A third puzzle illuminated by the Metaphysics of Quality is the ancient
'Free Will vs. Determinism' controversy. Determinism is the philosophic
doctrine that man, like all other objects in the universe, follows fixed
scientific laws, and does so without exception. Free will is the philosophic
doctrine that man makes choices independent of the atoms of his body.
This battle has been a very long and very loud one because an abandonment
of either position has devastating logical consequences. If the belief in
free will is abandoned, morality must seemingly also be abandoned under a
subject-object metaphysics. If man follows the cause-and-effect laws of
substance, then man cannot really choose between right and wrong.
On the other hand, if the determinists let go of their position it would
seem to deny the truth of science. If one adheres to a traditional scientific
metaphysics of substance, the philosophy of determinism is an inescapable
corollary.
If 'everything' is included in the class of substance and its properties,' and
if
'substance and its properties' is included in the class of 'things that always
follow
laws,' and if 'people' are included in the class 'everything,' then it is an
air-tight
logical conclusion that people always follow the laws of substance.
To be sure, it doesn't seem as though people blindly follow the laws of
substance in
everything they do, but within a Deterministic explanation that is just another
one
of those illusions that science is forever exposing. All the social sciences,
including
anthropology, were founded on the bed-rock metaphysical belief that these
physical
cause-and-effect laws of human behavior exist. Moral laws, if they can be said
to
exist at all, are merely an artificial social code that has nothing to do with
the
real nature of the world. A 'moral' person acts conventionally, 'watches out
for the
cops,' 'keeps his nose clean,' and nothing more.
In the Metaphysics of Quality this dilemma doesn't come up. To the extent that
one's
behavior is controlled by static patterns of quality it is without choice. But
to the
extent that one follows Dynamic Quality, which is undefinable, one's behavior
is free.
The Metaphysics of Quality has much much more to say about ethics, however,
than simple
resolution of the Free Will vs. Determinism controversy. The Metaphysics of
Quality says
that if moral judgments are essentially assertions of value and if value is the
fundamental ground-stuff of the world, then moral judgments are the fundamental
ground-stuff of the world.
It says that even at the most fundamental level of the universe, static
patterns of value
and moral judgment are identical. The 'Laws of Nature' are moral laws. Of
course it sounds
peculiar at first and awkward and unnecessary to say that hydrogen and oxygen
form water
because it is moral to do so. But it is no less peculiar and awkward and
unnecessary than
to say chemistry professors smoke pipes and go to movies because irresistible
cause-and-
effect forces of
the cosmos force them to do it. In the past the logic has been that if
chemistry
professors are composed exclusively of atoms and if atoms follow only the law
of
cause and effect, then chemistry professors must follow the laws of cause and
effect
too. But this logic can be applied in a reverse direction. We can just as
easily
deduce the morality of atoms from the observation that chemistry professors
are,
in general, moral. If chemistry professors exercise choice, and chemistry
professors
are composed exclusively of atoms, then it follows that atoms must exercise
choice too.
The difference between these two points of view is philosophic, not scientific.
The question of whether an electron does a certain thing because it has to or
because it wants to is completely irrelevant to the data of what the electron
does.
So what Phaedrus was saying was that not just life, but everything, is an
ethical
activity. It is nothing else. When inorganic patterns of reality create life
the
Metaphysics of Quality postulates that they've done so because it's 'better'
and
that this definition of 'betterness' - this beginning response to Dynamic
Quality -
is an elementary unit of ethics upon which all right and wrong can be based.
-lila ch12
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