> "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.
I'm with Struan here.
> 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.
And here, although is it moral in itself to decide which of a variety of
ideas is the most moral?
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