[MD] The Moral Landscape

[Steven Peterson]

Steve:
What spiritual matters are you talking about? Harris embraces a "new
spiritual rationality" that recognizes that science presupposes values
and can apply its reason to study values. This is Pirsig's dream but
apparently your nightmare.


Mark:
Steve, spirituality is not rational.  Rationality has no place in it.  You
have got no idea what you are talking about.  ...I do not believe this
was Pirsig's dream.  I think you are being misled.


Steve:

I didn't just pull the term "new spiritual rationality" out of my ass,
Mark. This is indeed Pirsig's dream

ZAMM:
"The cause of our current social crises, he would have said, is a
genetic defect within the nature of reason itself. And until this
genetic defect is cleared, the crises will continue. Our current modes
of rationality are not moving society forward into a better world.
They are taking it further and further from that better world. Since
the Renaissance these modes have worked. As long as the need for food,
clothing and shelter is dominant they will continue to work. But now
that for huge masses of people these needs no longer overwhelm
everything else, the whole structure of reason, handed down to us from
ancient times, is no longer adequate. It begins to be seen for what it
really is...emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless and
spiritually empty. That, today, is where it is at, and will continue
to be at for a long time to come."

ZAMM:
"He felt that the solution started with a new philosophy, or he saw it
as even broader than that...a new spiritual rationality...in which the
ugliness and the loneliness and the spiritual blankness of dualistic
technological reason would become illogical. Reason was no longer to
be "value free." Reason was to be subordinate, logically, to Quality,
and he was sure he would find the cause of its not being so back among
the ancient Greeks, whose mythos had endowed our culture with the
tendency underlying all the evil of our technology, the tendency to do
what is "reasonable" even when it isn’t any good. That was the root of
the whole thing. Right there. I said a long time ago that he was in
pursuit of the ghost of reason. This is what I meant. Reason and
Quality had become separated and in conflict with each other and
Quality had been forced under and reason made supreme somewhere back
then."

Steve:
The solution Pirsig proposed was a "root expansion of reason" so that
it can deal with values. It starts with recognizing that reason itself
is subordinate to Quality, that reason is not independent of values,
it presupposes values. Therefore, there is nothing unreasonable about
values talk.


Mark:
Let me say, that I follow no-one.  My conscious experience dictates all.  I
derive things empirically through experience.  I am not one of those theists
that believes everything the physics textbooks tells me, nor am I an
agnostic waiting to really see the electron before I  believe in it, nor am
I an atheist that needs to deny some phantom, that I have created, in order
to justify my behavior.  So you may be right if a discussion on morality
means creating a moral system scientifically and then forcing it on people,
we have nothing to discuss.  The whole concept of defining morality in such
a way smacks of a highly dogmatic Religion which will be forcing us wear
burkas because it has been scientifically proven to be highly moral.  Such
an encapsulation of morals is not only dangerous, it is immoral.

Steve:
Where are you getting this bit about "creating a moral system
scientifically and then forcing it on people"? Science tells us that
it is good for you to exercise everyday. Is anyone forcing you to do
so? But nevertheless, isn't it good to know what is and is not good
for you even if no one forces you to do it? Or is it better to remain
ignorant of certain truths?