David,
Anybody who kisses his wife passionately is OK in my book but I have
a small something to say about your latest post to Struan.
DAVID:
I have come to the conclusion that you are correct about the
logical inconsistencies within Lila, however, I do not believe that these
necessarily are a mistake by the author. They become a mistake to me when he
attempts to claim that they are not logical inconsistencies.
For the kinds of things we're talking about, they're a mistake right away.
Pirsig is writing a serious metaphysics here. One would assume he's
trying to avoid logical inconsistencies and that this goal is implicit
in most everything he writes, and on the odd occasion when it isn't, only
then would he make note of it.
Elephant,
I disagree with your statement that his moral taxonomy, as you call it,
is not part of the MOQ but resides under it. If it resides under it,
then the idea of the moral taxonomy should be derivative of what remains
of the MOQ ideas, these principally being that reality is composed of
static and dynamic quality and that value, quality, and morals are
equivalent. There's nothing in these alone to suggest that certain classes
of static morals are better than others.
Pirsig's hope for the moral taxonomy was to give MOQ a kind of Jamesian
pragmatism. It represents the only truly practical aspect of MOQ, and
you can tell by the way Pirsig writes about it that he's quite proud of
it. He thinks he has hit on something quite useful and marvelous and
original, and I'm sure he would tell you that it is part of the MOQ.
Platt,
You still think, even after our long discussion last fall, that the
moral taxonomy helps you avoid slipping into the morality that is
currently fashionable or politically correct. What you fail to see is
that it doesn't really matter which moral school you prefer,
because you can justify either side of any reasonably difficult moral issue
with the full backing of the taxonomic method. It really only works
effectively when the combatants are two or more levels apart, as is the
case with patients and germs, and then only under normal circumstances. If
the doctor is starving, the most moral thing to do might be to let the
patient die, then eat him.
You'll recall that when combatants are just one level apart, the lower
level combatant prevails if you can justify to yourself that the higher
level would jeopardize itself by defeating the lower level. This might
be the tact an ecologist takes to justify saving rain forests, for example.
In another example dealing with your grandchildren's visit, you made the
claim that it was more moral to do a social rather than an intellectual
activity on the mere basis that the social level was supporting the
intellectual level - a much weaker justification for level reversal.
And then of course there's Struan's example. Here you can mold the
taxonomic method to your liking by taking advantage of level ambiguity and
treating man as a biological entity in one case and an intellectual in another.
So all these back doors to the taxonomic method really make it very
flexible.
Essentially, people make moral decisions based on something close to
Pirsig's method without being conscious of it. To his credit, Pirsig's
accomplishment is that he discovered at least some of the underlying
principles that already guide peoples' moral decisions. However, he failed
to see it as a discovery, and thought instead that it was a new
high-powered moral tool of his creation. And in his enthusiasm, he does a
disservice to his readers by only showing how the method responds to
fairly easy moral issues, and then implies that the reason the method is so
effective is because it is objective and scientific. If you believe this
(and this is where the real danger lies), you might be seduced into quick
moral judgements without the thoughtful consideration you formerly applied
to moral issues, all because you are smug about the ability of the
framework.
Why he thinks the taxonomic method is objective or scientific I can't say.
Certainly it was not arrived at by scientific means. He did not apply the
scientific method here. Further, the taxonomic method does not resemble the
scientific method, otherwise you'd do experiments to reach moral
judgements. The only thing I can think of is that the taxonomic method has
an algorithmic, cook-book quality to it that faintly resembles something
that science might produce, but didn't.
I can't help seeing a similar kind of seduction about applying so-called
objectivity to moral issues over at the Ayn Rand web-site. Might you be a
fan of Ayn Rand too, Platt?
Glenn
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