From: Kevin (kevin@xap.com)
Date: Fri Nov 01 2002 - 17:48:29 GMT
Platt:
Please show how the MoQ sorts out the "grays of ethics" in Chap. 24 of
Lila. It appears to me that Pirsig makes many black & white moral
judgments based on the MoQ. You may want to pay special attention to
the part where Pirsig says that sympathy towards criminals and
lawlessness is "really stupid."
You may be right, he may be wrong, but I think I'm closer to reflecting
the MoQ position regarding terrorists than you or Buff who seem to be
suffering from what Pirsig calls intellectual moral "paralysis." While
you
agonize over the ifs, ands and buts of the ethical situation, terrorists
target innocent civilians to kill by crashing planes into buildings and
setting off explosives. That is just plain, unmitigated evil for which
no
rationalization, no justification, no excuse is possible in a civilized
world.
I'm thankful that the MoQ doesn't shrink from identifying and
condemning evil biological behavior.
Kevin:
Again you oversimplify. No one is questioning whether it's moral to
defend society from terrorism. That seems fairly plain. What was being
discussed was the METHOD the Russian Special Forces used to "defend"
society from terrorists. Are *all* methods moral? Does the end justify
the means?
I'm expecting your usual appeal to "moral ruthlessness", but I don't
think Pirsig would advocate killing the infected patients to destroy the
virus.
I referred to the "gray areas" of ethical questions. Nothing radical
expressed there. Taking time to untangle issues at the various levels to
discover the varying degrees of betterness or worseness is precisely the
point. In LILA, Pirsig struggles to untangle some particularly messy
ethical questions throughout the entire narrative of the book. He
certainly doesn't fall into the trap of knee-jerk Black & White
moralizing. He carefully deconstructs a given question to discover the
interplay of the various levels, values each independently, then values
them collectively and reaches a moral decision that seems best. I
suppose it might be accurate to say that the reason we commonly refer to
such issues as a "gray area" is because there seems to be right & wrong
interactions on multiple levels competeing for supremecy. Only by taking
the problem on in it's entirety (not just the most obvious level) and
evaluating ALL the levels at work do you make the MOST MORAL decision.
Perhaps we can say that the decision to use gas in the theater seemed a
high moral decision but suffered from miserably miscalculated execution.
That assumes, IMO, that the risks were either unknown or misjudged. I
can't believe they were unknown since it's a pretty obvious and
documented property of the chemical agent used. Did they misjudge the
concentration of the gas or it's effects in a crowded closed space or
it's potency on the weakened hostages? Did they calcuate it correctly
but simply failed to execute the delivery of the agent in the
quantity/concentration needed? Or did they just assume an attitude of
complete "moral ruthlessness" and roll the dice on the lives of everyone
in the theater? They might as well have set fire to the theater and shot
every 5th person who exited. Why not simply carpet bomb Chechnya or use
Napalm over the entire region to erradicate the terrorists with complete
"moral ruthlessness"? Nuke 'em all! Gotta break some eggs, as they say.
Wouldn't complete "moral ruthlessness" on the part of the State do
nothing more than make the terrorists morally justified in fighting the
state with complete "moral ruthlessness"? If a few thousand civilians
have to die in order to bring down the Repressive Static State or end
the civil war (thereby saving potentially hundreds of thousands), isn't
that moral?
Just because it's moral to defend against terrorists does not make ANY
AND ALL actions to combat them moral.
With hope,
Kevin
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