From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Wed Jan 08 2003 - 21:59:45 GMT
Platt, Jonathon,
Platt said:
I don't think you have to be omnipotent to tell good from evil, right from
wrong
and act accordingly.
Matt:
Abosolutely ;-) That's why I follow Rorty in thinking that the reason we
can tell good from evil and right from wrong, and act accordingly, is
because we are all ethnocentric. We act from our ethnos, our culture, our
_static patterns_. Under the pragmatized Pirsig, we would need to be
omnipotent to be able to tell _absolutely_ and with logical certainty what
was good and evil. Those locutions of absoluteness just seem like bad ways
to say what's good and bad. All we need to know is how it looks from our
present standpoint. In more grey areas, we might need more information,
more efforts at recontextualizing the situation to see what the best choice
would be. To say that Pirsig offers us a "rational way to make moral
decisions" is to say that Pirsig has offered us a way to contextualize
events to choose between good and evil and that way uses persuasion rather
than force.
Matt
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