Code Reading looks like a fantastic book. I happened to see it when I was in Barnes & Noble tonight, and I flipped through it for a few minutes. Check it out.
Ooh, synchronicity.
Very long - almost two and a half hours. But some really impressive cinematography. Tons and tons of action (too much), but it was fun. Much better action than Terminator 3, for instance. Martin Lawrence and Will Smith have great chemistry as usual. But to sum it all up, I can cover pretty much the whole movie in four words: Way over the top.
One more thing: What was best about the action, especially in the beginning, was the energy everything had. Many movies have "pretty" action, where a car flips off of something and spins in the air once or twice, and you know that they had to specifically design some ramp and maybe some air jets to make sure it spins just so. In this movie they just freaking threw cars and people and boats and shit off of everywhere, stuff flips over -- not once, but like 17 times -- goes on fire, crashes into other stuff, etc. Everything seems "raw" and powerful, rather than pretty, which is very nice.
When asked for an objective basis for laws or morals, many (probably most) people will say that there isn't any. Someone close to me recently volunteered the example that if most people thought murder was ok, then it would be ok.
People will often go that far in their nosedive off the cliff of objectivity into the ravine of relativism, but you usually have to lead them off of it. He just jumped right off without me asking. I think that's great, because while we were debating moral systems, he showed that he has a system that can condone the murder of innocents, which to me immediately invalidates his system and shows that he's arguing nonsense.
This type of moral relativism is one of the most naive moral systems there is. Anyone who proposes that type of "system" typically hasn't done a lick of philosophy. I put scare quotes around "system" because it can't rightly be called a system of ethics. Under his "system", anything at all can be justified as long as "most people" agree. It's a simplistic majority rule, and lacks many important characteristics of ethical systems.
First, and most importantly, it's not normative. It makes no prescriptions about what is right and what is wrong. In other words, there's no way to query "most people" and find out what they believe in order for you to know what's "right". The issue of normativity is so important that I could just stop here, since if a system of ethics isn't normative, it isn't a system of ethics.
Second, it's not constant. Any sensible system of ethics must be timeless. Murder is always wrong, etc. There are issues, however, with cultural sensitivities, but that can be resolved simply by positing something like "It's wrong to be rude, but what's rude can change based on the society". That doesn't in any way diminish moral objectivity. The point is that it's nonsensical for what's right and wrong to be able to change. "Killing Jews in Nazi Germany was right at the time and in Germany, but isn't today." "Slavery in early America was a just system until most people decided it wasn't." Both statements are nonsensical.
The third problem with the "system" is that there's no reference point for it. I mean that, while it's "majority rule", there's not even any good definition for the "majority" -- the majority of what? Whatever your choice of "majority" is, it's completely arbitrary. The majority of people in your country? That seems absurd, since across the invisible line of a national boundary something can be "wrong" which is "right" a few millimeters away, and vice versa. (Keep in mind that there's a distinction between legal and moral, of course.) Maybe the majority in a given geographic area... that avoids the "invisible line" problem, but how big is the area? Where does it extend to? What about the majority living at one time? That seems to be a better measure, but it's still totally useless, and essentially arbitrary. Why can't I pick my own group? One might say one's immediate social group determines what's moral for a person, since the majority of people he knows believes a certain way. In short, it seems that one can pick which group to consider the majority in a situation according only to one's whims, and each choice is as arbitrary as any other.
So, possibly the most damning criticism of this type of "system" is that it can justify anything whatsoever. Like I said, it's complete nonsense, yet a surprising number of people today seem to unquestioningly accept this view of things as dogma.
Friday, July 18, 2003
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Girls, please don't get breast implants
I have 34 A breast but at 22 yearsold they seem to be growing againwhich ...
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