Yes.

I have no objection to saying that our acts are facilitated or partially determined by prior practice. But it seems to me that that only supports libertarian freedom, though, if the prior acts that formed those habitus were themselves libertarianly free.

Probablistic is just a description of partially determined. It allows for limited freedom.

So far as it goes, sure.

But I’m trying to press you on the something more that distinguishes the probabilistic from the free. I mean, we don’t hold an atom morally accountable for when it decides to decay. If we went to say that something like whether an atom decays or not can be the decisive factor that makes human acts not be fully deterministic, we still haven’t got the sort of moral freedom that underlies moral responsibility–unless the agent had some sort of control over whether that atom decayed or not, but that is just pushing the question of freedom back.

I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but it seems to me that you are taking some (limited) libertarian freedom as a brute fact. It just is. And one can do that; I did it for a long time.

But my contention is that if we try to analyze the concept–what is libertarian freedom, what allows it to be the source of moral responsibility–we find we can’t. We stop with something that is vague (and open to a compatiblist interpretation) or, if we try to be specific, we get something that is internally incoherent.

And where that leaves me is saying either that libertarian freedom is real, but inherently incomprehensible, inscrutable, and internally paradoxical or that libertarian freedom is mistake and all the actual data that I have (including my own experiences of freedom) is compatible with determinism.

I’m perfectly content with probabilistic. To me it seems like a good description of partial freedom, which I don’t experience as random.

There are probabilistic events (like the decay of a radioactive atom) that are not free, you say yourself that such quantum events are very different from human behavior, and part of the difference is, as you say, human acts give rise to responsibility.

In that case, the probabilistic and the free can’t be simply the same. Something must differentiate the merely probabilistic from the free. Something special about the free introduces the notion of responsibility. What has to be added to probabilistic that makes it not merely probabilistic but also free?

I think we can maintain responsibility in the face of determinism if we allow that each of us is (as an individual moral agent) essentially defined by our most basic loves. But like I said earlier, I think moral guilt is the hardest thing for compatibilists to account for.

Take someone who commits a really, truly horrid crime–let’s say he murders a family of strangers in cold blood to perpetrate a robbery.

Now, intuitively we might want to say that, if ultimately that crime was determined by various things outside of his control, and we still hold him responsible for the crime he committed, he could object that it isn’t fair to punish him for what he couldn’t help but do.

But, I ask, is his objection sincere? I mean, can he honestly say he regrets what he did, and that if he had it to do over he wouldn’t choose the crime again–even without consideration of any punishment he is now facing? Can he honestly disavow the act and say it isn’t his in the morally relevant sense?

(I realize in practice it is very difficulty to judge sincerity in such situations, but let’s stay at the level of theory for now and just assume we have some way to know the person’s conscience.)

If he says, yes, he sincerely would act differently if he could do it over, and he would choose differently even if he thought he could get away with it, then we have sincere repentance. This is genuine regret (not just a selfish regret that things happened to turn out badly for him).

Let’s set that case aside, because it is not at all clear what, if any, punishment is due in such cases–intuitions tend to be deeply divided. (I’m only trying to reconcile determinism to the common moral beliefs about responsibility: if there is no common consensus on such cases, I don’t need to account for it.)

But let’s imagine he can’t truthfully answer, yes. If he regrets anything, it is only that he got caught. He is recalitrantly selfish and anti-social. All the loves and dispositions that motivated him to commit the crime in the first place are still firmly in place.

The thing I want to draw attention to in that second case is that he can’t very well object that it’s not his fault or that he was set up by forces out of his control. Even if it is true that he was in some sense set up by forces out of his control, it remains he has no standing to make the objection because he still loves the same things that led him to commit the crime in the first place. The whole point is that he acted willingly. He did what he wanted to do, and the basic desires that led him to want to do it then remain in place. He can’t really disavow the act. He can’t complain it wasn’t his. It is his, and the fact he doesn’t regret it proves it is his in all relevant respects.

Anything that might let him raise the objection would ipso facto constitute some form of regret, some manner of disavowing his prior act as well as the love and desires that moved him to choose it) as really not his own. And he can’t disavow those loves and desires if he still has them (and has them in the same proportion).

To speak somewhat imprecisely: The objection to determinism makes sense if we think of moral agents as sort of raw individuals–bare hypostases, who have some individual existence logically prior even to their own most basic desires. Such bare individuals could complain that their most basic desires, insofar as they are given not chosen, aren’t really theirs because they didn’t get to choose them. “You can’t hold me responsible for killing a man in cold blood for money: I didn’t ask to have an obsession with material wealth and an utter disregard for justice.”

But if those desires are constitutive of the individual as an individual agent, if there is no bare hypostatis who is prior to those most basic desires and loves (which is what I would argue is the case), then such an objection doesn’t even make sense. There is no one to object. If he in fact is obsessed with the acquisition of wealth above all else, even to the point of callous indifference to innocent human life, what could even motivate him to raise such an objection? How can he disavow the act as not his when he would do it again? When he remains unrepentant?

Now you might say, “fine, he can’t raise the objection, but can’t we as observers?” I don’t think that works either. Again, even raised by a third party, the objection would only make sense if we presume there is some innocent individual agent who was saddled with extrinsic desires he didn’t choose. But if the agent is constituted in part by those desires, they aren’t extrinsic to him and he isn’t innocent.

That isn’t to say you couldn’t have a conflicted agent–someone who in some sense hates himself for what he does. But for a criminal to hate himself for his crimes bespeaks lively and good desires; that is just the sort of real regret we set aside earlier.

I think they’re thinking about something observable such as icicles.

Water freezes at zero Celsius. Between minus 5 and zero temperatures it is likely for icicles to form.

The deterministic nature of icicles can be known because a temperature range is known. However no mathematics can predict exactly what shape the icicles will have in the present and future. That is the indeterministic nature of icicles. Icicles always vary in shape and such the closer they’re looked at and observed. No two icicles near the window will be exactly the same.

Yes, the indeterminate nature is for the most part what can’t be known with mathematics. Modernism has redefined it as a spiritual humanism concept. Einstein said to Boer, “god does not play dice.”