Steve said:
Why use a term when you can be nearly guaranteed to be misunderstood when you
use it? Who outside of the handful of people participating in this forum would
think you were defending the capacity to respond to dynamic quality when you
say people have free will? How is that shorthand helpful even around here?
dmb says:
I think that objection is super-flimsy for one simple reason. We are not
talking to people outside this forum. Put another way, the discussion is
between people who are perfectly well aware of the fact that we are discussing
Pirsig's view. You are literally making a mess for the sake of unnamed people
who are not here and do not care what we say to each other. Come to think of
it, "flimsy" might be a bit too generous.
Ron quoted the Stanford encyclopedia on Free Will:
"It would be misleading to specify a strict definition of free will since in
the philosophical work devoted to this notion there is probably no single
concept of it. For the most part, what philosophers working on this issue have
been hunting for, maybe not exclusively, but centrally, is a feature of agency
that is necessary for persons to be morally responsible for their conduct."
dmb says:
Thanks, Ron.
It probably goes without saying, but the guy who wrote the Stanford article did
not have our conversation in mind. He could be talking about anyone who tries
to define to term too specifically or narrowly but it certainly applies to what
you've been done to the term, which is to superglue it to SOM assumptions. But,
he says, despite the variations in meaning, the question of free will is
centrally and almost exclusively about human agency, which is necessary for
persons to be morally responsible. "Human agency" is another names for "free
will". And in Pirsig's formulation is about the extent to which "one is free".
Come on, Steve, everybody knows we are talking about the MOQ's reformulation of
free will and determinism, regardless of what you call it. It simply isn't true
that the term is welded to Descartes or to the Church and even if it were we
could cut that connection with the analytic knife. I think you're gumming up
the works by insisting on observing a rule that never
existed in the first place.
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