{"id":2719,"date":"2014-11-15T11:37:20","date_gmt":"2014-11-15T18:37:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/?p=2719"},"modified":"2014-11-15T11:37:20","modified_gmt":"2014-11-15T18:37:20","slug":"askphilosophers-org","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/2014\/11\/15\/askphilosophers-org\/","title":{"rendered":"AskPhilosophers.org"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The <a href='http:\/\/www.askphilosophers.org\/question\/5711'>answer<\/a> provided by a professional philosopher (at AskPhilosophers.org) to the question &#8220;If we have no free will, then is the entire legal system redundant since no one can be held accountable for anything since no one has control over their own actions?&#8221; would be shocking if my expectations were not already so low.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The level of &#8220;free will&#8221; required of humans in order to justify legal penalties for behaviour that we wish to prevent is no more than that required of a dog to justify the use of negative reinforcement in its training (and of euthanasia in the case of a dog that is dangerously untrainable) &#8211; or that which is required of a computer chip in order to justify callously discarding those that fail their initial start-up tests. If the computer chip had a built-in program that responded to a signal by switching between two available algorithms, then we might &#8220;punish&#8221; a chip that fails its test when using the default algorithm (due perhaps to a wrong bit somehwhere in its coding) by applying the signal to make it switch to the back-up version. The only &#8220;freedom&#8221; required of the chip is to perform as programmed when the &#8220;switch to backup&#8221; signal is applied, and the only &#8220;freedom&#8221; required of a human (in order to &#8220;justify&#8221; applying censure or punishment as a tool of control) is to have a built-in propensity for avoiding behaviours that it reasonably expects will lead to censure or punishment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The answer provided by a professional philosopher (at AskPhilosophers.org) to the question &#8220;If we have no free will, then is the entire legal system redundant since no one can be held accountable for anything since no one has control over &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/2014\/11\/15\/askphilosophers-org\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2719"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2719\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2720,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2719\/revisions\/2720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}