From: Valence (valence10@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Aug 26 2004 - 00:04:08 BST
Hi Glenn and all,
G
> Prostitution does sound like a strong charge, but if a
> person exchanges values across levels, such as
> exchanging sex (biological) for money (social), the
> MOQ would say that a prostitution, or immoral
> exchange, of value has taken place.To be consistent,
> the MOQ would also have to say that the same kind of
> thing is happening when intellectual patterns are
> sold. In the first case the money is tainted by the
> sex, and in the second the ideas are tainted by the
> money. I admit that Pirsig does not explicitly discuss
> the morality of trading value between levels, but the
> conclusion I draw above seems to me to be a natural
> consequence of his moral taxonomy.
R
If this is a 'natural consequence' of the MoQ taxonomy, then I'm not sure I
agree with the MoQ. I went to Las Vegas this weekend and splurged on an
embarrassingly expensive deep-tissue massage at the hotel spa (since we're
talking about Vegas, I want to be clear that there was nothing sexual about
it at all, just a regular massage). I didn't medically need it. The only
reason I did it was because it sounded like it would be relaxing to the
muscles. I biologically enjoyed it. I paid for it with money. Was that
immoral? If so, why? Was there some actual harm coming to someone or
something from it? Or just because of the technicality that I was exchanging
values of differing levels? If not, why would paying for the sheer
biological enjoyment of sex (assuming voluntarily and intelligently
consenting adults) be immoral? How can we meaningfully distinguish between
the two?
When speaking about transactions between voluntarily and intelligently
consenting adults, I'm not sure I really see why, or agree that, an exchange
of sex for money is always immoral. In the Money thread from a month or so
back, I suggested that Pirsig had misspoke when he said that money is an
'index of social quality', I believe what he meant to say was that money is
a 'social index of quality'. The difference is that if money was an "index
of social quality" it would mean that we can tell how much "social quality"
something has by how much money it's worth, while if money is a "social
index of quality" it would mean that the amount of money something is worth
is an indicator of how much quality within its own level social patterns
believe it has. Pirsig said the former, but I think he meant to say
something more like the latter.
The difference is important because if we accept my "correction" then what
we get is, I think, a bit more akin to how we generally think about spending
money. What I mean is, if we think Pirsig meant what he wrote, then we get
the situation you're suggesting. It's immoral, as you say, to exchange
money for lower level patterns (inorganic and biological) because money's
value is social value and it is tainted by the lower level value; and, as
you say, it's also immoral to exchange money for ideas because money's value
is social value and it taints the higher level idea. So we have this
situation where we can only morally exchange money for other social patterns
(and maybe biological necessities under the "higher level must maintain
what's beneath it" catch-all) because money's value is social. That seems,
I think, a bit weird and a most unpragmatic way of thinking about money
since it makes pretty much all of us immoral as I'm sure we all routinely
exchange money for patterns that aren't considered social by Pirsig.
Now, I think that we should read him as saying that money is a "social
pattern" because its validity for exchange comes from a social convention.
Prices represent the level of value society places on the given pattern
within its own level. Using a simplified example, it costs more to build
your house with steel and bricks than with wooden boards alone because when
it comes to the inorganic qualities sought in a house-building material,
steel and brick are more highly valued by society. The social convention
that makes money a medium of value exchange facilitates the transaction, but
the transaction itself is about the level of quality the purchased thing is
believed to have within its own level. This way, society is expressing its
collective opinion about the value of various patterns by setting prices for
things that can be paid with an agreed upon medium for the exchange (e.g.
dollars, pounds, yen, pesos, etc). I don't think we have to see the use of
that medium as "tainting" that expression of evaluation.
To bring it back to the point, I don't think the exchange of money for sex
(between voluntarily and intelligently consenting adults, etc, etc) or for
ideas is _inherently_ immoral. It just indicates that people value sex the
same way that supermarket chains indicate that people value food and
pharmacies indicate that people medicine and IP laws indicate that people
value innovation in science and the arts. I think it's generally thought of
as immoral not because social patterns are being exchanged for biological
patterns, but because we associate it with genuinely immoral social and
biological patterns that really weaken society (e.g. the spread of disease,
drug-addiction, slavery, subjugation, extra-marital sex, etc). Similarly,
when it comes to IP laws, I don't think that there's anything particular
useful about simply concluding that they're immoral because patterns of
different levels are being exchanged, rather the question should be whether
IP laws are associated with other patterns that genuinely endanger the
integrity of social patterns (e.g. monopolization of an invention).
G
> IP law's promise of a nice reward might motivate
> people to carry through with their ideas, and that is
> indeed an important element, but I don't think this
> promise inspires the ideas themselves. I tend to think
> that an intellectual pursuit has to be its own reward,
> a personal one.
R
I agree with you that IP laws don't inspire the ideas themselves, and that
they motivate people to carry through with ideas they already have, I
believe they that they do also sometimes inspire people to look around at
the world for niches that need to be filled (to borrow a phrase from a
recent MD post I saw), niches they wouldn't have otherwise even bothered
looking for if they didn't think that building a better mousetrap (so to
speak) would earn a them a profit. I think this maybe connected to Pirsig's
thoughts about capitalism being a powerful engine for DQ.
> > R
> > What if the license holder is
> > collecting fees to recoup
> > his investment rather than to profit, would that be
> > different? I would be
> > very interested to hear your thoughts on that
> > question.
>
> Yes, I think that would be different. You could argue
> that there are a lot of social costs and costs in
> materials that get included in intellectual
> investments. It is moral to recoup those.
R
So creation is only moral if it's a break even experience? Surely, the
"opportunity cost" that the creator pays in time and lost opportunities
should be factored in as well. If the creator could have been earning
profit off of a non-creative job for the same amount of time he instead
chose to work on his creation, he must at least be able to get that back as
well, no? And what about the notion that if the creator makes a great deal
of money off of the creation, he'll have more time in the future to dedicate
to pursuing further creations. What if he wants to become rich so he can
spend his full time at intellectual pursuits? Is that immoral?
> > R
> > And yet, Pirsig doesn't give LILA away for free...[snip]
G
> Pirsig once gently explained how all the seeming moral
> hypocracies in Lila could be sidestepped. You see it
> was Pirsig who stated that it's immoral to eat meat
> but it was Phaedrus who actually did the eating. You
> don't think a fictional character has to agree with
> everything the author believes, do you? Ha ha ha.
R
I'm not sure if it's really true, but if Pirsig wants to maintain it, I can
get behind the idea that Phaedrus may not be a perfect mirror of the real
Robert Pirsig (although the similarities seem to far, far outweigh any
suggested differences). However, even granting that, I don't really think
that completely exonerates the hypocrisy (to the extent that one believes it
needs be exonerated) because the book seems to clearly attribute the thought
about vegetarianism to "Phaedrus". The passage begins on the first page of
ch.13 and runs (in my edition) from p.183-186. The analysis concludes in
the penultimate line "It was tempting to take all the moral conflicts of the
world and, one by one, see how they fit this kind of analysis, but
*Phaedrus* realized that if he started to get into that he would never
finish (emphasis supplied)." So if Pirsig says that it was Phaedrus who did
the eating, then Phaedrus, at least, is a bit of a hypocrite.
G
> As to McWatt's and Glover's efforts to profit off of
> Pirsig's ideas - my topic question asked more
> generally about the morality of selling intellectual
> ideas, but no matter; whether these ideas are your own
> or someone else's, the same reasoning applies and the
> same conclusions are drawn: intellectual ideas should
> not be prostituted for social gain.
R
But again, what if the intellectual ideas are being "prostituted" so that
the inventor will have the financial freedom (which translates into a great
deal of social freedom) to further pursue intellectual ideas?
G
A friend of mine
> pointed out the moral precedence of intellectual ideas
> in these two cases quite simply by stating, "If this
> is such an important breakthrough in philosophical
> thought, I would want everybody to know for nothing".
> If you sell a book that contains intellectual ideas,
> the MOQ implies that the moral course is to charge the
> customer based on the costs of printing, binding, and
> shipping the book, along with other social costs, but
> not the ideas therein.
R
But doesn't the MoQ also imply that the levels usually do what's best for
themselves, even when it conflicts with other levels? Doesn't that imply
that from the perspective of the 4th level, whatever system generates the
most high quality ideas is the most moral system whether or not some social
pattern is getting rich off of it?
G
It follows that if you were to
> borrow such a book it shouldn't cost you anything, and
> this is the thinking behind Ben Franklin's free public
> library system. There is a certain irony in Ant's and
> Glove's enterprising efforts to make money off the MOQ
> and McWatt, who is charging $30 for a mere PDF file,
> is the more morally dubious.
R
I'm still not sure I agree this is immoral. I mean, if I were to hire
someone to edit the MD archives into a readable form, or to write a research
paper comparing the MoQ to more well known philosophies, surely, those
people would expect me to pay them for their expenses, their time and their
efforts. And surely they would expect to make a profit off of the
arrangement. Why would that be less moral than any other exchange of a
profit-sized sum for the rendering of a service? And why would reversing
the process as Glove and Ant have done (i.e. doing the work first and then
naming the price for those who are interested in it) be less moral?
G
> On the other hand, we might take a different tack and
> revisit the agreement from a few months ago that money
> is a social pattern. If money is seen instead as more
> of a purified form of static value potential that is
> exchangable with value at any level, then we might be
> less psychologically burdened by the immorality of
> inter-level exchanges.
R
I think I suggested that last month. See above :-) What do you think?
take care
rick
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