Hullo Platt and all,
I've enjoyed the lively exchange on whether the MOQ provides a moral compass. Platt's
message was especially interesting because he is both realistic and hopeful, and to me the
real significance is not so much whether the MOQ lives up to his hopes, but that in hoping for
a moral compass he is pointing to one of the factors that keeps us interested in the MOQ. For
me, being told that everything is moral does nothing to change my situation. It is ultimately as
unsatisfying as being told that morality is just some sort of unimportant epiphenomenon in my
head. What shines through Platt's post is both that moral issues matter, and that we need a
better way of resolving moral issues than the traditional ones. While I agree that Pirsig fails
Jonathan's test of being easy to read and unambiguous, what he has achieved is no small
thing; he has clearly identified the centrality of morality (as quality) in our fundamental
experience. I am currently working on yet another article in which I try to identify where his
project fails, and can perhaps suggest some better alternatives, though I doubt that I can
come up with an unambiguous moral compass. What follows is a sort of dredging expedition
to explore these deep and muddy waters.
Returning to your post, Platt, I noticed on re-reading it that you speak of dynamic action as
the morally superior of two courses of action. What is the second? If it is static action, then
we need to ask what kind of strange beast is this. I am not convinced that Pirsig actually tells
us to "follow a course that's Dynamic", as you put it, though I could be convinced, I suppose,
by appropriate quotes. When Pirsig speaks of the dynamic, it is usually in relation to an
experiential encounter, not an action. I believe he quite wrongly equates dynamic quality with
"the good", even as he talks about encounters with hot stoves which are hardly 'good' in any
common sense of the word. It is Pirsig's desire to keep quality simple that ends up costing
him any hope of offering us a moral compass, for in my opinion quality is by no means
simple. While he is quick to point out that the moral codes at each of the four static levels
differ to the extent that they are often in opposition, his attempt to resolve this untidy situation
(which seems to me very evident in my experience) is to suggest a hierarchy which is
unconvincing in the extreme. This is the sort of nonsense that sent millions of men to their
deaths in WW1, ideology triumphing over biological self interest. If you think WW1 was only
about social values the hierarchy is still challenged.
Action, it seems to me, is by nature dynamic. Morally, though, it can be good, bad, or neutral.
Morality only makes sense in terms of human agents. Moral agents choose in the sure
knowledge that their choices have consequences, though just what these consequences
might be is at best a guess, a projection from past experience. In Aristotle's view the most
important moral choice was to desire the good, even though we often lack the knowledge to
be sure that our choices will always result in good outcomes. Pirsig seems to have
abandoned the possibility of humans being agents. They are the playthings of patterns of
quality of which they are often unaware. His mocking disdain of the 'editor' is just a veiled
attack on the potency of the human agent. But our existence is that of agents, often unaware,
it is true, caught up in the conflict between our biological, social and intellectual imperatives,
as Pirsig so rightly perceives, but for all this agents with no way of evading choice and
action. The existentialists were quite right to see the human condition as one where we are
thrust into a world where choices are demanded of us, no matter how unprepared we might
be.
A moral compass would need to point to the best outcome of any choice that faces us. But
we can never be sure what the outcome might be. In his bleak later years, Mark Twain wrote
a story called 'The Mysterious Stranger', who is actually Satan, whose cruel acts when
challenged are shown to actually be the best outcome of those possible. Choice is in one
sense always fantasy, since we can only predict the outcome on the basis of past
experience, which is inadequate to guarantee the future outcome. Yet we experience shame
and guilt when our choices are shown to be immoral.
It is possible to break the law in the service of a higher good. It was ironic to see the female
judge who sentenced 'Dr Death' to imprisonment for assisting terminally ill patients to die, at
their request, preaching at him the necessity to obey the law, while forgetting that she could
become a judge only because a previous generation of suffragettes had broken the unjust
laws of their day that kept women out of the professions. The law is built upon past actions,
and is inevitably static, hence is always being adjusted as dynamic quality is encountered
and acted upon by people serving a higher morality. While this might be derived from
intellect, as Pirsig suggests, it could as easily come from a comitment to beauty, or some
imagined unity. What Pirsig does achieve is a reinstatement of quality to the core of our
experience. In a strange way, we do know quality when we meet it. When we act, though, we
gamble with the outcome of our choice. It is not possible to know quality in advance of the
experience. Action flows in a strange parallel with science. We hypothesise what the 'best'
outcome of a choice might be. It is only as we undertake the experiment that the quality of
our choice is affirmed or denied. What Pirsig gives us is some confidence that we will know
the quality of the outcome. What he cannot give us is some static system to predict this in
advance. To that extent a practical moral compass is an impossibility.
John B
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