[MD] Free Will

[david buchanan]

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.