[MD] The Quality of Free Will

[david buchanan]

dmb said to Steve:
Is there such a thing as a bad pattern of quality? Again, logically speaking, this is nonsense.


Steve said:
Yes, of course there are good and bad patterns of value. I would say that rape is a pretty good example of a bad pattern, but let's not get side-tracked.

dmb says:
Biologically speaking, there is no such thing as "Rape". That term expresses the horror of biological values being asserted in violation of the dignity and "the will" of victim. The sex act only counts AS rape when it is perpetrated against the will of the participant. If "the will" is a fiction, then the victim has no grounds for charging her attacker with a crime and the rapist cannot be held responsible for that act. Are you maybe starting to rethink the consequences of your insistence that there is no such thing as a self with a will? Do you suppose that only Cartesians can be raped?
Anyway, the point is that sex is one kind of good and even violence is a biological good in the sense that they both have basic biological survival value. Freedom from violence and violation is a social good. "Rape" is a highly charged evaluative term. It expresses blameworthiness in a very big way and this is just as true in the MOQ, where it is usually the result of following the lower values rather than the higher values, of choosing the wrong level of good.  

dmb said:
The dispute seems to be over whether or not "the will" is the exclusive property of the Cartesian self or not. Can the idea have any meaning within the MOQ's reformulation of the self? Can "the will" be conceived as the human capacity to act freely, to act in response to Dynamic Quality.

Steve said:
You can define "the will" in any way you want. ... Pirsig defines "free will" itself as this capacity, and he says that this is not a human capacity. Everything has this capacity to varying degrees. 

dmb says:
You mean, Pirsig defines free will as this capacity but it is not EXCLUSIVE to humans. Humans do have a free will and so does everything else to some degree. Okay, if stopped there we could agree. So I will just stop there - and leave out the part where you backtracked...