Being a caused individual does not mean that nothing that you do matters. What you do impacts others experiences and shapes them through becoming part of their causes. When people create rules they are essentially training people to act a certain way. Recognizing that we are led by experiences that include the rules of society allows people to be better able to recognize these forces. Once someone reads something or listens to someone that tells them the ways that society is leading them, they are having experiences that will allow them to judge how to act in society. Their decisions are impacted by the people around them and the education they receive. Recognizing this inclines one to value education and perhaps to think that education is a moral responsibility. This would be morality without free will because it recognizes that some things are good training and training is possible in a world where people are determined by experience. This view recognizes culture as an important part of human experience as a training ground. People learn to respond to causes based on the teachings of their society. We would have to say that it is inevitable that each society would arise as it currently is because of determination, but this does not change the impact it has on people.
We discussed the idea of praise and blame as put into question by determinism, but what about other emotions like compassion and empathy. We could find that because people cannot change the way they act we should have more compassion for criminals. We could also say that we should not feel anything for them. They are following essentially a programmed set of events like a computer. They are not unique beings in the sense being part of a divine being would make them. This argument is undermined in the sense that people are unique beings. Everyone has a different biology and set of experiences, so they are unique even if their life follows a set line. We also could not argue that people do not feel and suffer. Even if they cannot change their actions and behaviors, they are beings that respond to pain and suffering and should be treated as such. This does not mean we should get rid of aspect of society that punish, like prisons, because we need to teach people to behave a certain way. Our behavior is clearly important and we learn this. We teach kids to look both ways when they cross the street, and we would be amiss not to teach this. The kid, though, can only act in ways that have been caused. If they are not told they will not look and if they are told in a convincing manner they will look. They cannot control what’s convincing to them either. That comes from the consistency of parents, the strength of the speech or a variety of other experiences. We can always think of a reason for actions and these reasons come from causes. We also are weighing things in our mind when we make decisions and can logically say that when given the same information in the same situation with no knowledge changed we would always make the same decision. This means we are all determined, but determined largely by other people.
Are individual people important if the world is determined and nobody makes uncaused decisions?
