Jonathan & squad
Jonathan wrote
> 2. The (moral) conflicts WITHIN a level are resolved at a higher level.
> The decision who should eat first is a SOCIAL decision. Democracy,
> courts and the press use INTELLECTUAL patterns for deciding on SOCIAL
> issues.
This is very clearly put and resolves the moral conflicts that the MoQ seems to present. For example from a rapist's point of view his actions seem moral, ie biologically dynamic. However from the victim's point of view the event is definitely low biological quality. One says it's dynamic the other says static, so who's right? The conflict is resolved, as Jonathan says, at a higher level. Socially, depending on the culture and the circumstances, it may be either the victim or the rapist who is considered more moral. But intellectually, which overrides both social and biological value, the rapist is always in the wrong.
Speaking as a member I'm amused that you said the press use intellectual values to judge social values. The press generally print what they think will sell - gossip, scandal, sensationalism -- an engrossing story that tells people what they want to hear is preferable to any intellectual idea of what constitutes news. If anything they use social values to judge intellectual values, which would make them immoral.
> My second point follows some quotes:-
>
> Diana quoted:-
> >From chp 13
> >
> >"First, there were moral codes that established the supremacy of
> >biological life over inanimate nature. Second, there were moral codes
> >that established the supremacy of the social order over biological life
> [snip]
>
> The other place in Lila where morality is extensively discussed in
> Chapter 24, where Pirsig talks about morality in terms of the INTERFACE
> between the levels.
> >Pirsig talks
> >about 5 levels of moral conflict which he gives as:-
> >1. Chaos vs. Inorganic patterns
> >2. Inorganic vs. Biological
> >3. Biological vs. Social
> >4. Social vs. Intellectual
> >5. static vs. Dynamic
> Pirsig thus differentiates between morality which is INTERlevel, and
> value patterns which are INTRAlevel. Somehow, I don't think he really
> means this.
Could you elaborate Jonathan, after all you've just proven that Pirsig lists these five moral codes in more than one place in LILA, that would suggest to me that he had thought them through pretty thorougly.
Diana
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Make a name for yourself - Freemail@hongkong.com
Hongkong.com Ltd. http://www.hongkong.com
homepage - http://www.moq.org
queries - mailto:moq@moq.org
unsubscribe - mailto:majordomo@moq.org with UNSUBSCRIBE MOQ_DISCUSS in
body of email
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:02:38 BST