Hello everyone
I'm not completely new to this group but I haven't posted before so please forgive me if i make one or two mistakes:
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Struan wrote
Pirsig is even more categorical than usual on this one. 'Quality IS
morality'. Elephant, equally categorically, states that 'Good ISN'T
morality'. I look forward with great relish to someone telling me that, in
the moq, Good does not equal Quality, at which point I will have a field
day.
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I agree that Pirsig makes it very clear that Quality and Morality (and Value) are all the same thing. They are identical. But nowhere in Lila does he say the same about Good being identical with Quality (and Morality and Value). In fact he makes it clear that there is a difference when he says in the last passage in the book:
"Good is a noun. That was it. That was what Phædrus had been looking for. That was the homer, over the fence, that ended the ball game. Good as a noun rather than as an adjective is all the Metaphysics of Quality is about. OF COURSE, THE ULTIMATE QUALITY ISN'T A NOUN OR AN ADJECTIVE OR ANYTHING ELSE DEFINEABLE, but if you had to reduce the whole Metaphysics of Quality to a single sentence, that would be it."
So it looks like Pirsig sees Good and Quality as very very closely related but not identical. The Quality/Morality/Value is the ultimate Quality he is referring to in the passage. So it looks like when Elephant says:
"'Good isn't morality, any more than London is a tube map. Nobody intuits
morality - they intuit the Good. Morality is what reason does with these
intuitions.'"
he has a reasonable point - although the analogy is poor. Morality and Good appear to be more like Parent and Child maybe.
Mark
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