[MD] The Relativist's journey

[david buchanan]

dmb said to Ron and Steve:
I'd certainly agree with Ron about the MOQ's ability to judge cultural values,..  I think that this ability is much less limited than the ethno-centric judgements to which Rorty's view would confine us. I think the MOQ's evolutionary morality is the non-ethnocentric way of judging that Steve is asking for. This ability doesn't depend on ultimate foundations of the kind that Rorty denies, and yet it escapes the paralyzing confines of one's ideological tribe.

Steve replied:
Sure, the MOQ can be used to judge cultural values, but to call the MOQ a non-ethnocentric way of doing it is extremely naive. ...What Rorty is saying is that philosophy cannot offer us a foundation upon which to create mathematical-type proofs of the superiority of one culture over another. We can certainly supply lots of reasons why the Taliban sucks, but philosophy can't offer us a way of saying how the Taliban doesn't conform to reality while democracy does. There is no way to adjudicate between such provincial sets of values that does not depend entirely on some set of provincial values. Pirsig certainly understood this fact. He was not giving us a way to step out of our own skins to make moral judgments. His goal was the more modest yet manageable one of demonstrating that we could apply reason to morality and that reason is a moral process. 


dmb says:
Philosophy can't offer us mathematical-type proofs or foundations that tell us which society conforms to reality. Okay. We can agree on that much. Rorty is denying the kind of foundation that were sought in his own positivist tradition. These denials are meant to exorcise the demons that haunt his own school. Pirsig attacks the aims of assumptions of scientific empiricism too. But Rorty comes to very different conclusions. I think they are drastic and paralyzing. To say, as you just did, that there is no way to adjudicate between sets of values, is a very neat description of the relativist's position. Apparently, Rorty thinks this adjudication is impossible without philosophical foundations and so rejecting foundations can lead only to this kind of ethnocentric relativism. I like to call this way of thinking "all-or-nothingism". Pirsig doesn't think we need any fixed, eternal, objective truths to avoid relativism. That was Plato's mistake too.

"...the Metaphysics of Quality says that what is meant by "human rights" is usually the moral code of intellect-vs.-society, the moral right of intellect to be free of social control. Freedom of speech; freedom of assembly, of travel; trial by jury; habeas corpus; government by consent-these "human rights" are all intellect-vs.-society issues. According to the Metaphysics of Quality these "human rights" have not just a sentimental basis, but a rational, metaphysical basis."

"Communism and socialism, programs for intellectual control over society, were confronted by the reactionary forces of fascism, a program for the social control of intellect. ... The gigantic power of socialism and fascism, which have overwhelm this century, is explained by a conflict of levels of evolution."

"It is immoral to speak against a people because of the color of their skin, or any other genetic characteristic because these are not changable and don't matter anyway. But it is not immoral to speak against a person because of his cultural characteristics if those cultural characteristics are immoral. These are changable and they do matter.  ..Genetic patterns just confuse the matter. And this is a war in which intellect, to end the paralysis of society, has to know whose side it is on, and support that side, and never undercut it." 

"This conflict (the overthrow of society by intellect) explains the driving force behind Hitler not as an insane search for power but as an all-consuming glorification of social authority and hatred of intellectualism. His anti-Semitism was fueled by anti-intellectualism. His hatred of communists was fueled by anti-intellectualism. His exaltation of the German volk was fueled by it. His fanatic persecution of any kind of intellectual freedom was driven by it."