[MD] Morality and Prudence

[david buchanan]

dmb said:
... Sociopaths and psychopaths are both forms of anti-social personality disorder but the latter is more severe. I'd point out that normally the capacity to feel empathy begins at a very early age. Even infants can do it and researchers like Franz DeWall have found that primates and even rats have this capacity. Empathy is the basic foundation of morality and of the family structure even in the animal world. A person who's incapable of empathy is seriously damaged, is missing something very basic. Morality is about how we relate to each other. It's about "we", as opposed to me or it. Without empathy "we" means nothing.


Steve commented:
What people usually mean by the word "morality" includes the capacity to empathize, but in the MOQ, morality goes all the way down. Rocks and trees and atoms are moral beings. Rather than empathy being "the basic foundation for morality," in the MOQ morality is the basic foundation for everything (which includes empathy). It seems that you've made an argument _against_ the MOQ as the best way to think about morality.

dmb says:
Seems like you're bending over backwards to find something wrong with empathy, which is kinda funny given the meaning of term "empathy". Anyway, since the point was made in terms of what various kinds of mammals can do, in terms of what's basic to what "we" do our branch of the evolutionary tree, and in terms that specifically excluded "it", then a reasonable person should conclude that I'm talking about human morality, and not about rocks or atoms. In effect, you're criticizing my comments for being limited to the actual topic, namely empathy, the thing that sociopathic personalities do not have. 



Steve continued:


Nevertheless, empathy is what I want people to think of with regard to moral talk rather than divine command or Natural Law. If you think it has an important place in the MOQ (if there actually is no contradiction with the MOQ in what you said above), it seems to me this is an area that needs some work since it is not something that I recall Pirsig writing about and since it does not divide neatly into the MOQ levels to talk about moral progress as expansion of the capacity to empathize with wider and wider circles of concern. In the modern liberal conception, morality is about better taking into account the needs of more and more people. In the MOQ as I understand it, that is not what morality _is_ it is just one goal that certain people have that either does or does not contribute to evolution of static patterns toward dynamic quality.



dmb says:

Yea, let's get rid of all those advocates of natural law and divine command. They're drowning out the MOQ and they have to be stopped. 

But seriously, empathy has tremendous evolutionary advantages and the MOQ is not opposed to scientific facts such as those produced by primatologists like Frans DeWall. I mean, we can look at such findings from an MOQ perspective even if Pirsig did not comment on them specifically. That's just par for the course, isn't it? That's what thinking is for, no?


Care is the essential ingredient and it isn't reaching at all to say that empathy is the sort of care we extend to each other. The motorcycle repairman has to care in relation to the bike. The freshman writing her essay has to care about quality in that context. This is JUST as true when it comes to dealing with people, if not MORE so. In Lila he says of his character, that the only moral thing he did on the whole trip was to say something positive about Lila to Rigel. "Yea, she has quality," he said. And it doesn't take much reading between the lines to see that he can truly empathize with her insanity, he defends her right to be insane for a while and tells us that the best thing to do would just let her go through it in peace, someplace quite. 

I can't even imagine how the MOQ's moral vision could be incompatible with human empathy. It may be awkward to push the concept all the way down to atoms but it's so basic that even rats exhibit some empathy and a distaste for cruelty. Chimps are very sophisticated about it and small children are already experts. It is easy to justify intellectually and all the great spiritual leaders have held it as centrally important. It reaches across and transcends the levels. Do unto others. It's the golden rule wherever you go. Can you think of any GOOD reason why the MOQ would be inconsistent with that? I can't.