Greetings,
ELEPHANT:
"There is a certain logic to keeping the word 'morality' always and
only for actions and reasoning directed first at the other, and then only
second at the truth, or Good, or Quality, or God or whatever. That's just
fine: you can define your terms how you like. But it seems to me that if
you define 'morality' like that, then morality becomes a perfect set of
absolutes existing in someother realm, and having no connection with the
lives that real people actually lead, and the desires and fulfillments that
they actually pusue. It is a joy for a Platonist, like myself, to be able
to lay this pragmatist charge justly against someone else, and it is a
strong point which Struan should answer."
Elephant, you make a very peculiar leap from a definition of morality being
concerned with actions towards the other, to the erroneous claim that this
necessitates a morality with 'no connection with the lives that real people
lead'. If one is motivated by a love of mankind to 'love thy neighbour as
thyself', for example, and then one sets about acting towards others with
love as the motivation for every action, then in what sense is one not
pursuing 'desires and fulfilments' and in what sense is one not an
'ordinary' person engaging in 'ordinary' actions? Indeed, Situation Ethics,
which postulates precisely that love should be the motive for all action, is
a very good example in that its creator, Joseph Fletcher, placed pragmatism
as one of the four fundamental principles of his 'agapeistic calculus'. The
loving thing to do is, by definition, in part, the thing that works.
Of course, if you want to point to love in this example as being, 'de
facto', the 'whatever' at the end of your first sentence in the quotation
above, it may well be, in your words, 'that this has become an argument over
words merely,' but, if that is the case, how can you possibly see the
'pragmatist charge' as a 'strong point which Struan should answer'? A rose
by any other name would still as sweetly smell, would it not?
As an aside, I have often pointed to the complete failure of the ethical
examples in Lila to provide any sort of consistent advice upon how to live
one's life. Apply the moq to any real life, ordinary, every day ethical
dilemma and it will have nothing coherent to say as I pointed out in my
first ever posting to the squad where, amongst other things, I wrote:
---------------------------------------
"In the context of the American civil war Pirsig claims that, "an
evolutionary morality argues the North was right in pursuing that war
because a nation is a higher form of evolution than a human body," and so
the hundreds of thousands of lives were justifiably lost because the higher
level of evolution (society) prevailed over the lower level (biology).
In the next paragraph and in the context of capital punishment, Pirsig goes
on to claim that in the case of a criminal who does not threaten the,
"established social structure," it is plain that, "what makes killing him
immoral is that a criminal is not just a biological organism. He is not even
just a defective unit in society. Whenever you kill a human being you are
killing a source of thought too."
What seems to utterly evade Pirsig is the fact that the hundreds of
thousands who died in that civil war were also a, "source of thought too,"
and that therefore by his own criteria the war was morally wrong because the
ideas lost through these deaths were at a higher evolutionary plane than the
nation they were sacrificed for. And here the philosophy becomes even more
muddled because it would be possible to argue (as Pirsig hints at) that the
ideas of equality which drove the war on were morally superior to the nation
and the ideas of those who defended it. But by what criteria do we decide
which ideas take precedence? The MoQ has nothing to say on this matter and
yet this is the whole basis of discussing ethics. . . . . . the MoQ utterly
ignores the relationship of ideas in ethics, to the extent that it has
almost nothing to say about morality. If person A kills person B then the
MoQ might say that person A was justified in killing person B because person
A did it to protect his nation state which is of more value that the
biological entity of person B. Alternatively it might say that person A was
wrong to kill person B because the source of ideas that constitutes person B
was of more value than the nation state person A was defending. I’m sure we
could all come up with a whole host of other scenarios within this context
and we can have no way of choosing one over the other."
---------------------------------------------------
I would strongly suggest that it is those who follow the MoQ who need to
worry about being pragmatic, Elephant; certainly not myself.
Struan
Struan Hellier
<mailto:struan@clara.co.uk>
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