Greetings,
Well said Platt and Ian!!
This is very similar to the point I made in my first ever posting to the group and
Pirsig's reply
didn't help at all. I reproduce the salient parts of both below:
I wrote:
"In the context of the American civil war Pirsig claims that, "an evolutionary
morality argues the
North was right in pursuing that war because a nation is a higher form of evolution
than a human
body," and so hundreds of thousands of lives were justifiably lost because the higher
level of
evolution (society) prevailed over the lower level (biology) In the next paragraph and
in the
context of capital punishment, Pirsig goes on to claim that in the case of a criminal
who does not
threaten the, "established social structure," it is plain that "what makes killing him
immoral is
that a criminal is not just a biological organism. He is not just a defective unit in
society.
Whenever you kill a human being you are killing a source of thought too." What seems
to utterly
evade Pirsig is the fact that hundreds of thousands who died in civil war were a
"source of
thoughts" too, and that therefore by his own criteria the war was morally wrong
because ideas lost
through these deaths were at a higher evolutionary plane than the nation they were
sacrificed for."
Pirsig responded:
"There is no inconsistency here. It's moral for a society to prevent a criminal from
destroying it
by killing him if that is necessary. But an imprisoned criminal is no longer a threat
to society and
it becomes arguably immoral to kill him because he is still capable of thought. The
confederates,
who started the Civil War by shelling Fort Sumpter in South Carolina were out of
prison and shooting
and killing men of the United States army. This is a criminal act. Lincoln made it
very clear that
although he abominated slavery that was not the cause of the Civil War. He told
Confederates that he
did not take an oath of office to destroy the Government of America but he did take an
oath to
preserve it. As long as they were attempting by force to destroy the elected
government of the
United States he had a right to stop them by whatever force was necessary. When they
stopped
shooting and began obeying the laws of the United States the right to kill them
expired. At that
point the US Government did stop killing them."
Pirsig has shifted his ground here and effectively disowned his argument in Lila. (The
bit about
slavery and John Brown). Make of it what you will. I agree with Platt that there is a
great deal to
be desired in Pirsig's take on the state v the individual. It is confused and
contradictory.
It might be a good idea for us to try and sort this one out as a group, although the
quality of the
debate so far doesn't bode well for our chances I'm afraid to say.
Struan
------------------------------------------
Struan Hellier
< mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
"All our best activities involve desires which are disciplined and
purified in the process."
(Iris Murdoch)
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