Do free will skeptics make their own point by being so dumb?
What is it about free will skeptics and their insistence that we completely reorganize society based on their realization that nobody controls their own actions in any way? The Munk Debates just published Be it resolved, humans have free will, and it's a classic of the genre.
There is an interesting nugget at the start, which is how much of what we decide is based on extraneous factors. I'd love to go deep on that debate. I thought I wouldn't have time to write about this podcast as I needed to mop some floors. But my wife decided to steam clean them instead and so this post wouldn't exist without events that are completely beyond my control. But it also wouldn't exist if I wasn't interested and didn't want to write it.
Unfortunately instead of that debate we get the discussion about how with no free will criminals have no choice about commiting crimes and therefore we should not punish them. The first part of that may very well be true, much more on that subject here. The second part though shows such catastrophic misunderstanding that maybe it acts as a kind of proof. Nobody with free will could fail so comprehensively to follow their own argument to its logical conclusion, and so free will cannot exist.
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(Published to the Fediverse as: Do free will skeptics make their own point by being so dumb? #etc #freewill If criminals have no choice in committing their crimes we also have no choice in how we treat them. )
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