Free Will

    The less free will we have, the more we should be sympathetic towards other people's situations. If free will doesn't exist, we should look at a criminal with pity. They didn't choose this life, they didn't choose their parents. They didn't choose their upbringing, or their bad influences, or their faulty brain chemistry. Since we don't have free will, we shouldn't really judge. However, if we are judging others heavily even though free will doesn't exist, we shouldn't be too hard on ourselves. If we look at that criminal and say out loud "god, what scum," we shouldn't judge ourselves too much, even if that reaction isn't logical. We can't help that we judge them, given our upbringing, genetics, and neurochemistry. See the unfolding paradox here? 

    The less free will we have, the more understanding we owe towards other people but also the less understanding we owe other people. If someone else is a bigot then it is not really their fault, but that means its not really my fault either for being a bigot. If we can't hold others accountable, we shouldn't hold ourselves accountable either. This is why I'm not really a fan of using free will as an argument for anything. It strays too close to the nihilistic "everything is permissible" boundary to be useful for anything. Maybe everything is malignantly useless, but Pascal's Modified Wager is useful here. If there is a 50% chance that nothing matters and a 50% change that something matters, you should probably live your life believing that something matters. If you are wrong, it doesn't matter anyway. Maybe free will doesn't exist, but then it doesn't really matter what you do or think because you can't change your mind or affect the events that were set in motion by the big bang. So you might as well think that it does. Maybe it doesn't work the way tradition thinks it does, and we probably should be empathetic towards people's background and situation. But the stakes are high, and it is easy to create very bad incentives by leaning too far to either side.