Struan:
Surely in your limited definition of morality it is better to tell the truth than to
lie. Assuming you’re not a complete charlatan I take your statements to be
truthful and thus moral by your own definition. If you’re lying you’re subject to
moral condemnation. To deny there’s a “human behavior” moral element in
an exchange of philosophical ideas is to deny the obvious. From that you
cannot logically escape any more than you can escape from making moral
choices (value judgments) in order to stay alive.
To change the subject abruptly, I’d be interested in your assessment of the
following quote from British theologian and essayist, William Ralph Inge:
“Idealism is most satisfactorily defined as the interpretation of the world
according to a scale of value, or in Plato's phrase, the Idea of the Good. The
highest values in this scale are absolute, eternal and super-individual. Lower
values are assigned their place in virtue of their correspondence to or
participation in these absolute values.
“Valuation arranges experience in a different manner from natural science.
The attributes of reality, in our world of values, are Goodness, Truth and
Beauty. And we assert that we have good reason to claim objective reality for
these ideas as for anything in the world revealed to our senses. Man does
not make values any more than he makes reality. Our contention is that the
world of values … is the real world; and in this world we find our own
immortality.”
Am I correct in assuming you consider Inge’s views to be as foolish as
Pirsig’s?
Platt
P.S. I thought I made it clear in my post on Copenhagen that it’s playwrights
and critics who are catching up to Pirsig, not the “conversation” between
Bohr and Heisenberg. As for my posts being “messianic,” I’ll bow to the
judgment of our fellow philosophers.
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