You are now just not even addressing anything I’ve said about this.

Your recommendation was proved inefficient and pointless. You have posted no response to that conclusion.

Move on.

This exchange is very frustrating. It is clear you have very strong opinions that you have been thinking about for a while but to anyone outside the conversation it couldn’t be more clear that you are failing to engage with Carrier’s position (in the post and in the replies). You just want to say what you think and your responses only very loosely, if at all, touch on any arguments made in the responses.

On the assumption that you want to make progress you should step back and see if you are able to state Carrier’s position in a clear way such that Carrier would say “yes that’s exactly right, that’s the position I argue for.” Then if you think its wrong you can say why with reference to it.

Right now it doesn’t look at all like you know or care to know the position you are arguing against, you just want to state your own, which doesn’t make the best conversation.

Richard, I know this discussion is getting old, but I think some clarifications are in order regarding our exchange above.

I did not ‘obsessed over an incidental obscure detail’ nor ’semantics’. I focused on a conclusion that you introduced at the end of a long post on free will, while emphasizing the word ‘required’ with italics. I’m not the one to blame if I assumed you were onto something.

To restate the obvious, you don’t get ‘A requires B’ from ‘A is compatible with B’. On the other hand, if you prove ‘A requires B’ you win. Call that anyway you want, but has to represent what you mean. If ‘A requires B’ is not the case, or takes too much energy or time to convince people, fine then, let’s keep compatibilism.

To add onto Richard’s points:

Even if it were true that malevolence and benevolence are especially difficult, even impossible, to detect, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. We don’t detect the Big Bang either. The challenge behind identifying and measuring a construct doesn’t make it invalid.

I think you’re correctly identifying mistaken ways that people behave and think (e.g. using some notion of free will to say that a thief who steals bread is the equivalent of Bernie Madoff) as an excuse to reject a method. I understand your reticence, but just as with the conversation about the trolley principle, you’re not talking to the people in the conversation you’re actually in.

I think you are missing the point. The debate that label refers to is over whether free will is compatible with determinism or not, not over whether free will requires determinism. You are obsessing over an incidental obscure detail that isn’t about the very purpose these words were coined to communicate. And you are choosing a word that poorly communicates even that detail, since no one will know what “necessitarianism” refers to without elaborate unpacking, which defeats the whole purpose of words.

Meanwhile, convention has thoroughly entrenched the meaning of compatibilism, so no one needs to change it. You should hew to convention, as changing everyone’s brain the world over is a Herculean, nay Quixotic task, whereas the convenience of the existing convention is easily resourced. A wise man wears shoes, rather than trying to pave the Earth with leather. Much less shitty leather.

Follow up on Richard’s response @ 5:27PM (I can’t reply to that comment).
Richard, in a previous post you said: “In the real world, having free will is about whether you consented to what you did—whether you did it knowingly and intentionally. Which actually requires causal determinism to exist.”

The word ‘requires’ establishes a necessity, not a mere compatibility. No causal determinism, no free will. So, no, compatibility doesn’t convey the requirement that according to you exists. You could backtrack on your words, or you could follow your good advise and steelman your position. What an appropriate name would be for such position I don’t know, but if you were the first in noticing the requirement is only fair that you pick it.

Yes, there is a common label that fits my position. It’s called “compatibilism.” It is so well known as to now be standard convention in the field. And it exactly describes the position it labels.

Nothing else you ramble on about has anything to do with this, the only relevant point in this discussion.

“There is no reason to replace a good and informative label choice already widely known, with a bad and uninformative label choice no one has any familiarity with.”

Just concerning that specific point on label choice, in some other cases there is simply not a common label that exactly fits your position, and the closest label is different enough that it would would accurately describe your position.

For example take someone that is agnostic about the possible existence of a Deity, but lacks a belief in any particular God or theology. That person wouldn’t call themselves a Deist, because they aren’t certain such a thing exists. And they wouldn’t call themselves an Atheist, because the common use of that word is someone that doesn’t believe in a God (or Deity) of any sort.

So they are left with just trying to explain their position, for lack of a better word to use.

On a side note I think that society has completely misused the term Atheist. Because the term “Theist”
describes someone that not only believes in God, but more than that subscribes to a particular theology (otherwise they would just be a Theist).
And in other uses of words, whenever we see a known word with preceded with an “A”, we understand it to mean the complete opposite of that word.
For example “typical” versus “atypical”.

So likewise the word Atheist should simply mean someone that doesn’t subscribe to a particular theology. Then we would need a separate another word (like Adeist maybe) to describe someone that takes a hard disbelief position concerning the existence of a deity altogether.

I don’t know how a word that correctly conveys the stance that free will is “compatible” with determinism can be “superfluous.” All names for things are tautological. That’s how naming works. That’s what gives names utility. If you want to label a position, the best word to use is a word that actually describes the thing. Then you not only have a usable label (to distinguish a position from its competing stances, in this case contra-causalism or libertarianism, and “hard determinism”), but the label also conveys useful and indexable information about the thing labeled. That’s the opposite of “superfluous.”

By contrast, “necessitarianism” conveys nothing at all intelligible about the position or why it is distinct from its competing stances, and is already thoroughly superseded by a pervasive linguistic convention by now establishing the lexical meaning of compatibilism. It’s thus a terrible label choice. There is no reason to replace a good and informative label choice already widely known, with a bad and uninformative label choice no one has any familiarity with. This is just semantics 101, honestly.

Richard, if determinism is a requirement for free will (as I understand is your stance) saying free will is compatible with determinism is trivially true rendering the denomination ‘compatibilism’ superfluous, isn’t it? That’s all I’m complaining. Perhaps, given the arguments from the ‘no free will because determinism’ camp, is what it should be emphasized.