What is the responsibility-maker of your Goal Theory? Does it have one?
The goal theory of morality is that ethics is always: if you want x then do y. So, how do you know if X is moral?
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Richard Carrier
Richard Carrier on May 20, 2024 at 10:47 am Knowledge and intent.
That is the responsibility-maker everywhere for everyone in all real world situations regardless of their philosophy.
These philosophers are standard ivory tower composers of useless nonsense. They are disregarding what words like “responsibility” even mean, like in a court of law for example, and so their opinions have no relevance to reality. They can be dismissed as simply non-responsive.
Interesting read, all the complexities, makes one’s mind spin. But in the end seems to boil down to the serenity prayer:
“Universe, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.”
I have a pragmatic perspective: We always have to make choices, and those choices have consequences respecting what we want to achieve.
Pragmatically, successful living requires an attitude of free will within constraints - it is exercised via countless small decisions, that then flow into the tomorrow we create for ourselves. Or like the old wives used to say, we sleep in the bed we make for ourselves.
… And this is actually why free will matters. We don’t want to be passengers in a life someone else is controlling.
And if you want to be in control of your own life, you have to first acknowledge what the difference is between being in control of it, and not in control of it—the difference between being a passive slave to others’ opinions and the happenstance trends of the external world or random walks of your internal whims, and being a person who actively examines and vets who they are and what they want and the decisions they are making, and begins selecting only those they informedly assent to on a basis of evidence and reason, and thus ends being a wholly passive victim of social forces.
That difference matters. And that is why free will matters. If you start training yourself to see no free will in anything, you are training yourself to see no difference between being the manipulable slave of society or an independent thinker who actually chooses who they become, what they want and believe, based on evidence and reason, rather than influence and easiness. …
After all, if you are not asking “What does it take to be free?” you will never discover what the answer is, much less take steps to implement it. …
I was describing the reasoning generally, so no, science is never done, there is no answer book for the questions we’ll have tomorrow. But you know that, so maybe I’m misunderstanding your question.