[MD] Flying Spagetti Monsters

[Ben Golden]

I'm going to backtrack and do some analysis of the discussion so far, so 
that I can interject questions and comments in the appropriate places.  Like 
SA, I've been mostly ignoring the personal attacks (some have humor quality) 
as well as some wild tangents like how a baseball league should name stuff.

[Arlo]
Neither "theism" nor "atheism" make one ipso facto a moral person, let alone 
a "good" person...You'll notice in history, that the problems are always 
evidenced when "blind obedience" to the power structure (whether its church 
or state) becomes the operative norm.

[Platt]
There are times, especially in war, when blind obedience to orders is 
crucial to success.

[Arlo] (edited slightly)
Hass there been any order from a commanding officer that an American soldier 
should not have obeyed ?

[Platt]
In battle, no.

[Ben]
Based on this exchange and later comments, I'm thinking that perhaps Platt's 
definition of blind obedience is not so blind at all.  Seemingly, upon 
receiving an order, a soldier's decision-making process should look like 
this:
1)  Is the body that issued this order a moral one?
2a)  If yes, then follow the order.
2b)  If no, then question the order.

Here, 1 is a very long and pronounced step, as Platt has done a lot of 
thinking about the morality of various military actions over the years by 
differing nations.  He is not advocating blind following as Arlo sees it; he 
is advocating the deliberate following of orders he deems moral.

Hence the question shifts to the morality of the orders rather than the 
morality of following them.  Platt if I might ask you to weigh in on whether 
you consider some historical military orders were moral.  I ask about these 
examples--all of which are sore spots in American history--not because I 
hate America, but because I think they're difficult/interesting to assess. I 
would assume that if you consider the orders immoral, you would not follow 
them and would consider those who did to be immoral:

1)  American orders to kill native Americans/conquer America
2)  British orders to burn the White House in the war of 1812
3)  American orders to fight the Vietnam war
4)  American orders to fight the War of Independence
5)  British orders to oppose America in the War of Independence
6)  American/British/French orders to fight in World War 1
7)  German/Italian/Austrian orders to fight in World War 1

Basically what I want to know is whether you consider these actions 
equivalent to American involvement in World War 2, which you 
enthusiastically support or equivalent to Japanese involvement in World War 
2, which you enthusiastically oppose.  Also, you can freely place any of 
these actions somewhere in between.

[Arlo]
Blind obedience to social structures invariably leads to immoral behavior

[Ben]
This is still in my mind the meat of this discussion.  I find myself 
disagreeing with this position.  The opposite of blind obedience is some 
amount of reasoned analysis before acting on an order.  Now I'm a big fan of 
reasoned analysis and I usually think that more of it is better, but I don't 
see it as an easy fix to all problems.  What it does is add one additional 
step (ie one extra independent thinker) into every decision-making process.  
So consider two examples:

1)  A general and two colonels make a decision together.  They give an older 
to a captain, who then forwards that order to a soldier.  The soldier 
blindly obeys the order.
2)  Same as 1) except that the soldier analyzes his order and decides 
whether to follow it.

Now, in the first case there are 4 people involved in the decision and in 
the second there are 5.  It may be that the second case is preferable since 
there are more thinkers, but it may not.  The soldier is the least 
experienced of the bunch and may have entirely different interests than the 
army.  The soldier may be following biological patterns of survival when the 
generals are following social patterns of army success.  This is a bad 
results, since according to Pirsig, social vaules are higher than biological 
ones.  Seemingly, it's only when the soldier is more intellectual than the 
generals that a better result occurs; this seems highly unlikely.

The point Platt seemed to be making was that American soldiers didn't need 
to worry about following orders because the orders themselves tended to be 
highly moral.  I do have some doubts about this claim, but I'm not sure the 
best way to fix the problems in the military is to encourage soldiers the 
think more freely.  In my opinion, doing so would not lead to greater 
morality in the military; it would lead to greater chaos, less efficiency 
and less morality in the military.  For instance, suppose the order came 
down that soldiers are not to rape innocent village girls.  An immoral 
soldier who has been taught to question his orders, may well disregard this 
particular order on the basis that he knows better.  He knows that innocent 
village girls are the enemy, that they'll go on to have kids that will kill 
his kids, so he might as well assert his dominance now.

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