One of the more outrageous excuses I've heard for Pirsig's muddled thinking came from someone who, while acknowledging logical inconsistencies within Lila, thought that these did not constitute mistakes unless the author claimed they weren't logical inconsistencies. This is like saying that an incorrect answer I give for an arithmetic problem can not be a mistake unless I make the extra claim that it isn't wrong. For the kinds of things we're talking about, they're a mistake right away. Pirsig is writing a serious metaphysics here. One would assume he's trying to avoid logical inconsistencies and that this goal is implicit in most everything he writes, and on the odd occasion when it isn't, only then would he make note of it.
Someone else, who seemed to be realizing that the moral taxonomy might not be all it was cracked up to be, tried to downplay this fact by saying that it was not part of the MOQ but resided under it. However, if it resides under it, then the idea of the moral taxonomy should be derivative of what remains of the MOQ ideas, these principally being that reality is composed of static and dynamic quality and that value, quality, and morals are equivalent. There's nothing in these alone to suggest that certain classes of static morals are better than others.
Pirsig's hope for the moral taxonomy was to give MOQ a kind of Jamesian pragmatism. It represents the only truly practical aspect of MOQ, and you can tell by the way Pirsig writes about it that he's quite proud of it. He thinks he has hit on something quite useful and marvelous and original, and I'm sure he would tell you that it is part of the MOQ.
Someone else argued that Pirsig's books, being novels, should be evaluated differently from normative philosophical works. Western logic, the argument continued, should not be applied to art and besides Pirsig is not telling you what to do or think, but just pointing to possible paths individuals might take.
Pirsig does a lot more than 'point to possible' paths for further inquiry. In Lila, Pirsig clearly tells us how we should think and what we should believe. For example, he tells you that cultures are not all morally equal and they can be graded objectively by his system. He tells you that morality, quality, and value are synonomous. He tells you that Dynamic Quality is undefined and real. I could go on and on about things he tells you that read like gospel. The point here is that Lila is far more than a novel masquerading as a self-help book.
I don't buy the argument that I'm slicing and dicing the art that is Lila. Lila is first and foremost about a metaphysics. If you think creating strawmen, being contradictory, misrepresenting science, and leaving things vague or unexplained in Lila is immune to criticism because it is an expression of art which paints a sometimes unflattering portrait of an imperfect man struggling for the good, then I disagree. This kind of thing worked beautifully in ZMM, but it has no place in a presentation of a metaphysics. These things only serve to mislead and confuse what is intended to be a serious doctrine.
I don't see how the MOQ defies refutation by Western logic by claims that it is more art or fiction than metaphysics. Rather, I see arguments as this as just another way to retreat, sidestep, or minimize mistakes in the MOQ. But it's not the final retreat. Perhaps the final retreat, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, goes like this:
"MOQ defies refutation by Western logic because MOQ proves that Western logic is flawed. Then by the new MOQ logic, 'consistency' of thought is de-emphasized. What's important is 'the good'. So when Pirsig claims 'A' somewhere in Lila and a couple chapters later claims 'B', and 'A' contradicts 'B', it's not such a big deal. In fact, if 'A' and 'B' are both independently good, then both are true. That's because the test of the true is the good. Consistency is one of those vestiges we still stubbornly cling to from SOM. It's nice when you can get it, but it's no longer paramount. Even Godel proved that consistency is a pipe dream, so why be so anal about it? Consistency is not a noun."
In a discussion about how DQ and people interact to create static patterns like rocks, Platt Holden's arguments became more and more speculative, suggesting that rocks can appear simultaneously in quantum space/time and human/mental space/time. This might explain why a rock that you create in your garden when you unearth it can be seconds old (what the MOQ says) and also millions of years old after you have it scientifically dated, without contradiction. I suspect that someone could be driven to such excesses in order to argue through a contradiction in the MOQ, at the risk, of course, of sounding ridiculous!
A similar thing happened in the Dec. 2000 MF, where it was suggested that all MOQ's problems boiled down to the problem of "self". Someone then suggested that this could be resolved by realizing that the self is really an illusion. And since this is consistent with Hinduism, it adds a certain respectability to it. But I'm not happy with it. I feel quite certain I'm not a fiction. I'd much rather retrace my steps and try to figure out which part of this metaphysics is wrong that would lead to such a conclusion.