odsoc
That reply was a beautiful piece of sophistry. I admire the attempt to conflate the meaning of custom & morality. Main problem: Custom & Morality are not the same.
While I agree that all morality is custom the reverse is NOT true. That's like saying because all roses are flowers then it's equally true that all flowers are roses. Customs can mean many things other than morality just like flowers can mean many things other than roses.
You then mention how the semites conquering Babylon wrote their CUSTOMS [note NOT morality] into the city's laws.

5 points.

1)Nowhere in your article link does it say that all the Babylonian laws were based on these new customs merely that the customs of the conquerers were added.
2) Customs [and indeed morality itself] may be said to be an attempt to meet a perceived need in society. The custom or morality is abandoned if it is felt the need is not met. Now this sounds like early attempts at reasoning to me. Ergo any attempts to bring custom into the law rely on early applications of reason. Therefore reason is ulimately the basis of the law.
3) If you had read my earlier post I had already admitted that custom, & morality had influenced some laws. But they were not the basis for all the laws. This being so the laws can conflict as indeed morality itself conflicts sometimes. How are we to decide between these conflicts except through the application of reason.
4) It may interest you to know that over 32 law professors in America have given evidence in court that American law is secularly based. Now American law, by & large is based on Common law just like us. So we too are secularly based.
5) Finally if all law is merely based on custom then we can have no new laws to cope with changing conditions. Why? Because customs have not yet developed to make such laws possible. But we do have such laws. Ergo our laws are NOT all based on custom.

GP, now to free will. fMRI machines are showing us what goes on in the brain, so neuroscience has leaped ahead. Susan Greenfield does an experiment, you might have even seen on TV. Use your free will to push a button when you decide to. The brain activity associated with that, starts well before you make that decision. So how free was that? Its an interesting experiment.

Next point- What we do involves both nature and nurture. Genes don't determine behaviour, but they certainly influence behaviour.
All those ligands, peptides, hormones etc affect how we feel and act.
Every so called free will decision made in the rational centres of the brain, is also affected by the emotional circuits. Some we are aware of, others not, but they still affect our decision making process. The stronger an emotion, the less we can reason. In a rage we hardly think at all. If we say suffer from depression, due to low serotonin levels, our decision would most likely be different then if we are happy, or angry etc. Some people are emotionally engulfed.
So they act on their feelings, then rationalise the whole thing away to justify it. Usually they are not even aware of it.

If we look at the mind of a psychopath. He feels to empathy, no caring, no love, just cold hard calculations. Is that then free will
to make rational decisions? Of course we lock him up, he lacks morality. Why do you think that those things that we define as moral, are not part of our genetic makeup?

Odsoc and Bosk,

I have no background in law and frankly have no interest. This disinterest stems from a perception that the justice industry is so inefficient, that one could best be served by staying completely out. Not only in cost of bringing about any outcome, but the fact that neither the cost nor the outcome can be reasonably known beforehand. When one leaves criminal law out (as it relates to neither custom nor morality :-(), justice is served 50% of the time - at best. Often both parties to the proceedings lose.

Having said that, what is case law if not custom? Where does reason come into proceedings when a non-guilty party can be made to compensate the guilty party? Sounds more like custom and some misguided sense of morality to me. What kind of reason is used to determine that all contracts and agreements made in good faith, have no standing? What kind of law is Family Law?

Yabby – I read of another experiment where a neuroscientist found that by putting a probe into a certain spot in a patient’s brain he could make the man’s arm move. He then told the patient, who was conscious, to try and hold down his arm with his other hand to see if he could stop it moving when he inserted the probe again. The patient was able to do so. Results such as that caused that scientist to change his belief in a completely materialistic explanation for the human mind.

I have no problem believing that there is an interaction between the physical brain and the non-physical mind - that which enables us to have free will. A person’s free will can be inhibited or influenced by their brain chemistry. But the important question is, is a mixture of brain chemistry and external physical factors totally responsible for our thoughts and behaviour?

If it is the case we have no free will then several absurdities follow – for one thing we cannot hold anyone responsible for anything – good or bad - as they could not have done otherwise and so any moral discussion is pointless. But much more importantly, we would have no reason to believe anything that is said, no matter how rational we may think we are being. Whatever thoughts or words that happen to arise in our brains would be due only to a complex combination of physical processes over which we have no control. So non-physical ideas and arguments count for nothing. Our words are just noises. In a world with no free will nothing is as it seems – we can’t even meaningfully talk about a truly deterministic world as everything is based upon a presumption that we are free agents and not merely mechanical machines.

GP, I'm not claiming total determinism as some do. What I am saying is that there are many influences on our ability to reason,
many of which we are not even aware of, happening at the subconcious level. In other words, those things still influence our reasoning process. In that case what we have is not really free will, but limited will so to speek, limited by these other factors.

All these genetic traits influencing behaviour, certainly gives me
a better understanding of people and the world. Some people have
addictive personalities for instance. Gambling, drugs, whatever.
They have a huge problem with these things, if it was simply free will they could rationaly just walk away easily. They can't.

I also believe that some people need religion to cope with life,
some don't. Some are anxious without that kind of belief, others not.
That influences their reasoning ability and decisions. Fair enough.

Yabby, so in your view what enables people to have even a measure of free will? For materialists, and that is most evolutionists, there is absolutely no room for anything non-material which would allow for us to be even partially free in our will. Can a non-material free will evolve? It is very hard to imagine how.