The fish trap exists because of the fish.
Once you’ve got the fish you can forget the trap.
The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit.
Once you’ve got the rabbit you can forget the snare.
Words exists because of meaning.
Once you’ve got the meaning you can forget the words.
Where can I find a man who has forgotten words?
That’s the man I want to talk to.
– Chuang Tzu
It’s been a little while. Which, on one level is a shame, but on another, perhaps reflects something else but my bottomless pit of enthusiasm for university when the end of semester approaches.
Here are a few quotes from my Ethics lecture that I found interesting. They are in relation to Olivero Toscani’s advertising work for Italian clothing brand, United Colours of Benetton.
Controversy arose when Benetton released an advertising campaign that consisted of quite shocking images stamped with the Benetton logo.
McKenzie Wark’s criticism of the campaigns negative reception…
“Of course, Benetton are seeking to gain commercial advantages from the display of these images of war and murder and death. They are no different from a newspaper or the TV news in this respect…In good bourgeois fashion, intellectuals make rules about what is proper cultural behaviour – we can have the spectacle of death in our newspapers and in our art galleries, but not in advertising. Like the man who insists his wife be faithful, but who frequents the bordello twice a week, intellectuals are not terribly consistent when setting moral parameters for the image.”
and Toscani’s personal view on the matter…
“Advertizing is the richest and most powerful form of communication in the world. [Even so] we need to have images that will make people think and discuss. Ad agencies…are far too comfortable. When the client is happy, they stop trying. They don’t want to know what’s going on in the world. They create a false reality and want people to believe in it. We show reality and we’re criticized for it. Our advertising is a Rorschach test of what you bring to the image. You can see a news photo of the fighting in Sarejevo and it’s in context; it conforms to your expectations. Shocking violence in the News is normal. But when you take the same photo out of the News and put a Benetton logo on it, people pause and reflect on their position on the problem. When they can’t come to terms with it, they get mad at us. When journalists focus on strange and serious topics, nobody criticizes them for trying to sell their stories to the media. Yet, when an advertisement touches on a real problem, everyone is immediately up in arms and protests that it’s in bad taste. It seems that an advertisement which misleads the consumer with deception and lies is considered more correct.”
In response to the unlecture, where Adrian attempted to blow our minds with the notion that the internet was not, in fact, a virtual space, but was actually very physical with very real world consequences.
I think the question was, “What does it matter if there are more mobile phones with internet connections than there are people on the planet? Does the internet actually exist if we aren’t using it?” In essence at least.
Adrian responded by giving examples of all of the reasons that the internet existed in physical space, and how there was a literal, measurable, carbon footprint for every email that we send (and that, it is reasonable to describe spam emails as physical pollution).
(One of the things he failed to mention, in terms of how large Google was as a company – “Google uses more electricity than Melbourne” – was how it is storing some of it’s most recent data farms. They eliminate the problem of real estate costs by floating their servers in the ocean.)
In response to this, I agree, the internet does have a physical presence on the world. However I think the distinction lies in the fact that is is the infrastructure that takes up the physical space, and the internet itself (I suppose this really comes down to a definitional argument; what is the internet?) remains virtual. I cannot touch Facebook any more than I can touch this blog post. I can touch a server, or a screen, but not the literal thing in itself.
Similarly, I cannot access the internet without a computer or a smartphone. The internet can still exist, in terms of the fact that servers, fiber optic cables (oh Tony), data centers, technicians and electricity can exist, but without a medium through which to access it, it doesn’t exist in a practical sense. And if a person is only able to access the internet through one medium at a time, there seems little point in championing the fact that there are more mobile phones than there are people on the planet.
It seems a little like owning more than one pair of the exact same glasses so that you can read different books while wearing them. One pair for fiction, the other for biography. An iPad for social media and a computer for working.
It almost becomes an existential argument, “If a tree falls in a forest…”, and ties quite will into what we were talking about in philosophy and quantum theory, and how perception of a thing alters the physical state of the thing (Schrodinger’s Cat), but that isn’t what I imagine Adrian had considered when he was answering the question.
(Strange how we inevitably alter the context of a thing in order to suit it best to our field of specialty/interest.)
So, after listening to Adrian talk about the death of context for half an hour, I wasn’t able to restrain myself, and wrote a post about why I disagreed with it. Here is what I wrote.
“My initial reaction was to want to write a post about this immediately, but as the case was, I had a two hour class right after the ‘unlecture’, and was unable to. This might prove to be a good thing, as my possibly emotional, and probably unreasonable reaction has since been tempered and I’ll no longer be shooting from the hip, so to speak, and might be able to argue this point better.
In essence, I disagree on several different levels, with what was discussed by Adrian in the ‘unlecture’ this afternoon. I understand his self admitted (seemingly in a keen way) position as devil’s advocate for these slightly challenging ideas, and for that reason, I assume no personal offence will be taken. I agree with some of your more progressive notions; the death of the book other than that as an object of literary study and the idea that as producers and that we are not being paid for our product but for the experience had by the consumer when using the product. Today’s discussion, however, was different. Not only because it challenged long held preconceptions about the role of an author, but because it seems to approach the argument from a limited point of view.
The main notes that I took, to help me remember exactly what heresy you were promoting, was that it is impossible for the context of a work to survive, and that an author has no control of the interpretation of the work by the audience.
On the second point, to some extent, I agree. An author is not able to control how their work is read. A Muslim will read Dante in a very different way to a Christian. A report on the success of an agricultural technique used on a farm in New Zealand will be read by an Ethiopian in a very different way to a Norwegian. That is the nature of context. Everything is subjective, and there is categorically no possible way to have perfect communication. No matter how you say something, it will be interpreted in different ways by different people. Loaded language used by journalists will mean something different to me, than it might someone who hasn’t studied media. That is the nature of language. It is imperfect. Which leads to it’s own plethora of problems, none of which I have much room to discuss here.
His other proposition, however, that context cannot survive once a work is published, or produced, is what I do have a problem with.
Context, is everything. To suggest that one should take a work as an isolated incident, removed from the author and the time it was published, it ridiculous, plain and simple. How can you possibly remove a work from it’s context. And I don’t mean that as, “How could you possibly, it simply isn’t right (morally) do disregard such a long standing tradition”, but rather, that it is not possible (literally). How can you achieve a higher objective plane where the context of a work no longer affects an interpretation of it?
I remember reading somewhere once, that to read and understand Dante, you have to be a Christian for as long as the reading takes, or at least, words to that effect. To understand the author, you must insert yourself into the context of the author, in order to best understand it. How, otherwise, would you be able to marvel at the Wright brothers achieving flight for the first time, if you refuse to allow yourself into the context that is a flightless 1903. For the whole of my life, flight has been very achievable and is done thousands of times every day across the world. Who cares if the Wright brothers did it 110 years ago? Because of the context. It is in the context of the event that flight had previously not been achieved by humanity, thus making it an enormous step forward for us as a species. It was the context, as was illustrated in an interesting YouTube video about who certain people are successful, that showed they were one of several teams attempting flight at the same time, and were by no means the most financially or materially supported. That similarly increases the significance of the event.
If context cannot survive with a work, why is it that only last semester, while studying Kafka, Linda Daley suggested to us that we read his diaries to better understand his work? And that to read more of his work, including his articles, autobiographical pieces, short stories, and other people’s accounts of him, would also help our understanding of him.”
This was unfinished, but I think the points still stand by themselves. After I wrote that, I had a chat with Eliot about what exactly Adrian might have meant, and he suggested that he might mean it more specifically in the context (HAH!) of hyper-text narratives. And with this, I would agree. That is the function of the hyper-text narrative. To remove the authors context in order to give more agency to the reader.
But still, while a reader might have 30 options as to where the story goes next, those 30 options are still somewhat a reflection of the authors own context. A hyper-text narrative written in 1890 in Texas (supposing there were any hyper-text authors in Texas in 1890) might write about an adventure across the south of the United States, and as the protagonist, you come across a seated black person on a packed bus. Your 30 options might then be variations on how you might remove him from his seat so you are able to sit down. That might be a perfectly justifiable course of action in the context of 1890’s Texas, but in the present context, we might struggle with the ethics of choosing the best way to remove a person from their seat, because they are black, from the 30 options presented to us. The context of the author then affects us today, when we read the work. We are unable to avoid our own context while reading it (as is the nature of context), but similarly, we are unable to avoid the authors context as the choices he gives us within the hyper-text narrative will inevitably be choices that seemed reasonable to him when he wrote the text.
Perhaps, as Eliot suggested, Adrian worded his argument rather too strongly, so as to best carry his point, and for that, I might forgive him. We are all prone to exaggeration on points that we believe passionately about, and as his passion seems to be the forward progression of media and cultural texts generally, it makes sense that he might push his point strongly.
Thoughts on that?
This morning at training, after warming up, I did the 1km time trial that the whole senior part of the club has to do at the start of the training period for the Open Water State Champs. Everyone else did theirs last week, but I missed it due to illness, which was frustrating.
(I’m still a bit sick. My lungs feel smaller than usual, and I keep feeling like I’m not getting quite enough air, even when I’m just standing around.)
In the end, I did 13min 42secs for the 1km distance. Not quite the best time, but it is the second or third quickest time in the club. And the comparison that I’m using against it, is from about 7 weeks ago, when I did another 1km time trial when I started my triathlon preseason training.
On the 4/7, I did 14min 16secs for the same distance, and considering that I haven’t really been training any more than I was then (only about 1 or 2 times per week, 3 if I was lucky), I think it’s a decent improvement. Well on the way to being fit for the AUG’s triathlon in the middle of October.
Considering the last time was averaging around 1min 25secs per 100m, it’s an improvement of nearly 8secs per 100m in 7 weeks.
Ideally, I would be able to get that down to under 13mins by the start of October.
When you hear X&Y, it’s not surprising that your thoughts turn instantly to the popular Cold Play song, from the album of the same name released in 2005. After selling 13 million copies, this is understandable.
(After writing the first sentence of this, I thought of dear old Patrick and his long and detailed monologues about various albums and artists. Though as my intention is to neither bore you or ax you to death, I might get to the point.)
Forgetting this, and basing the title purely from a quote from Albert Camus‘ novel, The Stranger, I decided to call a short clip I made last semester X&Y as well. It was for a class called Editing Media Texts.
The task was to generate 2 mins multimedia aiming to serve as a self-portrait to present as our major assessment. There was, however, a catch about this. Firstly, all of the sources material had to be publicly available, meaning we had to get it from either Wikimedia Commons or Archive, so as not to be breaching copyright. Secondly, we also had to meet these criteria:
These criteria made the task more interesting, and more difficult at the same time, which in the end, turned out to be positive.
Have a watch of it, and let me know what you think, either here, or on YouTube.
One of this weeks readings was a section from a book, The End of Books — Or Books Without End?: Reading Interactive Narratives, by Douglas, J. Yellowlees. It was quite long, which was rather taxing, but it did make some interesting points about several issues, including the future of the book in the face of e-readers and new technologies.
One interesting passage argued that even though technology has passed the book by, history suggests to us that this does not necessarily mean the end of the book.
“Even if ou became used to reading in this way, it is hardly likely that digital media like hypertext are going to supersede books, regardless of how much critics like Miller or Birkirts fret over the fate of the book and le mot juste. Radio and cinema went foraging for slightly different niches once television debuted on the scene, and ballooning numbers of video rentals, airings on premium cable and satellite channels, and pay-per-view showings have all helped recoup losses for films that were absolute dogs at the box office – and unexpected boom for Hollywood. It is hard to imagine books becoming the horse of the twenty-first century – a possession that has lost so much of it’s utility that only the well-to-do can afford to have one around.”
The article places the discussion in the context of hypertext, and how these kinds of technologies will affect traditional reading experiences. What, for example, would happen if you were never able to read the same book twice? And that by virtue of your past experience, will read a text one way, as opposed to if you reread it again two weeks later?
This question is much less of a hypothetical example and more of a reality once we admit the possibility of the self being as fluid as a choose-your-own-adventure novel. The question then becomes, if we are now being forced to be aware of this fluidity of our own perception in terms of the different texts we consume through specifically built structures like hypertext, will that affect our conscious reading of traditional paper books?
If we become aware of the fact that we never take the same path through Wikipedia twice, even when searching for the same information, then will that awareness extend to when we are reading a hard cover of Jane Austen? Will we begin to consciously realise that our attitudes to a character we may have hates on our last reading, are perfectly able to change on this reading due to a near infinite number of different variables?
The question was summed rather perfectly by Brian, when he compared the discussion to the quote by the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”
After reading the double-loop learning article by Chris Argyris for what must be the fourth or fifth time this morning, I must admit that I still don’t quite get it. I was once told that the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else, which has since become a small measure I test myself with every time I am learning a new concept, and I would not be confident at the moment to begin to try and explain the notion of double-loop learning to someone else.
It seems as far as I can deduce, that double-loop learning is essentially a reframing of a situation by adapting your perspective on it in order to embrace the perceived ‘problem’ as a potential ‘solution’ for something else. This may, however, be far from the mark.
In an effort to employ double-loop learning to assist my understanding of double-loop learning based on what I understood so far about the theory, I began to independently research it. The problem being: the reading was not explaining clearly what double-loop learning was exactly. So as I understand it, a response via single-loop learning would have been to repeatedly read the article till it made sense, and if questioned about what it means, I would reply in very broad and general terms so as not to seem stupid or incompetent. Perhaps a double-loop learning response would be to question if or not the article is actually able to communicate the theory to me adequately. Perhaps I learn better via a more varied platform of communication. Perhaps some audio explanation and some visuals are needed to help clarify the dry academic text?
So after a quick Google search of double-loop learning, I came across several pieces of media that have helped me understand the theory better. And while my understanding may not yet be complete, it is more advanced than before I started to look.
I found this flow chart, which seems to explain the theory pretty well. The crux seeming to be that I must get past defensive reasoning when facing the problem. Perhaps my reasoning might be, “I am very good with the English language. My VCE results say so, as have my teachers and most people who read what I write. Similarly, I am able to read complex academic works and understand them. It is unacceptable that I am unable to understand the theory in this article, as surely I am capable of understanding it through reading it alone. I will read it and reread it till the theory makes more clear sense.” For to admit that I am unable to understand it through reading alone would be a reflection of my weak grasp on the English language. Once I move past this, and admit that I have a developing understanding of English rather than a developed understanding of it, I may be able to move forward in my understanding by approaching it via different media mediums.
I also found this video. Apart from what seemed like hours of unnecessary footage of the woman working out, the message was similar to that of the flow chart. The woman had two problems: she couldn’t get any breakfast and a creature was throwing bananas at her. Her solution was to keep running (I assume, till the shop opened) and try and avoid the creature by moving away from it. This solution is single-loop learning, as she accepts that the creature will continue to pester her and that she is hungry. After a “what if…” break in narrative, she employs double-loop learning, where she changes her perspective on the banana throwing problem in order to transform it into a solution for her other problem: hunger. This way, both problems are solved as she is no longer hungry and the bananas are now welcomed rather than being rejected.
This other video was much more concise, and was more specifically business related. It challenged us to ask the question, “Why?” when faced with a problem that couldn’t be fixed because it “just couldn’t”. If it required a breaking of company policy in order to fix a problem, rather than adapting the solution in order to stay within policy guidelines, the better response would be to question if or not the policy was actually beneficial, rather than to assume it was correct simply because it had been the standard and enduring policy for a number of years.
So in essence and summary, the theory of double-loop learning when opposed to single-loop learning, is that you must take a step back from the parameters of the problem and test if or not those parameters actually have any value in being there. If I receive a a bad coffee, rather than accepting the coffee is bad and fixing it by pouring sugar into it to make it drinkable, I should go to the barista and tell him that the coffee wasn’t great, and perhaps he needed to do something else when making it. Or maybe I even just make my own coffee and bring it from home.
Basically, don’t get stuck in your old ways. Be open to change.
I just read through the article that was set for us to read several weeks ago, As We May Think, by Dr. Vannevar Bush.
I thought the article was quite interesting, especially as it showed what a visionary Bush was, and what he was able to suspect might be possible in the future. Especially his comments on the technology of photography, and about the possibility of, “dry photography”. As he suspected, “often it would be advantageous to be able to snap the camera and look at the picture immediately”. This is digital photography. And we must not forget that he wrote the article in July of 1945, close to 70 years ago.
Another part that I thought was important was his foresight to notice the possibility of information overload, and that the point would arrive where the content being created was greater than that which was possible to consume. He used the example of Mendel, whose discovery of the laws of genetics, which was lost for a generation as it was not read by the few people who could put his thought into practice and make the discovery public. This is now an even greater concern following the advent of the Internet. What if the key to curing the AIDS virus was stored away on a hard drive in a university somewhere, unread and unappreciated. The idea reminds me of this passage from a letter by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the French author and aviator. (I also find it interesting that Bush published his article only 13 months after the premature death of Saint-Exupery. The fear of too much information was a common worry in those years.)
Does anything we write have any weight anymore? Is what we are writing pushing the human race forward, or even having any positive or constructive influence on the world around us?
It is also the only ethic that worries me about this subject. The notion of being a content producer. For who is to say that I am only adding to the clutter and chaos of information on the internet by writing here? Does the fact that I can publish my own content mean that I necessarily should? What is really more valuable to be found here than in the angsty ramblings of a 13 year old girl with a Tumblr account? Who am I, really, to say anything?
This is an essay I wrote over the last few days for my Media Ethics subject. I wasn’t sure exactly how it would turn out, but I think it is reasonable. If only in that I can’t currently see anything wrong with it. Which may be to do with my sleep deprivation…
“When dilemmas such as ‘Jim and the Indians’ demand an ethical choice, is deciding by dice throw: better; just as good; or worse than: deciding via Kant’s Categorical Imperative and Bentham’s Hedonistic Calculus? Why?
When faced with a situation such as that in ‘Jim and the Indians’, the ethical choice demanded, is by no means a simple one. The different epistemological elements that come into play confuse even the most morally apt; as it is far from clear what is the best way to respond. Several options are open to us, however correctly making the decision that leads to the least moral ambiguity seems almost impossible due to the potential gravity of each choice.
Upon reading the dilemma outlined by Williams and Smart, there seem to be two potential courses of action that Jim is able to take, which can be separated into the dominant epistemologies that they fall into; that is, to accept, or not to accept the offer of the captain. Does Bentham’s deontology convince us with his Utilitarian ideology of acting in reference to a Hedonistic Calculus, or is Immanuel Kant more persuasive with his teleological notion of acting via a Categorical Imperative?
The first option open to Jim would be to agree with Pedro, the sweat stained military captain, and shoot one of the protesters in order to save the other 19, thus favoring Bentham’s moral framework. This framework can be summed simply in the more commonly used phrasing: “the ends justifies the means”. Or basically, that if the outcome of an action is perceived to be more beneficial than failing to perform the action, then the action used to achieve this outcome is justified. So for Jim, the act of killing one protester would be seen as justifiable as the result is the saving of 19 lives. But more specifically, Bentham argues that any moral question can be answered by establishing what will generate the most pleasure (good) and conversely, the least pain (bad). As, surely, the totality of happiness after the action is more important than the action itself?
In contrast to this, we see Kant favoring motive rather than outcome in order to establish what is the most moral route through an ethical quagmire. To sum his argument more simply: “don’t do bad to produce good”. Kant based his theory on the thought that ethics was too serious a subject to be left up to probability or chance. He means that by justifying the means with the ends, the protagonist is leaving their decision up to what might happen, or what they suspect is the most likely consequence of their action, which is by no means a certain thing. The projection of a probably future was, for Kant, not enough to base a moral groundwork on. What if Jim chose to kill one protester in the hope of saving 19 other lives, but the captain failed to honor his word, and proceeded to kill the remaining 19 as well as Jim? Even if Jim refused the captains offer, and he killed all 20 before executing Jim too, at least the last moral choice Jim made was not one that resulted in him actively ending the life of an innocent stranger. Or so argues Kant. His argument is that an ethical decision must remain “good”, regardless of the eventual empirical consequences. Not only this, but that the ethical decision must apply to both specific situations, and also universally to all situations. He says this most famously in chapter two of his work, Groundwork of Metaphysics of Morals.
“Act only on that maxim through which you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” (Smith, 2013)
If Jim were to follow a Kantian process of decision-making, and he chose to kill one protester in order to save 19, he must also will a world where he is happy to be killed by someone in order to save 19 others. This is Kant’s test for ethical maxims; that the M-I (maxim applied individually) must match without contradiction to the corresponding M-U (maxim applied universally). Kant would argue that if a contradiction is found between the M-I and M-U, then the maxim cannot be used, as it is seen to be ethically invalid. This is Kant’s adaptation of the Golden Rule, the ancient moral principle that has been seen across both centuries and cultures, which suggests it to be one of humanity’s only common ethics. It is seen to exist in all major religions, from Christianity to Buddhism, Islam to Taoism. It is from these common principles that Kant derives his Law of Non-Contradiction, from which stems his Categorical Imperative, and thus his motive focused method for overcoming ethical dilemmas.
However, supposing that Jim had either a coin or a dice in his pocket? What if there was in fact a third option for deciding how Jim should act in his difficult situation? Could it be ethical for Jim to toss a coin in order to decide if or not he should kill one to save 19, or refuse the offer, and walk away? This broadens the dilemma significantly, as it takes the decision process out of the hands of Rationalism, for which both Kant and Bentham argue (though admittedly from opposing sides), and puts it firmly within the grasp of Chance. As reason through logical deduction has proven to be flawed in significant ways, even when argued from both sides, perhaps it is better to avoid logic and its inherent failures to provide a clear moral path, and it is better instead to remove it as a variable completely when making such a difficult decision. As French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery argues, logic is self-validating, but does not always produce consequences that sit at moral ease.
“If your purpose is to understand man and his needs, to know what is most essential about him, you must not set the proof of one man’s truth against another’s. Yes, you are right. Everyone is right. Anything can be demonstrated by logic. The man who blames the ills of this world on hunchbacks is right. Let’s declare war on hunchbacks and all get carried away.” (Saint-Exupery, 1995)
Logic, by its very nature, serves as a finite explanation of the world. Perhaps logic is not equipped to answer all of the problems we might face in life, as Jim has found. The conclusion that the moral action is to kill one in order to save 19 is based on a firm logical foundation, but so it the conclusion that the only moral path is to never kill. Both arguments are valid as they are both logically consistent, however they are derived from different first principles, thus creating their stark opposition. Even Wittgenstein, the maser logician and philosopher admits in the introduction to his first major work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, that thought is limited by both language and logic, with anything remaining outside of logic to be purely absurdity.
“…the aim of this book is to draw a limit to thought, or rather – not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought).
It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.” (Wittgenstein, 1961)
Perhaps these kinds of logical dilemmas sit outside of what Rationality is capable of overcoming, and instead sits in a realm of absurdity? One example of a clear rejection of morality formulated via logic is in the novel by Cormac McCarthy, No Country For Old Men. The character of Chigurh does not appear to behave consistently with any traditional form or rational morality, instead, preferring to use his own word as his final and absolute truth. When he feels like this may not be adequate, he uses coins to decide if or not he should keep his word (usually in regard to if or not he should kill someone). The catch, however, is that the person who he intends to kill must call the toss of the coin.
“None of this was your fault.
She shook her head, sobbing.
You didn’t do anything. It was bad luck.
She nodded.
He watched her, his chin in his hand. All right, he said. This is the best I can do.
He straightened out his leg and reached into his pocket and drew out a few coins and took one and held it up. He turned it. For her to see the justice of it. He held it between his thumb and forefinger and weighed it and then flipped it spinning in the air and caught it and slapped it down on his wrist. Call it, he said.
She looked at him, at his outheld wrist. What? She said.
Call it.
I wont do it.
Yes you will. Call it.
God would not want me to do that.
Of course he would. You should try to save yourself. Call it. This is your last chance.
Heads, she said.
He lifted his hand away. The coin was tails.
I’m sorry
She didn’t answer.” (McCarthy, 2005)
This scene is an example of pure chance deciding the result of an ethical decision. Is this morally right? This method purer than anything that human reason is capable of. It is distilled morality, the essence of what we strive to achieve with every decision we make, for human reason creates morality in order to strive for fairness and equality. When a judge sits in his chair at the top of a courtroom, his purpose is to pass a sentence that is the fairest response to whatever the crime may have been. However the very fact that the judge is human, who thinks, feels, worries and gets hungry makes this job impossible to complete to perfection. All of those things detract from the seriousness of the decision that the judge is required to deliver. Albert Camus saw this and highlighted it as an absurdity in his novella, The Stranger.
“The fact that the verdict was read out at eight P.M. rather than at five, the fact that it might have been quite different, that it was given by men who change their underclothes, and was credited to so vague an entity as the “French people”—for that matter, why not to the Chinese or the German people? —All these facts seemed to deprive the court’s decision of much of its gravity.” (Camus, 1946)
These fluctuating variables take much away from the seriousness of life and death that these dilemmas commonly deal with, and chance nicely avoids these protean aspects. Chance is unaffected and remains immaculate, unlike Rationality, which is inevitably muddied by the logic of mankind, forever relying on itself to justify its own first principle. It is similar in the differences in scoring places between running and gymnastics at the Olympic Games. While gymnastics is based on a grading system out of 100, with judges scoring the athletes for their performances, running remains forever objective as it is ranked via the incorruptible clock. Time, just like Chance, is an unbiased platform from which to accurately and fairly judge a situation. For these reasons, chance should be used in favour of either Rational Deontology or Teleology as a basis for making ethical decisions as it exists independently of human alteration, allowing for a higher position of objectivity to be taken.
If: The most objective motivation to act in a situation is the most moral motivation to act
And: Chance is the most objective motivation
Then: Chance is the most moral motivation to act”
So what do you think? Agree? Disagree? Anything I messed up as far as reasoning or argument goes? Let me know!