[MD] Morality, Abortion and the MoQ

[Ham Priday]

Michael --

On 3/29 at 1:24 PM you wrote:


> I see plenty of "moral" implications in the Quality thesis.
> I'd argue it is nothing BUT a moral thesis. I refer back
> to my comments about it all being a very Schopenhauer-
> esque idea, but with the notable and paradigm altering slope
> being imparted to the flat Schopenhauer plane of "it all just is."

As I suggested before, you seem to be looking for a codified morality system 
that can used like a dipstick to measure the intrinsic goodness or badness 
of a societal act such as abortion.  You will not find this in the MoQ, 
despite its "moral implications".  When you're dealing with a philosophy 
that equates Morality with Quality, and proclaims them both "universal", 
there is no intelligible way to structure a "situational ethics" or a moral 
code that applies to specific behavior patterns.

The alternative, of course, is to regard morality as a "subjective" matter 
based on proprietary value-sensibility.  As you just stated to Ron, "Quality 
implies what humans perceive as 'better' over 'worse.'  Without that 
distinction, Quality is meaningless."  While you and I understand that as a 
truism, it won't persuade the MoQers, inasmuch as Pirsig has done away with 
subjectivity.

> That the word "morals" has such static weight is not the
> problem of Pirsig's MoQ, which I find deeply moralistic in
> the broadest understanding of morality. It's a problem of
> the static latching others have imbued the concept of
> "morals" in a practical, and notably societal reality.

"Static latching" is a concept that has been debated here with various 
interpretations, none of which are comprehensible to me.  A quick Google 
search turned up only one reference to this term attributed directly to the 
author in LILA:

    "Phaedrus recognized that there's nothing immoral in a culture not being 
ready to accept something Dynamic.  STATIC LATCHING is necessary to sustain 
the gains the culture has made in the past. The solution is not to condemn 
the culture as stupid but to look for those factors that will make the new 
information acceptable: the keys. He thought of this Metaphysics of Quality 
as a key."  (caps for emphasis)

It's hardly possible to glean any real meaning from such a brief 
description.  However, Doug Renselle in a 1997 "Perspective of LILA" sees 
the term's relevance at least to "good static patterns" as the basis of  "a 
new value ethics":

    "Intellect has the highest moral precedence followed by social, 
biological, then inorganic.  It is moral for the higher of two layers to 
dominate the other.  It is immoral for a lower layer to dominate a higher 
layer.  This is a profound discovery and for me it is the new value ethics. 
I see world legal structures eventually adopting this ethical system.

    "Finally, he unifies the static versus dynamic dichotomy.  He shows that 
the world is both static and dynamic and if long-term dynamic world patterns 
are to work, good static patterns must LATCH to permit the next dynamic 
emergence.  He does not say so, but I infer that just like his value 
framework, he sees a static and dynamic framework that scales from zero to 
infinite space-time intervals."  (caps for emphasis)

Do good latched static patterns create long-term dynamic patterns?  And, if 
it is "immoral" for a lower level to dominate a higher level, why does it 
happen in a universe that is inherently moral?  Perhaps you can comprehend 
such "inferences".  I've given up trying.

> But seems to me, we should not fear a "moral" label to MoQ
> just as we should not fear "faith" one. We should simply
> encourage broader, dynamically open understandings of
> those otherwise societally statically charged terms.

I don't see "fear" as relevant to the criticisms expressed, but I'm all for 
broader understandings (whether "dynamically open" or "statically charged"), 
provided of course that I can understand them.

Good luck with your query, Michael.

Essentially yours,
Ham