Hi Matt, you said to Mary, > > I think you're aiming at an important ambiguity in Pirsig > writing, Mary. Pirsig describes DQ as a telos (indeed, > saying a moral telos would be redundant), as an > important emendation of the mechanistic, Darwinian > worldview, but much of the apparatus of the MoQ > seems designed to impede any power to be derived > from DQ being so described. If it's a telos, it is an > impotent one because knowing it to be one does > nothing for us in practice. It aids us not a whit in, as you > say, predicting what moral behavior will be in the future, > which in an evolutionary paradigm means _acting morally > now_. > > This suggests, as Steve added some passages from > Pirsig giving credence to this, that the MoQ isn't very > useful in making moral decisions. But then what is it useful for? >
My view is that this "ambiguity" - a paradoxical aspect - is its strength. When the "as if" telos is added to a more reductionist Darwinian take on causation, then moral behaviour is all too predictable, now and in future - that doesn't make it uniform. The problem is most people still look to SOMist arguments to justify their predictions - and are surprised when they fail, as any SOMist argument containing a paradox will. The MoQ has its weaknesses as currently defined (eg in the idea that intellect is free of social baggage and narrative, or in the confusion of individual freedoms with intellect) but these seem to be redeemable / fixable. Ian 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/
