----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan B. Marder" <marder@agri.huji.ac.il>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: 30 March 2000 21:19
Subject: Re: MD Moral Sense?
> Hello Platt and all,
>
> PLATT
> > Do we have-- like our physical senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste
> and
> > smell--an inborn, instinctive moral sense?
> >
>
> Well, well, well! I just looked back over some posts from November 1998
> (Re: MD PROGRAM: Morality and the MoQ), when Platt and I were arguing on
> the same point.
> The argument actually got rather heated - I know I did, with one of my
> post going out under the following header:
> >JONATHAN RAGES AT PLATT AND CALLS HIS
> >RATIONAL MORALITY A MoQery
>
> Platt, in November 1998, you were calling it "warmed over pseudo love".
> That doesn't quite fit with what you are now writing in March 2000:
> PLATT
> > In chapter 20, [Pirsig] leaves little doubt about our possessing an
> intuitive moral
> > sense: "There was 'something wrong-something wrong-something wrong'
> > feeling like a buzzer in the back of his mind. It wasn't just his
> imagination. It
> > was real. It was a primary perception of negative quality. First you
> SENSE
> > the high or low quality, then you find reason for it, not the other
> way around.
> > Here he was SENSING it."
> [snip]
> > As radical as the idea may seem, belief in a innate moral sense has
> been
> > expressed by some of the world's greatest philosophers including
> Buddha,
> > Plotinus, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Henry David Thoreau, Herbert
> Spencer
> > and William James. Darwin also believed that humans possessed an
> innate
> > moral sense which separates us from the rest of the animals. But
> Immanual
> > Kant, who many modern thinkers hold up as the last word in secular
> moral
> > matters, claimed that belief in a moral sense was a fallacy. That most
> > biologists today agree with Kant is hardly arguable. (Am I right,
> Jonathan?)
> >
>
................Most psychologists, and especially experimental
psychologists, don't agree. Some neorologists are coming round to the
possibility of identifiable neurological substrates whose business is the
processing of information often characterised by philosophical labels.
ppl
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