Excellent post Matt. I dont have the time to respond in any length but it has alot of content worthy of reflection.
good stuff nicely written. -Ron ----- Original Message ---- From: Matt Kundert <pirsigafflict...@hotmail.com> To: moq_disc...@moqtalk.org Sent: Wed, June 15, 2011 8:46:31 PM Subject: Re: [MD] Free Will Hi Steve, Steve said: What is your personal view on the matter of free will? Matt: My personal, fairly unphilosophical view is that it doesn't pay much to think about "free will vs. determinism" as a problem. In other words, I don't think about it much and I'm encouraged in that view by how boring the debate seems in the abstract and how disconnected the debate seems from moral philosophy when it is keyed at an epistemological level. The meat is much lower to the ground, and Nagel's challenge is really about how to reconceive our common moral intuitions about blame, praise, intention, and luck. _Nagel_ thinks there are some root paradoxes about human nature in there, but Nagel takes a pretty pessimistic view toward what we can do to ourselves by handling our concepts in different ways (a pessimism I don't think Pirsig shares). Occasionally, I imagine, we'll have to revise our moral intuitions, but for the most part I think a lot of our moral categories can be saved: we just need to think of them differently. For example, the notion of "autonomy": this is the central Kantian notion that cues the free will debate. But if Robert Brandom's revisionary reading of Kant and Hegel is right, then autonomy is a perfectly suitable notion for value-first philosophers like Pirsig and the pragmatists. For at the heart of Kant, so argues Brandom, is the notion that conceptual activity is at its root normative. And having norms in play means values, valuing one thing and not another. What Brandom builds, and what a number of other philosophers have been concurrently working towards, is a story about _how_ normativity works, the mechanisms that need to be in place for values to exist. Ultimately, the story is that norms require the recognition of the norms as having authority: _you_ bind _yourself_ to be held accountable according to such-and-such a norm, rule, or value-standard. That's autonomy, the choice of what communities you're going to include yourself in. We're not making those decisions as children, of course, which is why people Bernard Williams writes books about shame and Thomas Scanlon about blame. Expressions of disapprobation, even when untied to, say, legal consequence have an important place in the mechanisms of society because expressing blame or resentment _is_ the norm-crossing consequence of behaving in a manner the community you belong to disapproves of. The trouble with Pirsig's metaphysical strategy, in specific relationship to the multifarious free will debate, is that his explanatory strategy is to treat Value as a primitive: you treat it as the only given, and explain everything else from that first step. That strategy is very successful on a number of fronts, but not in explaining what value is, or how it works. How could it? You've already been asked to cede its equipment as a given for explaining everything else. This is why Quality can remain, explanatorily speaking, undefined. The trouble with the concept of Free Will is that Freedom and the Will, whatever they are, are pretty central pieces of equipment for the concept of Value. You have to basically treat the problem of free will as a moot point, pretty much along the lines of the Humean compatibilist strategy Pirsig articulates in Lila. "When you're bein' static, you be static; when you Dynamic, you Dynamic!" The trouble with Pirsig's neat solution is that he never tells us how we are to know when a person is being "controlled" by static patterns or is "following" Dynamic Quality (the interestingly chosen verbs he modulates between). If you want to know whether a person is morally responsible for an action, based on his freedom of will, you are still in the same position as you were before. But answering that question doesn't seem to be Pirsig's quarry. (What is interesting is the Kantian position that Pirsig strikes right afterwards, that judgment is the root primitive of cognition.) I don't think there's anything incompatible with Pirsig's strategy and, say, Brandom's strategy (someone who doesn't take value to be a explanatory primitive). I also don't think there's anything incompatible between those who deny the existence of the concept of "free will" (based on redundancy arguments as you've been pressing) and Pirsig's value-first strategy. The trick is to specify, as in Daniel Dennett's phrase, the kinds of freedom worth wanting. The image of empty selves, making capricious decisions _because_ bound to nothing, is not one of them. In the Hegelianism I like, when it comes to freedom and autonomy, you gotta' give it to get it. You have to bind yourself before you can be free. Matt Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html