Logic
This is an interesting bit of reasoning.
The letter pinned overnight to the wall of the mosque in Kandahar was succinct. “Girls going to school need to be careful for their safety. If we put acid on their faces or they are murdered then the blame will be on their parents.”
That’s good, isn’t it? If we put acid on their faces, the blame will be on their parents. Well of course it will – if it hadn’t been for their parents, the girls wouldn’t be there to have faces that Talibanists can put acid on. Furthermore, if the parents hadn’t fed them all those years, again the girls wouldn’t be there to have faces. If the parents hadn’t neglected to slice the girls’ faces off with a sharp knife or sword or farming implement, again, the faces would not exist. If the parents hadn’t ignored their obvious duty to behead their daughters, how could the Talibanists have found any girls’ faces to put acid on? They couldn’t; so you see; the blame is on the parents. That’s called ‘determinism’ and it means that the Talibanists are simply bowing to the inevitable.
I’m afraid those free passes really matter, too. Not so much from the likes of the SWP, although they are not nothing; they’ve got an MP even if he’s a clown.
But when you get huge swathes of the left in the US and especially the UK and even more so in the rest of Europe who are indifferent at best to the effort to wipe out the Taliban, you get a much weakened campaign to wipe them out.
Of course the free passes matter. That could be why I’ve been ragging on them for the past four years here.
It would be good to learn that western muslims are appalled by the actions of the Taliban, but apparently large numbers think it would be just fine if these people were back in control.
Is this intended to be some sort of reductio ad absurdum argument against incompatibilist determinism? If so, the argument obvioiusly doesn’t go through, since under true determinism, no one can ever be held responsible for anything. Now, the parents cannot be held responsible, as the Taliban suggest, because they’re actions are also causally determined by a combimation of genetics and enviroment, the grandparents cannot be held responsible, the genes certainly cannot be held responsible, nature cannot be held responsible (because it has no will) and, since there is no god, there can be no supernatural responsibility either.
In any case, if we look at moral responsibility as a question of the most immediate or proximate cause (the Taliban in this case), we run into all sorts of counterexamples: Fred held a gun to William’s held and told him to beat his wife, otherwise he would be killed.
If one invokes authentic free will, then
one needs to explain where and how in the closed causal chain of natural phenomena, a sui generis act of origination could have taken place. But this seems to supernatural explantations and we are back to the Taliban!!
As noted before, as far as the SWP, Respect and their pals are concerned Human Rights Watch and Amnesty appear to be fine when reporting on US and UK mistreatment of prisoners/combatants, but these impartial NGOs become merely the stooges of western govts when reporting on intra-Islamic attrocities…
“Is this intended to be some sort of reductio ad absurdum argument against incompatibilist determinism?”
I got the impression it was sarcasm.
“I got the impression it was sarcasm.” Oh, I see. Well, I thought there might have been interesting point of disgreement there. Too bad.
The determinism, of course, only applies to one’s own behaviour – one’s beliefs and attitudes are taken as an immutable, incorrigible given, and so one’s specific actions are then caused by the variable of What The Other Guy Does. Blame is always elsewhere.
Usually this comes in the third-person variety (i.e apologists blaming their own governments for being ‘root causes’), but it’s interesting to see someone actually denying their own responsibility for what they’re intending to do.
”The determinism, of course, only applies to one’s own behaviour – one’s beliefs and attitudes are taken as an immutable, incorrigible given, and so one’s specific actions are then caused by the variable of What The Other Guy Does. Blame is always elsewhere.”
Exactly. These fundamentalists are far from denying the existence of free will. They just feel that they are constrained by moral or theological considerations (0; to have to involuntarily punish the evil young women for the sins freely commited by their parents. It’s very similar to the reasoning behind such things as the Inquisition and other religious horrors: it is very, very painful for me to do put you on that rack and mercilessly turn the screws, burn out your eyeballs or stick your head under water until you talk, but the will of God must be served and thou hast caved in to the tempetations of the Evil One (i.e. you didn’t give in to me to some other fellow, damnit!!)
“These fundamentalists are far from denying the existence of free will. They just feel that they are constrained by moral or theological considerations”
It almost reminds me of the ‘god is omnipotent therefore we have no free will’ argument – except with ‘the US’ substituted for ‘god’…