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From: mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Strange Side-effects of Responsibility and Determinism
Message-ID: <1975@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 25-Oct-85 00:01:20 EST
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.1975
Posted: Fri Oct 25 00:01:20 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 31-Oct-85 05:31:56 EST
References: <1951@pyuxd.UUCP>
Organization: U of Maryland, Computer Science Dept., College Park, MD
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In article <1951@pyuxd.UUCP> rlr@pyuxd.UUCP (Rich Rosen) writes:

>  Responsibility has come to mean two things.  First, as
>Baba says, there is the "measure of participation in a causal chain".
>X is responsible for Y if X caused Y to happen.  But then Baba adds in
>"accountability", which really has nothing to do with THIS definition of
>responsibility.

Well it does if you take accountability in the sense of indicating where the
behavior could effectively have been different.  This bears upon the
following:

>  Yet responsibility has come to mean "charged with the duty
>of accomplishing/not accomplishing something, taking the credit for 'good'
>things accomplished, and taking the blame for 'bad' things accomplished (or
>'good' things not accomplished)".  If perchance we were able to create
>a sentient machine, and we conditioned/programmed it to kill someone, would
>the machine be "responsible" for the death of the person?  NOT just in that
>first sense of "participation in a causal chain", but in the second sense
>of taking the blame for what occurred?  How can you impose blame on a
>non-self-determining entity?

Well, first one has to separate conditioning from programming.
Advertisements are certainly a form of conditioning, but they are
resistable.  If one goes out and buys something because of an ad, we still
hold them responsible because they chose to believe it.

Responsibility is generally connected to choice.  If one can't choose, then
one cannot be responsible.  (I'm not concerned with legal responsibility,
since it worries about rationality and other concerns which aren't
immediately important.)  So at least from one point of view, a deterministic
entity cannot responsible.

On the other hand, responsibility still exists, although in a vastly
different fashion, in a deterministic world.  In this case it is just as
Rich says; it emanates from human feelings of guilt and pride.  It is the
common principle behind the statements "it was my fault" and "I'm proud of
my work", regardless of whether these feelings are "justified".  So
discussion of responsibility is still possible, although now it must concern
itself with the evocation of these feelings rather than with their
justification.  Note, however, that this moves you into a curiously amoral
grey area.  One talks about guilt as a motivating factor, and how to evoke
it.  It ceases to become a symptom of a moral dilemma, and becomes instead a
mere psychological tool.


>> If your thesis of materialistic determinism is correct, it can hardly
>> matter whether a person is capable of reason or not.

>Oh, but clearly it does.  The person you are today exists as a result of
>all your experience that came before.  If today you can think rationally,
>it is because you were taught to use your brain in a maximal fashion from
>early on in childhood, and have had that behavior reinforced by the positive
>results it offers in interfacing with reality.

Or because your mind naturally inclines to this mode.  As best I know, this
question hasn't been adequately resolved.  One must also note that use of
reason is invariably suspended in many circumstances, which suggests that
things are more complicated then Rich seems willing to admit.

>  If today you are a mass
>murderer, is it because you "made a conscious free decision" to become a
>mass murderer?  Or because those previous experiences led you to your
>current state?  You saw your parents behaving violently and learned that this
>was "acceptable".  You grew up behaving violently and had that behavior
>reinforced by the success of behaving violently.  You learned that acting
>violently when things don't go your way is acceptable behavior.  Etc.
>Which is it?

Both.  One has to choose to learn, after all.  One thing which is
characteristic of psychology is that its results (thus far) can only be
stated in terms of statistical trends.  Correlations are almost invariably
quite fuzzy.  Most children of violent homes do not grow up to be mass
murderers; perhaps most do not murder at all.  The children of thieves are
not invariably thieves.  There's clearly some process going on which often
overrides the supposed conditioning.


>> As long as you're interested in talking about motives, Rich, do you take 
>> pleasure in punishing people?  Did your parents? You seem to have this 
>> strange vision of the world as an endless sea of sadistic disciplinarians.

>I do?  Obviously the people who formulate such notions as societal rules
>see things that way.  Look at the Christian motif of "man is fallen, we are
>all evil and need to be regulated and controlled, and if we're not good
>we should be punished".  The sea isn't endless, but I still haven't seen the
>other coastline yet.  This notion permeates a good deal of western law:
>you do something wrong, YOU are a bad person who should be punished.  That
>may not be the hallmark of "sadistic discplinarians", but it hardly sounds
>like the actions of rational people to me.

Once Clarence Darrow made the mistake of making this kind of argument in
court, to which the judge replied that if you take away responsibility for
the crime, you also take away responsibility for the punishment too
(althoug, being wise and learned, he said much more pithily).  And once
again I will only note upon Rich's gross misconception of christianity as
whatever Jerry Falwell (or pick your favorite Fundamentalist demagogue)
believes in.  But to return to the first point: there is almost invariably
an inconsistency in this sort of argument; Rich acts as if we are free when
we apply reasoning (what ever that is) and not free when, for instance, we
do something conditioned.  Under Rich's assumptions, reasoning is just
another conditioning force (and a poor one at that, by his own admission).
Why should we be concerned with the truth of reason?  The only argument
which to my mind holds any water here is (I believe it was suggest by Paul
Torek) that it is evolutionarily advantageous for reasoning to be true.  One
could then quite reasonably ask why all the non-rational and irrational
modes persist, unless they too are somehow advantageous.  Either way, truth
becomes a much less precious commodity.


>If what I say is false, regarding the way experience and
>exposure to the rest of the world leads you (conditions you) to become what
>you become, why do we bother with parenting, with attempting to imbue 
>positive values in children, guiding that conditioning process toward a
>goal of a mature rational adult?  Hell, by your reasoning, it doesn't
>matter what we do as parents.  If we smoke in front of our kids, if we
>show violence and anger as acceptable behaviors, if we act dishonestly
>or hatefully when we serve as examples to our children, they are still
>"responsible" for what they do as adults, right?  It wasn't OUR fault
>that the kid is now a delinquent, or a failure, or a murderer, or a hacker...

Well, if what you say is true, then we have no choice but to do whatever we
do as parents, so you can hardly fault the bad ones, or praise the good--
unless of course you want to consider it in terms of manipulation, something
you swore off of just this week.   From my point of view, their's plenty of 
blame to spread around.  The bad parents have some responsibility, but,
given that many kids overcome such disadvantages, some of the responsibility
has to hew to the kid too.

Charley Wingate  umcp-cs!mangoe

"I say this because I want to be prime minister of Canada someday." - M. Fox