This is more Pirsig quoting at the AHP conference on the topic of morality, the
most important part of the MOQ....
"Of all the aspects of this MOQ this is the one which is the dearest to my
heart. That people stop saying: "We don't… this is what I am afraid of… huge
scene among psychiatrists… "We don't make moral judgements, we just describe
things". And I say: "Please start making moral judgements. Please say to your
patients what is right and what is wrong."
They want to know, I wanted to know. And maybe you're going to tell them
something that is right or wrong from only a social point of view… But to me
the need to say that some things are better than others, the need to say what
is right and what is wrong is an integrating need. It's something that will
pull us all together whereas amoralism has fragmented us as a society."
----------------------------------------------
> I want to get down to the problem which is the essence for me the most
> important of… not the essence but the most important part of the MOQ and that
> is that it establishes a morality. A scientific morality. Quality is
> morality. They are identical.
> "The MOQ says that if moral judgments are essentially assertions of value and
> if value is the fundamental ground-stuff of the world then moral judgements
> are the fundamental ground-stuff of the world." (LILA, Chapter 12)
> The world is primarily a moral order.
> "It says that even at the most fundamental level of the universe, static
> patterns of value and moral judgment are identical. The 'Laws of Nature' are
> moral laws. Of course it sounds peculiar at first and awkward and unnecessary
> to say that hydrogen and oxygen form water because it is moral to do so. But
> it is no less peculiar and awkward and unnecessary than to say chemistry
> professors smoke pipes and go to movies because irresistible cause-and-effect
> forces of the cosmos force them to do it..."
> "So what Phædrus was saying was that not just life, but everything, is an
> ethical activity. It is nothing else. When inorganic patterns of reality
> create life the Metaphysics of Quality postulates that they've done so
> because it's 'better' and that this definition of 'betterness' - this
> beginning response to Dynamic Quality - is an elementary unit of ethics upon
> which all right and wrong can be based." (LILA, Chapter 12)
> Now, it says as a subset of this that there, what we see because of these
> different levels, that there is not just one moral system, there are many.
> And these are named as a morality called the Laws of Nature by which
> inorganic patterns triumph over chaos. There is a morality called the 'Law of
> Jungle" …where biology triumphs over the inorganic patterns of starvation and
> death. There is a morality called social patterns which are called 'The Law',
> and which social patterns triumph over biology. And then there is the final
> struggle, the final morality which is perhaps the most crucial one we have
> today and that's the struggle… well, we have two of them actually: One, there
> is the struggle between intellect and society, and this has been coming to me
> very much in the last few months since LILA was written, how profoundly deep
> this struggle is between popularity-dominated people and truth-dominated
> people.
>
> ------------------------------------------------
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