[MD] Free Will

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Steve,

Steve said:
What is your personal view on the matter of free will?

Matt:
My personal, fairly unphilosophical view is that it doesn't pay much to 
think about "free will vs. determinism" as a problem.  In other words, 
I don't think about it much and I'm encouraged in that view by how 
boring the debate seems in the abstract and how disconnected the 
debate seems from moral philosophy when it is keyed at an 
epistemological level.

The meat is much lower to the ground, and Nagel's challenge is 
really about how to reconceive our common moral intuitions about 
blame, praise, intention, and luck.  _Nagel_ thinks there are some 
root paradoxes about human nature in there, but Nagel takes a pretty 
pessimistic view toward what we can do to ourselves by handling 
our concepts in different ways (a pessimism I don't think Pirsig 
shares).  Occasionally, I imagine, we'll have to revise our moral 
intuitions, but for the most part I think a lot of our moral categories 
can be saved: we just need to think of them differently.

For example, the notion of "autonomy": this is the central Kantian 
notion that cues the free will debate.  But if Robert Brandom's 
revisionary reading of Kant and Hegel is right, then autonomy is a 
perfectly suitable notion for value-first philosophers like Pirsig and 
the pragmatists.  For at the heart of Kant, so argues Brandom, is the 
notion that conceptual activity is at its root normative.  And having 
norms in play means values, valuing one thing and not another.  
What Brandom builds, and what a number of other philosophers 
have been concurrently working towards, is a story about _how_ 
normativity works, the mechanisms that need to be in place for 
values to exist.  Ultimately, the story is that norms require the 
recognition of the norms as having authority: _you_ bind _yourself_ 
to be held accountable according to such-and-such a norm, rule, or 
value-standard.  That's autonomy, the choice of what communities 
you're going to include yourself in.  We're not making those 
decisions as children, of course, which is why people Bernard 
Williams writes books about shame and Thomas Scanlon about 
blame.  Expressions of disapprobation, even when untied to, say, 
legal consequence have an important place in the mechanisms of 
society because expressing blame or resentment _is_ the 
norm-crossing consequence of behaving in a manner the 
community you belong to disapproves of.

The trouble with Pirsig's metaphysical strategy, in specific 
relationship to the multifarious free will debate, is that his explanatory 
strategy is to treat Value as a primitive: you treat it as the only given, 
and explain everything else from that first step.  That strategy is very 
successful on a number of fronts, but not in explaining what value is, 
or how it works.  How could it?  You've already been asked to cede 
its equipment as a given for explaining everything else.  This is why 
Quality can remain, explanatorily speaking, undefined.  The trouble 
with the concept of Free Will is that Freedom and the Will, whatever 
they are, are pretty central pieces of equipment for the concept of 
Value.  You have to basically treat the problem of free will as a moot 
point, pretty much along the lines of the Humean compatibilist 
strategy Pirsig articulates in Lila.  "When you're bein' static, you be 
static; when you Dynamic, you Dynamic!"  The trouble with Pirsig's 
neat solution is that he never tells us how we are to know when a 
person is being "controlled" by static patterns or is "following" 
Dynamic Quality (the interestingly chosen verbs he modulates 
between).  If you want to know whether a person is morally 
responsible for an action, based on his freedom of will, you are still 
in the same position as you were before.  But answering that 
question doesn't seem to be Pirsig's quarry.  (What is interesting is 
the Kantian position that Pirsig strikes right afterwards, that 
judgment is the root primitive of cognition.)

I don't think there's anything incompatible with Pirsig's strategy and, 
say, Brandom's strategy (someone who doesn't take value to be a 
explanatory primitive).  I also don't think there's anything incompatible 
between those who deny the existence of the concept of "free will" 
(based on redundancy arguments as you've been pressing) and Pirsig's 
value-first strategy.  The trick is to specify, as in Daniel Dennett's 
phrase, the kinds of freedom worth wanting.  The image of empty 
selves, making capricious decisions _because_ bound to nothing, is not 
one of them.  In the Hegelianism I like, when it comes to freedom and 
autonomy, you gotta' give it to get it.  You have to bind yourself before 
you can be free.

Matt