moral judgments and physicalism

Suppose determinism is true and we are like characters in a play in that there is only one possible plot. Does this diminish us as moral beings? Certainly we can still make moral judgments about the decisions people make in the same way we can morally judge characters in a play. But can we make the deeper kind of judgments that we routinely reserve for actual people who make actual choices? (We’ll call these “deep moral judgments”).

On a physicalist view of the world, human behavior and consciousness is the result solely of chemical and electrical processes in the brain. So a physicalist who makes a moral judgment about someone is at bottom making a judgment about the way that person’s brain functions on a physical level. If a physicalist thought Hitler was evil, it would really amount to a belief that the chemical and electrical functioning of Hitler’s brain was evil. That makes Hitler sound more like a natural disaster than evil.

The dualist doesn’t have this problem. The soul rather than the brain is really in charge, and there’s no problem with saying Hitler’s evil soul should be damned to hell. But then you have to posit the existence of souls.

Physicalists are often determinists, but the difficulty of making deep moral judgments from a physicalist position doesn’t turn on weirdness introduced by determinism. They are distinct positions. Consider the opposite pairings.

Dualist/determinist. Even if Hitler’s soul was “fated” to do what it did and couldn’t have done it differently, it is still the case he (or his soul) did these awful things with relish and that in itself is sufficient to make a deep moral judgment against him (and earn him a well-deserved place in hell). So determinism doesn't present a problem for morally judging hitler.

Physicalist/nondeterminist. Even if Hitler’s brain really wasn’t locked into its processes by determinism, his actions were still the result of brain processes. To be sure, these are to be regretted as a natural disaster is regretted. But it loses traction when we try to make it into a deep moral judgment. So absense of determinism doesn't make the physicalist's moral judgment less clinical.