I'M HAVING A WONDERFUL TIME. AND I'VE GOT THE BLISTERS TO PROVE IT.

The past few days have been glorious. Despite a few showers here and there, the weather has been sunny to overcast, but beautiful all the same.

Yesterday, we went to Manchester, to indulge in the gloriousness of a soon-to-be closing Doc Martin's store. Two pairs of boots, including a lovely ten-eye pair that I've been salivating after for years.

We've also hit a few museums and churches. It's a bit odd to see actual working churches that have 1) gift shops or 2) tour plaques all over the place.

I've seen three, count 'em three OU fans here, designated by their outerwear. It's so much fun yelling, "Boomer!" and hearing a resounding "Sooner!" right back 'atcha. The Karen would be proud.

One more thing: if you're ever in Manchester, I highly recommend Mr. Thomas' Chop Shop. Wonderful beef and brown onion soup. Very yummy.

And on that note, I bid you adieu, as we're off to find food before the nightly drinking and dancing ensues.

I HAVE ARRIVED.

Well, technically, yesterday afternoon. But kids, Naked Jay's in London.

The past two days have been relatively tourist-free, which is fine with me. Yesterday, we went to a nice Indian place, and hit a few of the queer bars, before (inadvertantly) retiring early to bed. Of course, my insomnia kicked in around 2 am, so I spent an hour or so reading in the hotel lobby, and of course, smoking like a banshee.

Today, we visited Cutty Sark and other Greenwich delights. Of course, my dumbass forgot my camera (and Greg's guidebook), so pictures will be few and far between. If you know me, though, you're aware I'm not much of a picture-taker as it is; it's not a bother, really.

Tonight, it's more fun queering it up with the guys, with a report to follow later. After a nice dinner at Wagamama, it's time for more drinking to ensue. Later, kids!

JUST IN TIME FOR THE HOLIDAY SEASON. . .

The Gift that Keeps On Giving.

EXCITEMENT OVERLOAD!

Tracy Quan is going to write a sex advice column for Salon.com. Between Dan Savage and her, I'll definitely get my "other people's problems are funnier than mine" fix every week.

ONCE AGAIN, THE KKK PROVES THAT A MENSA MEMBERSHIP IS A PREREQUISITE.

Bullet fired during KKK ceremony hits participant

Nov. 24, 2003 | JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. (AP) -- A bullet fired in the air during a Ku Klux Klan initiation ceremony came down and struck a participant in the head, critically injuring him, authorities said.

Gregory Allen Freeman, 45, was charged with aggravated assault and reckless endangerment in the Saturday night incident that wounded Jeffery S. Murr, 24.

About 10 people, including two children, had gathered for the ceremony. The man who was being initiated was blindfolded, tied with a noose to a tree and shot with paintball guns as Freeman fired a pistol in the air to provide the sound of real gunfire, Sheriff Fred Phillips said.

A bullet struck Murr on the top of the head and exited at the bottom of his skull, authorities said.

Freeman fled the ceremony but was arrested near his home, authorities said. He was released on $7,500 bail.

I'M SINGIN' IN THE RAIN . . .

Just checked out the forecast for the trip. Rain, glorious, rain. Although, the wind will make it less "play in the rain" fun, I'll still enjoy the weather. And it makes it a lot easier to pack for.

THINGS THAT SUCK. . .

1) I've totally been MIA towards blogging in the past week, which will only be compounded by a trip to London over the Thanksgiving Holiday.

2) After picking up Greg at the airport at 3 am, two hours of sleep wasn't cutting it. So a "nap" at 7:30 last night turned into "bedtime," hence the 4 am random blogging.

3) I've been feeling that this week has been a long time coming, but it still came too soon.

4) I'm leaving tomorrow night, yet I've got three friends that are going through emotional crises of some sort, and I feel like I'm neglecting them.

5) I hate weird dreams that involve a combination of people who are actually in my life today, and people who've I've lost touch with from years ago.

6) Even after a busy week that made it seemingly impossible to blog, I feel like there really hasn't been much going on.

HEHEH. . .

I know Dan Savage has a great point in this Salon.com article, but the phrase (totally taken out of context) "This means we're going to be seeing a lot more of . . . Santorum frothing on the news, aren't we?"

Hehe. Yes, if you read the article, you'll see I removed a key word from the quote, but that was still the first image I had, even at this early hour. Disgusting, but funny.

LONG DAY. TIRED. POST MORE TOMORROW.

But, huzzah for Massachusetts. More thoughts on it when I'm a bit coherent.

TV WATCHING. . .

So, I just clicked on my TV, and one of my favorite candidates for President, Carol Moseley Braun, is on Hardball. Now, granted, I don't think she has a snowball's chance in hell of getting the Dem nomination, we tend to see eye to eye on a lot of issues, and she's got that nice mixture of Midwest sensibilities and Chicago street smarts. Of course, there was that whole "scandal" about misappropriation of funds. . . me thinks that'll have a large part to play in the fact that she won't get the nomination. Plus, I think that the party's still a little afraid of another Geraldine Ferraro situation, where a woman on the ticket will let the Republican steamroll their way to a win.

WE'RE INVESTIGA-AWESOME!

Check out the New Strong Bad Email to brighten up your day.

HEHE. PROOF THAT I'M WEIRDER THAN THE AVERAGE PERSON.

Just took a Morality Quiz, with the results posted below. Kudos to Jen for the linkage.

Taboo - The Results




Your Moralising Quotient is: 0.07.

Your Interference Factor is: 0.00.

Your Universalising Factor is: 0.00.

What do these results mean?

Are you thinking straight about morality?

You see very little wrong in the actions depicted in these scenarios. However, to the extent that you do, it is a moot point how you might justify it. You don't think an action can be morally wrong if it is entirely private and no one, not even the person doing the act, is harmed by it. Yet the actions described in these scenarios at least seem to be private like this and it was specified as clearly as possible that they didn't involve harm. Possibly an argument could be made that the people undertaking these actions are harmed in some way by them. But you don't think that an action can be morally wrong solely for the reason that it harms the person undertaking it. More significantly, when asked about each scenario, in no instance did you respond that harm had resulted. Consequently, it is a puzzle why you think that any of the actions depicted here are of questionable morality.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Analysis: Morality, Taboos and the "Yuk Factor"

Probably most of us would like to believe we are able to give good reasons for the moral judgements that we make. For example, if we were asked why it was wrong for the older girl to push the younger boy off the swing, as described in the first question of this activity, we might talk about the fact that the boy's rights had been violated or about the fact that he experienced at least some physical harm. Whilst it is true that the philosophical waters would soon become muddied if we examined our reasoning more carefully, we are able to give at least prima facie good reasons for our judgement of moral wrongdoing.

However, there is a class of activities where it is much more difficult to offer arguments to support a judgement of moral wrong. This is the class of activities which are harmless (at least in a narrow sense), private and consensual, yet violate strong social norms. The examples we utilised in this activity were to do with the taboos and rituals associated with death, food and sexuality.

No doubt some people will suspect that we have constructed this activity with the intention of showing that people are just mistaken if they think that things like having sex with a frozen chicken are wrong. This is not the case, since it is possible to at least make arguments that such things are wrong. Here is an example of one such argument. Human beings are God's creations. Their sexuality is a gift from God to be enjoyed only in the context of a monogamous union between one man and one woman. Chickens, frozen or otherwise, are not part of the picture. Therefore, to have sex with one is to abuse the gift of sexuality, and will necessarily harm a person's relationship with God. It follows that having sex with poultry is a moral wrong.

So if the intention then is not to show that the moral prohibitions surrounding taboos cannot be justified, what are we trying to show with this activity?

Morality and Harm

The intention is to demonstrate that there are tensions in the way that people reason about morality. One important tension has to do with how central the idea of harm is to many moral frameworks. Previous research suggests that, with the exception of the siblings story, most people judge the scenarios presented here to involve neither harm to the protagonists nor to anybody else; but that, regardless, plenty of people still think that these scenarios depict acts which are morally wrong (see Haidt, Koller and Dias, Affect, Culture and Morality).

This activity asks people precisely to make judgements about whether acts can be wrong if they harm only the protagonist and whether they can be wrong if they harm no-one. If the answer to the second question is "no", then automatically any claim that the scenarios presented here involve moral wrongdoing results in difficulties. To retain a consistent moral outlook, it would be necessary to show either that there is harm in the acts depicted here, or to revise the judgement that some kind of harm is necessary for moral condemnation. Both resolutions contain philosophical complications.

There is harm in the acts depicted here

This will probably be the most popular response amongst people who think that their moral outlook has been unfairly identified by this activity as involving a possible contradiction.

There is no doubt that it is a defensible position to argue that there is harm in the acts depicted here. However, it is not an easy argument to make. Primarily, this is because these scenarios have been set up precisely in such a way so that it seems that no harm has occurred. The protagonists suffer no ill-effects as a result of their actions and their actions remain private. Given this, any argument that harm occurs is going to be very difficult to ground empirically. However, this is not to say that it cannot be done, simply that it is something which will require a good deal of thought.

The other point to make is that it is possible that a judgement that harm occurs is an ex post facto rationalisation of a prior intuition that the acts depicted here are morally wrong. In other words, people don't like things like incest and sex with poultry, they are pretty good at inventing stories to explain why they don't like them, but, in fact, they don't like them regardless. We already know that people engage in this kind of retroactive reasoning when justifying their responses to taboo type stimuli (see Haidt, Koller and Dias). We also know that judgements of wrongdoing by people who take a moralising stance towards the kinds of acts depicted here are better predicted by asking them whether they would be bothered to see these acts than by asking them whether anyone is harmed. The suspicion, then, is that a judgement that harm occurs is simply a buttress of a prior baseline moral commitment.

Harm is not necessary for moral condemnation

It is possible to argue that there is no harm, nor possibility of harm, in the actions depicted here, and yet they are still wrong, by insisting that harm is not necessary for moral condemnation. But again there are difficulties with this kind of argument.

The major problem is the danger that it will deprive the justifications offered for particular moral judgements of any real content. For example, whilst it is easy enough to claim that siblings should not have sex with one another because it violates the rules governing human sexuality which have been laid down by God, it is much more difficult to show what is wrong with violating these rules unless one talks about harm (though, of course, there is nothing to stop one simply asserting that it is wrong to break rules). Thus, one finds the idea in Christian theology that Man is harmed by his sins in that they constitute a barrier between himself and God.

Some philosophers have gone so far as to suggest that a notion of "harm", understood in a certain kind of way, is a prerequisite of proper moral reasoning. For example, Jeremy Bentham, the founder of classical utilitarianism, argued that pleasure and pain (a "positive harm"), instantiated in the notion of utility, are the only proper measures of value. In his terms, then, a wrong act is one which increases pain (or which, given equally possible choices, results in the least pleasure). Although utilitarianism has moved on since Bentham's day, it is still possible to find philosophers who are willing to argue that pain (and, by implication, a certain kind of harm) should be the central concern of moral philosophy. Richard Ryder, for example, in Issue 23 of TPM, argues that "our prime moral duty is to reduce the pains of others and especially of those who suffer most."

Of course, this is not to argue that these philosophers have got it right, and that some conception of harm has to be central to the moral judgements that we make. Rather, it is simply to claim that if one wants to argue that an act can be wrong without harm, or the possibility of harm, then it is necessary to think carefully about how one justifies the attribution of wrongdoing, in order to avoid at least some notion of harm - however broad - entering into the moral calculus.

The "Yuk Factor"

The other tension in moral reasoning that we hope this activity helps to elucidate has to do with the role of reason and emotion in moral judgements. One of the interesting things which Haidt et al found when exploring people's reactions to the scenarios featured in this activity is that people who have very strong emotional responses to these stories frequently find it difficult to provide an explanation or justification for what they are feeling. According to Steve Pinker, this is because our moral convictions are rooted not so much in reason, as in the evolutionary make-up of our minds. In his words: "People have gut feelings that give them emphatic moral convictions, and they struggle to rationalize them after the fact. These convictions may have little to do with moral judgements that one could justify to others in terms of their effects on happiness or suffering. They arise instead from the neurobiological and evolutionary design of the organs we call moral emotions." (The Blank Slate).

The dangers of rooting moral attitudes in emotion are obvious. It means that a "yuk-factor" might lead us to condemn actions - and even people - we have no good reason to condemn. For example, consider the fate of the untouchables in the Indian caste system. They were not allowed to touch people from the higher castes; they were not allowed to drink from the same wells; on public occasions, they had to sit at a distance from everybody else; and in some regions, even contact with the shadow of an untouchable person was seen as polluting and necessitated a purification ritual. Such prohibitions might sit easily with a certain kind of raw sentiment. They are much harder, if not impossible, to justify in the light of reason.

However, one must be careful not simply to assume that emotion has no role to play in moral reasoning. Indeed, some philosophers claim that it is just a mistake to think that moral judgement involves anything other than emotion. A. J. Ayer, for example, in line with the dictates of his logical positivism, argued that ethical statements are nothing more than the expression of emotional attitudes. He denied that it was possible for ethical statements to be factually true. Rather, they are exclamations of the form 'Hurrah for X!'.

Even if one does not accept this kind of extreme "emotivism", it is still fairly easy to see that emotion can play some kind of role in good moral reasoning. Empathy, for example, would seem to be an important component of a proper moral outlook. It is hard to imagine that the atrocities of the holocaust would have occurred had its protagonists been more able to imagine themselves in the emotional position of their victims. Indeed, the philosopher Jonathan Glover has argued that many of the atrocities of the last century were possible precisely because people's moral emotions had been switched off.

Nevertheless, it is probably right that we are suspicious of moral judgements which are rooted in the "yuk-factor". Steve Pinker, in The Blank Slate, puts it like this: "The difference between a defensible moral position and an atavistic gut feeling is that with the former we can give reasons why our conviction is valid. We can explain why torture and murder and rape are wrong, or why we should oppose discrimination and injustice. On the other hand, no good reasons can be produced to show why homosexuality should be suppressed or why the races should be segregated. And the good reasons for a moral position are not pulled out of thin air: they always have to do with what makes people better off or worse off, and are grounded in the logic that we have to treat other people in the way that we demand they treat us."

How did you do compared to other people?

Taboo has been played 3571 times.

Your Moralising Quotient of 0.07 compares to an average Moralising Quotient of 0.25. This means that as far as the events depicted in the scenarios featured in this activity are concerned you are more permissive than average.

Your Interference Factor of 0.00 compares to an average Interference Factor of 0.12. This means that as far as the events depicted in the scenarios featured in this activity are concerned you are less likely to recommend societal interference in matters of moral wrongdoing, in the form of prevention or punishment, than average.

Your Universalising Factor of 0.00 compares to an average Universalising Factor of 0.35. This means you are less likely than average to see moral wrongdoing in universal terms - that is, without regard to prevailing cultural norms and social conventions (at least as far as the events depicted in the scenarios featured in this activity are concerned).

WELL, PALBERT, IT'S FINALLY HAPPENED.

A new Strong Bad Email! Life is good.

JUST SO YOU KNOW I'M NOT DEAD. . .

Jay-sus. It's been quite a while since I've posted, let alone posted something worth reading. And. . . it'll probably have to wait till tomorrow, at least, although Saturday is a much more plausible date to shoot for.

Basically, it boils down to this: I've worked every night this week, closing on three of them. I work tomorrow. I've been working about 30 hours a week at the daytime job. And my dad's still a prick, but that's a story for later this weekend, when I'm a bit more ready to delve into the soap opera otherwise known as "Living with your Alcoholic Father Sucks Ass." (Really, you should check it out sometime. It's an Emmy-winning show. No laugh track, fortunately.)

Oy. Plus, MT + my hosting company = headaches for Jay. I'm going to try to work out more kinks on that in the next few days, as well.


But for right now, it's a few Nutcracker Ales and Pizza Rolls in an attempt to get to bed soon.


(I know. . Pizza Rolls?, you ask. . . well, I'm all about good food. But sometimes, you just want cheap, quick, and easy. Hehe. My motto on so many things in life, eh?)

TWO QUICK THINGS BEFORE BED. . .

Well, actually three:

1) Go to Kirk's for dinner, next time you're in St. Louis. Good food, entertaining customers (there was a gay couple, obviously on a first date. Gay #1: Loud, obnoxious, and wouldn't take time to breathe for fear of missing out on time to talk; Gay #2: Bored out of his mind. I think we might have seen him yawn if Greg and I weren't trying to be inconspicuous in our gawking)

2) Rent The Italian Job. Beautiful people (Charlize Theron, Jason Staham) and Beautiful Cars (The New MINI Coopers) are a good combination.

3) Don't say I've never done anything nice. I was picking out some movies yesterday, and found the only copy of Finding Nemo in the store, deep amid the "recently returned" pile. A small girl asked the counter for a copy, and they searched frantically for the *one* copy they had listed in the store. I surrendered it, because I thought the little moppet was going to cry.
I got a free movie out of the deal, because, as the clerk who checked me out put it, "Most people would've horded their copy like assholes."

I would say I should be a nice person more often, but then I think it would ruin my fun when I do something dastardly evil. *grin*

OY.

What a week, kids. Busy, busy, busy with work, and more work. And of course, what would Jay's life be without familial drama? Full story in a bit; right now, I'm off to get some food, and shower. Also, I've got hardly anything to do for the next few days, so hopefully, i'll get past my MT woes, and the new site will be up this weekend.

[Listening to: Say Something - Haven - (03:23)]

UGH.

I'm sure it's from something I ate last night or yesterday, but I really needed this* while driving to work this morning. Most definitely not a pleasant way to start the day, or the work week.

I'm going back to bed.

*Probably Not Safe for Work, or Safe for those who have any decency at 10 am.

FOURTEEN HOURS LATER. . .

Oy.

Despite breaks for naps, food, and smokes, I think I've finally figured out what's been going wrong with my MT installation. SO. . . .

I'm going to completely reinstall everything on the server, now that I've configured my MySQL databases to what's needed. (I think.)

Hopefully, by this time tomorrow, it'll all be finalized. But for now, off to bed!

[Listening to: Different Situation - Athenaeum - (04:04)]

SIGNS THAT I SHOULDN'T EAT PAST 2 A.M., OR HOW MY PARANOID DELUSIONS GET THE BEST OF ME

For the past two nights, I've had weird dreams about security issues and my computer. Friday night, it was a dream about a random AIM user stealing all my credit card information; Last night, it was a weird virus getting into my computer, and emailing all my friends lots of porn.

I've absolutely NO idea why I'm having these dreams, but I've been running Norton like a mad man every morning, just in case.

[Listening to: You're So Damn Hot - OKGO - (02:40)]

GETTING THERE. . .

The new blog location should be up pretty soon. I'm in the process of uploading MT to my server as we speak, so cross your fingers, that I did everything right. Of course, the *real* hassle will probably be changing over from the Blogger codes to the new codes.

I'll keep you updated on the happenings as they happen.

BTW, for those of you (e.g., Jen) who are questioning the move, seeing as how I've not been updating much lately: I've finally made the switch in hours at Job #2, so I'm only working there three nights a week, and five days at Job #1. Huzzah! More time to rant!

[Listening to: Wheel - John Mayer - Heavier Things (05:33)]

HEHEHE.

So, I'm watching Undergrads on DVD, and they're doing the episode about sex ed. Their R.A. just handed out free condoms and a pamphlet about STDs which reads, "V.D.: Two Letters That Can Burn!"

What a great way to start the day.

[Listening to: Clarity - John Mayer - Heavier Things (04:32)]