[Platt] No. Lying, cheating, stealing and killing are biological patterns. [Arlo] No.
Let's take a closer look, first "stealing". On the biological level, there is no such thing as stealing. Pirisg refers to a "might makes right" orientation, but the thing to remember is that when a wolf takes a leg of lamb from another wolf it is not "stealing" it. "Property" is a social level pattern. What the wolf does is purely moral on the biological level. "Stealing" occurs only when the social pattern of "property" meets the biological moralness of self-preservation. "Stealing" is not a biological pattern, it is a moral pronouncement of the superiority of social codes of property over the biological organism's right to self-preservation. It is the social level that says the butcher's "property" is more moral than the man's need to satiate his hunger."Stealing" is a social level statement of value, not a biological pattern. "Lying" is much the same, abeit it far more nuanced that I can get into here. Simply, it is a moral statement of intellect asserting its dominance over social patterns. It says that manipulation of facts (intellectual patterns) to serve social ends (social patterns) is immoral. But it is NOT a "biological pattern". "Killing", I might agree with some qualifications, is the result of intra-level biological conflict, but when we use it here we are expressing an intellectual level value that the word does not have on the biological level. Thus, while a wolf may kill another wolf, this act is not immoral within the biological level. We also (most) do not see the "killing" of a wolf by a man to be "immoral". And, we also do not see the "killing" of a man by a wolf to be indicative of "immoral behavior" on the part of the wolf. As such I think "killing" (in the sense of man killing another man) is a value expression of the conflict between intellectual level values and biological and social level values. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
