Hey Steve, Steve said earlier: 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. Matt: Picking up this thought about there being a "basic foundation for morality" and its compatibility with the MoQ, what's interesting is how the section on care at the beginning of ZMM intercedes: Pirsig says there that care is the flipside of Quality. If one accepts for the moment a prima facie integration of that passage with the MoQ, then it suggests that perhaps "foundation" is the wrong way to formulate the relationship, but that Quality and care/empathy are essentially related in some fashion. And if we take this to be the case, then like Pirsig's staging of capitalism as the economic expression of DQ-allowance within a static pattern, then the MoQ seems to house within itself the near-perfect representation of modern sentimental liberalism. We don't need to fall down to a "soup of sentiments," but Pirsig's MoQ would then seem designed to exactly coincide with liberalism, rather than calling it "just one goal." The MoQ, in this regard (and I think this might be the right way to regard it), would be like T. H. Green's metaphysics, or Dewey's, (maybe Hegel's), and certainly Benedetto's metaphysical philosophy of history, History as the Story of Liberty. These metaphysics were _designed_ to be compatible with the basic ideas of liberalism, because though their creators were professors of philosophy, they took liberalism to be the most important thing going on in their lives. Put that last way, this might not be the case for Pirsig. More was going on in the 60s as a reaction to stale liberal attitudes, and so Pirsig's relationship is not simple on this score. But the core seems to be soundly in the direction. As has so often in the past been commented upon, DQ seems interchangeable at times with Quality. This may cause a few metaphysical or epistemological conundrums. However, say we take advantage of that. And say we take Steve's rough definition of liberalism, which is the politico-moral philosophy of empathy, as "better taking into account the needs of more and more people." Perhaps, then, we might reformulate Pirsig's formula for his philosophy of history from "All life is a migration of static patterns of quality toward Dynamic Quality" to "All life is a migration toward a better taking into account of the needs of more and more static patterns." I think that grafts pretty well. And notice, like care being the flipside of Quality, the chiamus between the first and second formula. 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
