Free Will: You Should Dance If You Want To
Recorded: October 25  Posted: October 26
travis68 wrote on 10/26/2008 at 06:48 PM
Re: Free Will: You Should Dance If You Want To
Nice diavlog. It's great to have Will to abstract out the various arguments since he brings such clarity.
There are two parts that I don't get:
1) The first part where the moral reason to help someone is independent of a desire to help someone.
2) The last part where the reasons determining the weighting function aren't explained, but Mark says that his explanation rests on a similar explanation given in the first part -- see above. But that's the part I didn't understand.
Mark seems to want to resist Will's pushing of the cultural relativity among moral reasons. If they talk again, I wish Will would push him more on that topic.
It seems that human beings are both wired socially and individualistically. We don't want to be outcasts in society but at the same time we tend to resist social demands that will result in self-immolation.
fedorovingtonboop wrote on 10/26/2008 at 08:45 PM
Re: Free Will: You Should Dance If You Want To
don't everyone get mad at me because i'm trying to be (sort of) gentle...
here it is: not-a-lotta substance (or comments.) i'll stop there
Bloggin' Noggin wrote on 10/26/2008 at 11:55 PM
Re: Free Will: You Should Dance If You Want To
Thanks to Will and BloggingHeads for hosting a discussion that's liable to have so very small an audience! I enjoyed this. Mark did a nice job of explaining how he keeps his theory of reasons from implying an excessive self-involvement. He does seem to get rather hand-wavy where he tries to explain the connection to moral reasons -- particularly, as Travis points out, when he gets to his recursive theory of the weighting of reasons etc. Still that's to be expected in a conversation like this -- it whets one's appetite for the book. Unfortunately the book is too expensive even in the Kindle edition! Well, who knows? I did download the free sample -- maybe that will tempt me further.
I do wish Will would try to provide a bit more of a foil for his guests, even when he feels he's in broad agreement with the guest. For example, here are two questions that would have helped clarify where Mark stands for me:
1. If all reasons are based in desires, does that mean that I don't have a reason until I have the desire? To use Thomas Nagel's example, suppose I know I'll be hungry
bjkeefe wrote on 10/27/2008 at 01:21 AM
Re: Free Will: You Should Dance If You Want To
Quoting Bloggin' Noggin: Thanks to Will and BloggingHeads for hosting a discussion that's liable to have so very small an audience! I enjoyed this. I was going to gripe about yetanotherdiavlogonmorality, but if you're happy, I'm happy.
MikeDrew wrote on 10/27/2008 at 02:14 AM
Re: Free Will: You Should Dance If You Want To
Wisconsin! Represent!
MikeDrew wrote on 10/27/2008 at 02:55 AM
Re: Free Will: You Should Dance If You Want To
I have never seen how moral facts could be embedded in a materialistic world. I therefore have always looked at morality as an invention of human civilization and consciousness. If Mark has an account of the metaphysics of morality that situates comfortably in a materialsitic, mechanistic world, I would be very interested indeed.
Francoamerican wrote on 10/27/2008 at 02:35 PM
Re: Free Will: You Should Dance If You Want To
Shall I go dancing? Shall I be a rockstar? Shall I be a philosopher? Shall I help Katy?
Help Katy! If you really cannot understand why your reason(s) for helping Katy are moral reasons whereas your reason(s) for being a rockstar or a dancer or a philosopher have nothing to do with morality, then, I would suggest, you are not yet a philosopher, or at least not yet moral! When Hume said that Reason was, and ought to be, the slave of the passions, he wasn't saying that all reasons for action are on the same plane; he was simply saying that what motivates us to be good (or virtuous) has nothing to do with knowledge of fact (science) or knowledge of relations (mathematics), but with the sentiments (passions) that certain situations arouse in us. I believe Hume was mistaken, but he was certainly right about one thing: morality is something other than whim.
Me&theboys wrote on 10/27/2008 at 04:36 PM
Re: Free Will: You Should Dance If You Want To
are you enjoying your Kindle?
schumacher wrote on 10/28/2008 at 06:32 PM
Re: Free Will: You Should Dance If You Want To
I like both of these guys,but i found this very hard to understand.
Bloggin' Noggin wrote on 10/28/2008 at 07:07 PM
Re: Free Will: You Should Dance If You Want To
Quoting Me&theboys: are you enjoying your Kindle? Love it, love it, love it! Only problem: your book is not just a book but a whole book store, and it's awfully easy to get distracted from the book you're reading by all the books you might be buying. I assume you're still enjoying yours as well?
I haven't yet given in, but I'm actually somewhat tempted to shell out the 54 dollars for the Kindle edition of Mark's book. The little bit they give you as a sample was pretty good. But just think of how many times I could go dancing (if I wanted to) rather than buy that book!
Me&theboys wrote on 10/30/2008 at 05:26 PM
Re: Free Will: You Should Dance If You Want To
Quoting Bloggin' Noggin: Love it, love it, love it! Only problem: your book is not just a book but a whole book store, and it's awfully easy to get distracted from the book you're reading by all the books you might be buying. I assume you're still enjoying yours as well?
I haven't yet given in, but I'm actually somewhat tempted to shell out the 54 dollars for the Kindle edition of Mark's book. The little bit they give you as a sample was pretty good. But just think of how many times I could go dancing (if I wanted to) rather than buy that book! Me, too. I find I am loading mine up with lots of samples (a great marketing tactic) and PDFs of papers I want to read, which is far better than dragging around lots of 8.5x11 paper. I also thought about buying mark's book - mostly because Will seemed so enamored with it, so I figured that there must be more substance to the arguments in the book than Mark conveyed in the diavlog. He reverted too often to non-moral decision examples when making claims about moral decisions, which I found frustrating. If you buy it, let me know what you think of
Uhurusasa wrote on 10/31/2008 at 11:12 AM
Re: Free Will: You Should Dance If You Want To
the more thoughts i hear on thinking, the more i long to hear the unthought thinking on the subject!! then too, maybe i just haven't been exposed to the greater body of thought? or, perhaps, in this regard, i am on a journey without a destination.
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