[MD] atomic bomb and torture

[Platt Holden]

> [Platt]
> I wonder if at your convenience you would take some time to document the
> moral positions you describe below, citing quotes to substantiate your
> interpretations of the MOQ. I've tried to come up with suitable
> references but couldn't find where Pirsig said the things you attribute
> to him.
> 
> [Arlo]
> Fair enough. And in doing so, if you disagree, perhaps you could find me
> the appropriate references in Pirsig that demonstrate my error.
> 
> My post indicated that although "killing biological threats to social
> patterns is justified", there are three caveats.
> 
> (1) The biological threat must be real and immediate. 
> (2) Killing non-threatening Person B in order to stop
> biologically-threatening Person A is not justified. (3) The threat MUST
> be biological.
> 
> To the first, of course, is Pirsig's oft-quoted assessment of capital
> punishment. "When a society is not itself threatened, as in the
> execution of individual criminals, the issue becomes more complex... if
> an established social structure is not seriously threatened by a
> criminal, then an evolutionary morality would argue that there is no
> moral justification for killing him."

This passage is strictly context dependent in that it specifically 
refers to suitable punishment for a convicted criminal. It has nothing 
to do with a society threatened by war, nor does it say anything about 
the immediacy of a threat.          

> To the second, Pirsig had said the following, "A primitive isolated
> village threatened by brigands has a moral right and obligation to kill
> them in self-defense since a village is a higher form of evolution."
> Here he is clear in that the "self-defense" of "killing" is directed
> towards the threat, "them" are the "brigands".
> 
> It is true, that Pirsig writes on the Civil War, "... everyone knew that
> innocent people would be murdered [note the use of the word "murder"
> -Arlo]. The North could have permitted the slave states to become
> independent and saved hundreds of thousands of lives. But an
> evolutionary morality argues that the North was right in pursuing that
> war because a nation is a higher form of evolution than a human body,
> and the principle of human equality is an even higher form than a
> nation". Although this one statement "a nation is a higher form of
> evolution than a human body" is immediately contradicted when he says
> "Whenever you kill a human being you are killing a source of thought
> too. A human being is a collection of ideas, and these ideas take moral
> precedence over a society",

Not a contradiction when you take into account the context both 
statements. The first applies to a nation, the second to an individual, 
i.e., different levels.

> I think this to come about because Pirsig is
> talking about the Civil War being a war of Intellect (Freedom) versus
> society (slavery). In ZMM, Pirsig calls the atomic detonations in Japan,
> a "mass destruction of human beings". Since these "human beings" take
> moral precedence over "society", and constituted the deaths of hundreds
> of thousands who posed no "serious threat to establish social
> structures", I hardly can see how it can be considered "moral". 

Frankly, I'm amazed that you don't consider the war against Japan a war 
of Intellect (Freedom) vs. society (Tyranny). Pirsig's moral rationale 
for the Civil War applies to the Revolutionary War, World War II and 
all the subsequent wars we've engaged in, a point I've made 
consistently. 

> To the third is Pirsig's statement, "Just as it is more moral for a
> doctor to kill a germ than a patient, so it is more moral for an idea to
> kill a society than it is for a society to kill an idea." My statement
> that given that the world at large is still operating under a SOM
> mindset, and that makes it hard for me to believe that any ONE nation
> would have exercised unanimous moral judgement with MOQ morals, is
> simply a call to beware that you are not favoring state-apoligism over
> "fair and balanced" MOQ criticism. That the U.S., for example, has been
> able to always determine when a threat is "biological" and when it is
> "intellectual", when a threat is "immediate" and when there is no real
> threat, in alignment with the MOQ is placing the MOQ subordinate to
> static social patterns, making the MOQ an apologist philosophy for U.S.
> actions. 

Would you that by me again? Is it difficult to determine that an attack 
employing terror, violence and death is biological? Shouldn't we use 
the MOQ to help determine the morality of real world events? And if it 
supports U.S. actions, should we toss it out or rewrite it?

> Some other Pirsig quotes on war worth considering. Emphasis added by me.
> 
> "With Victorian spirits atrophied and their minds hemmed in by social
> restraints, all avenues to any quality other than social quality were
> closed. And so this social base which had no intellectual meaning and no
> biological purpose slowly and helplessly drifted toward its own stupid
> self-destruction: toward the SENSELESS MURDER of millions of its own
> children on the battlefields of World War I."
> 
> "The Victorian social system and the Victorian morality that led into
> World War I had portrayed war as an adventurous conflict between noble
> individuals engaged in the idealistic service of their country: a kind
> of extended knighthood." (sound familiar?)
> 
> "... the Victorians and their Edwardian successors sent an entire
> generation of children into the trenches of World War I on behalf of
> these ideals. And murdered them. FOR NOTHING. That war was the natural
> consequence of Victorian moral egotism." (the natural consequence or
> moral egotism... sound familiar?)
 
Again, context dependent, not applicable to all wars. 

Platt