[MD] Moral Responsibility and Free Will

[david buchanan]

Steve said to Craig:
I don't think he [Parfit] was trying to establish all the requirements of moral responsibility. He was just saying that even under determinism, we would still have enough _freedom_ for moral responsibility. We "could have acted differently if we had wanted to" even if "what we wanted to" is is understood to be causally determined. ...



dmb says:

Under determinism we have NO freedom. So how could "no freedom" count as enough freedom? 

If the dictionary is right about the meaning of "determinism", then your claim is pure nonsense.

determinism |diˈtərməˌnizəm|noun Philosophythe doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes external to the will. Some philosophers have taken determinism to imply that individual human beings have no free will and cannot be held morally responsible for their actions.


Pirisg makes the same point about determinism:

"This battle has been a very long and very loud one because an abandonment of either position has devastating logical consequences. If the belief in free will is abandoned, morality must seemingly also be abandoned under a subject-object metaphysics. If man follows the cause-and-effect laws of substance, then man cannot really choose between right and wrong."


To the extent that Parfit's view is predicated on causal determinism, Pirsig is talking about Parfit's view specifically. 


"If one adheres to a traditional scientific metaphysics of substance, the philosophy of determinism is an inescapable corollary. ..it is an air-tight logical conclusion that people always follow the laws of substance.  To be sure, it doesn't seem as though people blindly follow the laws of substance in everything they do, but within a Deterministic explanation that is just another one of those ILLUSIONS that science is forever exposing. All the social sciences, including anthropology, were founded on the bedrock metaphysical belief that these physical cause-and-effect laws of human behavior exist. Moral laws, if they can be said to exist at all, are merely an artificial social code that has nothing to do with the real nature of the world."

You see, it's not a particularly Pirsigian move to say that free will is an illusion. SOM science does lead one to that conclusion, however, AND it logically follows from that conclusion that morality and moral responsibility are also illusions. If people blindly follow the laws of substance, then they have no choice and no free will. Everything they do is determined by those laws, they do not have the capacity to act at their own discretion. People are just one more link in the causal chain of events and are as morally responsible as a cog, which is to say not at all. 

But, of course, the MOQ reformulates the issue without reducing people to atoms and without any causal laws at all, not even on the atomic level. That's why the traditional dilemma doesn't come up; because those devastating logical consequences no longer obtain. We don't have to abandon science to save morality and we don't have to abandon morality to save science. In the MOQ, where the dance of freedom and order is the whole game, morality and science are not mutually exclusive.