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Conscience, Free Will and Determinism - Coggle Diagram

- - - - The conscience is divinely imparted by God when we reach adulthood
    - - The conscience is an 'ulcer in the soul' which gives us crushing guilt
    - - God gives humans an innate knowledge of good and evil
      - Non-Christians know what is right but choose not to follow it
      - We use our innate knowledge to discern moral laws
      - Only Christians can act in a morally correct way as their motive is to serve God
    - - Conscience is the ability to distinguish between good and evil rather than innate
      - Synderesis: everyone has a natural desire to avoid evil
        
        Moore: naturalistic fallacy
      - Conscientia: the process of using reason to fulfil synderesis
      - Acting wrongful comes from being misinformed rather than being innately sinful
      - Two different types of being wrong
        
        Vincible: when the wrongness is your fault for reasoning incorrectly
        
        Invincibly: the fault is entirely out of your control
    - - Our conscience allows us to adjudicate between self-love and benevolence
      - Conscience is the supreme authority in human nature, and is God-given
      - Every human being has the ability to make decisions according to the conscience, and it is an intuitive process. IT is self-authenticating.
        
        Hobbes: psychological egoism makes moral relativism like this impossible
        
        It is not infallible, however: it can be misinformed or wrong
    - - Illative sense: a spontaneous facility to reason. We arrive at knowledge without explicit actions connecting the stimulus and conclusion. This is the illative sense.
      - We have an illative sense of moral judgements rather than use of reason or conditioning
  - - - Ego ideal: learning to satisfy expectations through the pleasure when praise is recieved
      - Conscience: fear of punishment from bad behaviour
    - - Ego (front to interact with society
        
        Feelings of dissaproval of society are internalised here, so it restricts the instinctive nature of the individual
  - - - Agreed with Freud that children go through developmental stages
      - No separate conscience, instead the brain develops to fulfil its capacity
      - Two dimensions of conscience
        
        Immature: feelings of guilt from parents/school, doing things to gain approval
        
        Mature: the best way to act with integrity, genuinely concerned with right and wrong
    - - Different stages of development which allow different levels of reasoning. Not everyone can fully reason morally.
      - Stages the conscience is acquired in
        
        Pre-conventional level (based on good or bad consequences)
        
        Conventional level (based on laws which guide action)
        
        Post-conventional level (based on good and evil/society's best interests)
    - - Freedom is the central characteristic of human nature
      - Our conscience is humanistic: we have an innate knowledge of what is constructive or destructive to human existence
      - We also have the authoritarian conscience put forward by Freud, but it is possible to transcend this
      - This commands civil disobedience, as we follow a humanistic conscience rather than one concerned with consequences
  - - - Franz Boaz cultural relativism
- - - - Physical/causal (all events are caused by an antecedent cause)
      - Genetic determinism
      - Psychological determinism
    - - To be responsible for/the cause of our actions, they must come from us
      - To come from us, they must be in line with our values/who we are as people
      - To be responsible for these, we must have caused everything leading up to their formation
      - We can't have caused our own existence, so we can't be the cause of or responsible for our actions
    - - Experiments to see if we have free will
      - Showed that there was unconscious brain activity associated with the action half a second before the patients were aware of their decision to move ('readiness potential')
      - Showed that the mental deliberation ('libertarianism') doesn't cause the action
      - Dennet: could apply differently to more complex decisions
    - - Uses four progressive thought experiments to prove that we are not in control of or in charge of our actions
        
        Cases differ between the amount of manipulation involved, but all come to the conclusion that the agent is not responsible for his actions and has no free will
    - - Free will is an illusion
      - Our behaviour is the result of how we are brought up/our experiences
      - If an action has good consequences, we are more likely to repeat it. (Thorndike law of effect)
      - Most behaviourists think it doesn't make sense to speak of mental states as they can be reduced to behaviour, but Skinner thinks they are still important
    - - Hooke's law for the extension of springs
      - Newton's laws of motion/gravitation
      - Boyle's law of gasses
    - - Moral reasoning can be reduced to evolution. Focuses on the evolutionary benefit of emotions.
    - - Reductive physicalism
      - We think/decide with our brain
      - There is a correlating physical event for every 'thought'
      - All mental events are therefore caused by the physical events which cause them
  - - - At the level of sub-atomic particles, determinism no longer applies
      - We can only give relative probabilities for the outcomes of things
    - - One ought to follow objective moral laws which we discern through reason
      - Ought implies can
      - Therefore, the will must be free to follow these laws
      - Dualism: the rational mind transcends the physical world, which is determined, through its ability to consider what could be/ought to be
    - - We seem to experience free will, just as we seem to experience causal determinsim
      - If our conception of free will is fallible, then our conception of determinism can be as well
      - Free will is a convincing experience, and we should take it seriously
    - - Free will is logically tenable
      - Pragmatism: what is useful is true
      - It is useful to believe in free will and this experience is what aligns with our experience of the world, therefore free will is true
    - - Humans cannot escape making choices
      - Existence precceeds essence, so we must make decisions
      - Through our choices, we forge our nature
    - - Descartes: the mind is a seperate and distinct substance to the body, and so can cause physical states
      - Leibniz' law of identity: things are identical with themselves. Since brain states and mental states are different, they must be different things.
  - - - "a free agent is he that can do as he will, and forbear as he will, and that liberty is the absence of external impediments"
      - Bramhall: a river is 'free' to flow in its direction
      - Man is as free as an unimpeded river
    - - Freedom isn't having alternate possibilities (doesn't think we do because of Frankfurt), but being responsible for the actions we take
      - Perceived lack of free will causes agents to act negatively
    - - Argues agains the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (being free is having alternative possibilities)
      - Fischer: thought experiment
        
        If someone was voting in an election and would be caused to choose candidate X if they voted anything else, they don't have alternative possibilities. But, they vote candidate X and so still made that decision freely.
      - Kane: indeterminist world objection
        
        Either they had foreknowledge of what he would vote, or they would change it after he made the wrong decision which leaves actual free will.
    - - Argues against Dennet's compatibilism with incompatibilism
      - Free will is incompatible with determinism
      - Moral responsibility is incompatible with determinism
      - We have moral responsibility, therefore determinism is false and we have free will