Roger, Bruce, squad
RISKYBIZ9@aol.com wrote:
>
> Bruce, Platt, Drose, Rick, Jonathan and Squad
>
> Welcome Bruce. For too long the Lila Squad has been like Baptists arguing with
> Methodists whether God exists. Finally, a true skeptic.
I liked Bruce's post as well, hope he's not another one-post-wonder
though I think I might have missed some of it as it all came through in
one long line. I haven't replied to it cos this worries me too and I
haven't got a good answer for it.
However, help is at hand;)
Roger writes
> To start out, let me define "morality". Rather than write it myself, I
> borrowed from Walter’s recent awesome post. (Forgive the paraphrasing
> Walter.)
>
<snip>
>
> MORALITY BETWEEN LEVELS-- Because the higher level is more complex and
> dynamic, it is moral to dominate and, if absolutely necessary, destroy a lower
> level pattern to maintain the higher level solution. The higher level pattern
> opposes the base values below it partially to preserve the greatest dynamic
> pattern complexity below. From here, the higher level patterns take off and
> develop patterns of their own that can become seemingly disconnected from
> those below. Though dominance of a lower level is always moral, destruction
> of lower levels isn’t necessarily so.
I'm going to stop you here because this is what I thought Bruce was
getting at. Dominance is moral, destruction isn't. That's standard MoQ
and I'm not going to argue with that. My question would be how can you
tell the difference between the two?
Somebody mentioned that we're making things easy for ourselves by only
analysing past events -- it's easy to be moral with hindsight. So how
about an example which hasn't been resolved yet.
And, seeing as it's an important issue and the newspapers have hardly
even mentioned it, how about Bill and Monica. Oh yes. Sorry but it does
fit my purposes rather well.
What we have is low social value - adultery, lies, scandal
and intellectual value - so what? It doesn't affect the economy
The intellectual value is superior, but isn't there a danger that
sanctioning of these low social values by the president, no less, could
lead to further breakdown in the nation's social value. This single
event might not be the cause of all social problems but in retrospect it
might be identified as the last staw, the crucial event in American
history that finally destroyed the most important values of that
society. Maybe this time the intellectual level has just gone too far.
At the moment nobody really knows.
Donny writes that you shouldn't need a metaphysics to tell you who to
vote for. That's fair enough but Pirsig himself makes the claim that the
MoQ let's us make moral decisions based on reason and I think this claim
is worth investigating. In this example, I can see that the MoQ might
help us clarify the issues somewhat, but it doesn't make the answer
obvious. Sure if we knew in advance whether or not the social level will
suffer too much damage then we could decide what was best. But we don't
know, so the only thing we can do is go with our feelings - Dynamic
Quality.
Platt argues that DQ is reasonable. Well I would agree that the
acceptance of the DQ phenomenon is reasonable but I'm not so sure that
that makes the exercise of DQ an exercise of reason. If it were then we
should be able to logically show why Clinton should stay in power or why
he shouldn't, and if that logic were sound then everyone would agree
with it.
Diana
Diana
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