Steve said to Craig:
I don't think he [Parfit] was trying to establish all the requirements of moral
responsibility. He was just saying that even under determinism, we would still
have enough _freedom_ for moral responsibility. We "could have acted
differently if we had wanted to" even if "what we wanted to" is is understood
to be causally determined. ...
dmb says:
Under determinism we have NO freedom. So how could "no freedom" count as enough
freedom?
If the dictionary is right about the meaning of "determinism", then your claim
is pure nonsense.
determinism |diˈtərməˌnizəm|noun Philosophythe doctrine that all events,
including human action, are ultimately determined by causes external to the
will. Some philosophers have taken determinism to imply that individual human
beings have no free will and cannot be held morally responsible for their
actions.
Pirisg makes the same point about determinism:
"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."
To the extent that Parfit's view is predicated on causal determinism, Pirsig is
talking about Parfit's view specifically.
"If one adheres to a traditional scientific metaphysics of substance, the
philosophy of determinism is an inescapable corollary. ..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 bedrock 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."
You see, it's not a particularly Pirsigian move to say that free will is an
illusion. SOM science does lead one to that conclusion, however, AND it
logically follows from that conclusion that morality and moral responsibility
are also illusions. If people blindly follow the laws of substance, then they
have no choice and no free will. Everything they do is determined by those
laws, they do not have the capacity to act at their own discretion. People are
just one more link in the causal chain of events and are as morally responsible
as a cog, which is to say not at all.
But, of course, the MOQ reformulates the issue without reducing people to atoms
and without any causal laws at all, not even on the atomic level. That's why
the traditional dilemma doesn't come up; because those devastating logical
consequences no longer obtain. We don't have to abandon science to save
morality and we don't have to abandon morality to save science. In the MOQ,
where the dance of freedom and order is the whole game, morality and science
are not mutually exclusive.
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