Steve, inserted (I've not read Matt's intervening post ... yet) On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 6:56 PM, Steven Peterson <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Ian, (Matt), all, > > Ian: >> You said ... responding to Matt about dmb's earlier response ... >> (I agree Matt's contribution was spot on ... and dmb's response to you >> was pretty much mine.) > > Steve: > Does that mean that you now understand that I did not mean to imply > that modifiability is the same as morality nor that responding > positively to punishment exhausts modifiability?
[IG] No I don't believe it does. But hold that thought - modifiability (of behaviour) is NOT morality, you say. See below. > > Steve previously: >>> What remains to be articulated is how the MOQ levels might shed some >>> light on the issue of moral responsibility and prudence versus moral >>> behavior .... > > > Ian: >> If prudence is judged as behaviour in response to socially engineered >> punishments, then clearly there IS a prudence / morality distinction. >> A very important one, the one dmb made, but it's not an absolute one. >> Prudence can be based on the whole gamut or patterns of value - and >> where the patterns of value are your morality, then the prudence vs >> morality distinction effectively vanishes. > > Steve: > (I don't understand what you mean in that last claim.) [IG] Well that's your problem, so I wouldn't proceed any further then ;-) (Not interested in whether or not claims are Kantian or not, just whether they have quality in real life.) > > I would say that what Kant distinguished as prudence in MOQ terms is > not the absence of true morality as Kant saw it. It amounts to > following social patterns as a response to biologically defined > quality rather than as a response to socially defined quality(due to > society imposing biological consequences for defiance of social > norms). But I am far from an expert on Kant. > > Perhaps someone can articulate what Kant meant by this distinction? > > > Ian: >> For me the "moral responsibility" angle comes from participation (DQ) >> in the whole pattern of patterns, where we come to"identify" with the >> rights and wrongs of murder - not from some rationalised calculation >> rules derived from them. The latter are pragmatic only in the >> utilitarian "efficiency" sense of the workings of an "ordered" society >> - not everyone can learn all of life's lessons first-hand before DQ >> offers them opportunities to err. The social rules are layer well >> above - orthogonal to - the actual morality. > > > Steve: > I don't see how you parenthetical addition of DQ applies. Rocks and > trees and atoms respond to DQ but are not thought of as morally > responsible entities as humans are. I have proposed that the > difference is not "free will" as this capacity but rather the capacity > to participate in social and intellectual patterns which distinguishes > us morally responsible humans from non-morally responsible rocks, > trees, and atoms. [IG] This seems so straightforward to me. As in yes, but what's your point ? (Ask me to explain the point above.) That capacity to participate (and modify the participation by free-will) is crucial. I simply read DQ for participation. For rocks, that capacity is limited to interaction with a few physical patterns, so their ability to exploit their capacity as free-willed-action is vanishingly small, so the concept of them having moral responsibility is negligible.Rocks - on the moral scale, have very limited modifiability of behaviour, very limited behaviour in fact, very limited opportunity to use their experience of DQ in their interactions with physical patterns around them. Responsibility of not, the framework we are using to assess the situation is a moral one. Humans on the other hand ... have the whole gamut of patterns available across all levels ... irresponsible free-will could do a lot of damage, and we "know" it. So YES the participation in the higher moral patterns brings in the responsibility - the participation at these levels comes with free-will and responsibility. But the world is more than rocks and humans. So, Physical level - the moral order doesn't involve free-willed or modifiable actions. Socio-Intellectual levels - it does. Those are the easy questions. Biological level on the other hand - see the conversation with Arlo. The Bio-Social boundary isn't that obviously distinct. There are certainly modifiable (conditionable) actions, but to what extent the biological pattern has a self with free-will becomes the more interesting question. (My take is that we have "social" as soon as the biological being has some self-other consciousness and means of symbolizing that, but probably not free-will until we have the basis of an "intellectual" level - self choices about action based on symbol manipulation (free-will for short) - in fact the distinction between social and intellectual level is largely about individual freedom, freedom to decide. A wolf may be "morally responsible" for the lambs it kills (to eat) - this has nothing to do with blame or punishment - but at some point in evolution an intelligent animal will sense the value in the fate of the other - and bring that symbolically into its "considerations" ... maybe. Basically I'm saying the dog-human distinction (even ant-or-bee-human) is more interesting than the rock-human distinction. At that point my earlier "claim" that you didn't understand becomes more interesting. 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/md/archives.html
