Occasional Tales

Like Dracula, he keeps coming back to get swatted. I seem to have acquired a little pest over on Green Bamboo (the active one) recently. Someone – and this can't be automated – keeps leaving a comment with a bunch of links to sites which claim to be selling virtual merchandise for various online games. A Google search seems to reveal nothing good about these people. The stupid thing is that unless you happen to be searching for the content of the post (the comment has appeared with several different ones, but only one at a time), you're never going to find the comment. The culprit appears to be Chinese since the comment always starts "Welcome to visit…" which is a piece of typical Chinglish. A search also leads to quite a few Chinese sites, several of which Google marks as harmful. I seldom see such warnings and the whole thing stinks. Apart from that, I'm all right, although I've been suffering from a tension headache for the past couple of days. Green Bambo...

Magnanimity. John Donne famously told Death not to be proud; but according to one definition of pride, Death could justifiably be proud, because what is not to say that Death doesn't have a good and noble character? That is, goodness and nobility are necessary prerequisites for pride. A proud person is moderately pleased when they are praised by their peers, but not remotely interested when they're praised by lesser mortals or for lesser actions. In other words, pride is not one of the Seven Deadly Sins of snivelling Christian tradition, but a kind of virtue, albeit one that's limited to a small number of allegedly deserving people. The idea comes from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics . Is pride such a bad thing? If I've achieved something difficult, for example, is it wrong to be proud of my achievement or of myself for achieving it? Or should I only be proud of the thing achieved and let others be proud of me for my achievement? What if there's no one to be prou...

Or disgrace? Chrysippus the Stoic said that pleasure is not good. There are disgraceful pleasures and nothing disgraceful can be good. Are we talking about you or me, Chrysippus? Your morality or mine? If I assume that someone else will enjoy what I enjoy, then I may be disappointed. Just look at my classes. The book has many exercises of the sort that I enjoyed doing in English class when I was at school, yet I know from long experience that the odds of them enjoying some unit or exercise which I think might stimulate their interest are already against me. In general terms, of all the things which humans find pleasurable, most of us find only a subset of them to be enjoyable. It should be remembered that our subsets don't always coincide. Just because you might like it, doesn't mean that I will.

Advice to the emperor. One day Qin Shihuang was wondering why people didn't live as long as they used to. His chief minister, Qi Bo, should've said, "Well, dude, if you keep massacring whole families, it's no wonder no one's living as long. This is the age of Butchery, Buggery, Burning and Burial. And that's just a fun afternoon out for you. No one else enjoys it. So long as people live in absolute terror of you, they're going to be dropping like flies." But Qi Bo, knowing that the emperor was never in a mood to be gainsaid, waffled on blandly about moderation, regularity, and balance, perhaps hoping that Qin Shihuang would moderate his human rights abuses; be regular in them; and let everyone share in them. Can you imagine the disgrace for prominent families of the realm if the emperor wasn't even bothering to execute any of them? Should the emperor have followed Qi Bo's actual advice? That was his choice. Besides, Qi Bo was just making a few ...

Evil – I'm lovin' it! St Augustine began life as a fairly normal sort of chap and then got religion. He might've been remembered as the most fun person in history. Well, he'd probably be remembered for stealing pears and for enjoying the act rather than the fruit, which was fed to the pigs. The dilemma in the book is whether Augustine knowingly chose to do evil when he became the Pear Tree Raider. But this situation makes me wonder about motivation. We tend to judge people's actions in terms of the reason for that action. It's clear that we have a gradient scale where this reason is sufficient, but that reason is not. We like to know there's a good reason for something. Gustino's reason was the act itself, but this is regarded as weak motivation, and although we might disapprove of theft, we understand if there was some utilitarian purpose behind it. But Gus didn't want the pears for himself or for anyone else; he didn't even steal them for the...

Now you see me; now you don't. What would you do if you had a ring that made you invisible? Would you go round saying "Yesss my preciousss" and falling into rivers of lava? Gyges was shepherd who found a magic ring and abused its power, which culminated in the murder of the king and the usurpation of his throne. I should note that Mrs King was in on the plot and had put out to the invisible man. How easily could we be tempted to do wrong if we had such a ring (provided, of course, Sauron – bit thick if you ask me – hadn't put much of his power into it)? My inclination would be to keep the ring secret for a start. What would I do with such a ring? I don't know. I'm not inclined to larceny; I'm not a stalker; I couldn't use such a thing to eavesdrop because I don't understand Chinese well enough. I couldn't sneak into and out of the airport because I'd still give off a heat signature and thus register on the cameras that check people's t...

The Man is still a Machine. Today's problem is that Dr Descartes is talking about the division of body and soul, which makes the former little more than a machine controlled by the latter, which is independent of it. The question is that if the body's a mere machine and the soul is independent and immortal, then is there any reason why people could not be killed as freely as animals? Of course, this would assume that animals don't have a soul or, at best, have lesser souls than ours, which makes them fair game. When you live a short, miserable life, where Death waits round every corner with Famine, Pestilence and War, perhaps you want some reassurance that there is something beyond death to make the brevity of life seem less of a waste of time. Also, what an odd sort of existence, to be alive so briefly and then spend eternity either strumming a harp on a cloud or having demons prod your arse with pitchforks. The afterlife does seem sadly unproductive, pointless and rather ...

Tighten the nuts. Dr Descartes is now putting forward arguments about how to distinguish people from mere mechanoids. One is that they'd be incapable of using language creatively (i.e., language use that goes beyond what could merely be learnt), even although they might be able to give a verbal response to various stimuli. ("Ouch! You should not poke my diodes like that." "Check out the software on her.") The other is that a machine wouldn't have our range of capabilities, although there might be one thing at which it excels. Unless our brains are badly miswired, humans can produce novel utterances, whereas creatures which can "speak" merely mimic human speech, but are incapable of producing new strings of words. People who are born deaf and dumb still manage to communicate creatively. The question is whether the gulf between humans and animals is that great. Animals have ways of communicating and they aren't exactly wholly specialised in their...

What are we? We continue with the slightly deranged ramblings of Dr Descartes. This time, it's that little matter of free will. If we didn't have free will, then what would be the difference between humans and animals? What's to say that we have free will at all? I'm not saying that some god is the puppet master and we're the marionettes, but what I am saying is that we don't have as much free will as we like to believe. What we do have is choices. If I had an infinite number of choices open to me every time I made a decision, then I'd have free will. But I don't have such choices because my actions often lead me in very specific directions. If I do A, then B is going to result. The only choice I might have is not to proceed to B, although I might, and probably want to do that anyway. Or perhaps we always have infinite choices, but we can instantly exclude 99.99999…% of them. For example, I might need more breakfast cereal. My obvious course of action is...

Continuing from yesterday. I didn't realise that there was a bit more to yesterday's problem than the picture by Hogarth. The next part is about a lecture which involves the lecturer, Dr Descartes, an obvious subscriber to the Confucian School of Animal Rights, cutting the heart out of a live chimpanzee to demonstrate that animals are just machines. But one student notes that what can be said of non-sentient animals can also be said of human beings. The little swot has a point, of course, although while I recognise that humans are part of the animal kingdom, I recognise that we have more going for us than mere instinct. Humane or ethical treatment of animals, yes; but to give them right equal to that of humans is to overpromote them. Besides, Nature's a hard bitch. If lions were the dominant species on the planet and we were still humans anyway, they'd be snacking on us because that's what lions do. It wouldn't be a matter of lions thinking they're better, t...

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.