Dave, Many thanks for forwarding the link to Michael Rosen's article "Beyond Naturalism: On Ronald Dworkin" at:
www.thenation.com/article/178330/beyond-naturalism-ronald-dworkin?page=full& I found it a good overview for why SOM based metaphysical systems fundamentally fail us morally (as regards rights) and it looks like Dworkin was one of the most "enlightened" of such philosophers (notice here, how I talk of such philosophers as being in the long distance past!) with not dissimilar credentials to Pirsig and his two major Western influences (certainly in his early days), Pirsig's own father Maynard (the oldest law professor still teaching in the US during the 1980s and the 1990s - famous for not having lost a legal case) and FSC Northrop (the first "serious" philosopher that Pirsig ever read - as a young soldier returning home from Korea). However, Pirsig's "big trick" as it were, was to introduce a moral system based on the East Asian Tetralemma (even if implicitly - again thank his time as a soldier in Korea for that). This combination of a superior logical system to Aristotle's relatively limited syllogistic system (ask Prof Bart Kosko - the inventor of so-called "fuzzy logic" about the latter!) with an upbringing similar to having an 18 year long plus law degree (for instance, if the teenage Pirsig wanted to borrow his Dad's car for the evening he had a make a "water tight" case to one of the best lawyers in America!) God, I would have loved to been a fly on the wall for some of those "conversations"!!! Best wishes, Ant N.B. For more information about Prof Bart Kosko and his work with fuzzy logic systems, please visit his homepage at: http://sipi.usc.edu/~kosko/ N.B. For more information about the Tetralemma. please read Paul Turners overview about it at: http://robertpirsig.org/Tetralemma.htm ---------------------------------------- Dave Buchanan mentioned March 2nd 2014: 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&; ---------CUT-------- . 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
