>From: Struan Hellier
>Subject: MD Rambling Madmen
>Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2000 10:14:33 -0700
>There is a huge and vital difference between the 'good' of utility
>(e.g. 2 + 2 = 4 is a good answer) and the 'good' of morality
>(e.g. It was good of you to help that old lady across the street).
>What Pirsig (and now Platt) has done is to reduce the 'good' of
>morality to the 'good' of utility.
Why try to define what is good and what is bad in general? For me the whole
beauty of the MOQ is that there IS such a phenomenon as Quality, which is
the driving force behind evolution (or should I say DQ?). If I got it right
better quality is always the one that leads to more choices in the future.
That depends on the circumstances/context and the "correct" answer will be
revealed maybe a long time after the selection happened.
I am really happy just to know that there is Quality (DQ?) at work all the
time everywhere, it explains so many things. Sometimes I try to see what is
good Quality in a particular case but my tools for judging that are often
way too limited.
In a sense 'good' IS 'utility' if we consider ever more complex outcomes
(more new opportunities) being the goal. Even eugenics can have good DQ
since it provides some more ways to modify genes which would not be
available through purely biological means (someone wrote elsewhere on this
site that eugenics is immoral because it limits combinations, which I feel
is not true).
The nice thing about MOQ is that it placed myself where I belong - I am just
a tiny part of the universe. There are more powerful, more complex forces
out there: corporations, cities, countries, art. They are way beyond what I
could achieve by myself and now I finally understand why it is so: I am at
the biological level while they are at social and intellectual levels. The
social and intellectual phenomena are just as real as I am, they are just
more advanced/complex than I am.
Thanks and Regards
sasu
P.S. I am a newcomer into the MOQ world and I have no philosophical
background to write home about so please excuse me (or spam me!) if I make
RTFM type comments. To introduce myself: I am male, 32 yrs old, work as a
managing director for a software consultancy, I am a university dropout, the
philosophy authors I have read so far are Bertrand Russell, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Marquise de Sade, Robert Pirsig (sic!). The reason I ventured into
philosophy was to make sense of my marriage (Russell), which required
looking at the society (Rousseau, Russell), which led into even larger isues
(Pirsig, de Sade). My photo is here, the last one on the page
(www.regex.com.au/sasu/august2000.html).
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