From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Sun Nov 16 2003 - 19:21:03 GMT
Johnny,
Johnny said:
It's like saying we shouldn't respect such-and-such because we don't like some aspects of it. If you accept morality AS respect, then, don't you need to respect respect itself for it to have any meaning? It's like you need to value value for value to have any meaning.
Matt:
Sure. You have to respect respect and value value. But these terms only denote the narrow sense of "good stuff" not the wide sense of "good stuff and bad stuff". Another way of putting it is that I respect respect so much that I would hate to belittle it by respecting murder.
Matt said:
But as far as the debate, I take James' stance: there isn't a difference between the two that makes a difference. If we somehow figured out that the whole world was deterministic, would that change any of the choices in our own lives? No.
Johnny said:
You don;t think so? I think it would change our choices ito realize how contingent and co-related all our choices are. We'd put more care into them, and we'd also have a different attitude toward the choices of others. People today think they don't affect other people because everyone has free will, but they are wrong, what we do affects other people, we alter their wills.
Matt:
Whoa, you are in left field here. The debate you want to get into looks nothing like the debate usually explored in philosophy classes. In that case, when I say "deterministic" it doesn't mean "contingent". Because I think the realization of contingency, as you might have been able to tell, is a good thing. Typically the term "determinism," when run into in classes called things like "Freedom, Fate, and Choice," implies that we don't need to put care into our actions because they've already been determined. You may want to change the terms of the debate, put a different spin on the terms to change the way we think about them, but I would say that you've spun them so hard that you've landed far outside the debate. Which, I would say, is great because, as I said, I think the debate, using the terms they've used for the last several hundered years, pretty pointless.
Matt said:
Meaning doesn't disappear with free will and neither does morality.
Johnny said:
Well, free will implies an arbitrary will, a random will, and a will that is independent of morality - or else I don't understand how a free will makes any decisions. I'd say morality does disappear with free will.
Matt:
First, you misread me. I was saying that if free will _disappears_, then meaning doesn't disappear. I said that because of the typical terms of debate and the way things are typically infered in the debate. Second, you are, again, out in left field as far as the debate is concerned, which I say is a pretty good thing.
From the three things you've said, I'd say your truck shouldn't be with the free will debate, which anyone involved would say you've missed completely (again, its a good thing), but with debates over tradition. You want to emphasize the importance of tradition and how radical revolutions or overturnings of tradition aren't necessarily good (well, I think you might say inherently bad). I have sympathy with this. I'm with Oakeshott, Gadamer, Rorty, and MacIntyre on the importance of tradition and how the idea of breaking radically with tradition leads to two things: 1) in philosophy it leads to the idea of ahistoricality, and 2) in politics it leads to the idea that only a bloody revolution will save us. Number 1, I never have a truck with. Number 2 is something that sometimes is necessay, but certainly not in all contexts. When 1 and 2 are put together, such as in Marxism, they can lead to particularly disasterous results: the idea that the only thing that will _ever_ s
ave us is a bloody revolution.
Matt
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