[MD] Taking "Betterness" Seriously

[david buchanan]

Rocket Ron said to Matt and dmb (in the "Taking Words Seriously" thread):


...What Pirsig seems to be pointing to with "following DQ"  is the development of first hand critical thinking of "one's own" experience. I quoted "one's own" to lend emphasis to the concept of an individual that makes this honest attempt which is how the idea of free will is enlarged not redefined. The problem with the old understanding is that free will was bereft of morals one may act as one wishes the only consequence was of a social nature. But now we see free will as having a direction for one to truly have a "will" that is "free" one must follow DQ one must pursue excellence. Since excellence is the good by way of being, pursuing excellence is living the fullest best life. Nodding to Steve, following SQ, imitating the good we are not free and make preferences based on determined values. Prone to gumption traps and limited thinking and adhereing to what the status quo of good is, we are leading a less than excellent life. A mediocre one actually.



dmb says:
I think that's just about right, mostly. The MOQ argues that free will goes all the way down. It reverses the reductionist method by extrapolating will downward from Chemistry professors to chemicals, as opposed to extrapolating causal laws upward from atoms to the sphere of human activity. The MOQ's notion of freedom or free will is attached to the engine that drives all of evolution, and this engine is the movement toward betterness, toward greater freedom. Evolution, Pirsig points out, doesn't just happen within ecosystems and societies. It also happens within individuals too. Lila's battle is everybody's battle, even when that somebody is not a former prostitute going through a psychotic episode.

To say that there is no room in the MOQ for any conception of free will is to claim that the MOQ is a form of determinism - or, at best, it would be a claim that evolutionary betterness is strictly a matter of chance, just the accumulation of random alterations that just happened to produce a good fit. This is the kind of Darwinism that creationist types find so disturbing and impossible. How could all this happen by chance, they ask rhetorically, because it seems so implausible. Their alternative idea is to say that "all this" is the result of a divine creator. The MOQ says they are wrong, that the world is not determined by mechanical laws, not produced by random chance, nor is it guided by a divine creator. Instead, evolution is driven from within, driven by the "spur of the moment decisions" of the evolving forms themselves and this applies to us as well. Man is a participant in the creation of all things, Pirisg says. 

Without this ubiquitous notion of free will going all the way down, the MOQ's central notion of betterness is completely undermined. James did not articulate this notion in terms of evolutionary levels but he rejected determinism for two main reasons, namely the unacceptable moral implications and the fact that it would preclude his notion of betterness. As he framed it, pragmatism is a form of meliorism. 

Wikipedia on Meliorism

William James was an earlier adherent to meliorism as a halfway between metaphysical optimism and pessimism. This article is about the philosophical concept.
Meliorism is an idea in metaphysical thinking holding that progress is a real concept leading to an improvement of the world. It holds that humans can, through their interference with processes that would otherwise be natural, produce an outcome which is an improvement over the aforementioned natural one.
Meliorism, as a conception of the person and society, is at the foundation of contemporary liberal democracy and human rights and is a basic component of liberalism.[1]
Another important understanding of the meliorist tradition comes from the American Pragmatic tradition. One can read about it in the works of Lester Frank Ward, William James, Ralph Nader, and John Dewey.