When I woke up this morning, I heard a disturbing sound

This guy, and to avoid getting nasty comments, letters or being sued, let’s just call him Reverend Cleophus the Third...unless James Brown or John Landis is reading this... unlikely I know, but maybe we should call him Sid. Anyway, Sid made a troubling remark to me. He said “no one ever sues anyone for hundreds of thousands of dollars due to an attitude or dodgey look”, or something like that. I disagreed. I don’t think that he was right and the more I think about it, the more I think he is absolutely wrong. The more I think about it, the more I think that the only reason someone ever does something like sue someone else is due to a bad attitude or a dodgey look.  A few more well travelled solicitors I know would tell you that the reason is that the courts (especially family) are not about justice, fairness or even the law. They are about resolution. They are about getting two people who have a dispute and wearing them out, tying them up in procedures, process and paperwork until they get to a point where any solution, no matter how stupid, would be better than continuing with their dispute, and then sending them the bill. But do we learn from our pettiness, our inflated sense of self?  

There is a far bit of work going on in this area: exactly why and how do people disagree? Relational Contract Theory is fascinating, albeit American understanding of why people won’t disagree when they should. We’ve talked before about happiness and morality and how in the fight between emotions and reason, emotions will win. Especially emotions like disgust, vanity and pride. Then once we have made up our mind on that, we will stick with it way beyond the point of sanity. This is the point where our lovely confirmation bias kicks in and keeps us from re-evaluating the facts.

I live in this nice little quiet street, right on the beach where everyone , well, most people, get along really well. I’ve lived here for a few years now and the place was a clear change from my last abode, especially in terms of the neighbours. My last home was neighboured by druggies on one side and alcos on the other, so a street where most people say hello and are happy and look out for unusual or odd events is a wonderful change. The only problem is; it comes at the expense of the blue house.

The blue house is directly opposite us. When we first moved in, everyone in the street was welcoming and happy to talk to us. They all also warned us about those people in the blue house. They were not welcome. There were stories of having to call the police time and time again due to noise, swearing and fighting. The blue house’s cat was responsible for most of the ills of the street; from lounges and outdoor furniture being ruined to plants not growing properly.

I never had any issue with the people; they seemed nice and kept to themselves. I am not sure whether this is due to their character or that they knew no one liked them. There was only one night that I heard any fighting or yelling, and that didn’t last very long and wasn’t too intrusive, save for a radio being thrown on the road. But upsetting the neighbours on one occasion in over a year is quite alright with me. It’s a fair bit better than my usual average.

Then they moved out. There were stories that they were on the run from the law, that they were on the run from something else, had just run away, or that they had moved to the mines and the like. The house stayed empty for a while and then everyone was relieved when it was tenanted by ‘nice’ people.

Not long went by before the ‘nice’ people, while still being nice, this niceness had qualifications; they were nice, but drove a car that was too expensive. Then the teenage daughter left a light on overnight and was a little noisy. Another brief period of time passed before how they had acted on a particular occasion became who they were. “They did the wrong thing by upsetting...[well, let’s just call her Mrs Murphy]”

Another thing that has happened is that next door has been renovated and another person has moved in. The lady that lives next door is in her nineties and has lived in that house for fifty years. She still has an English accent that is almost too think to understand at times. She pays a grumpy old fool to mow the front lawn, but the back lawn is mainly overgrown weeds and clover. For a while now I have been meaning to spend a few hours mowing and then weeding the yard as it needs doing. This is not only cause I’m just that nice ... [cough] ... fine then... but it is also because it would save a lot of weeds coming through to our yard for a while. So while this was a helping-out-a-neighbour idea, there was also benefit for me in it.

But then her daughter moved in. And then her daughter swore at the neighbours for using a chainsaw too loudly. And then her daughter swore at me for using a sander one Sunday arvo.

“I’m just so sick of all this noise. Could YOU people make any more noise?”

Never ask an Aussie man if he could make more noise after you’ve annoyed him. You’re not going to like the answer. There may not be a valid reason for using a drop saw and a petrol powered pressure cleaner at the same time; come to think of it it’s probably a tad bit dangerous, but I do believe it answers her question.

But here’s the thing: now I am not inclined to help with the back yard at all.  

Why is this? Am I justified in just saying ‘well stuff them then, they can mow their own yard’ when I know that they clearly can’t? I lie to myself and say that I have too much on my plate as it is and couldn’t really spare the time.

I have witnessed the daughter have a partial tantrum at a council worker who was planting trees, prettying up the street; due to their being a palm tree there many decades ago (probably before this guy was born) that caused them some concern. So maybe I don’t want to be subjected to an onlooker. Maybe I don’t want to allow myself to be judged by an unwelcomed external source.

Maybe, and maybe not. But the point is that for some reason, I am a less kind person, I am a lesser person than I was and I can not explain why. If I say it was caused by her, I would have to admit that she has some sense of power to do that, which I don’t want to do. Maybe she’s just cranky and lonely and I should cut her some slack.

Australia has a fairly good track record at being able to turn the other cheek as a country. We don’t get all pissy when our leaders do something stupid. The closest we’ve ever come to civil war or rebellion was over rum and we didn’t throw a tantrum and dump a whole bunch of tea into a river or try and blow up parliament house with gunpowder, we just found him cowering under his bed and sent him back to England. “This one’s no good,” we said, “but no harm done, just send us another one.”  

By the way, sorry for all the cheesey Blues Brothers references and links... here’s one more to make a lie out of my apology. It’s my son’s new all time favourite movie. A while ago I lamented that the greatest joy in life is watching four children eat their breakfast and sway in time to ‘Love in an Elevator’. It’s been topped by those same kids not wanting to go to the school disco because the music is terrible... “I’d go if they played a little SRV or Beatles Dad.” ... you kids rock.

This post’s lame joke:

Most people don’t realise that Heaven isn’t above us and Hell isn’t below us, they are side by side. One day, Satan threw a huge kegger and ended up burning down a few sheds and the big fence that separates the two areas.

The next morning, God is out there and he is mad. I mean, he is really mad.

“You’ll fix up this fence and quickly.” He yells at Satan.

Satan, bleary eyed and hung-over, replies “yeah, yeah, we have tonnes of tradies here in hell. We have concreters, builders, builder’s labourers. It’ll be done in no time.”

A few hours later, God is surprised to see the fence has not only been completely rebuilt, but it is far more magnificent than the last one. When God inspects it a little closer, he notices that the fence is actually three metres on the heaven side of the boundary.

“You bum” God yells at Satan, “You won’t get away with this, I’m going to sue you for this.”

“Really?” Satan responds, “and where are you going to find a lawyer?”

This post’s groovy, identity seeking quote:

(you know the one I’m going to throw at you already don’t you dear reader?)

This is the Court...which has its decaying houses and its lighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man's acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give — who does not often give — the warning, "Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!"

This post’s inappropriate over share:

Continuing on from the theme of pettiness, or a variation of it, I can’t stand people who say “for all intensive purposes”. What on earth does that mean? I know they meant to say ‘for all intents and purposes’ but what is an intensive purpose? What isn’t? Are they even listening to what they’re saying? Why are non-intensive or less-intensive purposes not allowed? I know it seems little but man does it get under my skin. It’s like all these bogans who slush out the supposed ANZAC poem and say “...age will not weary them, nor the years condemn.” What does that mean ? Why would the years condemn them? That doesn’t make any sense. The years may contemn them, that would make sense. 

I guess I’m just small minded and petty...

To be or not to be...That’s actually not the question...not even close

Something that has worried me of late is can you do a bad thing, that may have a bad consequence, and be showered in glory when a good thing happens as a result? This has come about as I have noticed what seems like an infestation of bogan pride on social media lately that proudly states that hitting a child in discipline in not wrong due to the person in question apparently being hit as a child ‘...and it never hurt them much hey.’ Do you ever wonder whether Hamlet was wrong, he was being deceived, but killing his uncle was a good idea as he would have been a terrible king...could that act be right while being ill-informed?Someone, Nagel I think, asked us how far we can torture a disobedient child while we are stuck under wreckage in a car that is just about to crash. Can we break their arm to get them to free us and save us both?

Can you do something terrible (hit a child) with a good intention (disciplining the child) and expect to be praised as a result of performing a bad act (child behaves according to expectations) ?

A friend of mine sent me a wonderful link on the subject – an add about children copying which is brilliant. If you are going to listen to one thing on Youtube today, well listen to Dazed and Confused, after all, it’s Friday and you need to get a groove on already. But if you’re listening to two things....well, you know.

 

We’ve talked about the Heinz Dilemma before and how it expresses whether a person is wrong to steal, over-charge and the like for medicine;

A woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to produce. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $ 1,000, which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said, "No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from it." So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man's store to steal the drug for his wife. Should Heinz have broken into the laboratory to steal the drug for his wife? Why or why not?

But it can be complicated by a few things.

Firstly, is action more morally meaningful than inaction? Consider the two neighbours, Alf and Deb; both live in absolute luxury by virtue of the fact that they are the trusted protector of their very wealthy, multi-billionaire, two year old, orphaned niece. If Alf’s niece, or Deb’s niece die, Alf and/or Deb will inherit billions as the only remaining relative. Alf and Deb both absolutely hate their respective bratty nieces and resent looking after them.

One day Deb has had enough and, while her niece is in the bath, grabs her head and gently but forcefully pushes her under the water and her niece drowns.

As luck would have it, at exactly the same time Alf is bathing his niece and leaves for a second to grab a towel. When he returns, he noticed that his niece has accidentally slipped, fell, hit her head on the side of the bath and is currently not able to breathe. Alf doesn’t do anything. He steps back and waits for the bath to, of its own actions, kill his niece.

Both Alf and Deb are now billionaires and free from the trials of looking after their nieces. But is Alf’s conduct any less than Debs? Does it matter that he didn’t actually do anything to end the life of his niece?

Let’s warp the story a little more. Say neither niece die. Say that both Deb and Alf recanted at the last second and brought their kin back to life. But in this instance, their nieces both had book clots in their head which, being held under water for a little minute, were cured by the pressure of the water rushing in and blasting the clots out through their eyes. Should we praise either of them for curing the blood clots of their kin? Should Deb be praised more than Alf due to her actively changing actions?

Now, the more smarmy in our merry band will be shaking you fists at me screaming “This is the Doctrine of Double Effect and has been answered by everyone from St Augustine to Jerry Seinfeld.” And you’d be right, it has, but my favourite version of it; The Trolley Dilemma and the Kill Whitey Project, is where this blog is going today. And hey – if you already know the answer, skip ahead, but don’t spoil it for the person sitting beside you.

The essential question is – ‘what is the role of reason and emotion in moral questioning?’ We like to call ourselves advanced and say that emotion is bad and reason, devoid of emotion , equates to an advanced morality. Especially when you look at people like Piaget, Kohlberg and those following, there is this linear approach to moral development. The trolley dilemma and the kill whitey project present this wonderfully archaic, yet researched viewpoint that our morality is just as much a slave to our emotions, especially emotions like disgust, as they were to the hypothetical caveman who started the whole debate. It states that we are not further developed by our reasoning faculties at all.

The question is very much about Normative reasoning, of which there are two general schools of thought:  consequentialist and deontological, albeit there is a third school – virtue ethics which has a considerably better answer to these questions, but it’s not a task for us today.

The basic version of the trolley dilemma asks would you kill a man in a particular situation, and then presents a situation where this may be acceptable.

In the first instance, you are out walking one day and see a dilapidated train track. You follow it for a while and find two tunnels up ahead: one with five workmen in it, the other with only one workman. Then all of a sudden, an out of control train comes screaming down the track. You look down and, as luck would have it, you are positioned right beside the track changer which controls which tunnel the out of control train is headed. You notice that it is headed toward the tunnel with the five men in it. So do you act? Do you change the track to kill one man, deliberately and unashamedly just to save the lives of five?

Funnily enough, more than 90% of people faced with this dilemma would switch the tracks and kill one person.

In its second incarnation, the same situation happens, except rather than standing next to the track changer, you are standing on a footbridge on top of the entrance to the tunnel. You realise that you might be able to jump down in front of the train to stop it, but you would be way too skinny. Thankfully, standing beside you is a portly gentleman whose girth would easily stop the train. Do you push the man off the footbridge? Do you kill a man to save the lives of five?

In answering this question, most people say the exact opposite; almost everyone would let the five men die.

A third incarnation is where you are a doctor on duty in an ER, rushed and over-worked. A motorcycle accident victim comes in. He is pretty much dead, but there is a chance that an emergency procedure to open up his skull/brain area to relieve pressure has a 2% chance to save his life. It is a highly risky operation and no one would be the wiser if you accidentally slipped by half a millimetre and cut the wrong cord, killing the motorcyclist. You have five other patients, one who needs a lung transplant, one who needs a heart transplant, one who needs kidneys etc. And they need this within the next few hours or they will die. The motorcycle accident victim is a perfect match for all five patients and will most likely live in a brain-dead comma for a few days if left unoperated. Do you kill the motorcyclist? Do you perform the operation to the best of your abilities? Do you kill one man to save the lives of five?

There has been a great deal of research dedicated to trying to say why this is the case; from people being brain scanned while making these choices, to theories about our evolutionary background failing to come to terms with the significance of a switch.

Our sense of highly developed moral reasoning would say something like “the end never justifies the means” or perhaps “do the act that results in the least net harm” or something similar.

Then the Trolley Dilemma goes through a fat elvis stage; race and nationality are brought in. People are in a lifeboat which has one too many persons in it. You draw straws as to who has to leave (and drown). It comes up Tyrone Paton gets pushed off. Is this moral? Does saving the lives of the five men on the boat justify killing Tyrone. Almost all liberal voters would say no, almost all conservative voters would say yes.

In a second incarnation, you draw straws as to who gets pushed off and Chip Elsworth the Third’s name comes up. He gets pushed off the boat and drowns to save the lives of the five remaining passengers. Is this a moral choice? Is the killing of one man justified by the saving of five lives? Most liberal voters would say yes, most conservative voters would say no.

In further warps of the same logical problem;

·         is the killing of innocent civilians during a military campaign justified to end a war/restore peace in the situation where civilian casualties are minimised, but expected. In one setting, it is Western troops that are doing the fighting, and Iraqi civilians doing the dying; in another setting, it is Iraqi insurgence that are doing the fighting, Western Troops that are doing the dying.

·         is there a limit to the freedom of speech? Can someone burn an American flag? Can someone draw a malicious cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed? Which is freedom of speech and which has gone too far.

In these examples, the conservative/liberal divide comes through loud and strong: a liberal would have no problem killing Western Troops and burning the American Flag, but would see killing Iraqis and laughing at Mohammed as unacceptable. Conservatives go the opposite way.

Then something really interesting happens: people are given the same dilemmas to answer, but rather than political affiliation, they are first asked to unscramble a word. One group is given a word that is synonymous with patriotism, the other a word that is synonymous with multiculturalism. The findings, quite amazingly mirror the conservative responses in those given patriotism words, and the liberals in those given multiculturalism words.

What’s even more amazing is that people, when alerted to their moral inconsistencies: who will agree with the bombing of Hiroshima while at the same time being adamant that the end never justifies the means etc will change and adapt their understanding to new stimuli.

But irregardless, the findings of all this seems to be that we are not liberal, conservative, deontologists, consequentialists or the like; we have a morality like a bag of tricks, to be pulled out when we find it appropriate. This begs the question: why do we chose one moral principle in some settings, while find it abhorrent in other settings?

The answer, weak though it may be, is that we favour connectedness to a familiar view. We will do our best to preserve our own understanding of the world, to the point of absurdity at times, but we greatly exaggerate and over-estimate our own abilities. The confirmation bias, or as I’ve always said, “the one thing that unites us as humans is that everyone thinks that they are an above average driver.”

So is it right or wrong to hit children? I would say it is never acceptable...but why? Firstly, it doesn’t work, secondly it is violence, and violence is always wrong. Violence is always wrong. The only thing to be learned from it is to avoid it because it is the point where reason, thought...indeed humanity itself stops working. But then what about a situation where someone about my size was beating up a kid, an elderly couple or something and they weren’t listening to reason? Is it wrong for me to hit that person a few times...bugger, there goes that theory. What if the aggressor is considerably smaller than me?

What if it is the case that most people would pull the level to kill a person, but not push a fat man onto the tracks is because our evolutionary make up hasn't dealt with the concept of switches and buttons yet, however, we all know too well the effect of direct violence. Perhaps. Perhaps it is because we have never seen the effect of a switch, yet all of us have seen the effect of being pushed, in the school yard or in the workplace. Some of us know the effect of doing the pushing.

Then maybe it is because we have to see the man being pushed, we have to see the motorcyclist die. We see him watching us and dying. That breads the association that we fear and are disgusted with.

Is it just a case that I am not a pacifist, I see violence being used and chose to identify with the child that was hit, the child that will learn to mistrust these people, fear them, hate then and grow distant from them where other people would associate with the authoritarian parent figure and pretend that they learned respect from that action. Let’s just take that as a comment hey?

This post’s groovy, identity seeking quote:

'“People should either be caressed or crushed. If you do them minor damage they will get their revenge; but if you cripple them there is nothing they can do. If you need to injure someone, do it in such a way that you do not have to fear their vengeance.”

This post’s lame joke: `

A man and a woman who had never met before, but who were both "married to other people," found themselves assigned to the same sleeping room on a trans-continental train.

Though initially embarrassed and uneasy over sharing a room, they were both very tired and fell asleep quickly, he in the upper berth and she in the lower.

At 1:00 AM, the man leaned down and gently woke the woman saying, "Ma'am, I'm sorry to bother you, but would you be willing to reach into the closet to get me a second blanket? I'm awfully cold."

"I have a better idea," she replied. "Just for tonight, let's pretend that we're married."

"Wow! That's a great idea!", he exclaimed.

"Good," she replied. "Get your own damn blanket."

After a moment of silence, he farted.