dmb said:
Right, Pirsig says the dilemma doesn't come up. And in the very next lines he
says, "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."
Steve replied:
And note how Pirsig has just shifted the discussion away from the notion of
free will or even will in favor of talking about freedom which he then
associates with DQ.
dmb says:
What? Pirsig's statement is about the extent to which one's behavior is
controlled or free. How in the world do you figure that is NOT about one's will
or the freedom of one's will? He's talking about the extent to which people are
free or not within the terms of the MOQ. I think you're bending over backwards
to deny the obvious in several different ways and this is certainly one of
them. Like I said, the MOQ avoids this dilemma by saying that our behavior is
both free and controlled. The MOQ does not avoid this dilemma by REJECTING both
horns but rather by saying they are not mutually exclusive options. The MOQ
says freedom and restraint are both empirically known and they're both real to
various extents.
Steve said:
...The above interpretation makes it sound like the MOQ is just some
wishy-washy middle ground between the S and the O in SOM (it's a little of
each!!!) rather than a rejection of the fundamental premise of SOM which
underlies the tradition free will/determinism debate. Is the quality in the
subject or the object? Is the locus of control for human actions internal to
the subject or externally imposed by objects? Its pretty much the same false
choice that the MOQ was invented to dissolve rather than mediate.
dmb says:
Well, no. Obviously the MOQ is not framing freedom and restraint as a matter of
subjectivity and objectivity but in terms of static and Dynamic, which is the
quality of order and the quality of freedom respectively. And this is not some
wishy-washy middle ground on this particular dilemma but the MOQ's first and
most central distinction, as well as a description of what we are.
Steve said:
... free will is a meaningless term in the MOQ. If you insist on talking about
free will, Pirsig says we might just as well apply the term to atoms who we do
not think of as responsible as well as to people who we do hold responsible, so
possession of free will is not what makes one morally responsible in the MOQ.
In addition, Pirsig doesn't even talk about moral responsibility anywhere. He
is not interested in the praise and blame game and deciding who to punish and
who to reward since that is a social pattern.
dmb says:
We might as well say that atoms act on their preferences. Yes, that's the idea.
The ability to respond to DQ goes all the way down, which means freedom goes
all the way down. At the inorganic level this freedom is extremely limited but
nowhere is it completely absent.
Also, to say that Pirsig doesn't talk about moral responsibility strikes me as
very, very weird. The MOQ paints a picture in which everything is an ethical
activity, in which all of reality is conceived as a moral order, even the
so-called physical order of the universe is moral right down to subatomic
particles. And he is interested in what is morally praiseworthy and
blameworthy. Recall, for example, his explanation of the problem with racism.
It's wrong to condemn anyone for their so-called race precisely because that is
unchangeable and nobody has a choice about that and it is irrelevant anyway.
But, he says, our beliefs and values are changeable, we do have a choice and it
does matter. Just because he's not using specific terms like "responsibility"
does alter the fact that Pirsig's work is all about values and morals. The MOQ
puts morals and ethics not just at the center but from wall to wall and
throughout every square inch. So I find your assertions totally implausibl
e. (Causality is an amoral concept, whereas preference is not.)
Steve said:
...What I've said is that in the MOQ the notion of moral responsibility is in
no way predicated on free will. ...We DO choose some of our values in a way,
but we only choose what to value on the basis of other values, no? What other
basis could there be if the world is nothing but value? ... We make choices.
Sure, but what does it mean to say that your choices are free? They aren't
free, they are manifestations of your preferences, and we don't freely choose
our preferences. In the MOQ we ARE our preferences, so the MOQ clearly denies
both horns of the supposed dilemma. ... If my so-called determinism means that
we make choices based on our values, then that is just not the usual
mechanistic view of determinism where everything follows a fixed predetermined
set of physical laws.
dmb says:
I think your position is wildly incoherent. It seems you don't even understand
the problem, let alone the solution. Sure, we make choices but they are
determined? That idea simply defies the meaning of the term "choice". If our
actions are determined they are, by definition, without choice. We do get
different pictures if we say we are determined by our values rather than by the
laws of cause and effect, but this is only consistent with the switch from
modern scientific determinism to postmodern cultural and historical
determinism. You seems to be advocating a messy, fractured version of both
kinds in order to deny freedom and morality. But the MOQ is not any kind of
determinism. The order and constraint of static quality is an evolutionary gain
and that's what allows us to make choices.
dmb quoted Pirsig:
He says "moral judgements are essentially assertions of value and if value is
the fundamental ground stuff of the world, then moral judgements are the
fundamental ground-stuff of the world." What sense does it make to say we have
no choice about "asserting values and making judgements"? Surely it takes a
will to assert anything and what is judgement but a deliberate choice?
Steve replied:
So now you've discovered a new metaphysical entity in the MOQ called the will?
Of course not. We assert our values all the time. And what is deliberation but
an intellectual pattern of value? Our values our made manifest in the choices
we make (deliberated or not). The difference in our views here is that I don't
think that there is anything to the MOQ way of describing the situation
(associating freedom with DQ) that is at all like what is traditionally meant
by the term "free will."
dmb says:
No, Steve. Nobody said anything about the will being a metaphysical entity. And
of course the MOQ is saying something different than what is traditionally
meant. We're talking about the ability to act at one's own discretion or not,
according to the MOQ. You seem to be saying that we have to reject the notions
of freedom and moral responsibility because we have rejected the traditional
metaphysical version of Free Will. But that just ain't so. In the MOQ, freedom
is the highest value and it is codified the the final moral code, the code of
art. We are described as a complex forest of static patterns migrating toward
DQ, toward freedom. And the evolved order is not just an elaborate set of
restraints so much as a preserved, stable record of the freedoms gained in the
past. Freedom and restraint is the whole game here, mister twister. That's the
positive goal that the hippies didn't quite see. Because they tended to confuse
biological quality with Dynamic Quality, they rejected
social and intellectual values for the wrong reasons, for reasons of
negative. The idea here is they got caught up in freedom FROM rather than
seriously thinking about the freedom TO. Free love and feeling groovy, sadly,
is usually just another name for giving in to lust and sloth. That's not
freedom so much as a rejection of social level morality and degeneration back
to biological values. And on this point, Pirsig's comments wouldn't make any
sense if he thought that we had no choice in the matter because we are
determined by these social and cultural norms. He says that we ought not simply
reject those social level restraints nor should we blindly follow them either.
We ought to pick them up and dust them off to examine their point and purpose.
Then we can keep the ones that still make sense and ditch the rest. This is not
something a determinist could say, not even a "value determinist" - if there
were such a thing.
Isn't Dharma the highest form of moral duty? Isn't that what the Sophists were
teaching? This is a sense of responsibility for the unwritten laws that are
imposed by nobody. That's the freedom TO. That's the positive goal, undefined
Quality. That's the kind of freedom one needs to be an artist in the MOQ's
sense of the term "Art". That's why free will is NOT a meaningless concept and
that's why the MOQ is not a form of determinism.
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