[MD] Flying Spagetti Monsters

[Ben Golden]

Arlo, forgive me for not responding to your points directly.  I find that 
often the pattern of comment-response-response leads to more and more 
questions with little hope of consensus ever being reached.  I'm still stuck 
on your initial point and trying to find a way to communicate my stuckness.

[Arlo]
Blind obedience to social structures invariably leads to immoral behavior.
[Ben]
I assume that by social structures you mean static social patterns, as 
Pirsig would define them.  The function of static social patterns--really of 
static patterns altogether--is to preserve quality.  This end is encouraged 
by blind obedience.  Blind obedience prohibits dynamic quality (higher 
quality) but it also shuts down challenges from biological patterns (lower 
quality).  To say that blind obedience leads to immorality (low quality) is 
to ignore the abundance of (static) quality that is preserved by obey the 
social structures that issued the order.

I'm on the fence as to whether Platt's example of the American military is a 
good counter-example, but there are many others.  For instance, the Geneva 
conventions and the constitution are static social patterns.  Does the act 
of blindly following these patterns invariably lead to immorality?  By 
challenging these patterns (ie not blindly following) one might find dynamic 
quality and improve them.  But one also might regress to much worse/less 
moral behavior.

When you start to give concrete examples of what to blindly follow, it's 
much easier to determine whether it is moral or not to follow.  Platt's 
admitted that it is not moral for soldiers to rape, nor is it moral to obey 
orders to commit suicide.  You add that it is moral to drop an atom bomb on 
Japan or to shoot a young girl on a battlefield; Platt disagrees and I think 
I side with him.  Your underlying argument seems to be that because of these 
examples, it's inevitable that in all cases of blind following, immorality 
will result.

On an inorganic level, consider an arrow that flies in a straight line--is 
it acting morally?  Well, if it's a high quality arrow then it's a moral one 
and from an inorganic perspective an arrow that flies straight is high 
quality.  But if the arrow's about to kill an innocent person, would you say 
it's acting immorally?  Yes and no.  From an irorganic perspective it's 
moral.  From the intellectual perspective of altruism, it's acting 
immorally.  Yet you cannot infer from this that all arrows that fly in 
straight lines will eventually do something immoral.

It also occurs to me that perhaps what you really want isn't for soldiers to 
stop blindly following, but rather to follow a different but still static 
set of patterns.  You want them to have a code of conduct that differs from 
the one the military hands to them, wherein they sometimes do something 
other than what they're ordered to do.  But you still want them to do what 
you want them to do.  You seem to hold equal scorn for a soldier who's 
ordered to rape and blindly follows that order as you do for a soldier who's 
ordered not to rape and disobeys that order.  Only one of them has done what 
you initially sought to condemn--blindly follow.  Indeed if everyone blindly 
follows the instruction not to rape, this immoral deed would never take 
place

Now I may be misunderstanding your use of the word blindly.  Consider:

A is ordered to do x.
A does x.

B is ordered to do x.
B thinks about it.
B does x.

A is a blind follower.  B is not.  Yet in order for A and B to truly be 
different, there must be some instances where:

B is ordered to do x.
B thinks about it.
B does y.

Platt and I have argued that in a military setting, soldier A is generally 
preferable to soldier B.  You can give specific examples where this is not 
the case, but in those cases it's not the blind following that causes 
immorality; it's the immoral order itself.  To suggest that by not blindly 
following, soldiers can easily distinguish between moral orders and immoral 
ones I find somewhat curious.

It's true that at Nuremberg, Nazi official uses blind obedience as a defence 
for their actions.  It's not clear that that's necessarily what they were 
doing.  Consider for instance a young German soldier who does not blindly 
follow orders.  He has deep issues with what his government is doing, so he 
discusses the matter with close friends, all of whom support the Nazi party. 
  Unconvinced, he speaks to his father, who offers an anecdote about a 
Jewish businessman who once cheated him.  Still unconvinced, he goes to the 
library and reads Nietzsche.  Finally he resigns himself to the fact that 
his doubts were unwarranted.  Now this soldier never blindly follows his 
country's leadership.  Yet by supporting his government, he does act 
immorally.

So in summary, it's not clear to me that immorality follows from blindly 
following, since I can find many cases where one occurs and the other 
doesn't.

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