Rico Penguin

  As was spoken of briefly in the last update I find it extremely unusual that fair trade is an opt-in system. Essentially it is universally agreed in this country that all companies are treating anyone possible poorly unless otherwise specified. It would seem more reasonable to have all companies that do not want to treat people like people could opt-out of being labeled as fair trade.

  It’s odd though that this is where the world is. One would hope that thousands of years into civilized nations that at some point someone would have raised their hand and said “Hey lets stop looking for what is cheap and look for what is humane.” It’s true that treating people like dogs (figuratively speaking) can be cheap, in fact it almost always is cheap. Likewise absolutely ignoring environmental impact is equally efficient at saving money. However at what point is the income superfluous? What can a company do with 2 trillion dollars that it couldn’t have done with 1? There are plenty of things I can think of but there is an unusual difficulty in targeting a positive advantage to that extra chunk of change but perhaps visitors here are more creative.

  So also to the superfluous nature of the increased income comes the danger, especially now, of people discovering the dark dirty secrets of the company. Wal-mart has been getting increasingly more famous for the absolutely unacceptable treatment of its employees and Quasi-employees, those being illegal immigrants who are manipulated into working far longer than legal for fear of being deported. The Boy Scouts have recently made headlines for a large portion (I believe it was roughly 33%) making money by performing some exceptionally aggressive logging. Then we have the most obvious example of AIG and similar companies in the recent recession. All sharing the common trait of doing the wrong thing to make a little bit more money, sure to the average penguin the amount they save is amazing, however when looking at the relative gains its almost inconsequential.

  I think the first step succeeding as a nation (any nation not simply the US) is to not congratulate people for doing what should come naturally. Instead you should make known those who would sooner make a bit more while sacrificing any semblance of humanity their company has remaining. It is a fairly confusing trade-off that, if asked before the start of human dominance upon Earth, I would never see being debated.

Over the next day or two I will be discussing the following topics:
Formulating and Explaining: Determinism, Hard Determinism, Soft Determinism, Indeterminism, Volitional Indeterminism, The Theory of Agency, Fatalism, Theism, and Atheism.

Presenting, Explaining, and Evaluating: An Argument Against Moral Responsibility, The Kid Patriot Argument Against Soft Determinism, The Ernest Patriot Argument Against Simple Indeterminism, The Vera Patriot Argument Against Volitional Indeterminism, What I take to be the best argument against The Theory of Agency, The Argument for Fatalism, What I take to be the best argument for Theism, and What I take to be the best argument for Atheism.

Disclaimer:  For those of you that are here for entertainment, than I’d say you are in for a good couple of days. However if you are one of those students currently taking metaphysics with Ned Markosian that you might as well just turn around, he dislikes my explanations a great deal. Whereas the average visitor here understands this stuff, I have quite a few “makes no sense” tags in the exam. At any rate that’s the disclaimer since I know people Google before exams.

So lets get this part started:

Determinism: Every event that occurs is completely determined by previous conditions.

It’s essentially explained just by writing the line. Completely determined essentially means that the laws of nature require that the action carry out in the manner that it does. The common theme here will be abusing the concept of natural law.

The Argument Against Moral Responsibility

(1) Every event that occurs is completely determined by previous conditions.
(2) if (1), then every action that transpires is completely determined before the birth of the agent.
(3) If every action is determined by events before its agent then people do not act freely.
(4) If people do not act freely then people are not morally responsible.
—–
(5) People are never morally responsible for their actions.

The idea for premise one is that every event is completely determined by the series of events that lead to its activation. If you flip a coin the action of your finger would be the previous event beginning the flipping of the coin, your decision to flip the coin was the signal that told your finger to flip (ideally) and a series of events leading to that thought…so on and so forth. Premise two says that if everything is indeed decided by events before it then obviously the series of events leading up to your activities began before you existed. Another very reasonable assumption. The third premise states that if every action has already been determined by a series of events going before you were even alive then you do not act freely. Again reasonable given the argument. Finally the fourth premise states that if people do not act freely then they are not morally responsible.

Well once we make our way past that huge layer of text it pays to mention that indeed that is a valid statement, if premises are true then indeed the conclusion is true as well. However I would not go as far as to say that it is sound. The laws of nature, gravity, space, and time as well as others I am not thinking about are indeed outside of the control of humans (at least for now). However it is quite a bold jump to say that something like gravity has the same effect on thoughts and decisions as it does on a coin flip.

Reflexive actions are indeed outside of the realm of responsibility of a person. I’m pretty sure all reflexive actions from below the neck happen (relatively) long before a signal reaches the brain. However actions that are decided upon are hardly decided before the agent is born. I would never argue that you are in full control of the events transpiring around you, but you are (to a great degree) able to decide how you respond to them. It is that ability to choose your response that is why people are morally responsible. Natural laws play little or no part in the thoughts and decisions of any living organism. That is the primary difference between a living organism and a non-living thing (like wind). Wind is entirely at the whim of natural forces, your thoughts are not.

Once my headache breaks (hopefully tomorrow) I’ll have a larger chunk of this done.

  Dipping back into the wonderful world of Determinism we have a slightly different take on the idea. We’ll begin by defining Indeterminism:

Indeterminism: Not every event that occurs is completely determined by previous conditions.

  Now you might be saying “Well that’s obvious Captain Jack.” To which I’d remind you I’m not Jack, regardless we’ll continue. The next important thing to know is what it means for something to be undetermined.

e is undetermined =df e is not completely determined by previous conditions.

  This is important because it leads us into what becomes of Indeterminism. It’s a fascinating philosophy because as with other philosophies it gets taken to some very unusual extremes. One such extreme is called “simple determinism” which looks as follows:

Simple Indeterminism
1) There are some undetermined actions.
2) People act freely whenever they perform undetermined actions.
3) People are morally responsible for their own undetermined actions.

    At first glance this appeared to be a pretty reasonable setup. The first tenet says that there are ’some’ undetermined actions. It is difficult to say that something never happens, so its safe to say that there are ’some’ undetermined actions. Likewise it comes out to feeling common sense when you look back on your life. Some events did not move along because of the flowing of the wind or the force of gravity.

  Likewise tenet two is making a general statement that seems difficult to argue with. A person is acting freely when they are performing an action that is undetermined. In essence they had options A) and B) (at the very least) and decided to go with one or the other. That choice was their freedom in action.

  Finally the third tenet states that when you act freely you are morally responsible. The idea being that if you choose to murder someone then you are responsible for that activity. However there is a large loophole that this particular version of Indeterminism has and it has to do with the global nature of the third tenet. A seizure is indeed an undetermined action, during that particular moment before the seizure you had the event you desired and the possibility of a seizure. However if you killed someone while having seizures many would be hard pressed to file charges against you. There are more complicated examples but this simple situation puts us in the place of either denouncing Simple Indeterminism or deciding that indeed a seizure victim is fully responsible for the repercussions of their seizure.

  If we were to make some minor modifications to Simple Indeterminism we could clean up most situations.

Rico’s Indeterminism
1) There are some undetermined actions.
2) People act freely whenever they perform undetermined and desired actions.
3) People are morally responsible for their own undetermined and desired actions.

  The introduction of desired to the pre mentioned “undetermined” situations fixes the issue of involuntary problems. In this case when presented with (for simplicities sake) two options if you choose to do one but you are unable because of uncontrollable variables (IE. Seizures or similar situations) then the resulting act is not something you are morally responsible to.

  Now this philosophy has the possibility for abuse but only in the judgement of the person by other persons. If we are to accept morality as something of a natural law (which it isn’t but bear with me) then the person IS morally responsible it’s just that they are attempting to mask the fact that they are. Likewise the action of lying about it being their desired action is also another situation of being responsible.

  Morality is certainly a discussion for another day, however when taken into context of the idea of Indeterminism I feel it’s somewhat self explanatory. Likewise I’m relatively hard pressed to think of a situation where your desired action is not one you are morally responsible for or even one that isn’t an act of freedom. However anyone feeling frisky can take a shot at providing a situation where you are acting out in a desired fashion and are not morally responsible (or even should not be).