Occasional Tales

Make your mind up, you deranged old crank. My second port of call this morning was Danwei, where I'm greeted by the story Blogspot blocked again – ongoing saga . Fortunately, as I've just discovered, the proxy I've been going through is still working its magic. Of course, as I know from the previous occasion, it's possible to post here whether you use a proxy service to view blogspot or not. And so the mad old bat continues to be unable to make her mind up.

First catch a cat or dog… You'll need to have a look at William Hogarth's First Stage of Cruelty . The question is what the other three stages are once you've graduated from cruelty to animals. Stage 2 Cruelty to children. Obviously, making them eat pumpkin (major human rights violation), cauliflower (who on earth would want to eat the head of a giant, malodorous, mutant flower?) and cabbage (disgusting and smelly). Stage 3 Cruelty to adults. Making them teach Classes 1 and 2 for three years, and Class 13 for one. Stage 4 Cruelty to divine beings. (Well, I've run out of humans.) Apparently (according to Hogarth), the second stage is beating a horse with a stick; the third is murder; and the fourth is being dissected by anatomists after you've been executed. So my guesses were quite close, then.

Pushing granny under the bus. Three dilemmas this time, although I've already discussed a couple of them here or somewhere else. Dr Dedicated has five patients who are in urgent need of organ donors. He has a sixth patient who's recently been cured and who he could use as a source of organs for the other five. If he were to use the sixth patient in this way, that person would die, although five lives would be saved. Would it be right to kill one person to save many? This is the old Star Trek (aka Spock) Dilemma. You know the line, "The needs of the star outweigh the needs of realism". Well, he probably said something like that. Actually, there was something like this in the paper yesterday. The news was that the former head of China's food and drug agency has been sentenced to death. Some of the drugs which he authorised caused the deaths of ten people. It was felt that 10 out of 1.3 billion wasn't really sufficient to be of any particular concern. I'd say...

Boy meets girl. Bernard is having a casual affair with Ethel, who is married. His girlfriend, Zjamel, asks him whether he's having an affair. He doesn't want to lie, but he doesn't want to upset her either. He decides that avoiding the latter is better than avoiding the former, and thus denies the affair. Zjamel is happy and the affair ends not long afterwards. Did Bernard do the right thing? I suppose this is getting into the world of times when it's better to lie. In other words, we tend to think lying is a bad thing until confronted by a situation where telling the truth would be cause distress to others. Bernard's lie makes Zjamel feel better, and since happiness is the highest good, and lying makes you feel good, then we should lie all the time. Girl: Does my bum look big in this? Boy [lying]: Yes. Girl: Bastard! All right, perhaps that wasn't such a good idea. There are occasions when, I think, a lie is justified, just as there are many occasions when it...

But it comes with bells and whistles. All right, so you have this girlfiend, sorry, girlf r iend who insists on buying trendy crap that doesn't work. You've got the hi-tech toaster that doesn't toast bread properly and a fountain that got clogged up and sank to the bottom of the pond. (You've got a pond that deep?!) One day a catalogue for Bright, Shiny Useless Crap (does sound like the Innovations catalogue, doesn't it?) drops through your front door. It's full of those toasters, fountains, deck chairs with GPS navigation etc. and it's addressed to your girlfriend. Do you dispose of it or do you hand it over only to arrive home one day to a loo which announces how much weight you've lost every time you have a shit? There's too little info in today's problem to come to a judgement. Who's paying for this stuff? Whose house do you live in? Is your girlfriend buying this for you (major guilt trip if you reject it), herself (dump her 'cos she...

How could it have slipped my mind? Today's scenario assumes that you bought a computer online. It's arrived, but you haven't paid for it because you forgot to send a cheque. What do you do? Say nothing or phone the company and tell them the cheque is on its way? I'd do the latter, although I know of more than one person who'd do the former and then wriggle like hell to avoid people coming to repossess said computer. These are also the sort of people who believe that once something is in their possession, regardless of the means by which they acquired it, it's inalienably theirs. The discussion talks about what most people would do as a basis for deciding what your course of action might be, but I merely thought what I'd do when I considered the situation. It didn't even cross my mind to consider what the general custom might supposedly be.

It's what they do. Today's ethical problem is a customary guide to human rights. Human beings have some pretty odd and iffy customs which might result in The right to torture people. The right to own slaves. The right to infanticide. The right to kill and consume the elderly. If human rights was based on customs, then this is the sort of ethically dubious list you might end up with. And all these things have been and are still being done. The first three are alive and kicking, and I'm sure there's still some bunch of cannibals regularly serving mutton dressed as lamb. Of course, the custom-based rights above are all contrary to what we regard as decent behaviour in the West. The discussion in the book notes problems in formulating the UN Declaration on Human Rights because what we might regard as universal such as freedom of religion (aka the right to be wrong) and women's rights (although it should be unnecessary to have specific rights for half of humanity ) were ...

I am a free man. You've probably heard about the experiment Dr Robert Zimbardo conducted in 1971 in which he divided students into "guards" and "prisoners" only to find that the former group rampantly abused the power they'd been given over the latter. Both groups were depersonalised, but the "prisoners" also wore masks concealing who they actually were. The experiment is merely another manifestation of what happened during WW II in the extermination camps in Europe and Japanese POW camps (especially Camp 731). It seems that when one group of people depersonalises another, the latter group seems to lose something of their humanity in the eyes of the former, thus, apparently, excusing the treatment of one group by the other. It's alarming that such a thing should happen in an experiment involving students who were probably against the Vietnam War and would've deplored such brutal behaviour in others. Without being put in such a situation, I ...

Throw the baby out with the bath water. Today's ethical dilemma is a continuation of yesterday's. In this case, Tom the Cabin Boy tries to board the lifeboat, but causes it to tip (he must be Tom the "Fat Bastard" Cabin Boy to do that). The captain orders Bert the Cook to knock Tom back into the water. What does Bert do? The book suggests that Bert could sacrifice himself for Tom or chuck the captain overboard, but he might not favour the former because the instinct for self-preservation is stronger (also, since Tom's a fat bastard, he'll eat all the rations); he might not favour the latter because the captain has the key to the rations locker. Bert could always try to push someone else overboard, and would then perhaps decide who most dispensable member of the crew is; which leads him straight back to Tom the Cabin Boy who's already in the water. Problem solved.

No room at the inn. As I said yesterday, I thought I'd switch to an ethical dilemma. This one is that old story about the lifeboat which is in danger of being capsized if any attempt is made to rescue any more survivors. I've always thought that the pragmatic solution is to accept that there's only room for a certain number of people and that a number are unlikely to survive. The altruistic solution is for everyone to drown, thus ensuring that no one feels left out. The dictatorial solution is for the captain and his inner circle to purge the survivors so that the people who could see that there was no room for them won't feel so bad about drowning when some of the lucky ones ended up being turfed into the drink. The practical solution is to tow the bodies behind the lifeboat because you never know when cannibals might turn up expecting lunch. In reality, you'd hope to hell that you never ended up in a situation where people were going to die and there was nothing y...

It's truen't. Today's problem is the Liar's Paradox. "Everything I say is a lie." You know the deal. That's the last of the the problems from the first section. Might start looking at some ethical problems tomorrow.

Teasing out the problem. So far I've been trying to summarise the philosophy problems, but today it's hard to do that. I'm not sure whether this problem comes from the pen of Lewis Carroll himself, but it's a list of sentences in a random order. In spite of that, it appears that you should be able to reconstruct a coherent argument from them. Everyone in the world has an interest in saving it and protecting the environment. Everyone, if they eat and drink a lot, is part of the ecosphere. If I don't like someone, I avoid them. No one is naturally a meat eater, unless they have a psychological problem. (I assume this means "eats meat to the exclusion of other types of food".) Nobody interested in saving the world could possibly fail to eat lentils at least once a week. All my friends are just other people out there somewhere in the world, people like you and me. Politicians are not part of the ecosphere. All lentil eaters are closet carnivores. When someone ...

But we can't let you in. Today's problem is about the Society for Useless Information which decides that people can only join by submitting a piece of useless information. The problem is that years pass and there are no new members. What's gone wrong? I thought about this and wondered whether it had something to do with the information. The answer is a little less exciting than you might expect and lies in the word "useless". The information being submitted is not completely useless because the one thing for which it is useful is the gaining of admission to the Society for Useless Information . Hence, no one can actually join the Society . A silly dinner party exercise, methinks.

When is a thing no longer the thing it was? I can think of two instances of today's problem which I can take from my own life. I once had a bike. One day as I was passing Downing College, something gave way. The frame had sheared through and I had to get a new frame. In fact, I had to get so much of that bike replaced that by the end only peripheral items remained from the original which meant that by and large it really was no longer the bike I'd bought. The same was roughly true of my first PC. Apart from the tower case, the modem, and the sound card, the thing that got stolen by some bastard, son-of-a-bitch removal firm employee was not the machine I'd bought. This is known as the Sorites Problem and, like yesterday, is about gradience (which is a word; I've declared it to be so). It's all about the point at which someone is officially bald, or when you have enough grains for a heap of sand. There are a lot of things about which we have fuzzy notions because they...

Backwards. I recognise this scenario quite well – a class of slow, lazy pupils; threat of a test; sinking realisation that the whole thing will be a farce. (All right, I added the last part.) The teacher tells his class of retards that there's going to be a test some time before the end of term, and it's going to be a surprise. Two of the pupils reason that it can't be on the very last day because then it wouldn't be a surprise. Nor could it be the day before that or before that or before that etc. for the same reason. (I think you get the picture.) Thus our two idiots conclude that the test is never going to happen because, according to their reasoning, it'll never be a surprise. Nonetheless, the teacher does hold the test about a week later much to the dismay of the half-witted pupils who thought they'd realised what the teacher was up to. The question is whether their reasoning is flawed or the teacher is being a hypocrite. This appears to be an instance wher...

Grass your friends up. Two girls are caught stealing from the school tuck shop and accused of being the notorious Tuck Shop Gang. They're both told separately that if they 'fess up, the headmistress will go easy on them, but if they are found to be lying, then they're for the high jump. Either way, they're damned; but the aim is to get them to admit to their crimes. It's not clear whether the girls are the Tuck Shop Gang, although they're clearly guilty of pilfering.

First define your raven. Today's problem is about claiming all x are y and proving the assertion to be so. The declaration is that "All ravens are black". The philosopher gets out of trying to prove the claim by defining ravens as black and essentially denying any black bird of the corvida species is a raven. As someone points out, what happens if the raven catches a disease which turns it green temporarily? Is it still a raven during that time? I guess there are two problems. One is how to prove that all instance of x are y whether they're dead, alive, or yet to come; the other is a matter of definition, because if something ceases, at least for a time, to satisfy a definition, does it cease to be that thing? Oh, ah. According to the discussion, we're into the world of a priori vs. a posteriori which (and I hate these terms, to be honest, and understand them vaguely at best) are basically behind the whole rationalist vs. empiricist debate. I suppose with t...

Too much off the top. Today's problem is from the Hindu Kush (that's what the book says). It's about some local ordinance about neat hair (I'd be so dead; my hair is professionally messy; show it a comb, and it laughs to scorn). A hairdresser gets the contract to do all the cutting, but he runs away for some reason. The text says that the hairdresser wasn't allowed to cut the hair of anyone who normally did it themselves or his hands would be cut off. This sounds like a damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don't problem. The thing is, he cuts his own hair, but the law says that anyone with messy hair after six months will be executed. (I've heard of a trim, but this is silly.) Either way, the hairdresser can't win. His friends can't do it because amateur hairdressers aren't allowed. Even a second hairdresser (which violates the paradox – sort of) couldn't solve the problem without falling foul of it as well. Obviously, the law was devised not s...

Déjà vu. The latest news has me hating the school just that little bit more than I already do. Our exams are going to be from the 1st of June, which means that my prediction about these being the final two weeks was right. It's not clear, though, exactly when we see the back of our little bastards dears. We'll still have class the weekend after to make up for something (their exams?), but as I know from bitter experience, once we've had our exams, they cease to even make a pretence of being tractable. Hopefully, apart from that weekend (when I'm going to be showing them DVDs – what did the Robot expect we'd be doing? Actual class?), we'll see them no more. But, from next Monday, we've been landed with a whole bunch of proto-Senior 1s, namely the kids who passed the recent exam to get into the school. We're going to be giving them the infamous and impractical Speaking Classes which, I think, will become Speech Classes before much more time passes. Fortun...

The first case or the first case? Today's problem is about Euathlos who is trained by Protagoras to be a lawyer. The condition is that he doesn't need to pay any fees until and unless he wins his first court case. But like all good British Asians, he doesn't want to be a lawyer, but a musician instead. Protagoras wants his money and takes Euathlos to court. Whether he wins or loses, he believes he'll get his money. Euathlos thinks otherwise. The question is who's mistaken. The problem seems to be a question of firsts. There also seems to be a problem with the combination of the conjunctions "until" and "unless". If I say "until", there might be several occasions when the condition remains unfulfilled. If I say "unless", the implication seems to be that Euathlos would have to win his very first case, not just the fifth or sixth. That's how he interprets the agreement. The use of "and" doesn't help Protagoras,...

Seeing is believing. Today's philosophy problem is about a farmer who checks on his prize cow. He thinks he sees the cow in the field, but it's actually something else. The herdsman actually sees the cow in the field. The cow was in the field all along, but the farmer was mistaken in his impressions. The question is whether the farmer was right to say the cow was there. The farmer was right for the wrong reason, but, I think the crucial point is that he believed he knew the truth. The problem, I suppose, is that his version of reality was out of line with reality as it actually was. There wasn't really any cost to the farmer because the herdsman confirmed with facts what the farmer thought to be the truth. If the cow had been in another field, then that would've been another matter. The farmer probably would've wondered how the cow, having been in one field, had strayed to another. The issue seems to stray into the realm of belief where knowledge isn't based o...

Think again. One of the books I bought in Hong Kong was 101 Philosophy Problems by Martin Cohen. The first problem is about a liar who is going to be executed unless he can come up with one true statement, in which case he'll be sent to prison for ten years. But when the day or reckoning comes, the prisoner is not only not executed, but also released on the spot. The question is what statement might he have made to be let off any punishment. The statement has to be a true declaration, which excludes commands such as "Don't execute me". Something obviously true would only get him ten years inside. The answer is apparently based on the Liar's Paradox ("Everything I say is a lie."). The prisoner, Cohen suggests, would write something like "I shall be hanged tomorrow", which will be true if it happens, but violate the judge's sentence. Now, if only I could've thought of the answer. My version would've been much more interesting. The pr...

On the job again. I now believe that most of Class 13 no longer have their books, and even the ones who have their books aren't even bothering to open them. As for asking them about what they did during the holiday, it seems that apathy reigned supreme. The general response I got was "sleeping". Perhaps it's only the migrant workers and foolish foreigners who travel in China during any of the golden weeks. I'm wondering whether the heat will is going to make their brains even more torpid than usual. We're not even sure how much more teaching time we have left. Probably the final exam will be in the last week of May which is a mere two and a half weeks away. We'll simply stop teaching without any sense of a conclusion. In fact, we'll just be starting the next theme. The latest news I have about our antics in June is that the teaching load has been badly skewed, with Jane and Todd getting four classes a day, whereas I've ended up with two. I haven...

Oh how I wish I wasn't. Actually, I nearly wasn't back today at all. If I hadn't checked the date on yesterday's paper, I would've been trying to come back tomorrow only to find I was a day late . But I had the misfortune to note the date instead. I managed to spend a whole week doing none of those things that you'd traditionally associate with a holiday. I didn't go to a single museum which is a little unusual for me. Nor did I go anywhere special per se , unless you count Tai Wo and Discovery Bay; but I had good reason on both occasions. In fact, apart from buying 17 books altogether, I'm not sure what I did to fill in the time. There was at least one day when it rained and I sat round in Alison's flat reading until I felt that I needed to go on my adventures. I had intended to buy books and read them throughout the week, although I did no such thing most of the time. This is why I'm baffled about how the past seven flew by with such celerity. ...