dream load one

It was a big ol' honkin' three-day weekend over here, and we hope you can say the same. Friday especially was weird, what with Rocky's un-adoption right before the show. Thanks to all who came out for that, by the way. Then Rocky kept us up all night practicing his guard dog skillz. I spent the extra hours reliving my various errors from the concert... so that was fun.

But we're all rested up now, thanks to some naps and Rocky's mercy. As a result, I am in a position to promise that there will be a brand new tune posted on this blog tomorrow night, come heck or high water and by hook or by crook. I am not in a position to promise that it will be good. But neither am I in a position to judge - that's you.

In my few lucid hours, I've been pondering this article about morality. I know, I know. But really, click on it and take a look if you have any interest in good and evil, or why Republicans are the way they are, or why I am the way I am (possible dain bramage?).

One excerpt that I hope will entice you:

"[Here's] the favorite new sandbox for moral psychologists, a thought experiment devised by the philosophers Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson called the Trolley Problem. On your morning walk, you see a trolley car hurtling down the track, the conductor slumped over the controls. In the path of the trolley are five men working on the track, oblivious to the danger. You are standing at a fork in the track and can pull a lever that will divert the trolley onto a spur, saving the five men. Unfortunately, the trolley would then run over a single worker who is laboring on the spur. Is it permissible to throw the switch, killing one man to save five? Almost everyone says “yes.”

"Consider now a different scene. You are on a bridge overlooking the tracks and have spotted the runaway trolley bearing down on the five workers. Now the only way to stop the trolley is to throw a heavy object in its path. And the only heavy object within reach is a fat man standing next to you. Should you throw the man off the bridge?

"Both dilemmas present you with the option of sacrificing one life to save five, and so, by the utilitarian standard of what would result in the greatest good for the greatest number, the two dilemmas are morally equivalent. But most people don’t see it that way: though they would pull the switch in the first dilemma, they would not heave the fat man in the second. When pressed for a reason, they can’t come up with anything coherent, though moral philosophers haven’t had an easy time coming up with a relevant difference, either.

"When psychologists say “most people” they usually mean “most of the two dozen sophomores who filled out a questionnaire for beer money.” But in this case it means most of the 200,000 people from a hundred countries who shared their intuitions on a Web-based experiment conducted by the psychologists Fiery Cushman and Liane Young and the biologist Marc Hauser. A difference between the acceptability of switch-pulling and man-heaving, and an inability to justify the choice, was found in respondents from Europe, Asia and North and South America; among men and women, blacks and whites, teenagers and octogenarians, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, Jews and atheists; people with elementary-school educations and people with Ph.D.’s.

...

"But when the people were pondering a hands-off dilemma, like switching the trolley onto the spur with the single worker, the brain reacted differently: only the area involved in rational calculation stood out. Other studies have shown that neurological patients who have blunted emotions because of damage to the frontal lobes become utilitarians: they think it makes perfect sense to throw the fat man off the bridge. Together, the findings corroborate Greene’s theory that our nonutilitarian intuitions come from the victory of an emotional impulse over a cost-benefit analysis."



As I've probably mentioned to some of you, I am one of the very very few people who would flip the switch AND push the dude. Abbie, on the other hand, is one of the very very few people who would NOT flip the switch (or push the dude). She can't believe I would push him, and I can't believe she wouldn't flip the switch. But we both seem to believe what we're saying... and if so, we're both in tiny (different) minorities of the species.

Key to our successful marriage? Explanation of some of our bizarre idiosyncrasies? Or yet another symptom of some deeper weirdness? You be the judge.

But the article has other cool ideas, including some thoughts about the genetics of morality and of why liberals and conservatives don't agree but both think they're morally right (as I mentioned).

Enough of that. I hope you enjoy this brief and peaceful poem as an antidote to my long and frantic post. Good night, all y'all!




In a Station of the Metro


The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.



Ezra Pound