Thu 20 Sep 2007
Recently, I reviewed Julian Baggini’s book The Pig That Wants To Be Eaten. Have you gone out and bought it yet? If not, here are a few more moral dilemma tidbits from that book to entice you:
“‘Waste not, want not,’ was Delia’s motto. She has a great respect for the thriftiness of her parents’ generation, people who have lived through the war and most of their lives with relatively little. She had learned a lot from them, skills virtually no one her age had, such as how to skin a rabbit and make tasty, simple dishes from offal. So when she heard a scream of breaks one day outside her suburban semi in Hounslow, and went outside to find that Tiddles, the family cat, had been struck by a car, her first thoughts were not just of regret and sadness, but practicalities. The feline had been bashed but not run over. In effect, it was a lump of meat just waiting to be eaten.” Why are some animals like cats and dogs just wrong to eat? (#57)- How much free speech should people have? Do people have the right to say *anything* they want? How do you define
hate speech? (#33) - How is marriage like the Prisoner’s Dilemma? (#44)
- Can you be truly moral and still have complete faith in God? What if God asks you to do something immoral? (Like commanding Abraham to kill his son?) (#58)
- Why do we dislike forgeries? If someone could reproduce a famous paining so that it was indistinguishable from the original, shouldn’t it be valued the same? (#66)
- It’s said that how you’d act if you were invisible reveals your true moral nature. Is that fair? (#75)
- It is a good idea for everyone to maintain a minimal commitment to God, just in case? (#78)
- Is it OK to download songs for free that you would not otherwise purchase? Is it OK to freeload off your neighbor’s wireless Internet connection if your usage doesn’t affect theirs? (#82)
- A train is racing down the tracks where you stand at a junction. Down one lane, in a narrow tunnel, are 40 men repairing a section of track. Down a secondary track is your deaf son playing. If you do nothing, the train will shoot down the first track, into the tunnel, and kill the 40 men. If you move a lever, the train will change direction and proceed down the other and run over your son. Your decision is to kill your son, or to let 40 people die. What do you do? (#89)
- You are a doctor working the late shift alone. At 1 am the life support alarm sounds for Jon, an autistic child in room 1. You rise from your chair and grab your emergency gear just as a second support alarm goes off for a prominent scientist at the other end of the hallway. You’ll only be able to save one of the patients. Who do you choose? Would it matter if one of them was your brother? The president? The Pope? (#96)
October 7th, 2007 at 3:17 pm
Ok, I’ll bite…with the observation that this seems like the setup to one of those “conversation” board games, where all playing end up grumpy, half because they were forced to play in the first place, and the other half because of the answers given!
#57: This is a question I’ve thought about after seeing the furor on flickr over some pictures of dog meat being sold in an Asian country. The problem isn’t simply eating pets, but both fear that your pets will get eaten and second, the typical ethnocentric disgust over consumption of something you’re unused to, e.g., grubs, bird’s nests, organ meat. Eating your own pet is fine with me, but it seems most people usually distinguish between pets and animals for consumption when they have both, so this story seems suspect to me.
#78: Pascal presented this first, actually, that the payoff for belief if there’s a God is greater than either the costs for believing, or the benefit for not believing. To most people now this seems like a rather easy idea to discount, primarily by asking which God you choose to believe in. Additionally, the religion with the greatest payout isn’t necessarily the religion where that God exists, so for me, the only commitment you should keep is to the God you actually have reason to believe in.
#44: I noticed this because it’s an interesting (and slightly touching) metaphor, regardless of whether a dilemma actually exists in the conscious thoughts of most people, married or otherwise. The metaphor, of course, being that both partners in a marriage have to choose cooperation and not leaving (physically or emotionally), despite each’s fears of similarly being defected on. The bright side being that the benefits to each are greater than if one or both defects.
October 8th, 2007 at 10:08 pm
Hi Treu! Thanks for biting. I hope people don’t end up grumpy, though many of the situations are meant to be perturbing
#57: I think people have problems with eating things that are like them. Killing and eating higher-order animals that we can relate to (cats, dogs, dolphins, monkeys) almost seems like murder. It’s easy to distance ourselves from pigs, cows and chickens because they’re dumb.
October 9th, 2007 at 7:25 am
Eschew grumpiness!
I’d actually love to have a pet pig, as they’re supposed to be rather intelligent. But it’s easy to convince one’s self that pigs are dumb, because, hello, yum!