> dmb says: > Right. Sociopaths and psychopaths are both forms of anti-social personality > disorder but the latter is more severe. I'd point out that normally the > capacity to feel empathy begins at a very early age. Even infants can do it > and researchers like Franz DeWall have found that primates and even rats have > this capacity. Empathy is the basic foundation of morality and of the family > structure even in the animal world. A person who's incapable of empathy is > seriously damaged, is missing something very basic. Morality is about how we > relate to each other. It's about "we", as opposed to me or it. Without > empathy "we" means nothing.
Steve: What people usually mean by the word "morality" includes the capacity to empathize, but in the MOQ, morality goes all the way down. Rocks and trees and atoms are moral beings. Rather than empathy being "the basic foundation for morality," in the MOQ morality is the basic foundation for everything (which includes empathy). It seems that you've made an argument _against_ the MOQ as the best way to think about morality. Nevertheless, empathy is what I want people to think of with regard to moral talk rather than divine command or Natural Law. If you think it has an important place in the MOQ (if there actually is no contradiction with the MOQ in what you said above), it seems to me this is an area that needs some work since it is not something that I recall Pirsig writing about and since it does not divide neatly into the MOQ levels to talk about moral progress as expansion of the capacity to empathize with wider and wider circles of concern. In the modern liberal conception, morality is about better taking into account the needs of more and more people. In the MOQ as I understand it, that is not what morality _is_ it is just one goal that certain people have that either does or does not contribute to evolution of static patterns toward dynamic quality. Best, Steve 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
