Free Will Belief does not Justify Reward/Punishment
What doctrine is the greatest blessing to humanity? The doctrine of free will or determinism? Determinism is the doctrine that we are not free but programmed by forces in our minds to do what we do and that we only imagine we have a real choice. The forces are our forces which is why they make us feel free when we do what they want. They make us think we had the power to do differently what we did.
DETERMINISM AND ANGER
Determinism has the power to make people live in decency as no other doctrine about the will can. It tells us to love our enemies and to pity the wrongdoer. When people feel that others condemn them for doing wrong it makes them fearful and fear is the motive that lies behind all evil. Determinism gives us hope of making people reform but free will does not for it says there is nothing we can do if a person wants to be bad. With determinism you cannot fear being hated or despised for you know it is forces inside your enemies that are against you and not them. They are the puppets of the forces.
Anger
against a person would certainly be incompatible with belief in
determinism. But it is not a useful
emotion then anyway. When it is evil you
are mad at you need to be aware of that in case you take it out on the person. Those anger spurs into action are really weak
when they cannot help the world without it.
They are helping because of a feeling and not because it is right.
The
holy end their anger and guilt by praying for mercy so if they can work against
anger and guilt and survive, where appropriate, so can we determinists. It is actually better for determinists to
heal themselves of these things and make it up with the people they dislike and
hate to cause themselves to live better in the future than for a free
willist to go to confession and get what they falsely call healing by a
mere rite.
If you deny free will then logically you should not get angry with people as
people though there will still be things to madden you, and you should not feel
guilty and you should not be hating people as people.
That will be the only difference between you and a typical believer in
free will. There are believers in
free will who are easygoing and who hate nobody and who know their own goodness
too well to wallow or feel guilty. When
they can do it nobody should be saying that because many feel angry, guilty or
vengeful despite denying free will that that can stand as an argument for free
will. It cannot. People who say that are saying that we ought
to feel guilty and angry and vengeful for if we don’t we are undermining the
evidence for free will. Do you see the
vicious idolatry that underlines the doctrine of free will?
DETERMINISM AND GUILT FEELINGS
It
is argued that free will is the best for determinism removes and threatens the
emotion of guilt for it says our evil is not our fault.
Guilt
would not stop us wanting to do evil for it forces us not to do it. It is not a feeling that should be stopping
us but reason itself. We would be doing
the bad thing if it were not for the fear of guilt so guilt cannot make us
good. It just represses the badness in
us which will lead to it all coming to a head and we will erupt. It only has value in keeping public order but
no value at all with interior development.
God religion worries about interior development and even says that is
what we are allowed to suffer for so it is surprising that it imbues guilt at
all. Religion often propagates and
increases guilt for it is useful to gain power.
Some say, “We need some guilty feelings to keep ourselves in check and to function as warning signals that certain actions are to be avoided. If we believe in determinism we will lose a sense of guilt?"
As long as we make
ourselves suffer for doing wrong and pretend that we have free will we will
condition ourselves to retain guilt. Guilt is automatic and happens even to
deniers of free will. Belief in free will is not its cause.
If
determinism is a threat to guilt – the fairly reasonable kind of guilt in which
you dislike yourself for doing wrong wilfully but immediately erase it by doing
good to compensate, feeling guilty for understandable mistakes is not on – then
so is the freedom doctrine.
CAN WE REWARD THE PAST?
If it were not for the notion that free good acts should be rewarded and free bad ones punished, nobody would believe or want to believe in free will. Free will, at least on the human practical level, does not support them anyway as we shall see. So it makes no difference. It is complained that determinism abolishes the notion of rewards and punishment. Determinism retains them but has a more honest understanding of them.
Giving
rewards for an act is giving a reward because of the person’s past. The reward is not principally given because
the person has merited it but to encourage good endeavour in the future. Rewards are more future-centred than
anything. The only way one can be given
is based on the person’s past performance.
So the rewards that are given are not real rewards. These "rewards" can still be done without belief in merit so the abolition of the
fascist gibberish that is free will shall not make drastic changes in the way
we live and think. When the main reason
for bestowing a reward is the future it is nothing to make it the only
reason. The recipient knows anyway that
if he has won a gold medal for winning a race that it was not his will alone
that got him through. It was not the
aspect of his nature that can merit. It
was the luck to have genes that gave him a body to do what he willed. Merit does not come into it. Rewards then have nothing to do with
merit. They would if he could make his
own genes and body but they do not.
The
argument, “The past is over so he is rewarded for what cannot be changed. He can no longer help it that he won once he
crossed the line” superficially appears to be incorrect.
It seems that what is relevant is that he freely had control over his past. He is rewarded for his past not for the
present. But the question is, what comes first?
Does the past moment have to be put before the present moment? Is it right to reward him for a past moment
he can no longer help? If it is wrong
then it is wrong to reward anybody because people can only be rewarded after
they do the good deed. But it is wrong
for the present comes first. So even
with free will you reward in spite of it just as determinists reward in spite
of determinism for the sake of encouragement and respect and entertainment.
DO WE REWARD ACTS OF FREE WILL?
When
a free agent wins the race it is not free will that made him win for the rest
had the same goal. It was the condition
of his body. His body has not been made
the best by him but has become the best by itself building on how he treated
it. His success depended on factors
other than skill such as health, the ability to have a good night’s sleep, the
way his body handled food and the good luck of finding a real good trainer,
factors beyond his control. Even a
trainer’s credentials don’t guarantee that that he can get his employer to win.
So
when the winner is rewarded he is reward for what he cannot help.
DO WE REWARD/PUNISH MOTIVES?
To say we need belief in free will to punish or reward people really only makes sense if we are going to punish good or bad motives acted upon.
You cannot reward choices just because they seem to be good choices for you can’t see what a person is really after. The motive behind the choice has to determine if what they did should be rewarded or not. For example, when you reward the winner of a race you are rewarding the outward actions of the person and not the motives for you don’t know them and if they are bad and driven by smug superiority you are not going to be told that. This is not real rewarding for real rewarding is giving back good for doing good with a kind heart. The less you see if a person’s motive is good the less any reward is intended to be a reward for it depends on the extent of your knowledge of the person’s goodness. And we may ponder if it is right to reward somebody for winning a race and not reward somebody who tried harder and failed?
People are never
rewarded for being good but for their achievements. Nobody can reward motives for nobody can see
motives. Motives are what should be
rewarded anyway but the problem is we cannot see them so we have to forget
about that. There is no difference
between rewarding the likes of Mother Teresa for her good achievements when she
could have had the motive to promote the evil side of Catholicism all the time
and she probably did (eg when she forbade contraception
among the poor who needed it) and rewarding somebody for good achievement who
has no free will. The only reason the
reward is given is to act as an incentive to others and also because nobody
rewards themselves so other people do it and do it because
they want to gratify their own desire to encourage good work and are not doing
it for you. So it is called a reward but
isn’t really for it is for themselves for it is the desire they want not the
desired. That is what rewards and praise
are then. They cannot justify belief in
free will for they have nothing to do with it at all.
Everything we do we think is right. Even when we do evil it is because we have come to temporarily believe that we ought to do it. If doing good just because it is good is the law then it is immoral to seek to reward a person by praise for doing good for they do not want it and should not want it. Their attitude is that virtue is its own reward. They are satisfied just by doing good and consider that to be the only real reward. So the reward then is insulting the person. It is not a reward at all. It invites people to do what they see as wrong. All it is, is a display of hypocrisy if it is practiced by people who say they believe in sacrifice and in free will. Christianity wants God to have all the credit for human goodness but still it praises people which means it is a manipulative faith. Jesus started this giving God all the credit in his parable of the Pharisee and the Publican where God was pleased with the publican who never once brought up his good points unlike the Pharisee who thanked God that he was such a virtuous man. You have to believe we are naturally selfish creatures to gain anything from giving or receiving rewards which means they are not really rewards for you need free will to get them. But the truth is we care about the reward and the honour that comes with it and not our alleged free will.
We always do what we want to do under the circumstances and sacrifice is a lie.
Even if I give my life to save a drowning child I did it in response to feelings
that demanded that I do it and I had to satisfy them. You
cannot believe that we have free will to do what gratifies us. That is not free will for the person who
refuses to murder and this is for gratification is not really any different
from the person who murders for gratification.
I mean their actions were different but their motives were the same,
self-centred. Don't object that we can change our desires for when driven for gratification for that
does not change the will for gratification but it only changes the form that
gratification will take. The will is
still after the one thing, gratification, so it cannot will anything else. If you see the will as being the same as a
magnet that is attracted to safety pins and nails - whichever is seen as
handiest - you recognise how impossible it is for free will that is defined as
choosing different kinds of gratification to be free will for it is still after
the same thing just like the magnet likes pins and nails for they have iron in
them and is only after the iron. We only
do things because we think they will make us happy. Often we are wrong. In all the moral systems, it is recognised
that mistaken beliefs we really hadn’t the chance to correct, diminish
or eradicate responsibility which is another proof that free will is no use even for those
who wish to believe in responsibility for why believe in it when it is so
reduced? Even when we choose something
and are proven right to think that it makes us happy we are not any different
at all for we could still have been wrong.
When responsibility is so weak what is the use of visiting retribution
on anybody when you don’t know how much of it they really deserve?
Denying free will does not make the word should obsolete because even if we are
machines the word should still applies. We say a printer should print a letter
neatly.
A person should do what they want to do for there is no need for anybody
running anybody’s life and there should be as little external compulsion as
possible.
People only do evil because they are unhappy. Determinism, the denial of free
will makes them more understanding of others and themselves so they can press
the right buttons in people to make society a better place. To be happy we
should rejoice in people and not in material things and in simple things. It is
not true that we can’t live a good life without belief in free will. Nobody can
prove it anyway, it is blind faith, and still we are okay.
Determinism does say that what will happen will happen. But the determinist
cannot say that they should do evil for they will do it anyway for they can
just as easily say they should do good for they will do good anyway.
We can only do what we feel or think is good, so evil is a sickness that commands our concern and compassion as much as any other sickness does. Evil is not a sign of strength but of weakness. Evil is not a sign of cleverness but of foolishness.
WE DON'T NEED FREE WILL FOR REWARD/PUNISHMENT
Even if we are free we are only rewarded for things we got through chance so we can deny free will and still give out rewards. We are rewarded for success not merit which is why you cannot take a gold medal off an Olympic medallist who doesn’t have the right attitude to deserve what she or he gets.
What is the point of believing
in free will for the sake of rewards and punishment when nearly all of the time
you cannot punish all the wrongs done to you?
Most people get away with their evil so you may as well disbelieve in
free will. If you can’t punish you can’t
reward either but go through the motions which people are happy enough
with. Then the reward is something you
have to give, not a real compliment.
There is no point in believing in a harmful doctrine like free will just
for the sake of a few people getting punished.
Those that are punished get off lightly with murderers
rarely serving a life sentence anyway.
We can cope with this so we can cope without the doctrine of free will.
We could live without rewards and praise
being rational activities for they will happen anyway for people like doing
them and getting them. So it is nonsense
to think we need free will to make them plausible especially when even free
will fails to do that.
If we are to honour free will then we cannot
really reward. So we must only punish then. Free will implies that we deserve only
punishment so if you want to believe in rewards it is not going to help you do
it with consistency and rationality.
Free will can only appeal to those who want others to suffer punitively. Punishment means paying a person evil for
doing evil of their own free will. It is important that we be conscious of
this. Deniers of free will use pain to
discipline criminals but this is not the same as punishment -
what it is, is therapy.
Free will implies that extreme cruelty is fine. How does this fit in with my claim that it cannot justify rewards for if it cannot justify them it cannot justify punishment either for punishment is merely a reward in reverse? The answer is that the purpose of the free will doctrine is to defend responsibility and though it fails to do that that is what it is for and in so far as it does that it advocates cruel justice.
It is evil to believe in free will because we can live without believing in it
and it rouses hatred and grudges and condemnation and revenge so it is an
unnecessary evil and should not be believed even if we could be free. Why
condemn hate when you sow the seeds for it by teaching that free will is real?
It is evil for anybody to tell me I have free will when I am most sure of my
own existence for I have no experience that proves I have free will.
GOD BELIEF VERSUS REWARDS
If God exists then he comes first for he is goodness. The highest goodness is doing good with no reward except the thought that it is the will of God. But then religion says God rewards in Heaven which would mean you are getting rewards that are not rewards at all but insults for they mean nothing to you but doing what God wants does. Belief in God is incompatible with belief in real rewards.
It is commonly presumed that determinism, and we know determinism is true, denies the validity of reason. If we were produced without the agency of an all-truthful God and are programmed by chance it seems that our reason might be unreliable. It seems it might not have been programmed or set right. But no matter what we do we are still assuming that our reason is right anyway. We know by experience that reason works. For instance, reason says that if I step into a hole I will fall and experience verifies this so I don’t need circles and assumptions.
If you assume that reason is right for a God of total truth
exists and made us and it and that God exists for reason says so then you are
using circular reasoning. It is akin to
saying that the Devil is God because I feel he is and that my feeling is right
for the Devil is God. You could prove
anything with that kind of thinking. Its
called circular reasoning. Circular
reasoning denies the authority of reason.
You are still assuming with circular reasoning that reason is set correctly. So you might as well assume it without
bringing God into it. The argument of
the religionists is making reason depend on the assumption that there is a God.
If you say God exists therefore reason is true it gets interesting. You are just assuming that reason is true
because you are assuming God. You are
saying that God exists without reason which is irrational. It would be more
reasonable to simply assume that reason is right without bringing a God into it
for the God hypothesis is only a guess itself anyway.
It is said that if we were programmed by our past we would make no progress.
But in fact the programming might have planted the power to do better than
before in us which lies latent until then. A computer that always performs at
the same level of efficiency can contain an element waiting to work that makes
it improve. The computer is not free so
progress does not refute the denial of free will.
Also if God exists then reason is probably delusion for he made deception and
tolerates it and says he cannot abide temptation and has hypocritically made
our bodies to tempt us to sin.
PUNISHMENT - REWARD IN REVERSE
What
about punishment? To reward a person for
a past act is not as bad as punishing a person for a past act because a reward
is a nice thing. Because it is nice, it does not really matter that much if it is immoral on account
of the act being unchangeable and irreversible. But it is
evil to punish a person for a past act for they cannot change it. They are being hurt for what cannot be helped
anymore. What makes this more evil is
that the present matters more than the past.
If the person is still not sorry for what he did then this makes no
difference. To punish him would be like
punishing a person who has evil will in having approved of the evil another has
done that he has had nothing to do with but we don’t punish for what you will but
what you will when you do something bad.
So free-willists cannot believe in reward or
punishment anyway and might as well become determinists.
When
sin and evildoing are insanity it follows that if free will justifies rewards
it is by no means possible that it could justify punishment for you can’t
punish madness. That is barbarism not
punishment. So anybody that wants to
believe in free will has to hold that there is no justification for punishment
and that it is all about rewards in which case they might as well join our
side.
Only
a God could punish for only God could know what a person’s intentions were the
precise moment he did wrong or the precise degree of responsibility. What was believed before or after bears no
relevance and your memory changes and your imagination takes root. Other people will be less sure than you about
sizing you up. There is a lot of emotion
involved in a crime that ensures that what was inside you will be more
difficult to uncover. So, the free-willists cannot punish anybody. They are in the same situation as the
determinists. Punishment is an act of
hate and revenge when performed by them because true punishment is just for letting
people know that they cannot be rewarded for a crime by getting off and therefore
a necessary evil. Don’t think that we
should believe in a punishing God to put our minds at ease about the need for
people to be punished for he has rendered it so easy to get off that one might
as well believe in nothing. Also, belief
in a God like that will lead to carelessness and lack of interest when catching
criminals for he will punish himself anyway if we fail to.
But the fact that all who do wrong and cannot help what they did in the past would force God to forgive without repentance and hence to punish nobody. This shows how vicious and insidious the Christian doctrines of divine judgment and eternal punishment and original sin are.
Determinists don't
forgive evil people for to forgive you must judge them as evil and guilty.
Determinists teach that though there are people who do evil these people are not
evil in themselves. The
doctrine of free will prohibits forgiveness as much as determinism does for it
fails to justify rewards and punishments.
FREE WILL AND THE BACK OF THE QUEUE
With
regard to people who have caught AIDS through promiscuous behaviour or drug
abuse or those who developed a smoking habit and got lung cancer, it is widely
believed by free willists that these should be
relegated to the end of hospital waiting lists because they caused their own
illnesses. If you believe in free will
this is absolutely true. But since we
don’t and we recognise that all deserve sympathy for the past they have created
even if they have none for themselves and are unrepentant for they are helpless
victims of the past we can and should have sympathy. We should indulge the instinct we have that
they should not be dumped into the back of a waiting list. But if we believe in free will we cannot say
that for free will is about reward and punishment and praise and
condemnation. Praise is evil if you
believe in free will because it is patting another on the back for the
suffering they have underwent to do something. What is wrong with that is that since each
moment of consciousness when in pain is a waste in the sense that you do not
know if you will have a future or have had a past but still you are causing
your suffering and you are more sure of the suffering than the past or present. If you deny free will you can say that the
forces of determinism in us cause the pain for a good reason but that is not to
condone it for things should be better.
Better to condemn pain than to condone.
FREE WILL IS ANTI-FREEDOM!
Free
will is an excuse for forcing moral beliefs on other people. What people consider to be moral differs
drastically from century to century. For
example, in the middle ages you were considered to be
a freak or evil if you didn’t agree with burning witches or today if you agree
with forcing gays not to practice even though the suicide rate among abused
gays who feel they cannot endure society's disapproval is very high. Today, many follow a
destructive belief in God. This
consideration of how fashions change makes it possible for a criminal to argue
that he did not intend to do evil but believed it was good and then be entitled
to leniency or his freedom. Of course
everybody says you always believe that the evil you do is good but the
difference is that you agree on some level that the act is bad but this guy
thoroughly believes it is good. To
punish the criminal then would be unjust and it would not reform when for he
will see it for the revenge it really is.
It is the same as punishing somebody for being of below-average
intelligence.
ARGUMENT FOR FREE WILL FROM DESIRE FOR REVENGE
The argument that free will must exist for even if we deny it we still get much the same feelings as when we believed in it such as when some evil person attacks us, we still want revenge is mistaken. We can't believe in free will just because we don't like the consequences of denying it. We have loads of feelings that are inclined towards things that are not real or possible or sensible. Feelings of revenge are not based on logic but on feeling and have to be controlled by logic and logic is what counts most for it is given for our development and protection. Consequentially, if logic does not say we have free will then emotion is an inferior testimony and too unreliable. The cause of them is our desire to be safe not our belief in free will. To say that our nasty feelings are proof or evidence of free will is to advocate hate and evil because evidence and proof for free will are so important that it would be worth causing hate and evil for to get the evidence or proof. Another fact is that when such a serious doctrine like free will is defended by such plainly lame arguments the doctrine itself expresses hatred towards wrongdoers for the same reason that lame arguments to incriminate a defendant in court are expressions of hatred and a desire to blacken the defendant. In the case of free will the argument is not just lame it is plain useless and biased.
Free willists hold that it is worse to deny that free will exists than to
believe in revenge. Their doctrine then leans towards revenge even as it
condemns it!
FREE WILL AND PUNISHMENT
Free will believers teach that we must punish the guilty. Nobody knows how guilty a person really is or what kind of
pressures and disorders led them to commit anti-social acts. All agree that
there is something wrong with a person who does evil but they cannot say for
sure how guilty this makes them because it could be that since the disorder is
forced on us it might force us without us even realising it. Even free will
cannot justify the legalised revenge that is one of its attractions.
The law of the land and any other law is for public order and not for rewarding
or punishing. That’s all and that is how it should be. People believe in free
will because they want to believe in rewards and punishing but this is a
mistake. It is better to see a bad person as sick rather than as somebody who
is wilfully evil when we can and we always can. Always! It is less harsh and
that is why God and free will go hand in hand so belief in God is bad news.
The only real reason people want to believe in free will is to justify rewards
and punishments – and the latter more than anything else. They want to believe
that no other force but the person doing the act is the cause of the act for
these reasons. First of all, rewards are not given because you have done well.
That is only the excuse for them. They are given because people gain selfish
delight from your achievements just like you do. So we can retain rewards and
deny free will for they only for gratifying the selfishness that we cannot
help. As for punishment, keeping the criminal away from society for a while and
using the infliction of suffering to cure the criminal are what matters not
getting our own back. You only need to believe in free will if you want to
believe in revenge. When we can do without belief in free will we should for it
forces many people to hate and condemn. At least if we denied free will we
could honestly say that if any denier behaves that way that they did it in
spite of their knowledge of the non-existence of free will. Rewarding and
punishing are not important. What is important is giving people reasons not to
do wrong for whether we have free will or not we do everything we do for a
reason so we can be trained to do things for the right reasons. Therefore we
can forget about the dogma of free will and do it safely.
The only difference between a believer in choice and a non-believer is that the
first will believe in reward and punishment which are founded upon the idea of
deserving or earning while the latter will believe in neither. But in practice
the believer does not reward and punish anyway so there is no difference.
Rewards have to do with attaining goals but it is not the goal I care about but
the desire to fulfil the goal. It is just the desire. So I cannot deserve the
reward any more than a person who only helps his father to get his hands on the
father’s money deserves a reward. This
is because I am responding to a desire and desires are just desires. To reward desire has this problem. To reward a desire is rewarding the results
of the desire and to punish a desire is punishing the result of a desire. You don’t reward an eye for seeing black and punish
it for seeing white. The desire itself
is neither good or bad. Our desires control
us. When we go against a desire it is
only because we have a stronger desire that wants us to enjoy the illusion that
we can get away from desire and be free.
The law of the land will send you to jail if you commit
murder even if you meant well – in which case you only thought you were doing
right but this is not punishment for punishment is only for those who have
wilfully done wrong and known it. It is possible to believe that murder is
right just as it is possible to believe that nobody else exists but yourself.
Legalised murder was believed and felt to be right not long ago - when people
disagree so much on right and wrong then why not on murder as well? Criminals
are made to suffer for a bad action but that is not the same thing as
punishment. When even the choice doctrine cannot defend rewards and punishments
why should we be afraid to deny the doctrine? We can still reward and control
crime without the doctrine just like those who accept it do for these things
influence behaviour and we want to help people become good.
We can deny the existence of choice and still give rewards and as for
punishment. We practice much the same thing as believers in
choice do except we do not look upon it as paying the criminal back for doing
wrong. The reason is that even if we do accept that there is such a thing as
free choice we never reward the person’s motives but the outward actions of the
person so what difference does it make? None. We can carry on as we would if we
did believe.
The only reason we revere rewards and punishments, paying people back for what
they have freely done, is because of their effects. But we can behave as if we
believe these things just for the sake of the effects. Believers in free will
don’t really believe in rewards and punishments for they say that evil is
insanity for it is thinking what is not good is good so when it is only the effects
they worry about why can’t we do the same?
WHY PEOPLE TEACH FREE WILL AS A FACT
Most people keep up the lie that we are free agents because it gives them an excuse for wanting their pound of flesh and we all suffer from the conditioning of society and religion that makes us that vicious. People are eager to believe that what they are they have become through their own free choice. They may not realise it but it is true.
The fact that free willists avoid taking what
is coming to them for their sins or crimes proves that they are only after the
doctrine of free will for the rewards for themselves and to get persecuting
criminals under the guise of punishme.
This selfishness is another proof that there is no free will for free
will presupposes the power to be selfish or
unselfish. The selfishness is so
prevalent that we must ask what use the doctrine of free will is and the answer
we will come up with is none.