[MD] Begging the question of what is Quality

[Tuukka Virtaperko]

All,

According to the MOQ it's at least sometimes moral to beg the question 
of "What is Quality (ie. moral value)?" Pirsig claims to have empirical 
experience that doing so increases our understanding of morality and 
helps us in making moral choices.

Begging the question is an informal fallacy, a form of rhetoric. The MOQ 
states logic to be the subset of an undefined concept, Quality, for 
which it's moral to beg the question of how to define it. This is not 
intended to disallow logic.

Logic is about form. But arguments, that are informal fallacies, do not 
have any flaw in their form. Therefore begging the question of how to 
define Quality does not make the MOQ inconsistent or disallow logic.

When Russell applied logic to fictional entities and concluded they 
don't exist, Meinong told him his argument begs the question. In this 
case, nobody assumed that it's moral to beg a question about fictional 
entities. Furthermore, Meinong rejected Russell's argument on moral 
grounds, not because there would've been a flaw in its form. If it is 
permissible to reject an argument on moral grounds surely it should be 
permissible to accept an argument on moral grounds, too?

All axioms of logic are chosen on moral grounds since otherwise they'd 
be theorems. For example, it's moral that axioms aren't unnecessarily 
complicated and that it's easy to make relevant proofs with them.

Regards,

Tuk


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