Freedom as Forward Looking no comments
ersons are nodes in causal webs. Ultimately, if we trace all the springs of our actions we will arrive at processes and systems that are outside of ourselves, or not ourselves. If our brains are hypercomplex parralel processors, then tracing back our decisions, our values leads back to events, whether atoms bouncing around or our parents saying something in our youth, of which we are not the authors. It’s all physics one might say.
The issues here are complex and labyrinthian. But I would like to point out that if we view freedom as forward looking or as an educative and communicative tool, we can build a freedom on solid foundations of our best supported picture of human nature. For example, if we ground our praise and punishment (including our justice system, on future interactions, on teaching, then our praise and punishment becomes about teaching and corrective actions, rather than an eye for an eye, or that someone’s good deed is to be praised not for itself but because praise encourages repeat behavior.
We don’t have to worry about obtaining the impossible goal of being totally self determining, full agents. No human is such a being. We should instead seek to improve ourselves and our communities to do better in the future. And this sort of freedom is all we need.