Michael, Steve, Ron, and All --
I suppose there's a natural human tendency among philosophy scholars to judge the importance of a thesis by its social applications. We seem to be looking for ready-made maxims and pithy quotes that support our own "morality system", dismissing or rejecting ideas that suggest opposing views. It's as if a particular philosophy is no good if doesn't "authorize" what we believe to be moral in practice. Yet, if ontology, cosmology, epistemology, and metaphysics were theorized to accommodate a particular set of moral principles, their authors would be disingenuous. Putting praxis before theory is, to me, putting the cart before the horse. Philosophy is not an instruction manual for moral behavior.
On the issue of abortion, Steve got at the heart of the moral problem when he said ...
Obviously, there is no analogous "moment of conception" for making the distinction between human and non-human in biological evolutionary terms. Do you see the problem here?
And Ron put Steve's coment in a philosophical context:
You touch on a very important point, in MoQ, the term morality takes on a different meaning, it's not a guide to distinguish right from wrong or even the common understanding of betterness, but the understanding of tendencies toward certain types of static patterns and their relationships.
The moral issue -- what is right and wrong, how humans should behave -- is the last thing to be inferred from a philosophy, and to reject the fundamentals out of hand for moral or polemic reasons is not giving due consideration to the philosopher's efforts.
Unfortunately, Pirsig has compounded the problem by subtitling LILA "An Inquiry into Morals", thus setting himself up as a moralist. I think we all realize by now that Pirsig's Quality thesis is no such thing. LILA is essentially a romantic novel based on anecdotes from the author's life as a philosopher. Yes, it makes some thought-provoking statements about cultural values and intellectual pursuits, mostly from the anthropological viewpoint of a social liberalist. But, as far as authoritative moral guidance is concerned, it raises more questions than it answers.
This may be why you're not scoring with the MoQists on this particular topic, Michael.
Best regards, Ham 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/
