“…. natural law. Thus the cause of a person’s actions is the biological processes in their brain, not natural laws. Of course these biological processes themselves have causes, namely their …..”

Reading anyone from late 19th or early 20th century seduces one into their world view that science as they then understood it would very soon explain everything in the world. It never happened.

Anyone who wants to consider modern 21stC ideas about the biological brain’s role in behaviour or learning or skill should read “The Brain That Changes Itself”. Brilliant neurologist. For some educators, the notion that teaching – wait for it – handwriting is a good, even necessary, idea will come as a bit of a shock. (Dare I say rote learning …. that’s enough for now.) For me it was a quick read – I skipped all the yuk details of operations & experiments where things were put in people’s brains or other bits.

Importantly for OA’s view and for yours, repeated behaviours and responses are learned and imprinted. So, OA’s argument that schools should intervene when students behave badly becomes more urgent. Students l e a r n what will be rewarded, ignored or punished and the learning in and of itself changes the brain to promote repetition of the behaviours.

The easiest way to understand the point is to think of playing tennis or the piano as learned behaviour. Striking balls or keys in certain ways produces predictable results. You repeat the desired ones, you train yourself to reduce or eliminate the unwanted ones. Eventually, you can play Three Blind Mice without looking at the music or the keyboard, the ball sails straight over the net and inside the service court.

If students can ride a skateboard or sing or shoot a goal or find their way home after school, they can learn behaviours of other kinds. They already do – some unlearning of bad behaviours is needed.

If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.

My point is that I don’t want to argue about the existence of the cat. I am not saying this because I think the existence of cats is sacred. I just think that anybody who enters a discussion about cat-skinning without believing in cats has very little to add to the conversation. One might almost suspect that they were just looking for attention.

You seem to be wearily accepting that, yes, the assumptions of your argument, which are the premises of your argument, are indeed part of your argument.
You have now moved on to the claim that by destroying your premises I am destroying everything, including my own. “So stay away from them, they’re sacred!”

This is just another way of saying ‘you aren’t allowed to question my assumptions’, which is where we started out. I can very well show that your premises can be questioned. For example, your point that accepting determinism over free will would get rid of personal responsibility for one’s actions has already been discussed… at least by me.

You said: “That would be disagreeing with my premise, not my argument itself.”

I haven’t looked at logic for a while, but I can remember a bit about syllogisms. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllogism – “A syllogism… is a kind of logical argument in which one proposition (the conclusion) is inferred from two others (the premises) of a certain form.”
Please explain how your premises are not part of your argument. Perhaps you are using the word ‘premise’ in a way I am not used to?

Another way of putting it is this: would I not be responsible for destroying your house if I damaged the foundations? Yet you are saying the foundations and the structure on top of it are totally separate.

That would be disagreeing with my premise, not my argument itself.

I’m sure I explained this earlier with examples.

This is what you do when you come across people who say that “if classes were interesting, then students would not behave”. You, very rightly, say that the assumption that students behave for interesting lessons is wrong, that the assumption that students only misbehave for ‘bad teachers’ is wrong, that the assumption that students all equally care about education and all want to learn is wrong.

I think you need to get clear in your own mind what an “assumption” is. There is no reason to think that the opinion you mention is based on those other statements having been assumed.

So, it is an argument that assumes that free will exists.
Therefore one way of disagreeing with your argument is to say that free will does not exist.

This is what you do when you come across people who say that “if classes were interesting, then students would not behave”. You, very rightly, say that the assumption that students behave for interesting lessons is wrong, that the assumption that students only misbehave for ‘bad teachers’ is wrong, that the assumption that students all equally care about education and all want to learn is wrong.

(Thank you, by the way, for answering my argument in the detail that I try to answer yours. It makes me feel very much at home!)

Because my argument already assumes that free will exists. It is not an argument about the existence of free will.

You are the one attempting to change the subject to free will and determinism. If the Battleground Forum was working at the moment I would direct you there.

http://onphilosophy.wordpress.com/2006/04/30/determinism-and-moral-responsibility/
[Determinism and] Moral Responsibility

As you would expect moral responsibility is harder to deal with than the practical issue of punishment. We wonder if it makes sense to simply blame the world for one’s actions (“physics made me do it”). However the natural laws cannot be the cause of an action, although they determine how interactions between particles proceed they do not actually interact with the particles. If an electron is bumped out of its orbit by a photon the cause is the photon, not natural law. Thus the cause of a person’s actions is the biological processes in their brain, not natural laws. Of course these biological processes themselves have causes, namely their earlier states as well as earlier input from the outside world. The primary cause for any state in the biological system in question however is usually an earlier state of that very biological system. In more conventional terms we would say the primary cause of a brain state is earlier brain states. However since we are accepting materialism as one of the premises of this argument this is the same as saying that the person is the cause of their actions. What about those earlier inputs? Well they do contribute somewhat the person’s actions, so perhaps we should say that the person is mainly to blame, although their school teachers (for example) share some of the responsibility because they did not instruct them correctly. This description of the cause of a person’s actions is the same as that which we get when we analyze them under a free will theory, which means that our notions of moral responsibility are not affected by determinism.

This is an odd point because Determinists don’t make free will not exist (if it does) by denying it. What they do is argue that it does not exist. And their argument is therefore opposed to yours, and therefore determinists think you are wrong for believing in free will. So I’m not sure why a determinist should find your argument ‘pointless’. To give an example:
An atheist can argue with a theist about the existence of God. Both believe the other is wrong. Whether they believe the other’s argument is ‘pointless’ is an attitude either can take if they want. An atheist might believe a theist’s argument is ‘pointless’ because they are arguing for something that they, the atheist, believe does not exist. But an atheist might think that the real point of the argument is not to establish that God exists, but instead to rationalise an irrational belief based on faith.

So, to say that free will does not exist is not to label your argument pointless. It is not to deny the possibility of any debate. It is to say you are wrong. (The person who is trying to deny the possibility of a debate is actually you, by saying that a position contrary to your own cannot possibly disagree with you!).
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What would make you say such an odd thing? It is because you believe that: “The point is that you are challenging assumptions that are necessary for discussing morality, rather than simply challenging assumptions that are necessary for a particular view about morality.”

You are saying that to argue against free will is to throw away morality. So how can any discussion take place? Well, at the very least it could take place by bringing in non-moral ideas of praise, blame, punishment and so on; and instead talking about ethics. Such as the version of blame from Scanlon. So, you would have a free will moral responsibility system, and a different deterministic system. And I don’t see why these two systems couldn’t argue with each other. (In fact, they do).
Yes, ideas are thrown away that are ‘necessary for discussing morality’. But the argument is about the necessity of throwing these ideas away, because of their lack of truth and of utility, because this idea of morality is wrong.

I have just come across Betrand Russell’s The Element of Ethics. Having this discussion with you is certainly prompting me to read more about ethics! Here is some selected quotation from section iv, I have added some emphasis which I hope does not detract from the meaning of the text (please read the original if you feel I have doctored it at all http://fair-use.org/bertrand-russell/the-elements-of-ethics/section-iv):
The importance to ethics of the free-will question is a subject upon which there has existed almost as much diversity of opinion as on the free-will question itself. It has been urged by advocates of free-will that its denial involves the denial of merit and demerit, and that, with the denial of these, ethics collapses… The grounds in favour of determinism appear to me overwhelming, and I shall content myself with a brief indication of these grounds. The question I am concerned with is not the freewill question itself, but the question how, if at all, morals are affected by assuming determinism…

In fact, however, no one really holds that right acts are uncaused. It wouldbe a monstrous paradox to say that a man’s decision ought not to be influenced by his belief as to what is his duty; yet, if he allows himself to decide on an act because he believes it to be his duty, his decision has a motive, i.e. a cause, and is not free in the only sense in which the determinist must deny freedom. It would seem, therefore, that the objections to determinism are mainly attributable to misunderstanding of its purport. Hence, finally it is not determinism but freewill that has subversive consequences. There is therefore no reason to regret that the grounds in favour of determinism are overwhelmingly strong.