Autor: Melchin, R. Kenneth

Buch: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Titel: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Stichwort: 3 Freiheit - Moral; wesentliche - tatsächliche Freiheit; was konstituiert einen Akt als frei? Vermögeneiner der intelligenten Integration eines ansonsten zufälligen Mannigfaltigen

Kurzinhalt: Lonergan's definition of freedom has as its central moment the actuation of a capacity for an emergent intelligibility to integrate or order an otherwise coincidental manifold of human skills.

Textausschnitt: 62/5 The second qualification concerns a possible confusion about what distinctively constitutes human action as free. Men and women can judge badly, we can make incompetent judgments of value, and we can reject what we know to be of value in favour of a course of action which we recognize to be a mistake or a poor alternative. But the meaning of the term freedom is not defined here simply in terms of this absence of system or necessity linking insights with favourable judgments and linking judgments on the value of a possible course of action with the actuation of these values. 'Man is not free because he can be unreasonable in his choices.'1 Rather, Lonergan's definition of freedom has as its central moment the actuation of a capacity for an emergent intelligibility to integrate or order an otherwise coincidental manifold of human skills. When a program of action has been conceived and implemented, regardless of the relative competence of the subject's critical evaluation of the worth of the program, and regardless of whether the subject decided to act in accordance with his or her critical evaluation, it is the distinct act of ordering his or her (or their) performance in accordance with an act of intelligence within a reflexively operative scheme which constitutes that actuated program as free. (148; Fs) (notabene)

63/5 The distinctiveness of this type or class of act cannot be overstated. The operation which Lonergan comes to name 'decision' in Method and which he sought to explain in Insight, chapter eighteen, is not knowledge of fact nor is it knowledge of value. It is an operation of ordering an otherwise coincidental manifold of skills in accordance with a cognitional act. And whether the cognitional act is merely a re-enactment of a time-worn tradition or whether it is an ingeniously conceived new way of solving an old problem, the act remains essentially free. The term freedom, in Lonergan's conception, designates the fact that such higher order emergent integrations of 'will' have in fact occurred throughout human life and not the fact that they only correspond to judgments of value (themselves more or less badly performed) in accordance with statistical laws.2 (148; Fs) (notabene)