Strawson again: When we see intentions in behaviors what we see are the actions within contexts, contexts which imply a thinking agent behind them. by Galen Strawson In so doing, he seems to have simply moved the goal posts, however, redefining the kind of thing we think of as moral valuation in different terms. Both argue for the unreality of moral notions of goodness with Mackie suggesting that such notions can yet be useful social fictions (rather like the Marxian assertion about religion being “the opiate of the people").
On the view Strawson has sketched, they are not made by us but what we are made of.
At the cellular level, too, and below, at the molecular and atomic levels, physical causes govern what happens. Yet this removal from the physical domain still can't assure us of free will on the intentional level (or at least enough of it to justify a belief in moral responsibility) if Strawson is right.
If we agree that ice cream cones are morally irrelevant in themselves, except under certain circumstances (such as who is to get one, why, etc.) Galen John Strawson (born 1952) is a British analytic philosopher and literary critic who works primarily on philosophy of mind, metaphysics (including free will, panpsychism, the mind-body problem, and the self), John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche. Compatibilism merely preserves the appearance of moral choice on this view. But Strawson's attack looks more serious because it focuses on the impossibility of a self judging ever itself (in terms of the quality of the actions it performs) since whatever we think the self is (what we can say about how that person behaves) is entirely a function of that person's biological predispositions and the cultural influences which have shaped them. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools. To the extent we think we are all victims of forces outside ourselves (either heredity or cultural or both) there can be no independent judgment of the choices we make other than that which reflects whatever it is we want (or think we want) at any given moment. The farther back you go in this chain of causes, so must you inevitably come to rest at a place where what you are is given by your genetic make-up and the enculturation which informs your upbringing and education.
Examination of several accounts regarding the nature of moral responsibility allows the extraction of a conceptual core common to all of them. "Character is destiny" he notes, paraphrasing George Eliot, who, in a footnote he offers, was echoing Heracleitus: Thus there is no room on Strawson’s view for moral culpability—not only in the sense Garner uses "moral" but in his broader valuational sense as well. Here, too, causation seems to be the operant factor because brains, being physical entities, operate according to physical laws. Moral judgment can best be understood as the means by which selves accomplish this, on an incremental basis, for themselves. Nor does anyone think that liking what we have become familiar with, or conditioned to, undermines the quality of our choice in choosing vanilla rather than raspberry. And even if this seems to run up against how things seem to us when we act, the truth of the matter will be that moral valuing is unreal, a lie we tell ourselves and others. For Garner, ethics can still be done in a sense, albeit without the antiquated notion of morality which consists of belief in some special sort of moral authority. In fact, it is precisely this that moral valuing purports to do, i.e., it values our actions (though it's not the only form of valuing actions possible for us, i.e., we can and certainly consider actions for their prudential or practical value for us, too). He equates moral valuing, as a phenomenon (a form of activity which we engage in), with schemas we build on a framework of prescribed codes of action, the prescriptions for which can never, he tells us, be justified as they seem to require. Strawson, in affirming his “Basic” argument, acknowledges that the opinion that moral choices do matter is very strong in us despite what he takes to be the definitiveness of his argument but none of that has any bearing on the possibility of genuine moral responsibility: Of course without such relational activity on a physical level there is no mental life and so no actions that come from it.
The self, each and every aspect we can think about, is only a picture of a moment, or of the many moments in which we stand. There is no denying, of course, that we feel free when we confront the possibility of making choices in the real world (s demonstrated by Strawson’s Oxfam tin example above.
But everything we touch affects us as readily as we affect it and it remains possible at every moment to change the pictures we carry of ourselves—and so to alter them on the fly, nipping and tucking at the edges, finding and realizing different pictures of the kinds of creatures we wish to be. (4) any further changes that one can bring about only after one has brought about certain initial changes will in turn be determined, via the initial changes, by heredity and previous experience. Much more importantly, it also establishes, contra Waller and Pereboom, that only some forms of morality—so-called “behavioral” forms—remain possible without moral responsibility.
But as with the stranger bumping into us in the street, it's not the relation between physical phenomena coming in contact, one with the other, that’s at issue here but the choices, the agential deliberations that lead to decisions to act and to the actions which realize those decisions that matter. Intentions are just what we call the range of thoughts, feelings and beliefs an agent has at the moment leading up to acting and during the action itself to the extent they are implicated in the decision to act. Importantly, we note that this mental life is present and that it is nothing more nor less than what we call the "self." That picture of the self belongs on an entirely different level of analysis than the idea of the self as the mental life of brains and the entities which have brains. Indeed we can look at the self in slices and not as an indivisible whole, this latter approach being limited to things with an entity-like ontology.
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