I’m sorry for being a broken record

I find myself saying this phrase over and over:

“I’m a hard incompatibilist. All of what we do comes from what we are, we did not pick what we are, thus, there is simply no way to have free will such that it warrants basic desert moral responsibility.”

I have other ones, too, but that’s the main way I say on autopilot. I’m not sure I’m getting my point across on why this matters.

I think it bothers me because it people are held to a BDMR standard for what they are and this strikes me as mucho bad.

I mean, we all know people get better or worse lot in life based on what we are, and I argue that this are-ness encompasses also everything we do, by definition. In other words, we all know and hopefully accept that we tend to experience suffering and well-being in ways that are deeply tied to what we are.

This reality is enough to keep our hands full and come up with ways to make some meaning out of this. But just when we’re grappling with that, along comes a contingent — usually some sort of right wing Austrian school Ayn Rand fuckface who has to bring blame into it. Like, we already know some people have bad lives, but now we also blame them. We shame them. And these reactive attitudes somehow give us license to not care about their suffering.

We don’t merely say “nature did that.”

We say “He did that to himself, therefore not my problem. He deserves it.”

I wouldn’t go around asking people to care about the pain of others if people really did deserve it. But here’s a piece of good news: they don’t!

But this is also very bad news to meritocrats, the greedy, the sociopath, the narcissist, the egotist, the religious fundamentalist, or the laissez faire capitalist.

It’s bad news because 1) it challenges everything they believe and 2) it puts them out and threatens to obligate them to care and help, out of fairness, and 3) it challenges people to reevaluate themselves with the understanding that they ultimately can’t “earn” anything, in the traditional sense.

In other words, we need a way to live a good life without belief in free will. We desperately need a guidebook for this. It’s hard to ever get to the meat of what I want to discuss because the sub is so wrapped up in whether we have it. I’m already at “we don’t have it; now, what do we do about this?”

I feel a bit alone on this. Does anyone relate?