[MD] The Greeks?

[Matt Kundert]

Hey Ian,

Ian said:
I'm not prejudiced who I side with so long as they talk wisdom.
(Yes, even Richard Nixon has got soul - Neil Young ?)

Matt:
Spoken like someone that doesn't have to vote in the United 
States.  (Which is to say, think strategically--i.e. 
rhetorically--in this political environment.)

Sure, Dick Nixon has soul--it's just dark as night.

Ian said:
Rules ... OK, the meta-rule, that the umpire's decision rules, 
is much wiser than the particular rules of the game that the 
umpire is applying. Violent agreement. The authority of a 
legal system is more important than the laws they enforce.

Matt:
Maybe this is a better way of putting the point about 
fairness and rules (which I know you agree with if I could 
just put it the right way): rules are the embodiment of 
wisdom, but only people can be wise.  (Recall Pirsig's 
oft-forgotten assertion that only people can be Dynamic.)  
The difference between Platonism and Pirsigianism is: are 
we in service to the wisdom, or is the wisdom in service to 
us? 

In Pirsig's terms, you were rebelling against my formula that 
rules are fairness because of the nub of ZMM: "why do what 
is reasonable even when it isn't any good?"  Why follow the 
rules if they aren't any good?  Fair question, and there's no 
rule that can tell us, each and every time, when we should 
follow the rules and when not.  Platonism was the search for 
the co-incidence of Reason and Good.  At the far side of 
2500 years of moral philosophy, we might say that we've 
learned to say this: we've learned that the publicity of 
reasons for action is better than hiding why you act.  We 
follow the rules to promote perspicuity in moral reasoning.  
We only break the rules when we have a better reason.

Think of Bush adminstration's hidden intelligence for the 
Iraq War or McCarthy's assertion that there are 
Communists in the government that only he knew about, 
and pretty much every modern democracy's fight against 
letting the public know everything it knows.  The Sixth 
Amendment, giving the accused an absolute right to know 
what he's being accused of and how, was a huge step 
foward in political justice for the world, the Freedom of 
Information Act was a big step forward in the United 
States.  And the Bush Guantanamo Bay fiascos were a 
big step back.  We can see all of the political items as 
part of a larger movement in moral philosophy of letting 
_other people_ see your reasoning about why you act.  
_This_ was the Socratic Revolution--know thyself.  This 
is how we see Socrates and the creation of the modern 
notion of _evidence_ as of a piece (Ian Hacking's book 
The Emergence of Probability is instrumental to this story), 
and all about the Good.

We have found, over the evolutionary course of history, 
that people are more likely to do good things if they have 
good reasons.  And this for the same reason that modern, 
experimental science is lauded--because actions are 
experiments in reasons (reasons being habits of action), 
and unveiling your reasons for public scrutiny, like in 
science, allows others to perhaps spot a _bad reason_ 
which might create a _bad action_.  There's no perfect 
equation between reasons and actions, good or bad, but 
we've found that, overall, the more sunlight the better.

How does that sound?

Matt
 		 	   		  
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