posted November 21, 2005 05:46 PM         

I think what made me smile most at myself was

quote:

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You agreed that:
There are no objective moral standards; moral judgements are merely an expression of the values of particular cultures

And also that:
Acts of genocide stand as a testament to man's ability to do great evil

The tension between these two beliefs is that, on the one hand, you are saying that morality is just a matter of culture and convention, but on the other, you are prepared to condemn acts of genocide as 'evil'. But what does it mean to say 'genocide is evil'? To reconcile the tension, you could say that all you mean is that to say 'genocide is evil' is to express the values of your particular culture. It does not mean that genocide is evil for all cultures and for all times. However, are you really happy to say, for example, that the massacre of the Tutsi people in 1994 by the Hutu dominated Rwandan Army was evil from the point of view of your culture but not evil from the point of view of the Rwandan Army, and what is more, that there is no sense in which one moral judgement is superior to the other? If moral judgements really are 'merely the expression of the values of a particular culture', then how are the values which reject genocide and torture at all superior to those which do not?

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posted November 21, 2005 09:01 PM         

One of the most interesting ones for me was the tension between believing that a severely brain-damaged person has lost all self-hood, but also believing that we exist on some level after death.

posted November 22, 2005 09:43 AM         

The average player of this activity to date has a Tension Quotient of 29%.

posted November 22, 2005 05:18 PM         

I got 20%, probably because I was keeping an eye out for entrapments based on someone else's presumptions. But they got me:

quote:

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You agreed that:
The environment should not be damaged unnecessarily in the pursuit of human ends
But disagreed that:
People should not journey by car if they can walk, cycle or take a train instead

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The presumption of course is that by using a car it is environmentally damaging, yet:

1) cars are not all environmentally damaging. There exist cars that are not, so this is a realistic possiblity.

2) as the above demonstrates, cars can be made that are not environemtnally damaging, and therefore this is an reasonable attribute that can be applied to the broader definition of what a car is.

Since they failed to specific "car" as only "a vechicle that damges the enivorment needlessly" I am philosophically and reasonably in the clear. I think I should get a even better score.

posted November 22, 2005 05:30 PM         

quote:

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One of the most interesting ones for me was the tension between believing that a severely brain-damaged person has lost all self-hood, but also believing that we exist on some level after death.

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Yeah they gave that one to me too. However, for me "consciousness" and "selfhood" are seperated from the body if the body is too damaged to function or even during severe, life-threaening trauma. Hence I do believe that brain death *is* death, and that "consciousness" has already be severed from the body even if all signs of phsycial life have not ended. Granted, a lot of death is a mystery and does not play out in terms we readily understand. There's a lot of playing room here, and cold logic just doesn't get you very far.