All
It's biological. No your're wrong! It's social. B***S***, it's
intellectural. But surely the collapse of the WTC was physical. The
trap that we fall into when trying to apply the MoQ is trying to isolate
or attribute events to a single discrete level of value, forgetting that:
> Morality is not a simple set of rules. It's a very complex struggle of conflicting patterns of values. This conflict is the residue of evolution. As new patterns evolve they come into conflict with old ones. Each stage of evolution creates in its wake a wash of problems. Pirsig, Robert M., Lila. An inquiry into morals. New York (Bantam Books) 1991, 163
> "there is not just one moral system. There are many. ...there’s the morality called the "laws of nature," by which inorganic patterns triumph over chaos; there is a morality called the "laws of the jungle" where biology triumphs over the inorganic forces of starvation and death; there’s a morality where social patterns triumph over biology, "the law"; and there is intellectual morality, which is still struggling in its attempts to control society." Lila-pp 158
In any event that humans experience all these patterns of value are
present, interrelated, struggling, and conflicting. And what according
to the idealised MoQ should or ought to occur may or may not actually be occuring.
At the other end of the spectrum is the tendancy to over generalize,
faulting "the American" or "the Afgania" "Way of Life." Pirsig reminds
us that:
> The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do. Pirsig, Robert M., Lila. An inquiry into morals. New York (Bantam Books) 1991, 102
Hillary Putnam in 'Realism with a Human Face' say something similar:
"Is our own way of life right or wrong?" is a silly question, although
it is not silly to ask if this or that particular feature of our way of
life is right or wrong, and "Is our view of the world right or wrong?'
is a silly question, although it isn't silly to ask if this of that
particular belief is right or wrong. As Dewey and Pierce taught us, the
real questions require a context and a point. But this is as true of
scientific questions as it is of ethical ones."
While it is easy to focus on the 'bad' of this event maybe the better
question would be: "Where is the Good?"
Let's start here:
> It's not the "nice" guy who brings about real social change. "Nice" guys look nice because they're conforming. It's the "bad" guys, who only look nice a hundred years later, that are the real Dynamic force in social evolution. Pirsig, Robert M., Lila. An inquiry into morals. New York (Bantam Books) 1991, 161
Understandably your hackles jumped straight up; "How would these "bad
guys", whoever they are, ever look "nice"? They won't, Pirsig's rhetoric
waxes here, but these "bad guys" by their "unthinkable" (they thought
it?) and evil acts have brought the issue of terrorism to front and
center on the world stage. We can hope that this event places humankind
on the cusp of evolving beyond "terrorism". And that will be Good.
When we hear our leaders proclaim that they are going to, "solve the
problem of terrorism" perhaps we need to refer them to Putnam's "How NOT
to solve ethical problems".
" Philosophers (and their followers, our leaders) today are as fond as
ever of a priori arguments with ethical conclusions. One reason such
arguments are alway unsatisfying is the always prove to much; when a
philosopher "solves" an ethical problem for one, one feels as if one had
asked for a subway token and been given a passenger ticket valid for the
first interplanetary passenger-carrying spaceship instead." (Pirsig can
and has been read this way)
" We should reflect on principles- not only our own- but of those
persons with whom we disgree. But the way NOT to solve an ethical
problem is to find a nice sweeping principle that "proves to much" and
to accuse those who refuse to "buy" one's absolute solution principle of
immorality. The very word "solution" and "problem" may be leading us
astray- ethical problems are not like scientific problems, and they do
not often have "solutions" in the sense that scientific problems do. ...
I suggest that our though may be better guided by a different metaphor-
a metaphor from the law, instead of a metaphor from science- the
metaphor of adjudication."
Or
"A very different metaphor may be of help here-the metaphor of reading"...
"A common feature of both metaphors- the metaphor of adjudication and
the metaphor of reading- is openness and nonfinality." (or evolving)
"To adjudicate ethical problems successfully, as opposed to "solving"
them, it is necessary that the members of society have a sense of
community. A compromise that cannot pretend to be the last word on an
ethical question, that cannot pretend to derive from binding principles
in an unmistakably constraining way, can ONLY derive its force from a
shared sense of what is and is not reasonable, from peoples loyalties to
one another, and a commitment to "muddling though" together. When the
sense of community is absent or weak, when individuals feel contempt or
resentment for one another, when the attitude becomes that any consensus
that isn't the one an individual would have chosen himself isn't binding
on him, then fantasy and desperation have free reign."
And that, in a nutshell, is where we are.
Where we go from here- history will judge - good or bad.
Hopefully we will have the qualities to take the opportunity that 'bad'
gives us and make "Good".
3WD
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