>From: Struan Hellier >Subject: MD Rambling Madmen >Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2000 10:14:33 -0700 >There is a huge and vital difference between the 'good' of utility >(e.g. 2 + 2 = 4 is a good answer) and the 'good' of morality >(e.g. It was good of you to help that old lady across the street). >What Pirsig (and now Platt) has done is to reduce the 'good' of >morality to the 'good' of utility. Why try to define what is good and what is bad in general? For me the whole beauty of the MOQ is that there IS such a phenomenon as Quality, which is the driving force behind evolution (or should I say DQ?). If I got it right better quality is always the one that leads to more choices in the future. That depends on the circumstances/context and the "correct" answer will be revealed maybe a long time after the selection happened. I am really happy just to know that there is Quality (DQ?) at work all the time everywhere, it explains so many things. Sometimes I try to see what is good Quality in a particular case but my tools for judging that are often way too limited. In a sense 'good' IS 'utility' if we consider ever more complex outcomes (more new opportunities) being the goal. Even eugenics can have good DQ since it provides some more ways to modify genes which would not be available through purely biological means (someone wrote elsewhere on this site that eugenics is immoral because it limits combinations, which I feel is not true). The nice thing about MOQ is that it placed myself where I belong - I am just a tiny part of the universe. There are more powerful, more complex forces out there: corporations, cities, countries, art. They are way beyond what I could achieve by myself and now I finally understand why it is so: I am at the biological level while they are at social and intellectual levels. The social and intellectual phenomena are just as real as I am, they are just more advanced/complex than I am. Thanks and Regards sasu P.S. I am a newcomer into the MOQ world and I have no philosophical background to write home about so please excuse me (or spam me!) if I make RTFM type comments. To introduce myself: I am male, 32 yrs old, work as a managing director for a software consultancy, I am a university dropout, the philosophy authors I have read so far are Bertrand Russell, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Marquise de Sade, Robert Pirsig (sic!). The reason I ventured into philosophy was to make sense of my marriage (Russell), which required looking at the society (Rousseau, Russell), which led into even larger isues (Pirsig, de Sade). My photo is here, the last one on the page (www.regex.com.au/sasu/august2000.html). MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/ MD Queries - [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at: http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
