dmb said to Steve:
...You have just said that "all judgements in the MOQ are moral judgements" AND
"Some could be ...immoral". There is no way to rightly say that some moral
judgement are immoral. It's like saying some good things are bad. It simply
defies the meaning of the words by 180 degrees. It's just plain confusing and
wrong.
Steve replied:
...Of course you can say that some moral judgments are immoral. The study of
ethics includes talking about what is ethical and what is unethical. Talking
about morality includes specifying what is wrong as well as what is right.
making "moral judgments" includes saying things are immoral.
dmb says:
I'm a little hurt. You don't really think I'd be fooled by this bit of
transparent sophistry, do you? As if immoral judgements and judging something
to be immoral were the same thing. As if making a statement within the field of
ethics is the same as making an ethical statement. What sort of gymnastic
contortions would be involved if you attempted this silly switch with an
immoral ACT? The study of murder includes murdering and not murdering? Like I
said, a moral act can't also be an immoral act. That's like saying a true idea
could be untrue. It's pure nonsense.
Steve replied:
Not at all, it is like saying that a human being is a moral animal. When people
say that, they do not mean that humans are good. They aren't paying human
beings a compliment. They are saying that they are capable of doing right as
well as doing wrong. The category "morality" includes both.
dmb says:
Yes, Steve. Everyone knows that there are non-complimentary, non-praising ways
to use the term "moral". But that is not how you were using the term. Trying to
take cover in this way only adds more confusion. Even if you were really using
"moral" to mean a statement made within the study of morality, it would still
be confusing nonsense to say that some moral judgements are immoral. You'd be
using the operative terms in two completely different ways within a single
sentence. It's terribly confusing at best. I'm trying to generous and light
about this, but come on. You're really piling it on thick here, don't you
think? I'm certainly not buying it and I'm not even entirely joking about being
a little hurt by it's transparency.
Steve said:
...I am not saying that all judgments are good. I am putting them in the
category of moral consideration. But the MOQ goes further to say that there is
no other sort of consideration. There is no dimension beside the moral
dimension. In the usual prudence-morality distinction, we can conceive of two
dimensions which could be put on two orthogonal axes with possibilities for
acts to be moral and prudent, moral and imprudent, immoral and prudent, and
immoral and imprudent. In the moral-prudent quadrant, the criticism of a given
act may be that while it is moral it was committed not for the sake of it being
moral but for the sake of it being prudent. The MOQ does not allow for that
sort of criticism (at least in the same way) since, again, we do not have a
moral dimension as distinct from some other dimensions.
dmb says:
What? Values go all the way down so there is only one dimension, the moral
dimension. Prudence acts are not moral acts, so there is no such thing as mere
prudence in the MOQ. We can't judge an act as merely prudent, rather than
moral, because now we can only put morality on our graphs, not prudence. I have
to say this strikes me as totally absurd. I think it's a very strange
misunderstanding of the MOQ's claim that values go all the way down. You're
using this unifying concept to confuse and erase all sorts of obvious and
useful distinctions. The unifying ideas (Value or Quality all the way down) do
NOT cancel out the fact that Quality and morality have many dimensions and
permutations and they are constantly in competition or even conflict. The idea
that the MOQ is a one-dimensional picture of reality, I think, is leading you
into all sorts of confused absurdities.
The MOQ definitely gives us a compass by which to say what's moral and what's
immoral. It does quite a lot of that. This so-called one dimensional picture
says there is static good and dynamic good and the static good is divided into
evolutionary levels so that even the physical universe is included. This moral
system excludes nothing but that does NOT mean, as the new agers like to say,
that everything is everything and so nothing matters. As I read this picture,
all these various dimensions are in play all at once all the time. It's a
movie, not a still shot. And Pirsig uses this evolutionary morality to explain
history, politics, the relationship between science and religion and all sorts
of complex, practical matters. How you ever got an impression a flattening, a
blurring or a single dimension is something I really don't understand. And so I
still see no reason whatsoever for discounting psychopathy as it is usually
talked about. I think that sort of explanation is just
an empirical claim and it works just fine in the MOQ. Data are data. It's
simply a checkable fact. Psychopaths and sociopaths make up 80 to 85% of our
prison population and there is no metaphysical explanation that can make that
sad reality go away.
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