JKSCHW at aol.com wrote:
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.
Well, fair enough but as Honderich has shown all theories of punishment and not just retributionist ones depend (and nearly always assume) some type of metaphysics of free will. As Keynes said(I think), those who reject theory are just in the hold of some older theory. H shows that none of these theories holds any water, in which case determinism is true and certain political positions (socialism) follow directly from it. (Though it's not an inference to the best explanation, H does argue for determinism) Retributionist theories are question begging and are usually a rationale for revenge and bloodlust.
Punishment of the type we have in N.America does not deter or rehabilitate, so why have it? It removes people from society who engage in what is deemed anti-social behavior. Once people are removed from society (criminals are always on the fringes anyway-- anti-social behavior is ostracized anyways) and locked into cages and left to rot there is very little hope from there on in. In the case of a very small minority like serial killers and rapists this maybe the only solution. Of the percentage of people behind bars, how many are in for victimless crimes?
>
> 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.
Because causal determinism (every event has a cause and human actions are events) is true, I don't think we have to give up the idea that people (specifically the working class) make history. Even when every event has a cause you do not know what the ultimate picture will look like. Dennett uses the example of a tennis tournament. The tournament unfolds according to certain rules, an algorithm-- in this sense the tournament is causally determined. But we cannot know or predict how the tournament unfolds or who wins. This depends on human action. The causal chain(s) that determine a person's action may go back very far in history and the causal chains might be multiple too i.e. cultural, biological, economic etc.
Sam Pawlett