Matt had said:: "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." Matt: 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. Ron: By equating value with experience,Pirsig is placing the explanation in the now of experience, what it means to "be". Everyone knows what it is. Which is a really neat way to sew all the ends of explanation together in Value as being. Matt: 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.) Ron: I think moral responsibility is tied into freedom of will in terms of value being "the good" and Pirsigs use of breaking up species of the genus of "good" into 4 levels of moral order really expands the understanding of what we mean by "moral" behaviour". But I really enjoy your next paragraph. Matt: 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. Ron: Thnx 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