences. Pinochet
> deserves to be imprisoned for the rest of his miserable life, even if, as I
> think it likely, that will not deter future tyrants for ten seconds.
>
> Btw in the same connection I find that I am not an abolitionist on the death
> penalty. As we have it, sure, it's evil. As long as it is a way of oppressing
> the poor and the Black, and it may be that in capitalist society it cannot be
> otherwise, it should be banned. But for most of the Nuremburg defendants or
> Henry Kissinger? Give me a rope. After a fair trial, of course. Again. I
> think executing the these lowlifes has no deterrent effect whatsoever, and if
> it does, that's not why it would be OK to execute criminals against humanity.
>
> Jim notes, and perhaps all of us but Wojtek agree, that our present criminal
> justice system does a rather bad job of handing out appropriate punishments
> to those really deserving of it: you can get 10 years for possession of three
> vials of crack cocaine, when you should be sentenced to spend time in a drug
> rehabilitation center, but if you poison the environment and cause cancer in
> hundreds of helpless workers and citizens, you may have to pay a fine, which
> you can make up by jacking up the price of your products. It goes without
> saying that I don't defend those policies.
>
> Perhaps I should expressly dissociate myself from Wojtek's more exteme
> statements. I did make fun of those who get sentimental about poor
> misunderstood criminals. But I think that the rights of criminal defendants,
> severely under attack by the courts and the legislatures, are very important
> and no distraction from "more important business." Their rights are _ours._
> And it is part and parcel of retributivism that is is desperately wrong to
> punish the innocent, so the crumby representation and limited judicial review
> criminal defendants get is immoral on retributivist grounds.
>
> I also think that people who are being justly punished by imprisonment ought
> to be treated decently and not subjected to warehousing in pestilent
> overcrowded dumps where thet can be brutalized and sexually assaulted, or
> kept 23 hours a day in solitary. Being locked up is enough punishment.
>
> Finally, I disagree with Wojtek that the criminal justice system plays no
> part in oppressing the workers. True, it is less used against radical labor
> then formerly, but only because there is less radical labor. However, as
> Yoshie has said,a lthough I disagree with other conclusions she draws from
> this, Law 'n Order rhetoric and policies are an important ideological prop
> for right wing policies. You have to be blind and deaf (sorry Marta) not
> understand that "crime" is a code word for "race" in a lot of this rhetoric.
> The fact that a lot of workers are reactionary bloodthirsty racists doesn't
> mean that the policies they advocate do not contribute to their subordination.
>
> Jim thinks that I have come to accept rather uncritically many of the
> premises of bourgeois jurisprudence. Well, if I accept many of these
> premises, I hope I do not do so uncritically. If I have failed to think
> through things that I ought to have thought about, I would welcome having it
> called to my attention.
>
> --jka