[MD] Free Will

[Matt Kundert]

Hey Ron,

Matt said:
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 said:
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:
Yeah, but its _too_ neat for the purposes of attacking practical 
problems in moral and political philosophy (let alone real life).  What 
kind of explanation is it if the purpose of the explanation is to tell you 
that you already know, which is just a way of saying, "Why did you ask 
for an explanation?"  The kind is some form of epistemological, 
specifically one in which the epistemological framework requires one 
to answer certain kinds of questions.  Pirsig's explanatory strategy is 
to make you wonder why you asked the question, to make you see the 
framework and start tinkering with the framework so you can pose 
better questions.  In other words, things that make you go mu.

So, you're right that "Pirsig is placing the explanation in the now of 
experience," but that should just make one realize how much more 
work there is to do in producing all those myriad "ends of 
explanation" that you know, now, will be sewn together by Pirsig's 
metaphysical explanatory strategy.

Ron said:
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".

Matt:
I'm not sure I see what was explained.  First, I think it's important 
that we say not "moral responsibility is tied into freedom of will," but 
rather "freedom of will is tied into moral responsibility."  The object 
of the inquiry is to explain our modes of moral responsibility--if it 
wasn't, for Jamesian reasons Steve has just made explicit, it isn't 
clear why we should care about free will vs. determinism.  And my 
comments about what Pirsig wrote explicitly about free will and 
determinism were intended to convey that Pirsig was, indeed, 
forwarding a James-like solution, which is also just to say that Pirsig 
was not saying anything directly relevant to moral responsibility, but 
rather solving an epistemological problem incurred by thinking about 
free will in isolation from moral responsibility.  As I had said, it just 
wasn't his quarry in that section.

Second, what isn't perspicuous to me is where "freedom of will" 
came into any of the rest of that sentence.  It _might_ somewhere, 
but it isn't clear how you perceive what Pirsig's arrangement of things 
puts freedom of will into play and makes sense of how "value being 
'the good'" is supposed to make an impact on our thinking (for 
example, one might think the phrase simply redundant) or makes 
sense of the four levels of moral order (or the other way around).  
The static levels don't _explain_ anything about moral responsibility 
by themselves, they just put into place conceptual resources that 
then need to be exploited for that purpose.

For example, one might tie in Pirsig's explicit comments about free 
will by saying that when, say, you eat you are being biologically 
determined, but when (according to other explicit comments by 
Pirsig) you have sex, you are being Dynamically free.  But who's this 
"you"?  Ah, it's the biological you.  Pirsig calls that you "Me."  And on 
the other side of the break between the biological level and social 
level, between the end of "object" and the beginning of "subject," is 
the "We."  The We is at a higher level than the Me, and so has some 
jurisdiction over constraining the Me and its pursuits of freedom.  At 
earlier stages of society (goes this explanation), it made sense to 
constrain your sex partners because social and economic roles were 
determined by genealogy.  This is to say your place in society was 
thought of as a _property_ (and think of it straight up on the analogy 
with economic property: who gets the land? the kingship? if nobility 
is a property in the blood, what happens when you start mixing 
blood?).  But now we have later stages of society: it produced the "I."  
So now we have three levels Me-We-I (and we can think of these 
according to Freudian id-superego-ego terms or Platonic 
darkhorse-whitehorse-charioteer terms).  Once we get here, to where 
our particular kind of "we" is, we can see that while the We should 
constrain Me, the entire point of We is to produce I's, and not get in 
the way of it.  So now we have freedom of thought, and that thought 
has realized that the idea of properties of nobility in the blood is stupid, 
so it tells We to let up on Me in certain cases (creating the double 
meaning of the freedom of effing: the freedom of thought producing 
the freedom of sexual partners).

But where was free _will_ in all of this?  Where's the will, and what 
kind of freedom does it need?  It seems to me that Pirsig's levels 
lead one to think that, following Greek-cum-Enlightenment thinking, 
we have different wills, or rather, we will from different places, our 
impetus to act comes from different places: biological, social, 
intellectual.  Pirsig's levels also suggest that complicated, historically 
inflected lines of reasoning are needed to determine how particular 
phenomena should be judged.  The levels help categorize things, but 
there's no way one could understand _why_ sex _was_ constrained 
but now _shouldn't_ be constrained without shooting up into those 
categories some actual historical thinking.  And that's just to say that 
when one wants to talk about moral responsibility and freedom of 
will with Pirsig's MoQ, all Pirsig's MoQ does is give you some 
conceptual resources: they still need to be motivated, and you have 
all the hard work ahead of you.  And _after_ you've done all the 
work of showing where freedom and will fall into Pirsig's categories, 
you still have to yet to show the incompatibilities with other 
conceptual arrangements (e.g., the ones conditioned by the same 
pure-epistemological-problem shrugging off maneuver that Pirsig 
begins with).

That last comment isn't directed necessarily at you Ron, but it is at 
people who take issue with Steve's recent advancing of redundancy 
arguments against the notion of a _free_ will.  Steve's interested in 
normal, practical kinds of freedom, but what he doesn't have 
patience for are the metaphysical kinds of freedom that seem to 
serve no purpose in connecting with the practical kinds.  If Value is 
Pirsig's assumed starting point, and for value to exist you must be 
able to freely choose between X and Y, then Pirsig has _assumed_ 
the existence of free will, and made it the kind of thing that every 
existing thing has.  He has neither explained it nor argued for it 
(though he has argued for why we should reject SOM's arrangement 
of things).  He has also, by making it the kind of thing a rock has, 
made it nearly useless as a concept--if it stays at its assumed-status 
starting point--for practical reasoning.  To bring free will back down 
to earth and make it useful again is just find yourself, as a theorist, 
in the area of thinking Steve is suggesting is the only useful place to 
occupy: wanting to talk about practical kinds of constraint and 
freedom, not metaphysical kinds.

Matt