Hi Bodvar and other contributors:-
>The problem for the MOQ by the quotation from LILA about the chair
>consisting of little moral entities, I don't quite understand. Is it
>the fact that matter is a MORAL level and thus is supposed to be GOOD
>and not inflict damage to Biology? If so I think...
The point is that in Chapter 13, Pirsig clearly distinguishes between
"patterns of value", which make up the MoQ levels, and the "moral codes"
which mediate between the levels. In the Chapter 30 passage about the
chair, he says explicitly that moral codes and patterns of value are
synonymous. I call that a contradiction.
>XCTO and ROGER put it right: The lower level "knows" no value above
>itself.
I agree with them on this. It's something of a paradox that just by
following inorganic values, molecules arrange themselves into patterns
of value at higher levels. I'm currently working on an essay on just
this point.
>RICK introduced the morals of war. Was it ethical of the USA to drop
>the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Jonathan defended it by
>pointing to the shortening of the war, I agree ...
I'm not sure that it is useful to actually pass moral judgements on was
Truman right or wrong. To do that in this example is to pretend to be
Truman. I do believe that he probably made his decision using
appropriate considerations (30 years before ZAMM and nearly 50 years
before Lila).
I think our ethical sense is probably not highly different from that of
previous generations. The problem is not the ethics, but their potential
vulnerability due to the fact that they have no metaphysical basis in
dialectical (SOM) thought.
>Yet IMO the USA and the Allied had the moral upper hand,
Absolutely! This didn't come from some false quasi-intellectual
pseudoscience (like "Nazi Science"), but from a much deeper inner
conviction. Pirsig didn't invent morality and neither did the Greeks.
Our fathers and grandfathers fought because they simply knew that was
the right thing to do.
>The Middle East terrorists is the war issue again,
isn't it always ...
>I wish we could cover the West vs Islam conflict in a separate thread:
it is
>such a huge and "interesting" conflict, and a case where the MOQ
>explains things so much better than SOM.
Maybe you will expound on this some time. I maintain that the biggest
cause of the conflict is some unexplained assumption of a fundamental
difference in ethics. I think our "gut instincts" are all pretty much
the same. It takes philosophers and intellectuals to magnify minor
differences in outlook into existential conflicts.
>Intellect is the "enemy" that attacks us! Not just pompous academics,
>but the intellectual part of existence - of ourselves!.
Right on Bodvar! The intellect which ignores gut instinct can lead one
on a very long path away from morality.
Jonathan
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