[MD] Morality and Prudence

[Steven Peterson]

Hi Matt, dmb,

On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 7:00 PM, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

Steve:
That's exactly what I am trying to say. I would add that the notion of
empathy as the _basis_ for morality though is something mutually
exclusive with the MOQ. So can't base an MOQ morality/prudence
distinction on that score. That's how I think _I_ would make the
pragmatic distinction, but the MOQ does not allow for doing that in
Pirsig's system.