Sunday, 23 March 2014

Morality developing from the realisation that we have no free will

My lungs can not take it anymore. I am old. I think of a freind of mine. A furniture maker who achieved so much. Yet he will always be wondering what more he could have done had he not had depression . Depression I a terrible condition to have to endure. Perhaps the worst of them all. Because if you have hope, if you can summon up joyful spirit you will always have help.
It is the age of blaming the suffering for their own predicament. We have the third Dethronement of man. We know now that none of us are to blame for our character. We know that yet still live as a society as if these decades of discovery had never happened. The conservative government blame the weak and the poor for their predicament. Many people still do. Blame the depressed for not trying hard enough to cheer up. Blame schizophrenics for being weird. Blame the socially unskilled for finding no niche through networking. Blame drug addicts even though we know they have no free will.
Of course this enables the lucky to treat their own lottery wins as if they were somehow responsible. Those born in to money and private education need only be mediocre to rise to the top. Being born in Britain in the sixties I am aware that I already won the lottery each time I turn on the news.
It is time we abandoned all notions of making ones own luck. Being born with a predisposition to hard work and the fortune of being brainy is pure luck. You could just as easily be the slave of perversions society would see fit to hang you for. The Olympic gold medalist, the most successful businessman of the year, the discoverer of the Higgs boson. None of these have any greater right to feel pride than the paedophile who spends his days enduring hideous urges few of us could imagine, or the crack addict who betrays those he loves for a pipe of cocaine smoke. There really is no moral high ground.
Accepting he truth, that there is no free will has many ramifications. Our impulses and urges are the results of chemical and electrical processes within our skulls that we have no control over. For sure we should punish criminals in the hope we can rehabilitate them. But we should never punish someone purely for their nature. This is as stupid as to punish someone for the colour of their skin.

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