[MD] The Quality of Free Will

[david buchanan]

dmb said to Steve:

I don't think you have any legitimate reason to keep bringing SOM back into the issue. ...It seems totally unreasonable - if not downright dishonest - to keep adding an SOM premise to my comments.  ...I think you are jumping all over something I never said, the part of the statement I did NOT state. And that means you are disagreeing about nothing and talking to nobody. What's the point in doing that? Why not respond to the statements and claims I'm actually making rather than argue with your own fictional creations? Again, the only part of my statement that you disagree with is the part that I did not state, is the part you added.

Steve replied:
True, and I was up front about that fact. I responded to what was implicit in your claim by virtue of it being made as a criticism of what I have been saying.


dmb says:
Unbelievable. 
Okay, dude. Whatever. If you want to pointlessly waste time arguing with your own imagined implications, knock yourself out. But don't be surprised if I fail to answer your complaints. They should be directed to the straw man you've invented because I don't share his fictional views. 

Steve said:
It didn't escape my notice that you didn't respond. You made the claim that without free will there is no moral responsibility. That seems to be true under SOM premises as Pirsig says, but applying your claim to the MOQ does not stand to scrutiny.

dmb says:
Stop right there. Forget about the metaphysical differences for a minute. First, just think about LOGIC of the claim. Logically speaking, there cannot be moral responsibility IF we are not free. Our actions cannot be morally praiseworthy or blameworthy IF our actions are determined. This logic obtains no matter which metaphysical premise you begin with. It obtains regardless of your stance as to whether or not we actually are determined or free. If you don't understand that, then I really don't know what else to say. It's just simple logic and I HAVE tried to explain this to you several times already.
Secondly, the MOQ reformulates freedom as "one's" capacity to respond to DQ. Pirsig's notion of freedom does not depend on the concept of the Cartesian self, where the will supposedly resides, and either is or is not free. Doesn't that prove that the notion of human freedom can be asserted from an MOQ perspective? Doesn't that prove that human freedom doesn't necessarily imply SOM? Yes, of course it does. The MOQ reformulates freedom and morality, it does not evacuate them. In the MOQ, morality is still tied to freedom and it's a good thing too - because it would be logically incoherent otherwise. 

Steve said to dmb:
You claimed that the concept of free will is essential to morality in the MOQ. I reposted a quote from Marsha to back up my claim that it is not and rather the MOQ views morality responsibility as something that is beyond questions like free will/determinism and literally any such question that is about what is internal versus external. 


dmb quotes Pirsig:
"The physical order of the universe is also the moral order of the universe. Rta is both. This was exactly what the Metaphysics of Quality was claiming It was not a new idea It was the oldest idea known to man."
"Dharma, like rta, means ‘what holds together.’ It is the basis of all order. It equals righteousness. It is the ethical code. It is the stable condition which gives man perfect satisfaction."
"Dharma is duty… Dharma is beyond all questions of what is internal and what is external. Dharma is Quality itself, the principle of ‘rightness’ which gives structure and purpose to the evolution of life and to the evolving understanding of the universe which life has created."

dmb says:
Pirsig says "Dharma is Quality itself" but we can see that he is talking about Quality as both Dynamic and static. It's the basis of all order, he says, the stable condition and even the "physical" order of the universe. But it's also the principle of 'rightness'. This is perfectly in line with Pirsig's reformulation of freedom and constraint in the section on the dilemma of Free Will and Determinism. There are static constraints to some extent and there is also a capacity to respond to DQ. In that section, he describes freedom as the capacity to move toward undefined "betterness". Rightnesss is static and betterness is Dynamic and Quality is both. We are both. Freedom and constraint are not only quite viable within the MOQ, this is absolutely central to Pirsig's whole picture.

To use these quotes against my stance presumes that I have been saying that morality IS a matter of what's external and internal, but I haven't said anything like that. Your straw man says that a lot but I never did and I don't agree with your straw man. Nobody does. That's what "straw man" means. They're handy if you feel like you really need to knock something down and you need an easy target. But if you want to convince an actual person of anything, you're gonna have to work a lot harder than that.