Showing posts with label Morality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Morality. Show all posts

Sunday, January 26, 2014

Weight Loss Ward (ITV)

ITV's Weight Loss Ward (about extremely fat people) has proved to be somewhat compulsive viewing. Take Doreen Thomas: age 56, height 4ft 11, and weight 31 stone. Doreen can barely move and has been living downstairs for ten months. Her glasses have been upstairs since March, apparently.

"She's tried losing weight in the past, but it's never really succeeded. If we don't do something now she probably will be dead," says her nurse.

Doreen Thomas orders treats (from Stoke Sentinel)

On-screen, Doreen comes across as crafty and manipulative. She lives on benefits, has a full-time paid-for carer and snacks incessantly on treats ordered online.

My puritan reaction is of course outrage: why are we paying this person to waste her life in this way? She even refuses an operation to insert a gastric balloon! What could possibly be the purpose of her parasitic life?

On reflection, how would it help if Doreen were transformed into a bland, everyday mediocrity? As a welfare monster she gives millions the pleasure of lip-curling moral superiority. In her own (thankfully) inimitable way she has entertained and instructed more people than many a C-list pop star.

Yes, "Weight Loss Ward" has entirely justified Doreen Thomas's life - short as it's likely to be.

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Is 'n' ought

A giant asteroid is hurtling towards the planet of technologically-sophisticated aliens. Physics allows us to predict the trajectory of the incoming rock as well as the effects of any possible mitigation attempts. But it doesn't recommend any particular course of action. Morality is out of scope for physicists.

Let's turn to biology. The aliens are survival machines: they respond to threats with countermeasures. The biologist predicts the aliens ought to deal with the problem. Morality has entered the building.

The aliens won't be calculating rationally what they should do to keep their genes in play (far too slow and unreliable in an open environment). They'll decide on their hopes, fears, sense of social cohesion and egalitarianism - all the stuff which worked over their evolutionary history. They'll encode these emotional norms as their morality.

Doubtless to get their advanced society to work at all (featuring capitalism, 'bourgeois democracy' and wars) the aliens will have to compromise their emotionally-grounded moral principles. They will invent hypocrisy and politics and muddled public intellectuals.

Evolutionary biologists will analyse all of this: no-one will be interested, however, in their rooting of morality in evolutionary science.
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Note: Just to clarify. Formal moral positions are relative, not absolute - that's why they can change (this point is never understood by many in the media who confidently believe their own elevated moral positions are normative across time and space). But morality can never stray too far or too long from its basis in human biological values; while our morality is rooted in our emotional value systems these themselves are complex, can be in conflict and can generate different moral conclusions.

Example: suppose there is an activity which some people indulge in which results in little harm but causes feelings of disgust in most other people (drugs and certain kinds of sexuality come to mind). This could lead to a moral repudiation of such activities and indeed, the people themselves (hate the sin, not the sinner is a step too far for most people).

But the 'sinners' naturally feel stigmatised and rejected, which violates another of our values: social solidarity, fairness and egalitarianism. So the moral fatwa may be reversed and the deprecated activity abstracted and rebranded ('a lifestyle choice') to damp down the majority's natural repugnance. Intellectuals and libertarians, who rather naturally lead with their intellects, and idealists, who lead with visions of social solidarity and empathy, are often found in the vanguard of such rebranding.

Such people are often, of course, found in politics and the media.