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<blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 6358138" data-attributes="member: 177"><p>The idea that free will is required for there to be morality goes back to Kant, at least. He and other philosophers have covered the topic better than I can expect to do here. Call it extreme if you like, but it comes down to this - there is no moral or ethical value or character to a thing following inexorable, inviolable physical law. Take a ball bearing rolling down an inclined plane - it has no moral character. It just is. A thunderstorm is not good or evil - it just is, the result of natural processes in action. To quote Hamlet, "There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so." But, if it is all just stimulus -> deterministic response, then there is no *thinking*, except in the same sense that your laptop "thinks".</p><p></p><p>If you are a moist robot, following programming in a deterministic way, then you are not in any meaningfully way different from a rock rolling down a hill. Or maybe we can say you are a clockwork machine, like a mechanical watch. Wind you up, and you go. You have many parts, complex, but the parts interact in a completely predetermined way. Moist robots are... arbitrary mechanisms. Complicated, perhaps, but arbitrary.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>"Positive" in this context is a moral judgement. But, if those people are no more than rocks rolling down hills, or wristwatches, there is no positive, nor negative. Their interaction has no intrinsic meaning or value, as they are but objects. What does it matter if a collection of windup toys is disturbed?</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Umbran, post: 6358138, member: 177"] The idea that free will is required for there to be morality goes back to Kant, at least. He and other philosophers have covered the topic better than I can expect to do here. Call it extreme if you like, but it comes down to this - there is no moral or ethical value or character to a thing following inexorable, inviolable physical law. Take a ball bearing rolling down an inclined plane - it has no moral character. It just is. A thunderstorm is not good or evil - it just is, the result of natural processes in action. To quote Hamlet, "There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so." But, if it is all just stimulus -> deterministic response, then there is no *thinking*, except in the same sense that your laptop "thinks". If you are a moist robot, following programming in a deterministic way, then you are not in any meaningfully way different from a rock rolling down a hill. Or maybe we can say you are a clockwork machine, like a mechanical watch. Wind you up, and you go. You have many parts, complex, but the parts interact in a completely predetermined way. Moist robots are... arbitrary mechanisms. Complicated, perhaps, but arbitrary. "Positive" in this context is a moral judgement. But, if those people are no more than rocks rolling down hills, or wristwatches, there is no positive, nor negative. Their interaction has no intrinsic meaning or value, as they are but objects. What does it matter if a collection of windup toys is disturbed? [/QUOTE]
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