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So your argument is really based around the fact that nothing is 100% certain? Hmm.
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Anyone who claim to have the whole truth and nothing bout the truth on this subject matter is a liar. Therefore, I am not claiming that I know everything.
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Well, I take issue with that kind of argument. I know I have free will. Your argument as I've read it in this thread is very enticing, because it allows people to cast off their personal responsibility for their actions
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Well, to the middle classes I would rather claim that your point of view is enticing. but it implies that you doesn`t have to care for anyone but yourself, because anyone who is poor, working class, mentally ill or has other problem is an evil lazy bastard, and deserves all the suffering they get. I would rather say that it is your point of view that breeds cynism and class hatred.
Anyhow, the non existence of personal responsibility does not imply that people should suffer no consequences for their actions. It still is sensible to make sure that actions have consequences, so the actions of people are directed in a manner that are positive for society as a whole and other people.
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Well my genes dictate a lot of things to me, one being a very specific form of dyslexia. I'm terrible with numbers a lot of the time.
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Well, such defects certainly gives people a disadvantage. The problem is hovewer, that you doesn`t just make people responsible for their own actions. It is one thing to blame people for stealing, drinking, taking drugs, smoking and other actions that people can take on their own. The real problem is that you keep people responsible for their economic situation. Your economic situation is a combination of your choices, and the choices of other people! To get to a certain economic position, you either have to be able to make other people hire your or buy your services.
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That's what free will is. I was told when I was young that I would never be able to read or write properly, because I was a late developer. By your theory, I wouldn't be able to read your posts and write this rebuttal, because 'society' had decided I was unable to do so.
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No, that is no proof of free will. It may just be the case of you being lucky, of some "good" genes compensating for your bad genes, or you experiencing positive external stimulus. Free will is not a question about what other people decide, it is a question about what really happens inside the human brain when a human being makes decisions.
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They can, if they want, abdicate their responsibility and blame society for what has happened to them, or they can, like my family, work their way out of it. Ah yes, I haven't mentioned this have I?
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No, it is not that easy. There is just a limited number of decent jobs at one time. Sure, their numbers can be increased, but they are not increased a huge number overnight. Actually, most of the decent jobs need someone doing the mennial jobs to exist. Without factory workers, cleaners, construction workers, shop workers and the other people you think "fails to take personal responsibility", society wouldn`t go round. Therefore, there will always be people that have to take these jobs. If one manages to better themselves and escape these jobs, the outcompete someone else who will have to take these jobs instead.
I think this focus of "opportunities" is a large defect off the rightwing. If you have fifty workers working for $5,5 an hour, and three of them have progressed in the span of twenty years, it is okay the the other forty seven lives because they had an "opportunity" to progress? Opportunites is the best instrument of oppression ever devised by man.
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My father lost his business in 1989, a rather successful business it was, until the government decided to put a bypass around our town and destroyed almost 90% of his trade.
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Actually, that makes the rest of your paragraph a rather poor argument. Here, you show that your father had already started a business earlier, and knew very well how to handle a business and become successfull. This implies that the odds of him starting another business very well above those who have never started or owned a business at all!
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In your society of no free will, we would have simply existed at that state forever because we had no choice in the matter.
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Of course not, here you use a straw man. The lack of free will does not imply that you cannot succeed, only that you have to have some sort of factors or luck on your side to succeed. Determinism implies that if you know everything about the situation and the factors that are relevant, you can be able to calculate the outcome. All that you says is possible even if free will does not exist.
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You've mentioned elsewhere in this thread about the idea of choice. Choice, by implication, implies free will.
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No, it certainly does not. A computer programs makes a lot of choices, but the outcome of all of them are in the end predictable. The same thing goes for the choices of humans. You can get the choice between two options, but it the basis of that choice is taken based upon previous experience and causal and effect relationships, the choice is not free. The fact that you have a will does not imply that that will is free.
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Even if you have but two options, it's your own will that makes the choice. Not society, not the environment, not random chance.
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Because? This implies that the human brain is governed by something that is either chance nor cause and effect. How is this possible?
The rest of that paragraph really felt like appeal to emotion, without me seing the direct relevance of any of it.
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Creativity is the expression of free will.
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No, it isn`t. Creativity is taking parts of the know, and putting it together in new patterns. Actually, it is provable that creation does not need free will. Did free will exist before human beings? Look at the evolution of the earth! It evolved an atmosphere, the first animals appeared and the first plants apperad, heck, the whole solar system came into being without any free will working in it at all! The existence of a free will is not a precondition for creation or evolution.
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Hitler himself argued in a similar way to you. He spoke of the need for people to conform to society for the greater good.
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Well, that`s exactly what the marked does! In a market economy, you get money by satisfying other people needs. If you don`t satisfy the needs of other people, you get now money. If that doesn`t breed some kind of conformity, what does? What I think is that people should have the right to live, regardless of what other people may think. Actually, here communists, libertarians and nazis are just the same, the individual exists to satisfy others. If you don`t satisfy other people in a market economy, you starve. Actually, what you are expousing is one of the core principles of nazism, social darwinism. Actually, the nazis got a lot of inspiration from libertarian thinkers like Herbert Spencer and Bernhard Sumner.
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To him, the idea of free will was something to be destroyed, removed and supressed, since it made for a highly compliant society that could be easilly moulded in to whatever shape you wanted.
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Actually, that is not true. The nazis actually appreciated individual initatives. Of course, critizising the state was an excemption from this rule, but other initiatives were greatly appreciated. An example being the german command structure, which was the most decentralized command structure of any major army during WW2.
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It is the nation that must be preserved at the cost of the individual. This is the unfortunate logical conclusion of your argument.
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No, it is exactly the opposite. The conclusion to my argument is that human beings have an unconditional right to live. Not a right "not to be killed" like you believe, but the right to live. The right to live regardless of whether the collective appreciates it or not. The right to live a decent life regardless of other people/the market thinks that it deserves to live a decent life.
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These are collective entities.
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The market is also to a large degree a collective entity. The market is a collection of people bound together by mutual dependence, and affected by the decisions that other people make.
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When the nation takes precedence over individual choice, you have a dictatorship in everything but name.
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Actually, I think that it is your position is nazi, in that you think that society should "dump" those who does not fit int and do not to a large enough extend satisfy the needs of other people.
