Seems I'm okay then. I was working on the idea that the guy would prefer the sister so she was taking out a competitor. But as long as thinking like that doesn't make me psycho well then I'm happy.
It took me ages! But I've been watching so much Holmes I was determined not to give up, so I sat here in seemingly in a stupor for the last umpteen minutes, until I thought, "Aha! He only comes to funerals, so she's arranging a date!"
I sat with it, thought it was obvious because I'm a big head
and was amazed at the answer,>>> liked it Karl.
My thinking matched Chant's apart from taking the guy
home also I don't process any tendencies to kill, so I
suppose that makes me ok *amen to that*...
think it's much more sophisticated than that. it's to do with how you look at the world. the way the woman looks at the world is ugly, wrong. not thinking of the murder here, more the intended manipulation of events. lies outside normal people's mental parameters to think in this way, perhaps.
on similar lines, i thought he was the sister's husband and that the sisters hadn't seen each other for some time hence she'd never seen her sister's husband before..
to be able to answer the question is to be able to conceive of the world - ALL OF THIS - as being purely instrumental. demonstrates extreme egocentric tendencies, malignant solipsism.
Well, seeing as we're all here to produce the question "What is 6x7" or to provide the part that will repair a spaceship on Titan so that it can carry its message of "Greetings" to another planet....surely seeing everything as instrumental is *possible* even if it's not your natural way of thinking.
Karl,
Did you imagine what you'd start with this question??? I think I've fully understood maybe 30% of the discussion here but I have enjoyed reading it ...
"surely seeing everything as instrumental is *possible* even if it's not your natural way of thinking."
well, clearly it is possible for certain people and we call them psychopaths!
Well, I can kill with impunity now.
Psychopathy is totally unrelated to evil or hatred. A psychopath might stab the person in front of him or her in the queue to the cash machine, and rationalise simply as 'He was in my way'. Psychopathy is the inability to relate to other human beings, to put oneself in their position or to 'feel' towards them.
It's a misuse of the term to dub someone who is mentally unstable and prepared to kill to slake their emotional thirst a 'psychopath'. It's the legacy of Hitchcock and his ilk, and a public who find mental illness alternately repugnant or fascinating in a kind of messy car crash way.
Calling a psychopath's world view 'ugly' or 'wrong' is just sloppy cultural relativism. It's actually a highly pragmatic way of appraising and dealing with life. There's much in it to be admired; the tenacity, the impeccable reasoning, the focus. I'm not suggesting people adopt it - clearly a society cannot survive without a sense of mutual interdependency. All I'm saying is that it is unhelpful to transplant one's own conceptions of good and evil into the psychopathic mindset. Morality is, after all, a question of personal bias.
a provocative posting, Rokkitnite. do you also accept that YOU may be killed with impunity now?
literally, psychopath means 'suffering soul'. i would say that, etymologically, "someone who is mentally unstable and prepared to kill to slake their emotional thirst" is an adequate definition of the term.
as human life tends to be 'group' life, difficult to see how it could be 'pragmatic' to behave in this way. and, indeed, you accept this: "clearly a society cannot survive without a sense of mutual interdependency". pragmatic clearly the wrong word.
"Morality is, after all, a question of personal bias." it may be, if you accept moral relativism, which i do not.
Now what good would that do, Mr. Morgan?
I'm with Rokkitnite on this. Actually, I'm extremely surprised that I didn't type it myself, seeing as I've had furious debates in the past with people who claim that terrorists are all psychopaths, and insist that morality is absolute and that if we decent people say someone's evil, then by God, they're evil. When I proposed a similar idea to Rokkitnite's one chap reacted as if I was myself a psychopath.
To debate what is ultimately right and wrong, good and evil, seriously and open-mindedly is one thing (moral philosophy.) The way those concepts are flung about usually is, as ever, quite another - no more rational than psychopathy, since it is based on fear of and anger towards anything that threatens one's existence or freedom. In fact, as far as an inability to put yourself in the place of other human beings goes, an angry mob of paedophile-hunters demonstrates the concept wonderfully.
Surely, Chant - psychopathy is a medical condition. If we were to go by that literal definition, then a good many of us border on psychopathy from time to time. You might say much of the Western world was transformed into psychopaths immediately after 9/11 - the numbers of people asking to sign up for the army indicate that there was a *lot* of people happy to kill for their emotional thirsts.
As for 'pragmatic' - it is, surely, in a very simple way. The way of a lone hunter, rather than a pack animal. Just because we're primarily pack animals doesn't negate the possibility of the lone hunter persona emerging.
I maintain that morality, as the word is used today, is indeed down to personal bias. On no other logical basis can people go around calling each other "morally bankrupt."
yes, it's BRILLIANT
Henstoat's bit about justice and the scales, and forgiveness being the opposite COR
got more from this thread than all the philosophy modules at poly :0)
Notice none of you seem to include animals in the avoiding suffering stuff though...
Part of the reason I'm distrustful of morality - it's largely centred around humans, which seems again to suggest that its to do with putting outselves in people's places. There's no denying that what is done to animals is cruel and unjust, but it's far more acceptable. So one would conclude that few people really have a problem with cruelty and unjust action per se - they have a problem when these human traits are directed at people they can empathise with. Is defending *all* people from cruelty therefore any more moral than defending just your own people? Doesn't it just depend how compassionate you are?
Chant's & Rokkitnite's ideas that morality is the actual reasoning we put ourselves through to arrive at a decision suggests we are simply not bothered with morals when there's no human interest. Any thoughts?
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