[MD] Morality and Prudence

[Matt Kundert]

Dave,

Steve said:
What people usually mean by the word "morality" includes the 
capacity to empathize, but in the MOQ, morality goes all the way 
down. 

DMB said:
Seems like you're bending over backwards to find something wrong 
with empathy, which is kinda funny given the meaning of term 
"empathy".

Matt:
As Steve said explicitly for his own part, I think you are 
misunderstanding his intentions.  Steve seem to be asking for a 
systematic expansion of the Metaphysics of Quality, Pirsig's 
systematic philosophy.  You alluded later, correctly I think, to "care," 
which is one of the earliest important terms of Pirsig's philosophy, 
but it is from ZMM, and the earlier stages of it no less (and the 
dialectical quality of that book sometimes means the early stages of 
that book get drowned in the later).  What Steve wants are 
integrations of all the material found in both books into a unified 
exposition.  Not at all at once perhaps (this is, after all, just a 
discussion forum), but moving in that general direction.  How does 
"care" fit in the MoQ?  How does "empathy"?  How, given the 
metaphysical categories of DQ/SQ, does one conceptualize the 
notion of "empathy"?  Steve knows what it is; he just wants to 
know how Pirsig's MoQ would conceptualize it.  He's not 
_contesting_ empathy, he's requesting a Pirsigian understanding of 
it.

Steve is, it seems to me, essentially asking for a rapprochement 
between "morality-commonly-understood" and "MoQ-morality."  
Because as Steve points out, the MoQ understands the whole of 
existence as a moral order, which means morality goes all the way 
down.  A way of explicating that is to say that physics is a species of 
the genus morality.  What Steve is wondering about is how we 
cobble together, using Pirsig's tools (and not, for these purposes, 
our common understandings of things, which defeats the purpose of 
exploring what Pirsig is able to do in the scope of his writing), a 
functioning moral philosophy that can do all the kinds of things we 
want it to do.  You don't see the problem with being able to do this.  
I'm not sure Steve does exactly either, nor am I sure I see a 
problem on the horizon of doing it.  The point, however, is that it 
has not been done.  Steve wants to get back to the text, back to the 
letter in order to build out a spirit that can do all the things we want 
it to.  It is a way of testing the adequacy of a philosophy, but this 
isn't the way of attacking: it is the way of exploring.  Steve just 
seems to want to explore Pirsig's philosophy.  And this, it seems to 
me, should be the basic orientation we have to every philosophy.

Matt