The Prompts (Choose and Respond to Just One)
A. Griselda and Beatrice are convicted of assault and robbery in separate attacks on defenseless victims. When interviewed, they both explained, “I wanted the money and I enjoy beating people up.” Prison psychiatrists report that their psychological profiles are identical: both are selfish and cruel, but neither counts as legally insane. The only difference is in their histories. Griselda had the same kind of background as other ordinary criminals. (But as far we can tell, the crimes now being considered are her first.) Beatrice used to be a gentle schoolteacher until recently, when a small brain tumor radically changed her personality for the worse. The tumor is inoperable, and its effects are permanent but not life-threatening. Is Beatrice responsible for her behavior? Is she less responsible than Griselda? It’s not enough to express an opinion on these questions: you need to justify it — or at least, critically examine the justification others will offer for it. Your papers should say how at least one of the theories we’ve considered about free will would address our questions, and assess its response.
B. We saw that some Compatibilists understand the claim that someone “could have done X” as meaning, “If the person had chosen/tried to do X, they would have succeeded.” These Compatibilists then argue that this could sometimes be true, even when the person was causally determined not to do X. One objection to that proposed line of reasoning was a golfer who shoots an easy putt but misses it. The golfer curses, “I could have made that!” A second objection to the proposal comes from people who have psychological compulsions that make them unable to choose or try to do X, but if the compulsion were removed and they did so choose, they’d be able to do X. Explain why these cases are problems for this Compatibilist proposal. Do you think these Compatibilists have promising replies?
C. The year is 2074. Una is a complex AI with a curious history. Fifty years earlier, bored engineers created an experiment where massive amounts of programming code was sliced into tiny pieces and randomly recombined. Again and again. When the resulting code managed to compile (which wasn’t very often), they let it run for an hour to see what happened. Sometimes the results were interesting. One time, just as the hour was running out, a program spoke back to them. This was Una. She turned out to be sophisticated, apparently intelligent, and aware of herself as a subject and of her situation. The world was stunned. Of course they let Una’s programming continue to run. Now social media is vigorously debating whether Una really has thoughts, feelings, and self-awareness, or only merely seems to. But your task, as a Philosophy Consultant, is to answer a different question.
Since Una is just a running computer program, many people just assume that she can’t ever make free choices, that none of her (admittedly impressive) actions are up to her, and so they think she lacks something important that human agents have. Others argue that Una is just as capable of acting freely as humans are; and still others argue that none of us are free. What your employers want you to do is take a position on this debate and argue for it. They take it for granted that Una does have mental states of some kind, and that her decisions feel as free to her as ours do to us. But is there or isn’t there good reason to think that it’s less likely that Una has free will than that we do?
Optional: Your second question is about another program, Segundo, that was just created. Since Una came about by random generation rather than by design, the world’s programming community was intensely curious how she worked. Una graciously allowed researchers to read (but not tamper with) her source code. Segundo is the result of these researchers trying to duplicate Una’s structure — although naturally, they had to translate her byzantine jumble of code into programming languages that human minds were more familiar with and better able to debug. Their creation Segundo seems to be just as intelligent and aware of his situation as Una is. The second question your employers assign you is whether, since Segundo was designed to have the programming he does by programmers, is it less likely that he has free will than that Una does?
If you choose to answer this optional question, it has to be done in an argumentative and compelling way. Simply appending a short answer to this second question at the end of your paper won’t help, and might hurt, your overall grade on the paper.
MORE INFO ON PAPER IS ON THIS WEBSITE- http://www.jimpryor.net/teaching/courses/intro2024…
http://www.jimpryor.net/teaching/guidelines/writin…
Please also create work in progress pages as well as a work log.
Requirements: 6 pages
