Hello Squad
You will recall the question was:
>Does the MOQ support Socrates when he says, "A man who has learned
>about right will be righteous."?
>Will anoyone knowingly do wrong if he or she knows it's wrong? Or in
>MoQ terms: Will a person (or a society, or a molecule) knowingly
>choose a low Quality action over a high Quality action?
Pirsig identified four levels of static quality - inorganic, biological,
social and intellectual. And he identified four moral codes:
the law of nature
the law of the jungle
the law (legal system)
the code of art (Dynamic morality)
This is part one of the moq's moral code, ie higher levels are more moral
than lower levels. This means that it's more moral to be than not to be,
it's more moral to be a slug than the sea, it's more moral to be a
kindergarten than an elephant and it's more moral to be a philosopher than a
movie star.
Obviously at this simplistic level it doesn't work very well. It says that
the greatest morality is achieved if you spend all your time thinking about
philosophy and never eat or sleep. That's silly of course. Clearly we must
sometimes choose lower quality actions or else we would die. Thus, part two
of the moral code says that the higher levels, whilst being more moral, must
not destroy the lower levels.
*Will a person knowingly choose a lower level of quality over a higher one?*
Yes, often it's necessary to do this in order to preserve the higher levels.
This is the MOQ at its most simplistic level. The answer is clear. (It's
also clearly useless unless we have some guidelines as to how to judge when
a lower level is in danger of destroying a higher one, but more on that
later.)
I think the question we might be getting at is:
*Will a person deliberately lower the quality of his or her situation?*
If we take Rob's example about bullying. His intellectual patterns say:
defend the victim. His social patterns say: no, don't get involved or you'll
make yourself unpopular. His overall evaluation at the time must have been
that he could achieve higher quality overall by choosing to follow the
social patterns. Feeling guilty was the price he paid for being popular.
Perhaps later on he decided he had made a mistake but at the time he was
maximising his quality. As David said, we don't deliberately make mistakes.
Even people who make great sacrifices, even those who kill others, and even
those who kill themselves do so out of a belief (albeit misguided) that this
will improve the quality of their situation.
So by choosing lower patterns of morality we maximise our morality overall.
But, we often get it wrong. Even if Rob had known about the MOQ in that
situation, I doubt his reaction would have been any different. The MOQ
allows us to choose lower patterns sometimes so he would probably have
decided his action was a rational and moral suppression of the intellectual
to preserve the social for long term benefit.Or maybe he wouldn't have. But
either way the answer is ambiguous. You could make the codes prove anything
you wanted.
If the MOQ to be of any use as a moral theory (and seeing as this is
its primary purposes then it really ought to be) then we need some theory on
when it is moral for the lower codes to prevail.
Are the US President's indiscretions a victory for the intellectual level or
the death of the social level? Who knows? We all have opinions, but who
really knows? Even those of us who know all about the MOQ don't know. Maybe
thirty years from now we'll look back and we'll know, but now, it's anyone's
guess. The MOQ codes help us clarify the situation. Maybe they help a bit.
But not much.
*Will a person who knows when it's moral for the lower patterns to overrule
the higher ones be righteous?*
First, in order to know when it's okay for the lower patterns to overrule,
you would have to have a quantum computer that processes every piece of
information that's relevant to the situation and projects every possible
solution and every one of its consequences until the end of time (or beyond
as the case may be). Second, if you mean righteous in terms of maximising
your own quality, I would say yes, but that begs the question of whether
maximising your own quality makes you "righteous".
But I think pursuing the relative moralities of the four levels is a red
herring, because, in any case, there are not three moral codes, there are
four of them. The fourth code - the code of Art - says that Dynamic quality
overrides all static patterns. This renders the moralities of the four
levels academic. Dynamic-static overrules everything anyway, so that's the
one to pay attention to.
*Will a person knowingly choose static quality over dynamic quality?*
No, it's completely impossible because you can't "choose" dynamic quality
you can only "be" it. Once you have become it then you are choosing it
already. To know righteousness is to be it.
*Will a person in sync with dynamic quality flow with it?*
*Will a person who sees what's dynamic pursue it?*
It's a bit like asking:
*Will a person gasp for air when they are drowning?*
*Will a person jump off a hot stove?*
Of course they will. But they won't do it because they've chosen to. They'll
do it instinctively. By the time you've "realized" dynamic quality, you'll
have already done it. The notion that you see it and then follow it is only
how you analyze it after the event. We say "pursue" dynamic quality because
it's easier to think of it like that. But in fact, if you're doing something
as a result of analysis then, by definition, it is static. Any action that
has been thought about is therefore immoral, because it cannot be dynamic.
Dynamic action is without any intention at all.
"You only did one moral thing on this whole trip and that was when you
couldn't think of your usual intellectual answer."
David has argued that to be moral we should examine our lives. I think
that's right, but it depends what you mean by examining your life. Examining
it, means being intellectual perhaps, but it's also crucial that you base
that analysis on the truest empirical evidence you can find. Intellect is
quite easy, it's the empirical awareness part that we tend to have trouble
with.
I would say Hitler probably did examine his life intellectually, in the
sense that he thought and wrote about it. And I don't think anyone could
argue that the Germans aren't intellectual. If anything they're the most
rational, logical, classically minded nation on the planet. How does the
joke go? In heaven the British are the comedians, the French are the lovers
and the Germans the engineers. In hell the British are the lovers, the
French are the engineers and the Germans are the comedians. Static patterns
are immoral because they are not the way things really are. Hitler may well
have examined his life intellectually, but that doesn't mean he was honest
about it. He didn't look reality directly in the face and evaluate it
without preconceptions. He had all his intellectual reasoning figured out,
and didn't need to be bothered with the truth. Perhaps it was because he
believed what he had written, instead of attending to what he empirically
saw that he messed up.
Diana
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Jan 17 2002 - 13:08:45 GMT