Re: MD Democracy in the MOQ

From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Sun Dec 07 2003 - 19:43:09 GMT

  • Next message: David MOREY: "Re: MD When is an interpretation not an interpretation?"

    David, DMB,

    David said:
    Making a value based decision is not about applying a formula: this level is higher than that therefore do A not B.

    DMB said:
    Right. The moral codes are not like formulas or laws, they're more like principles or governing ideas.

    Matt:
    I think the main problem with how people understand my interpretation of Pirsig is that they give different meanings to certain key words. That my be a duh statement for DMB, but this is a case in point: I take "principle" to be equivalent to "hard and fast rules". So do a lot of other people. When I said a while back that we should eschew principles for rules of thumb, I think it sounds a lot like what DMB is saying. The Kantian read on moral philosophy was that we needed princples, that we needed an algorithm for churning out answers to our moral dillemmas. Rorty's turn to "rules of thumb" is the turn away from treating morality like mathematices.

    Matt

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