There is an interesting article about human rights and the limits of materialism linked below. I think some of Dworkin's ideas are similar to Pirsig's and he had very impressive credentials as a legal philosopher. As you'll see in the article, he did well at Harvard, was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, did Harvard Law School, was a professor at Yale, Oxford, New York University and University College London. He finished "Religion Without God", his last book, about a year ago - just before he died.
I was thinking about the human rights aspect of the MOQ as I read about Dworkin's work.... Pirsig describes the history of the 20th century as an extended conflict between "programs for intellectual control over society" and reactionary forces with "a program for the social control of intellect." This history, according to the MOQ, "is explained by a conflict of levels of evolution." This conflict between levels is not a conflict between society and the individual (As John and other conservatives have suggested). It is a conflict between two kinds of society. Just as an individual can be dominated by social values (Richard Rigel). a whole society can be dominated by social values (Victorians, neoVictorians, fascists). The same idea applies to intellectual values; a person or a whole society can be dominated by intellectual values. Pirsig points to human rights as a prime example of the intellectual values that should be in charge or the whole society. Like the other "programs for intellectual control over society," these rights are very much about the values which are supposed to guide whole governments and nations. And so, according to the MOQ, "a culture that supports the dominance of intellectual values over social values is absolutely superior to one that does not." "...In a subject-object understanding of the world these terms have no meaning. There is no such thing as "human rights." There is no such thing as moral reasonableness. There are subjects and objects and nothing else. ..This soup of sentiments about logically nonexistent entities can be straightened out by the Metaphysics of Quality. It says that what is meant by "human rights" is usually the moral code of intellect-vs-society, the moral right of intellect to be free of social control. Freedom of speech; freedom of assembly, of travel; trial by jury; habeas corpus; government by consent—these "human rights" are all intellect-vs-society issues. According to the Metaphysics of Quality these "human rights" have not just a sentimental basis, but a rational, metaphysical basis. They are essential to the evolution of a higher level of life from a lower level of life. They are for real." Check it out; this guy is saying something very similar to Pirsig, at least on this topic. http://www.thenation.com/article/178330/beyond-naturalism-ronald-dworkin?page=full# "Dworkin still wants to call his attitude “religious” because, although he does not believe in the existence of God, he “accepts the full, independent reality of value” and hence rejects the naturalistic view that nothing is real except what is revealed by the natural sciences or psychology." Ronald Dworkin's 1977 book, Taking Rights Seriously, "established him as one of the essential figures, along with Robert Nozick and John Rawls, in the modern revival of liberal political philosophy". "Any account of the law must of course include rights, indispensable elements of the complex network of permissions, claims, duties, warrants and exemptions by which laws knit individual actors together into political communities. But do rights have their existence only because of the existence of formal, enacted law? This is not what Dworkin thinks; things go in the other direction, he argues. For Dworkin, rights are fundamental and give the law its moral framework. Indeed, he claimed (though for most people unpersuasively) that they give the law its very identity as law. Rights, he says in a typically vivid phrase, are 'trumps'." 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
