I'd have to side with the idea that we have an innate sense of values
(morals). That doesn't mean we follow what we believe to be right or
good or best. Reality Therapy address this in a way. Glasser states
that the true reason for mental illness is our attempt to avoid pain.
When given a choice between doing what is right and what is easy -
sometimes we choose what is easy. BUT we know inwardly that the
choice we made is of low value (my paraphrase) and this in nturn
brings us more discomfort and then we must seek a choice to relieve
this pain/discomfort and so the cycle continues. The cycle can be
broken when we eventually hit a point where avoiding the discomfort
has a higher cost than confronting it. This would seem to indicate
that there is an innate moral sense. I truly believe that ultimately,
we all have the same moral values - but get confused. And the degree
to which we "stray from the path" - is the degree of discomfort we
have in our life. The closer we are to "the path" - the less
discomfort - the more "centered" we are.
Shalom
David Lind
Trickster@postmark.net
Platt Holden wrote:
> Greetings Philosophers:
>
> Do we have-- like our physical senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste and
> smell--an inborn, instinctive moral sense?
>
> Throughout “Lila,” Pirsig gives hints that such is indeed the case.
>
> In the famous hot stove example, he says, “This value is more immediate,
> more directly SENSED than any ‘self’ or any ‘object’ to which it might be
> later assigned.” (Emphasis added here and all following quotes.)
>
> Pirsig explains the brujo’s behavior: “He was just following some vague
> SENSE of betterness that he couldn’t have defined if he wanted to.”
>
> He describes Dynamic Quality: “When he is a few months old the baby
> studies his hand or a rattle, not knowing it is a hand or a rattle, with
the
> same SENSE of wonder and mystery and excitement created by the music
> and heart attack in the previous examples.”
>
> Moral sense also plays a part in sex: “In all sexual selection, Lila
chooses,
> Dynamically, the individual she wants to project into the future. If he
excites
> her SENSE of Quality she joins him to perpetuate him into another
> generation, and he lives on.”
>
> He ascribes a moral sense to intellectual and biological patterns: “Just as
> the patterns of intelligence have a SENSE of disgust about the body
> functions, the patterns of biology, so do Lila’s patterns of biology have a
> disgust about the patterns of intelligence. They don’t like it. It turns
them off.”
>
> Why is the free enterprise system good? Pirsig explains: “Some of them
> seem to SENSE there is almost something mysteriously virtuous in a free
> enterprise system and you can see them struggling to put it into words but
> they don’t have the metaphysical vocabulary for it any more than the
> socialists do.”
>
> In chapter 20, he leaves little doubt about our possessing an intuitive
moral
> sense: “There was ‘something wrong—something wrong—something wrong’
> feeling like a buzzer in the back of his mind. It wasn’t just his
imagination. It
> was real. It was a primary perception of negative quality. First you SENSE
> the high or low quality, then you find reason for it, not the other way
around.
> Here he was SENSING it.”
>
> He explains creative people: “But sometimes it’s Dynamic where your whole
> being SENSES that the static situation is an enemy of life itself. That’s
what
> drives the really creative people—“
>
> These examples add up to a fairly strong case for the existence of moral
> sense that’s able to “see” and respond to patterns of values that make up
> reality. Lest there be any doubt, Pirsig spells it out in no uncertain
terms in
> his “Subjects, Objects, Data and Values” paper:
>
> “In the third box are the biological patterns: senses of touch, sight,
hearing,
> smell and taste. The Metaphysics of Quality follows the empirical tradition
> here in saying that the senses are the starting point of reality, but—all
> importantly—it includes a SENSE of value. Values are phenomena. To
> ignore them is to misread the world. It says this SENSE of value, of liking
or
> disliking, is a primary SENSE that is a kind of gatekeeper for everything
else
> an infant learns. At birth this SENSE of value is extremely Dynamic but as
> the infant grows up this SENSE of value becomes more and more influenced
> by accumulated static patterns. In the past this biological SENSE of value
> has been called ‘the subjective’ because there values cannot be located in
> an external physical object. But quantum theory has destroyed the idea that
> only properties located in external physical objects have reality.”
>
> When you stop to think about, this is really an astounding paragraph. The
> entire world of subjectivity—the world of personal opinions and prejudices,
> likes and dislikes—is BIOLOGICAL? My admiration for Rachmaninov’s Third
> Piano Concerto stems from a visceral response of my cells or genes?
>
> As radical as the idea may seem, belief in a innate moral sense has been
> expressed by some of the world’s greatest philosophers including Buddha,
> Plotinus, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Henry David Thoreau, Herbert Spencer
> and William James. Darwin also believed that humans possessed an innate
> moral sense which separates us from the rest of the animals. But Immanual
> Kant, who many modern thinkers hold up as the last word in secular moral
> matters, claimed that belief in a moral sense was a fallacy. That most
> biologists today agree with Kant is hardly arguable. (Am I right,
Jonathan?)
>
> How many of us here in this group believe that our bodies, before sensing
> anything else, sense values? That the nature of our experience is primarily
> moral?
>
> I don’t know about you, but it’s a tough nut for me to swallow. Those
logical
> positivists have me brainwashed pretty good.
>
> Platt
>
>
>
>
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