Murdock, Mark (Mark.Murdock@Unisys.Com)
Thu, 20 Nov 1997 04:47:31 +0100
> Hugo:
> >> Be that as it may, my short answer to your question is that
> Pirsig's
> >> moral says that it is 'right' for free will to arise in the course
> of
> >> evolution. I am not sure it sayes anything on the rights or wrongs
> >> involved in different exercises of free will.
>
> Mark:
> >Morals, according to Pirsig, have everything to say about the rights
> or
> >wrongs in the different exercises of free will.
> >
> >The hierarchy of values is an ordering of morals. Biological
> exercises
> >of free will are immoral when they negatively affect social values.
> >Thus it is moral to imprison a rapist, but imprisoning a political
> >dissident is immoral. Murder is immoral in any context and so on.
>
> Mark, I am not sure I understand you here. Are you saying that the
> moral
> codes of Pirsig's value levels fulfills the role as a working moral
> for us
> humans?
>
How can they not? If they do not apply to humans, then why not? Lila
was not about natural science, it originally was slated as an
anthropologically-based novel, remember? Yes, they do fulfill the role
of working morals for us, I believe.
> And I am not sure I understand your examples, 'murder is immoral in
> any
> context', does that mean that killing in defence of yourself or your
> kin is
> immoral?
>
Killing is immoral, but someone threatening you or your kin is also
immoral. Here we judge, what feels like the right thing to do? We
defend ourselves and family naturally, but that doesn't change the fact
that killing is immoral. We live with having killed someone to save our
family. Society does not punish this act, it values life, but it values
family more. So I was trying to say that the act of murder is immoral
in any context, but acceptable to society in some instances.
War is another example. Defending against aggression is moral.
Aggression is immoral. This is why our modern industrial societies has
adopted Orwellian double-speak. Note how our aggressive actions are in
"defense" of a population, like the US invasion of Vietnam, or the
Soviet invasion of Afganistan. They turn an immoral act into a moral
one with one word.
That said, killing is immoral, whether defending or not. The act of
taking one's freedom to life is depriving him/her of the most
fundamental human right of all. But what about life as a slave? We
make judgements. Moral judgements. The Civil War was horrific. But I
believe that Lincoln's decision to fight was more moral than not to.
Slavery denies freedom. Here the immorality to kill was acceptable over
the immorality to enslave. You may disagree and that's fine. As
Sophists we do not engage in dialectic, but we do defend the Good.
> And we do in fact imprison political dissidents of the more insisting
> kind,
> take for instance Rote Arme Fraktion in Germany a while ago, or the
> Nazi's
> of today - how do we decide, using the moral of Pirsig, when
> dissidents are
> to be controlled?
>
Ah, excellent question. Here we can look to Lila. Dynamic Quality
values freedom. Freedom is Good. But in Lila we know that certain
controls are necessary, an order is required to judge between freedoms.
Society has a right to defend against all intellectual values.
Morality is on the side of freedom as long as society survives. Thus if
an anarchist speaks out on the total abolution of all laws, society has
a right to censor, or rather, to not promote. If someone espouses
genocide, society has a right to censor, bar from assembly, even
imprison. Now, if someone comes up with a new way to share power, for
example, which expands freedoms without destroying society, then
morally, it should be adopted. What's this, sharing power? You can see
why amorality has been promoted in this century.
Here is an example between current morality based on the intellectual
movement of the early part of this century and the morality that Lila
outlines:
There is a Frenchman who wrote a book which claimed the holocaust did
not occur. Public outrage was strident. Some intellectuals rushed to
defend him - not the content of his ideas - but his RIGHT to say them.
This is all in-line with amoral, freedom-at-any-cost intellectual
thinking. But, it is not right, not moral. He should never have been
allow to publish that book. In an MoQ world, a judgement on the
Goodness of what he was writing would be made. Is this Good for society
that we hear this? The answer is an emphatic NO. Note the public knew
this intuitively, they were enraged.
Lila says that freedom for freedom's sake is wrong. We must judge
freedom in some moral context. Our freedom of speech is Good when it
promotes freedoms which do not sacrifice social values. Thus Sakarov's
imprisonment was immoral and neo-Nazi's moral.
Good luck convincing the intellectual elite of this. The ace that we
hold here is that we approach this from a secular standpoint! That's
the brilliance of Lila. If we approached society with these ideas from
a Christian context, for example, we'd hear the usual separation of
church and state and there's no arguing religion. BUT, we come to the
table with a secular, intellectual argument for morality (which is also
intuitive for anyone who has a shred of humanity, IMHO).
> I am not altogether against what you are saying, we have discussed
> ethics
> on LS before, and I agree that there is a new foundation for ethics in
> MoQ.
> I am just not sure it is quite as simple as your answer above
> suggests.
> Could you elaborate a little?
>
Pardon my simplicity in the original post, it was for the sake of
brevity.
M.
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