In case you don’t read the comments, let me repeat some interesting stuff here.
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The conference yesterday went very well.
I want to recommend, in fact, that those of you who intend to go to conferences should make an effort to hang out with therapists whenever possible.
Whereas all the conferences of teachers offer coffee and doughnuts, this conference had on the hospitality table a selection of pastries from the local French bakery and a basket of assorted teas, including Lapsang Souchong.
I finished the Bijoux Blouse, but it is wet because I am blocking it, so I offer you no picture. I have put pictures of wet blocking things here before, I know, but they are not accurate, so I am not going to do that on a day when we are thinking about inaccuracy and evil. I would say that it turned out well, and I am looking forward to wearing it, but I could not help but notice that it involves several fashion faux pas, in that it is a boxy drop-shouldered sweater which is in color a very good match for my skin.
This round of discussion of good and evil was foreshadowed by a thought a few days ago that we need to distinguish between actual wrongdoing and mere differences in style, which we should probably ignore. So I will not hold these things against the Bijoux Blouse, but will wear it when I am not attempting to be chic. I bought the yarn and pattern last year when the closest I hoped to get to being chic was wearing clothes without holes in them.
My plan for this weekend is to be completely domestic. I plan to clean house, do the grocery shopping, cook, sew, stuff like that. The past three weekends have involved work (and illness) and next weekend is filled with parties, so this is the ideal weekend for unbounded domesticity.
I am still very interested in your thoughts on the questions posed yesterday, and your responses to the comments mentioned above.
Coming back to say that Ozarque is having a discussion on online civility over at her place which dips into points on perception, cross-cultural mores, and utility vs. morality.
“Canadian National said ‘But we learn (by society, perhaps) that being wrong is bad. Even in my courses, my students who are in their 20s, 30s, 40s are afraid to be wrong, so they don’t even try. How do we instill the idea that being wrong is okay?’ “
The most reliable way I ever found to explain this to my students — who were, like Canadian National’s, adults — was to take up the question of scientific experiments. You have a hypothesis; you do your experiment; your results demonstrate that your hypothesis is wrong. Students tend to think this means that you’re a failure, that you’ve wasted your time stupidly, that you’re a “bad” scientist, and so on far into the night. But I was always able to explain to them — successfully — that that’s not true, because every time someone demonstrates that a particular hypothesis is wrong they have made it possible for other scientists to eliminate that hypothesis from their list of things that have to be investigated. This is progress, and it’s valuable; it’s a case where being “wrong” is a good and useful outcome.
I consider myself closer to you on the subject. However, the problem with moral absolutism, is that not all people can be respectful of other people’s beliefs, especially when they find themselves in that black and white territory.
On the other hand, I sometimes play with the idea of what happens when our justice system fails, and would we be better served if violent rapists, pedophiles, and murderers were simply snuffed out, to keep them from perpetuating? Even though I think killing people is absolutely wrong, I sometimes think certain people (like John Evander Couey) should just be taken out back and shot.
Is morality dependent upon restitution? Much of our legal system is based on Germanic ideas, one of which is weregild — payment by the murderer or his/her family to the victim’s family an appropriate monetary sum to compensate them for his/her loss. We don’t put a sum on a person’s worth anymore (or do we, and if we didn’t why would we sue for wrongful death in civil court when we can’t win in a criminal court?)
I’m not really sure where I’m going with this, but I think my question is, would morality flourish or diminish without a superimposed legal system? If it were okay to kill someone as long as you paid the family weregild, would it still be immoral? How much of morality has to do with the approval or disapproval of our culture and the people around us?
Maybe I’m a relativist, after all. I really like the idea of a moral system there for us to discover, like multiplication tables. This implies there is some sort of natural law. But if we look to nature, do we really find evidence for that? The natural law seems to be dog eat dog. But the social law is different, as it helps us to live together in larger groups, such as primates. Do you still have that Dawson book?
RYC: I also believe that there is an external reality, but that it’s harder to pin down than we think. Would it include morals? It’s like you said: “if you and I disagree about pi, we would look at objects– like circles — to continue our discussion.” So let’s look at killing: the fact that cats appear to have different ideas about it, seems to suggest that morals are less universal than pi or Fibonacci numbers. On the other hand, we don’t really know how cats feel about it: killing mice comes natural to them, but killing other cats could be a more emotional experience. I feel that moral notions come from inside, that they are largely determined by our genes, and that they are evolutionary effective as far as they facilitate our functioning as social animals (which most felines are not, another difference being that they are carnivores). The laws that Kali Mama mentioned are meant to facilitate social behaviour too, and like her, I wonder about their universal value.
My friend Margaret came up with this some time ago:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/science/20moral.html?ex=1332043200&en=84f902d5855a9173&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss