Hi John B, Angus, all:
JB
> Platt started the ball rolling, by asking "Can the MOQ help straighten out
> the moral authority mess? Does the MOQ have any moral authority itself? Is
> it possible to have a "rational morality" as the MOQ claims?"
>
> His own position seems to be that moral authority is external. For example,
> he comments, "Who to follow? That is the question."
What I meant to convey was "On what basis do you form moral
judgments?" The basis could be a who, like Jesus or Allah, or a
philosophy like that of Kant or Nietzsche, or the mores of a group like
the Hippies or the Samurai, or something else.
JB
> In another post you (Angus) say "Morality needs an ideal to POSIT, and in Pirsig's
> case it is LILA". Is this Lila the person in the story, or the metaphysics
> of the book, or what? Anyway, you go on to talk about "a paraconsistent
> logic: a logic that is open to spatial logic as well as temporal logic
> (static and Dynamic quality respectively)", and later, "Temporal logic is
> the world of "show" and spatial logic is the world of "say."" Here you
> lose me again. I take it that some post-modern writer has generated the
> spatial and temporal metaphors, but they fail to connect with anything real
> for me. 'Show' and 'say' likewise.
I agree with John that the idea of a "paraconsistent logic" is too
esoteric by half. The famous image of the beautiful women turning to
an old hag or the duck becoming a rabbit as you stare at them shows
the impossibility of holding two thoughts or images in your head at the
same time. That's simply a biological feature of the split brain. No big
deal.
JB
> Later you (Angus) elaborate thus, "The spatial logic of "know thyself" is logical.
> The temporal logic is an action, and that action is love." "Dynamic love is
> an unabashed surrender into the flow of the moment. It has no object as a
> valuing would."
Dynamic love? Sounds like Christian doctrine to me.
JB
<Bo and
> others certainly come across to me as 'true believers', and it seems to me
> a very intellectual belief at that. I have been arguing the limitations of
> the intellect in this forum for some time, in response to this, not because
> I am a crazy mystic, because I am all too sadly aware that I am not, but
> because I have mined the intellect for what it is worth, and find it is an
> inadequate substitute for life.
Not sure what you mean by "substitute for life." Intellect keeps us alive
since we're not born with survival instincts--how to hunt, grow food, etc.
JB
> Finally, my take on moral authority is very different from Platt's, and
> seems different in important respects from yours. I argue that authority
> resides in the situation. "Let the situation dictate." But, and this is
> crucial, it is the situation as it is that dictates, not the situation that
> I fantasise exists, or that I would like to exist, or that I interpret
> through the coloured lenses of my ideology or metaphysics. You are quite
> right to reject the MOQ as itself a moral authority.
This sounds like good old situational ethics or "contextualism" to me.
One makes the best decision one can in any given predicament with
the well-being of others in mind. Thus, one can lie, steal, or cheat in
order to protect another. Contextualism seems to be the guiding
principle of of professional ethicists who inhabit colleges and
universities. Thus, it is thoroughly intellectual and claims moral
authority on the grounds that "we who have devoted our professional
lies to ethical issues makes us, ipso facto, experts in this field."
JB
> Pirsig argues that we all know quality when we see it. I think this is
> totally naive. (Even his own examples of teaching in Bozeman support my
> argument. He argues that most people agree on which writing has quality,
> but inevitably there are those who disagree. If quality was so obvious, why
> the disagreement?) Pirsig argues that we see quality differently because we
> all have different backgrounds, different experiences. I see this as a
> partial truth. Pirsig is quite correct to point to the primacy of the
> experience of quality as prior to subjects and objects. He is also right in
> suggesting that there can be more than one version of quality (for example,
> in the appreciation of art). What he totally ignores is the bias and
> distortion that our own egoic development brings to our actual perception.
> His view is naive. While he accepts that our view of what is, is shaped by
> culture and language, he ignores the most fundamental influence, that of
> the ego. In fact he trivialises the ego.
Well, one man's distortion of reality by ego is another man's truth. We
live in a "real world" of "adopt or die" in which the ego plays an
essential role. To negate it for some "higher truth" seems to foolish to
me, unless you want to become a monk where moral decisions are
pretty much laid out for you.
JB
> So when I say the situation dictates, I mean that as I become to free to
> experience what is, rather than what my ego wants to believe is, then I
> encounter value, (quality, authority,) directly. This is not simple and
> obvious, as Pirsig would have it, but the outcome of a long developmental
> path (or sometimes, rarely, of a sudden transformative experience,
> typically a near death experience). In this path the realm of ideas is not
> unimportant, but must be transcended if immediacy is to be allowed. Platt
> is correct in pointing to art as embodying something of the fundamental
> quality in which moral authority resides, just because in art we encounter
> to some degree value that is free of intellect and previous judgements.
> There can be a degree of immediacy in an encounter with art that points to
> a more fundamental potential, that of an immediate encounter with all
> reality, not just that which has been contrived by the artist.
I agree wholeheartedly that the aesthetic experience temporarily takes
one "out of oneself" as do other kinds of "zone" or "flow" experiences.
Yet I can't imagine what it would be like to live that way on a permanent
basis. Who would do the grunt work necessary to keep us alive in a
value level-competing world? After all, it doesn't take long for the jungle
to take over--as what's happening now in Africa after withdrawal of the
civilizing European influence demonstrates.
In sum, then. Angus appears to find moral authority in the unearned
love espoused by Christianity while John B. turns to intellectually-
based contextualism and a kind of Wilberized nirvana. Of course, I
could be wrong. But for either to claim that their moral stances were
created in a vacuum cut off from any external influences seems to me a
bit unrealistic if not naive.
Platt
P.S. I hope others will chime in on the basis for their personal morality.
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