DMB said: Anyway, I think merit and means can be talked about separately in the abstract but as a practical matter they are all tangled up in each other. If your means are bogus then merit goes out the window and if you have no merit but still insist on scoring points, then you have to resort to bogus means.
Matt: Yeah, our disagreement appears to go down pretty far about the ethics of inquiry and the kinds of allowable psychological profiles and what maturity looks like. You should check out the Trilling book: the moral stance you're taking has a history, and a very interesting one, one that continues to evolve. The slim piece of your response I've pulled out above was just to make clear on my part that my discussion of a kind of Machiavellianism and that "means do matter in the long approach to just ends" was intended to articulate just that point, that merit and means are "all tangled up in each other." What you see as my attempt to get you to act hypocritical, "phony" as you say, is my attempt to give a better ethics of inquiry once one realizes that they are tangled up. (Not at all, of course, conceding that the behavior you described as being phony, e.g. to "preface the criticism with some kindness or follow the accusation with expressions of love," is really at all the kinds of behavior I was commending. A better description is in my first post in this thread. (See "Pirsig Institutionalized" for a few negative comments about another "phony" behavior, the "just my opinion" qualifier.)) Matt 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/md/archives.html
