[MD] What kind of ethical theory is the MOQ?

[Steven Peterson]

Hi DMB,

It's not that I need to fit the MOQ into a pre-existing category. I'm
just trying to understand the form an MOQ moral argument takes. For
example, take the doctor, germ, and patient.

A Kantian may not even see that there is a moral question here to be
addressed because for him, morality doesn't apply to germs. Some other
sort of deontologist may say that it is always wrong to kill.

A consequentialist of one sort or another (like Sam Harris) might say
that the patient has a greater capacity for happiness than the germ,
so the doctor can reduce suffering and increase happiness best by
saving the patient and killing the germ.

My reading of Pirsig is that the MOQ is not a consequentialist
approach but a teleological one. The doctor should prefer the patient,
not for the patient's happiness or other consequences for sentient
beings but for the overall contribution of the migration of static
patterns toward dynamic quality. The moral duty is a duty toward
fulfilling a teleology, an external end--the evolution toward
betterness. It seems to be a sort of natural law ethical theory. Are
we MOQers supposed to recognize a duty to a natural order?

Such a moral order can describe the world as patterns of value and
dynamic-static evolution, but doing so only tells us what _is_. It
doesn't in itself tell us what we _ought_ to value unless we make the
leap that because the world is ordered in this way, then we ought to
behave according to the natural order.



> dmb says:
> I think it would be pretty tricky to fit the MOQ into any particular type of ethical theory, especially if the options are limited to Western philosophical theories. As far as I know, there is no Western school of thought that says morality goes all the way down. Pirsig thinks that "morality" as most people understand it is actually just one kind of morality, the social level of morality.

Steve:
Has he _discovered_ that morality actually does go all the way down,
or is he creatively extending the concept of morality and pushing it
into areas where it has not been commonly used?

In other usage of morality, the word usually means "what ought to be
done."  Does the MOQ just tell us who is on which side of the 20-yard
line without necessarily telling us who ought to win (as in his LC
intro), or is it about morality? Does it just describe values, or does
it prescribe norms?

Best,
Steve