Diana, Denis, and squad,
Diana, your post has too much meat in it. My head is muddled.
Diana says:
I think you can make the codes prove anything you
want. Note that Pirsig maintains it's wrong to destroy the intellectual
patterns of a criminal for the sake of society but it's okay to destroy
soldiers' intellectual patterns for the sake of society.
Clark says:
I think this is not a good example. We can destroy the criminal, or let
him live, without threatening the foundations of society. Iff an army does
not defend a society to the death then the whole society is immediately
threatened. Two different circumstances.
Denis says:
>We cannot argue that knowing right doesn't make one righteous while at
>the same time attempting to do just that : defining a "Guide to Morals :
>how to resolve a moral conflict in X lessons".
Clark says:
I see no conflict between defining a guide to morals and acting
immorally. Does a city dump it sewage into a river while knowing that a
downriver city will be obliged to use the water for drinking purposes. Done
all the time but we all know that it is an immoral act in Pirsig's terms.
Do we split a perfectly evolved moral molecule and use its parts to make
a bomb to kill about 130,000 people with two bombs? We did it and called it
moral because not doing it would have resulted in more deaths. Which
instance is less moral?
My point is that. while we do many immoral acts knowingly that does not
mean that having a guide to morals is not worthwhile. It just means that we
allow our human concerns to take precedence over the universal morality of
the MoQ.
Pirsig treats this with his idea that we all are operating under a
different Truth. His idea is that having a moral guidepost will serve as a
focus for the migration of our "Many Truths" toward the ideal.
This is also why our understanding of Morality should be broadly based on
the entire universe rather than narrowly focused on humanity. Disregarding
universal morality in favor of human morality will make the MoQ unworkable,
or rather, it will make it take a much longer time to work.
Denis and Diana write:
>Do what you *know* is good, and if you don't know, take a break, then
>try again.
This is the essence of Dynamic morality as presented in ZMM and in Zen and
the Art of Archery. Pirsig also says it to a certain extent in Lila. The
morality of the Zuni brujo illustrates it. The brujo just *knew* what was
good. "If you had asked the brujo what ethical principles he was following
he probably wouldn't have been able to tell you. He wouldn't have
understood what you were talking about. He was just following some vague
sense of 'betterness' that he couldn't have defined if had wanted to.
Clark writes:
The number of people in the world who know about the MoQ will always be
small. Most people will be operating on a "vague sense of betterness". He
evolved a system of morality that will work in any circumstance. Some
people will be highly moral, some will be average, and a few will highly
immoral. The workings of DQ and SQ will lead the vast majority of people
toward a higher level of morality whether or not they have heard of the
MoQ. Our "Truths" will be continually nudged by Quality. I believe this
intellectual movement will be toward a higher level of morality. If we last
long enough we may all wind up at the same level. Ken
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
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