[MD] Morality and Prudence

[david buchanan]

Horse said to dmb:
I think what Steve's saying here is something similar to what I said a while back.

dmb says:
Oh, well in that case I don't disagree. ...Just kidding. 


Horse continued:
As I understand the MoQ, all actions are moral actions (i.e. value judgements) but some actions are better or worse than others. And some actions are downright immoral - such as intellect being dominated by society etc.


dmb says:

Yes, some actions are downright immoral. But we can't say that and also say that all actions are moral actions simply because those are contradictory claims. I mean we cannot rightly say that "all actions are moral and some actions are downright immoral". That's like saying all trees are green but some trees are downright brown. 

I guess the confusion stems from the fact that immorality is basically a matter of following the lower level at the expense of the higher level, a matter of choosing the wrong values when they conflict, as in the case you cited wherein social level values trump intellectual values. Or if the doctor chooses to save the germs rather than the patient, etc., etc.. 

In other words, the MOQ's moral hierarchy allows us to say that values go all the way down but the evolutionary layers of those values give us a structured rank so that we can still distinguish between moral behavior and immoral acts. The notions that values go all the way down does not flatten the moral landscape so that all acts have equal moral value. Far from it. The notions of morality and immorality are both expanded in this picture. The MOQ even postulates that the creation of life was not an accident of chemistry but rather a moral act and, as you rightly pointed out with the Pirsig quote, even "the 'Laws of Nature' are moral laws."


Horse said:
So, while it is entirely possible (and for some people entirely normal) to act immorally, it is impossible to act amorally. Pirsig gives many instances of immoral behaviour throughout Lila in relation to the MoQ but his references to amoral behaviour are, for the most part, in the context of the problems of a SOM - i.e. amorality as a mistake of the objective part of SOM.


dmb says:
There's no doubt that amoral scientific objectivity is Pirsig's (And James's) central target for attack. We see the difference between that and the MOQ's moral vision in the quote you provided, in Pirsig's realization that the idea that the physical order of the universe is also part of the moral order of the universe is the oldest idea known to man AND we see it in the passages where Pirsig gives us his reformulation of the free will-determinism dilemma. Instead of extending the laws of cause and effect upward from the physical realm to the sphere of human action, the MOQ begins with the fact that chemistry professors make choices and extends that fact downward so that physical patterns like atoms also make choices, although the latter has far fewer options of course. 

Now, it might be helpful to realize that Modern philosophers have been going round and round about the distinction between facts and values. Ever since David Hume said that we can't deduce values from facts, this has been a troublesome pivot point in philosophy. Sometimes this same idea is expressed in terms of what "is" (the facts) and what "ought" to be (values and morals). Scientific objectivity, then, is the position that says reality fundamentally is just what "is" and the facts of the universe are fundamentally physical, this view says. You can never get values from the facts, they say, so morals and values are just things we made up arbitrarily, they have no basis in fact and can't be verified by science or the empirical method. The positivists even went so far as to say that morals and values are scientifically meaningless. But recently I learned that Hume never meant to say anything that drastic. He simply meant that the relation between facts and values was more complicated than a simple deduction of one from the other. He just meant that we have to be more sophisticated in our logic and thinking to get from one to the other. 

And then think about the relation between facts and values as it is formulated by the pragmatic theory of truth. Pirsig approvingly quotes James saying, "truth is a species of the good". Right there in that pithy little phrase we see that truth is a particular kind of good, that facts are a certain kind of value. This is also the move by which intellect is subordinated to value. The MOQ says that intellect is the highest form of static value patterns, but it is a subset of value, one category of morality that is subordinate to DQ, which isn't a static level at all but rather the source and substance of all static values. Morals and values are completely ubiquitous in this picture but it there are degrees and levels and the evolutionary process involves conflict and struggle between conflicting values and that's how we can still have moral and immoral acts. You know, Lila's battle is everyone's battle and that is always a moral battle. Her static patterns are always in migration toward DQ but that doesn't mean that a successful migration is certain. In fact, the reader is left wondering how things will work out for Lila and none of the possible scenarios is very promising. We just hope she can avoid death, jail or a long term stay at some psychiatric hospital. Even in the best case scenarios, she becomes a housewife or a church lady. These are not exactly the pinnacles of freedom, you know? In the MOQ, they're not especially moral or evolved. 


Horse said:
So neither myself nor Steve (nor Pirsig) are saying that immoral behaviour is not possible. Just amoral behaviour/actions etc.


dmb says:

Well, that's not what I saw in Steve's claim. He said, "What doesn't seem to be allowed in the MOQ though is to say that one behavior is morality and another is merely prudence since all behavior (and everything, period) is a matter of morality". If, as Steve says in the last part, all behavior and everything, period, is a matter of morality, then he saying that no behavior is a matter of immorality. Has he not just said that acts motivated by empathy are morally equal to acts motivated by self-serving interests and he has justified this equation by pointing the the MOQ's claim that everything is a matter of morality. If he's not saying nothing is immoral, then his claim is very badly put because that's exactly what I took it to mean. That's why I responded to Steve's claim the way I did. "By that reasoning", I said, "there can be no such thing as immorality in the MOQ" and "It's like saying everything is Quality so there is nothing bad and all things are excellent." It's not just me, is it? This really would be a silly and absurd conclusion, wouldn't it?