[MD] Principled Person Level

[david buchanan]

Platt said:
"Excellence" is what we all want. But, we all have different ideas about 
what is excellent. There's the rub.  I consider the personal traits I 
mentioned to mark of individual excellence. Others disagree,
putting them down as outdated  remnants of  insufferable Victorian morality.

dmb says:
Nobody is opposed to the virtues you've listed. Its insulting and 
self-righteous of you to suggest otherwise. The problem is that you want to 
distort the MOQ in order to assert theses virtues over everything else. 
Ironically, your virtuous proposal is immoral. It puts third level values 
over the 4th and over DQ. It violates at least two of the MOQ's moral codes. 
Your ideas about the man of principle are unprincipled insofar as you have 
to ignore the portions of Pirsig's system that are not convenient for your 
case. At this stage in evolution, shouldn't an excellent person have more 
going on than just social level values? Here are some quotes I've been 
throwing at you since the previous century. Its from Lila, the end of 
chapter 13....

"The structuring of morality into evolutionary levels suddenly gives shape 
to all kinds of blurred and confused moral ideas that are floating around in 
our present cultural heritage. ... Like the stuff Rigel was throwing at him 
this morning, the old Victorian morality. That was entirely within one code, 
the social code. Phaedrus thought that code was good as far as it went, but 
it didn't really go anywhere. It didn't know its origins and it didn't know 
its own destinations, and not knowing them it had to be exactly what it was: 
hopelessly static, hopelessly stupid, a form of evil in itself." ...

"Everybody thinks those Victorian moral codes are stupid and evil, or 
old-fashioned at least, except maybe a few religious fundamentalists and 
ultra-right-wingers and ignorant uneducated people like that. That's why 
Rigel's sermon seemed so peculiar. Usually people like Rigel do their 
sermonizing in favor of whatever is popular. That way they're safe. Didn't 
he know all that stuff went out years ago? Where was he during the 
revolution of the sixties?"

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