From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Mon Sep 15 2003 - 22:35:09 BST
GJ,
GJ said:
If you come in contact with a new pattern you have three options. Three reactions that are hard to influence. Especially if you have never had any insights about them.(pre-moq) If you come in contact with a new pattern the following can 'happen' to you:
1) you drop a level (for example: from intellectual to social, compensating
intellectual skills -patterns- with social ones)
2) Imitate succesfull patterns (aquiring skills by copying from others)
3) go Dynamic (get 'into' the new pattern and create new succesfull ways)
Matt:
I want to highlight what GJ said because I think it is a beautiful and useful example of redescription. GJ took the four options I drew up and redescribed them into a MoQian vocabulary in a way that emphasized something different then what my four options did. What I think this list emphasizes, in option (1), is how some options are ruled out of court. The drop of a level is considered to be immediately less moral then the higher level. What this means is that if the opportunity to follow the higher level exists, you should take it. If it doesn't, then you take the highest level option available.
Unlike some people, I think the ability to ascribe actions or people or nations to levels is extrememly muddy, and I think it should remain so. I don't want things to be easily ascribed so that we can draw up a table, a set of algorithims, and a flowchart and make morality a mathematical calculation. I think this is what Kant and Plato wanted, but I don't think it fits with Socratic deliberation, which is what pragmatists want.
However, I can think of one division that can be ascribed as a split between levels that is fairly universally agreed on in civilized portions of the world: that between discussion and force. It is illegitimate, so we say, that when confronted with a pattern, say a platitude spouting liberal, that we use force instead of persuasion. It is illegitimate for me to hunt down all of you people who disagree with me and beat you senseless. If I or anyone else even considered something like that, then I would take Squonk's ramblings a little more seriously. But we don't. We all agree that it is illegitimate, that it would be a reversion to a former state, say an animalistic, barbaric state.
Pirsig applies the distinction between levels in just this way when he describes the use of police. If conversation isn't an option, then other, less savory options open themselves because we have no other choice. To enjoy and gain pleasure from the incarceration of other people is despicable. It isn't pleasant, it is against our highest moral sensibilities, but those sensibilities cannot hold us in sway until we can think of something better to do, and so far the best thing we can think of to do with a murderer is to lock him away. We are trying, half-heartedly, to "rehabilitate" prisoners, which is a step up from the old days when they were simply locked away, but these methods of rehabilitation have a long way to go. We can work on them. However, like all practical things (like who you reply to on an e-mail philosophy discussion group on any given day), you have to prioritize and sometimes you just don't have the resources.
The same goes for war. I agree with Michael Walzer that there are just and unjust wars. I'm no hawk, but neither am I an ignorant pacifist who thinks that entering into WW II was unjustifiable. I don't care if we went into WW II to help the Jews or not. I don't care if their genocide was the direct, or even indirect, cause of our entrance. The fact is, we did go into WW II and we did save a lot of Jews. That, I think, is reason enough, if even retrospectively, to view WW II as a justifiable war. Sometimes, on rarer and rarer occasions, military action can be justified.
The main reason I highlighted GJ's three options wasn't to make concrete what option (1) means, though I think its an important point of intersection between Pirsig and Rorty. I also want to highlight the metaphilosophical issue of redescription. I like GJ's description, but I also like mine. The point is that I don't think either are mutually exclusive. You can have either one, depending on what purpose you want them for.
Matt
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