Free will that succumbs to evil influence is self-contradictory

Evidence

The second lesson tells us that putting self-preservation above moral duty is in no way predetermined, inevitable and inescapable. One can be pressed to do it, but one cannot be forced to do it, and thus one cannot really shift the responsibility for doing it on to those who exerted the pressure. It does not matter how many people chose moral duty over the rationality of self-preservation – what does matter is that some did. Evil is not all-powerful. It can be resisted. The testimony of the few who did resist shatters the authority of the logic of self-preservation. It shows it for what it is in the end – a choice. One wonders how many people must defy that logic for evil to be incapacitated. Is there a magic threshold of defiance beyond which the technology of evil grinds to a halt? — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 594 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Libet (1999) voiced concern over the automaton view of human nature and the characterization of humans as blissful illusionists. He proposed a du-al-control system in which individuals do not control the neural forerunner of a voluntary act, but they can consciously control whether to enact it or veto it. Given this “conscience veto,” people can be held morally responsible for their conduct. Libet’s critics vetoed his conscious-control function with the regress argument that the conscience veto is itself the product of preceding unconscious neural events. Thus, individuals cannot be held accountable for what they cannot consciously control. This view strips humans of any capacity for conscious control of behavior. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 318 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Free-will debate often collapses into accepted ignorance of divine foreknowledge; A for-itself can never constitute itself as evil on its own — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 755; Free-will debates misfire because both sides miss how motives acquire their status — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1070 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Evil can be resisted because self-preservation remains a choice. #complicates (0.75) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 594
• Free-will theories face an infinite regress defeating moral accountability #complicates (0.72) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 318