Archive for November, 2006
Morality
Posted on November 6, 2006
Uncategorized
I’ve been thinking about morality.
For someone who once based his ethics upon a religious imperative, morality presents unique challenges. How do you judge right and wrong when you don’t have a big beard in the sky dispensing irrefutable declaratives? Is there really anyone with the authority to state that what I do is wrong or right? Don’t worry, SafeT isn’t contemplating murder Dostoevsky style, he’s the same nice guy you’ve come to know and love. Perverse and perverted, yes, but no danger to himself or others.
I believe that most people wander through life doing things that they think are right or wrong based on rules of behavior and emotional predilections with little thought as to the root truth of what is right or wrong about the choices they make. Others might think that, perhaps, laws and society are dictating right and wrong. But fear of retribution is rarely the true moral motivation we operate under. How many times were you thinking about the relevant statutes when deciding on a course of action? What of actions you take that aren’t governed by law, such as monogamy and truthfulness?
I’m not covering any new ground here, although it is somewhat new for me specifically. I graduated from high school with a 1.9 GPA and have only a handful of community college credits to my name. I find that my wetware is relatively capable, but applying it has always been a challenge for me. So the internet becomes my classroom to a certain extent. I found this article from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to be interesting. I also became fascinated with the implications of this Taco Bell Nutritional Guide.
From the Stanford article I reacquainted myself with the organ transplant moral quandry, from Taco Bell I learned that a bean burrito, if ordered “fresco style”, is really not bad for you at all by fast food standards. First, the organ transplant.
Lets start with the following implausible situation. There is a group of five people in peril beneath a large, suspended weight. When the weight falls, as it surely will, they will die. There is a single person who is standing under another suspended weight, but this person is not in any danger. You are in possession of a button which will cause the first weight to be rendered harmless while releasing the second weight, killing the single person. What do you do?
- Press the button, saving five people while killing the one.
- Do nothing, allowing the five people to die while leaving the single person unharmed.
- Join the five people under their weight and lead them all in a spirited round of singing “We Shall Overcome” in order to lift their spirits just before they–and you–die a horrible crushing death.
It is very tempting to press the button, eh? Go ahead, its hypothetical anyway. Whatever button you currently have your hand on is not likely to hold the power of life or death. If you’re lucky, the button you are going to press will result in an audible beep. I like beeping.
So lets change the situation a bit, and introduce you to the organ transplant scenario. There are five people who have recently been attacked by a maniac. Each has a different damaged organ without which he or she will die within a few hours. Heart, lungs, liver, etc.
You are a gifted organ transplant surgeon who is faced with the sad task of overseeing their inevitable death due to a chronic shortage of organs. A man walks into the emergency room with a vicious hangnail, but he is otherwise healthy. As the amazing surgeon you are, you know that harvesting the requisite organs from this man will result in his death, but will certainly save all of the injured patients. Do you…
- Kill the mostly-healthy man, harvest his organs and save the victims.
- Fix the man’s hangnail and let the victims die.
- Read the hangnail patient a collection of Emily Dickensen and T.S. Eliot poems while listening to the Cure’s Disintegration continuously until the man offers you his organs of his own free will.
- He may even offer to kill himself with a sharpened soup spoon. This would be considered a bonus point.
This second scenario is actually the same as the first in that we are faced with the choice of murdering someone to save five others. No matter how many people are saved as a result of murder, it is still murder and wrong… by most people’s accounts.
But while all of this is interesting, and that Stanford article goes into more depth and explores many approaches to address the question of morality, I’m still left with a disturbing murkiness as far as what is and what isn’t good. Why would either possible outcome be good… or bad? No matter what rule I or the various referenced thinkers cited by the Stanford article come up with to justify my decision, is it not merely a rationalization of a choice I’ve already made? I think that’s enough out of me for now, I’ll talk more on it later. I welcome your comments, suggestions and questions.
Folk Versions of Rap Songs, Volume I: You Down with That?
Posted on November 2, 2006
Uncategorized
Safe T Halloween
Posted on November 1, 2006
Uncategorized
Hey, lookit Sam in her cute widdle cowgirl outfit! Yes, peoples it was a Halloween yesterday night, and with that comes Trick-Or-Treating.
Just in case you don’t celebrate Halloween where you are and, perhaps, aren’t up to date on the minutiae of American culture, here’s a refresher:
On Halloween, the physically immature offspring of common Americans don elaborate costumes and beg for candy from their neighbors in a practice intended to inculcate one another to the vagarities of homeless life, thereby instilling fear of failure and a strong academic/work ethic in the next generation.
On a related note, yesterday I witnessed an enormously obese woman wearing a bright green witch costume riding one of those electric senior scooters down a side street near my office. I didn’t have my camera, and it would have been awkward to have pulled up next to her and started snapping pictures.
Me: “Yeah, baby! Woo-woo, witchy-poo! Over here! Yeah, that’s it, big girl!”
Large witch on Amigo: “That’s genuinely hurtful. I hate you.”
You know, overweight witch upon a three-wheeler, you’re right. I’m sorry for mocking you. Queen sized witches need to get around too, and they shouldn’t let the gout or bad knees get in their way. I’m a bad person, really.
As a palate cleanser, here’s another picture of Sam! Now don’t you feel better about my insensitivity? I know I do. Having a cute daughter goes a long way toward justifying my own shortcomings. We handed out candy, used sidewalk chalk to draw pictures of creatures getting run over by the cars in the driveway, and tromped around the subdivision collecting sucrose specimens.
I went out dressed as a slightly overweight white man with short hair. I brought the family dog along to cement the bourgeois imagery and make it extra gritty and real. But ah, what might have been. I, too, could have been a cowgirl.
