On Thu, 20 Feb 2003, Damien Sullivan wrote: > On Thu, Feb 20, 2003 at 03:50:06PM -0800, Philip Hart wrote: > > > I don't see the distinction, frankly. You act because you were programmed > > that way by your genes, your environment, or some complex interaction > > between them. The degree to which genes, environment, or their > > interaction prevails affects social planning but without free will we're > > robots and there are bad robots (Grr! Arggh!) but not criticizable ones. > > Of course they're criticizable! Criticism is part of the environment (or > interaction) which shapes their future behavior. If they're dangerously > immune to criticism we call them mentally ill and lock them up. Ok, I was trying to preserve some sort of people/non-people language distinction - one doesn't criticize one's computer, one reboots it or downloads a new RPM or tells it to kill some annoying process. It doesn't have a moral failure, the hard drive fails or it's badly configured or running Windows. I think computers will be susceptible to mental illness but to me that means that "mental illness" doesn't mean what people think (what people say they "think" - oh, crap, foreget it).