[MD] Free Will

[X Acto]

Matt had said::
"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."  


Matt:
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.  

Ron:
 By equating value with experience,Pirsig is placing the explanation in the now
of experience, what it means to "be". Everyone knows what it is.
Which is a really neat way to sew all the ends of explanation together
in Value as being.

Matt:
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.)

Ron:
I think moral responsibility is tied into freedom of will in terms of value
being "the good"  and Pirsigs use of breaking up species of the genus
of "good" into 4 levels of moral order really expands the understanding
of what we mean by "moral" behaviour". But I really enjoy your next
paragraph.

Matt:
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.


Ron:
Thnx Matt

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