From: Jonathan B. Marder (jonathan.marder@newmail.net)
Date: Tue Jan 28 2003 - 06:30:34 GMT
Hi Platt, Matt, Joe, Glenn and whoever else I may have missed:
My e-mail has been making problems so I have had to check the archives.
Apologies if I missed anything significant in the "absolutely objective"
thread. This post is an attempt to resolve the main point of contention in
that thread.
So far, Matt has supported my "True is a noun" slogan (representing
relativism and pragmatism), while Platt and Joe have championed the idealist
campaign for the absolute ("Truth is a noun").
I recognise that Platt and Joe's position is ethically motivated - to ensure
that there can be no compromise between right and wrong. I think that their
approach has its own problems, and leads to fundamentalism.
As I see it, Pirsig debunks two different absolutist approaches:
1. Logical positivism - the position that everything is cause and effect,
governed by fixed laws of nature.
2. Mysticism - the position that empirical reality is an illusion, while the
real absolute truth is waiting to be discovered by some process of
"enlightenment".
Both these positions are Platonic (idealist), and the most prominent
philosophical argument in history is the conflict between them. It is the
basis of the conflicts between Science, Art, Religion, etc.
If we are to be true to the MoQ, we have to find an approach that dissolves
the conflicts.
The solution that works for me is to replace the word ABSOLUTE with
GENERALITY.
Thus - it is GENERALLY moral for the doctor to favour the patient over the
germ.
Platt is not going to be completely comfortable with this, so I need to make
it completely clear that I don't mean GENERALLY to be a weak word, but a
strong and rigorous word. A Generality is to be taken as a law, subject to
protection enforcement. It is not valid for a doctor to come along and
casually reject the law. To reject the law, he must come and prove
convincingly "I here have an exceptional circumstance because of x,y,z". I
think this debunks the notion that I support some sort of wishy-washy
"anything goes" morality.
I find a lot of support for my suggestion:
1. In the critique on Franz Boas and his breed of anthropologists (ch. 4 of
Lila), Pirsig states
"If you can't generalize from data, there's nothing else you can do with it
either."
"A science without generalization is no science at all".
IMHO, this extends to morality and ethics. The MoQ is a prime example - an
attempt to provide a GENERAL framework for solving particular problems.
2. The rules and laws are all SQ patterns. As soon as one allows for DQ,
their non-absolutism becomes clear. This is summed up (generalized) in the
simple truism "To every rule there is an exception".
Thanks for reading,
Jonathan
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