Bob
One thing I find helpful in this type of hierarchic investigation is to ask the
question from an evolutionary perspective. Asking which pattern of value
historically evolved before the other?
Many other animals [elephant,lions,wolves,apes of all sorts etc.] have an
identifiable social structures or social patterns. Once groups start forming
some sort of governance, quickly or almost simultaneously, emerges [i.e. alpha
males in wolves] to maintain the "laws" of the group. It is not hard to
imagine that this evolutionary pattern was similar for humans. So first the
group or social unit forms followed fairly quickly by some form of governance
usually involving "brute force". Under the MoQ this is moral because the
ordered group is BETTER, able to protect young, hunting territory, drive out
troublemakers, etc. Keep this up and in a few thousand years you get
politicians along with tanks, taxes, terrorists, and other trials and tribulations.
For these reasons, to answer your question. I feel both society and government
are on the social level, with government on a slightly more evolved level or
more toward the intellectual level. While Pirsig talks about the morality of
higher levels dominating lower levels he says each level has "laws" unto
themselves. But I think it's logical that the "betterness" or "evolving
toward good" principle apply within the levels as well. I also think that the
often overlooked principle that "it is immoral for the higher level to destroy
the lower" comes into play in the interactions between societies and governments.
Though it is moral for a government to dominant a society if that dominance
threatens to destroy the society; it is moral for society to destroy the
government. Your examples prove the point. Nazi's "the government" is gone but
the Germanic people (social pattern) remains with a different governmental
structure. Russian Communism is on the ropes, but the Russian people or
society remains to rebuild a government. This is not to say that all the
cycling though governments does not also change society, hopefully for the better.
One of the problems I've mentioned before with the Metaphysics of Quality is
that it is just a metaphysics and as such can do very little until the other
branches of philosophy (economics, politics, ethics, etc) are developed.
Dave Thomas
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