Hi dmb, Ron,
Steve said to dmb: > You are making huge unsubstantiated leaps here from Rorty's inability to > "get anything over on the Nazi" to relativism as the doctrine that we > shouldn't make judgments or that cultures can't be judged. Of course they > can. Rorty says they can and are judged ethnocentrically. Do you have a non > ethnocentric way of judging them. If you do, please provide it. If not, > then please shut up about Rorty being a relativist. > > > Ron replied: > Unfortunately Pirsig does say that cultures may be judged by their values; > "a culture that values intellectual patterns over social patterns is a > superior culture to one that does not" and that seems pretty ethnocentric > to me especially if one takes what Pirsig says about some patterns being > evolutionarily superior to others. > > > > dmb says: > I'd certainly agree with Ron about the MOQ's ability to judge cultural > values, but I don't understand why saying this would be considered > "unfortunate", unless Ron means that it's unfortunate for Steve's case. I > think that this ability is much less limited than the ethno-centric > judgements to which Rorty's view would confine us. I think the MOQ's > evolutionary morality is the non-ethnocentric way of judging that Steve is > asking for. This ability doesn't depend on ultimate foundations of the kind > that Rorty denies, and yet it escapes the paralyzing confines of one's > ideological tribe. > > Steve: Sure, the MOQ can be used to judge cultural values, but to call the MOQ a non-ethnocentric way of doing it is extremely naive. Of course cultures can be judged. Rorty had no problem making such judgments. What Rorty is saying is that philosophy cannot offer us a foundation upon which to create mathematical-type proofs of the superiority of one culture over another. We can certainly supply lots of reasons why the Taliban sucks, but philosophy can't offer us a way of saying how the Taliban doesn't conform to reality while democracy does. There is no way to adjudicate between such provincial sets of values that does not depend entirely on some set of provincial values. Pirsig certainly understood this fact. He was not giving us a way to step out of our own skins to make moral judgments. His goal was the more modest yet manageable one of demonstrating that we could apply reason to morality and that reason is a moral process. Consider Pirsig's critique of Descartes claim that he had successfully jumped out of his skin: Pirsig: Descartes' "I think therefore I am" was a historically shattering *declaration of independence of the intellectual level of evolution from the * *social level of evolution, but would he have said it if he had been a* *seventeenth century Chinese philosopher? If he had been, would anyone in* *seventeenth century China have listened to him and called him a brilliant* *thinker and recorded his name in history? If Descartes had said, "The* *seventeenth century French culture exists, therefore I think, therefore I* *am," he would have been correct.* * * *Likewise, if Pirsig is to be thought of claiming that the MOQ gives us a non-ethnocentric moral foundation as dmb sugests, he would be just as open to this critique.* * * *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
