Author Topic: The Morality Quiz  (Read 42667 times)

Offline Kerry

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Re: The Morality Quiz
« Reply #90 on: December 01, 2007, 10:27:17 pm »
P.S.  I just wanted to add that I'm sorry if I offended anyone with my comments.  I didn't meant to be insensitive to any Catholics, or former Catholics here.   :)

Certainly no offence taken by me, Gary. I thoroughly enjoy reading your intelligent, insightful posts.  :D
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Offline Kerry

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Re: The Morality Quiz
« Reply #91 on: December 01, 2007, 10:52:10 pm »
Thanks for that infromation, Kerry.  But a priest can deny to hear your confession or give you absolution, right?  And wouldn't these things, in a Catholic's view keep you from going to heaven when you die?

Gary

You are absolutely correct, Gary. Point taken.

Australia's most senior RC prelate is Sydney's Cardinal George Pell. A despicable, hate-filled homophobe of the highest order, if ever there was one. He refuses to give Holy Communion to "practising" homosexuals. Every now and then, members of the Rainbow Sash organisation front-up at the altar rail at St Mary's Cathedral in Sydney, draped in their rainbow sashes. They are always quiet, dignified and respectful of their surroundings. Even their rainbow sashes are sombre and understated. It's not as though they enter the cathedral in drag, disruptively chanting gay slogans. No, they solemnly join the other communicants at the altar rail. And what does Cardinal Pell do? He refuses them HC and instead makes a sign of the cross in their general direction. Despicable.  >:(

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Offline Kerry

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Re: The Morality Quiz
« Reply #92 on: December 01, 2007, 11:01:45 pm »
Oh and to add, although I don't know anyone personally that was involved directly in ther holocaust (My sisters ex grandad in law had his number tattoed on to his arm but I never met him and apprently he never EVER talked about it and she never saw that number) but having visited Auswitch - I had a very VERY strong emotional reaction to it - as most people do. If you have such a strong reactyion to it 60 years later, imagine what you felt to actually be there.

I recently read a wonderful quote, Kelda, that had me in tears. Apparently it stands at the entrance to one of the concentration camps:

"When they came for the Communists, I did not say
anything, for you see I was not a Communist.
When they came for the trade unionists I did not speak up,
because I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews, I did not protest, because
I was not a Jew.
And when they came for the homosexuals, I remained silent,
because I am not a homosexual.
Now they come for me, there is no one left to speak for me."
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Offline delalluvia

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Re: The Morality Quiz
« Reply #93 on: December 02, 2007, 01:33:44 am »
I recently read a wonderful quote, Kelda, that had me in tears. Apparently it stands at the entrance to one of the concentration camps:

"When they came for the Communists, I did not say
anything, for you see I was not a Communist.
When they came for the trade unionists I did not speak up,
because I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews, I did not protest, because
I was not a Jew.
And when they came for the homosexuals, I remained silent,
because I am not a homosexual.
Now they come for me, there is no one left to speak for me."


‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing’



Offline underdown

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Re: The Morality Quiz
« Reply #94 on: December 03, 2007, 08:43:18 am »
I know. But then, as philosopher Peter Singer always reminds us, many starving or sick people could be saved on what regular old middle class people spend on normal everyday luxuries.

One of his famous dilemmas: You see a chlid standing on a train track with a train bearing down. You could save her, but to do so you'd have to leave your $25,200 2008 Toyota Camry Hybrid on the tracks and have it totalled. Would you save the child anyway? Just about everyone would say, of course.

Well then, he responds, how can you spend $25,200 on a 2008 Toyota Camry Hybrid, knowing that by doing so you are spending money that could otherwise be used to save countless starving or sick children?



Scenario 1:
Driver leaps out of car, leaves it on the tracks, saves the child and the car is smashed.
This story of sacrifice and courage makes headlines and inspires selflessness in a host of people.
Driver refuses reward from parents of saved child, and says he/she is just glad that the child is ok, and wishes that all children could be saved.
Parents of saved child donate to childrens' charity.
Car manufacturer gives the driver a new car, benefits from the publicity and inspires even more goodwill.

Scenario 2:
Driver does nothing, watches as the child is killed, sells the car and donates the money to save starving children in Africa.
Driver inspires a 'Why should I do anything ... I'll just give some money' attitude in others.
Driver suffers depression, can't work, and his/her children starve.
He/she is never again in a position to help anybody.

Gary, you mde a great point when you mentioned the ripple effect.
Good or bad, it can have a real influence on the morality of Governments, religious groups, society and relationships.

Love the story about the starfish, Shasta. Who knows if such things are merely local?
I read your story in Australia, and I'm sure that, within Bettermost, a lot of these posts are appreciated globally.
Maybe they have a far more reaching effect than we realise?

Online serious crayons

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Re: The Morality Quiz
« Reply #95 on: December 03, 2007, 11:18:58 am »
That's just one of those rhetorical philosophical statements.  $25K isn't going to stop children from being sick or from starving.

$25K goes a long way in Africa. Singer talks about the world's poorest people living on less than the spending equivalent of one U.S. dollar a day. Donate that $25,000 to one baby, and you've doubled their standard of living for the next 68 years. I can't quote the cost of vaccinations and medicine, but they seem to be pretty affordable. Poor children who don't die of starvation often die of diseases that are easily treatable or preventable in industrialized countries. So yes, even a few dollars could potentially save a life. Or, back to the starfish, even if a single vaccination cost $25,000, so your car contribution saved only one life, wouldn't that one life still be worth it?

Quote
  In order for that to happen, entire governments need to change, people's values need to change and populations need to be educated

Yes. That is exactly what Peter Singer is attempting to do.

He's not trying to get you, one person, to sell your car. He's trying to get all Americans to think about the cost of the luxuries they enjoy, whether it's a $25,000 car, a $25,000 truffle, or all the other things we buy for ourselves.

Here's a recent Singer essay on the topic, which I just read in Best American Essays 2007, and ran in the New York Times Magazine last year. It's really though-provoking; I would encourage anyone interested in this subject to read it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/magazine/17charity.t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

Here's how he calculates things could change if people started thinking in those terms:

Quote
Philosophers like Liam Murphy of New York University and my colleague Kwame Anthony Appiah at Princeton ... calculate how much would be required to ensure that the world’s poorest people have a chance at a decent life, and then divide this sum among the affluent.

... What might that fair amount be? One way of calculating it would be to take as our target, at least for the next nine years, the Millennium Development Goals, set by the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000. On that occasion, the largest gathering of world leaders in history jointly pledged to meet, by 2015, a list of goals that include:

Reducing by half the proportion of the world’s people in extreme poverty (defined as living on less than the purchasing-power equivalent of one U.S. dollar per day).

Reducing by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.

Ensuring that children everywhere are able to take a full course of primary schooling.

Ending sex disparity in education.

Reducing by two-thirds the mortality rate among children under 5.

Reducing by three-quarters the rate of maternal mortality.

Halting and beginning to reverse the spread of H.I.V./AIDS and halting and beginning to reduce the incidence of malaria and other major diseases.

Reducing by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water.

Last year a United Nations task force, led by the Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, estimated the annual cost of meeting these goals to be $121 billion in 2006, rising to $189 billion by 2015. When we take account of existing official development aid promises, the additional amount needed each year to meet the goals is only $48 billion for 2006 and $74 billion for 2015.

Now let’s look at the incomes of America’s rich and superrich, and ask how much they could reasonably give. The task is made easier by statistics recently provided by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, economists at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris-Jourdan, and the University of California, Berkeley, respectively, based on U.S. tax data for 2004. Their figures are for pretax income, excluding income from capital gains, which for the very rich are nearly always substantial. For simplicity I have rounded the figures, generally downward. Note too that the numbers refer to “tax units,” that is, in many cases, families rather than individuals.

Piketty and Saez’s top bracket comprises 0.01 percent of U.S. taxpayers. There are 14,400 of them, earning an average of $12,775,000, with total earnings of $184 billion. The minimum annual income in this group is more than $5 million, so it seems reasonable to suppose that they could, without much hardship, give away a third of their annual income, an average of $4.3 million each, for a total of around $61 billion. That would still leave each of them with an annual income of at least $3.3 million.

Next comes the rest of the top 0.1 percent (excluding the category just described, as I shall do henceforth). There are 129,600 in this group, with an average income of just over $2 million and a minimum income of $1.1 million. If they were each to give a quarter of their income, that would yield about $65 billion, and leave each of them with at least $846,000 annually.

The top 0.5 percent consists of 575,900 taxpayers, with an average income of $623,000 and a minimum of $407,000. If they were to give one-fifth of their income, they would still have at least $325,000 each, and they would be giving a total of $72 billion.

Coming down to the level of those in the top 1 percent, we find 719,900 taxpayers with an average income of $327,000 and a minimum of $276,000. They could comfortably afford to give 15 percent of their income. That would yield $35 billion and leave them with at least $234,000.

Finally, the remainder of the nation’s top 10 percent earn at least $92,000 annually, with an average of $132,000. There are nearly 13 million in this group. If they gave the traditional tithe — 10 percent of their income, or an average of $13,200 each — this would yield about $171 billion and leave them a minimum of $83,000.

You could spend a long time debating whether the fractions of income I have suggested for donation constitute the fairest possible scheme. Perhaps the sliding scale should be steeper, so that the superrich give more and the merely comfortable give less. And it could be extended beyond the Top 10 percent of American families, so that everyone able to afford more than the basic necessities of life gives something, even if it is as little as 1 percent. Be that as it may, the remarkable thing about these calculations is that a scale of donations that is unlikely to impose significant hardship on anyone yields a total of $404 billion — from just 10 percent of American families.

Obviously, the rich in other nations should share the burden of relieving global poverty. The U.S. is responsible for 36 percent of the gross domestic product of all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations. Arguably, because the U.S. is richer than all other major nations, and its wealth is more unevenly distributed than wealth in almost any other industrialized country, the rich in the U.S. should contribute more than 36 percent of total global donations. So somewhat more than 36 percent of all aid to relieve global poverty should come from the U.S. For simplicity, let’s take half as a fair share for the U.S. On that basis, extending the scheme I have suggested worldwide would provide $808 billion annually for development aid. That’s more than six times what the task force chaired by Sachs estimated would be required for 2006 in order to be on track to meet the Millennium Development Goals, and more than 16 times the shortfall between that sum and existing official development aid commitments.

BTW, this esssay doesn't include the child-on-the-RR-tracks scenario, which I read in a different Singer essay, but it offers a similar example:

Quote
In an article I wrote more than three decades ago, at the time of a humanitarian emergency in what is now Bangladesh, I used the example of walking by a shallow pond and seeing a small child who has fallen in and appears to be in danger of drowning. Even though we did nothing to cause the child to fall into the pond, almost everyone agrees that if we can save the child at minimal inconvenience or trouble to ourselves, we ought to do so. Anything else would be callous, indecent and, in a word, wrong. The fact that in rescuing the child we may, for example, ruin a new pair of shoes is not a good reason for allowing the child to drown. Similarly if for the cost of a pair of shoes we can contribute to a health program in a developing country that stands a good chance of saving the life of a child, we ought to do so.

But books and movies and the internet, and little things like an attractive and comfortable sofa, etc., ...these things do sustain my spirit.  I do believe that I would be miserable if I lived in a shanty, slept on a mat on the bare ground, and ate nothing but beans.  I might get some satisfaction knowing I was able to give a few hundred dollars a month to charity, but still I'd be pretty depressed, and I'd likely soon lose my humanity and desire to help anyone.

Gary, I don't think even Singer would expect you to give until you're living in a shanty, sleeping on a floor mat and eating only beans. In this particular article, in fact, he is talking about millionaires and billionaires, though I've also seen similar things he's written directed at more common folk. But in any case, I don't think he's saying that, in order to be moral human beings, we all must give away our money until we live under impoverished circumstances. He's saying that, in America, there's a big, big gap between floor mats and beans, and the way most of us actually do live. And he's suggesting that we all think hard about the cost of that gap.

Here's one more excerpt from that essay, about an extreme example of what we're talking about:

Quote
Few people have set a personal example that would allow them to tell [Bill] Gates [who Singer considers an example of generous giving] that he has not given enough, but one who could is Zell Kravinsky. A few years ago, when he was in his mid-40s, Kravinsky gave almost all of his $45 million real estate fortune to health-related charities, retaining only his modest family home in Jenkintown, near Philadelphia, and enough to meet his family’s ordinary expenses. After learning that thousands of people with failing kidneys die each year while waiting for a transplant, he contacted a Philadelphia hospital and donated one of his kidneys to a complete stranger.

But even Kravinsky stopped short of reducing his lifestyle to floor mats and beans.


Offline Katness

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Re: The Morality Quiz
« Reply #96 on: January 09, 2008, 06:48:19 am »
I know this may not be listed as an option but, personally I could not smother the child. But I also could not let the people with me be killed. So the only thing I would see as an alternative would be to take the child find a clear enough route out of the place with the least amount of enemies roaming around. Stay low and with child concealed with me, stifling as much of the crying as possible. Leave the group and run like I have never run before till I reached safety. Even if it was day time I'd find the route with most shelter. Night time, I'd use cover of darkness and the route with most shelter. And I'd work out a way not to let anyone know there are others in there. If anyone saw me, I'd make it out like I'm alone with child and make them come after me. Give the others a chance.

And I'm not just saying that. I stand by what I said. On that note. However, if there was no other alternative, and not being able to kill the child myself. And if there was no one else who would. Then I'd probably let the child die by committing suicide by taking the child and walking out into the middle of a group of the enemies in surrender form while acting completely alone and if asked if I was alone I'd simply and blatantly say yes. And let them kill both me and the child. 

But thats just me. I'd prefer to either run and give the people I'm with a chance by making them come after me. Or let myself be killed with child while concealing the people I'm with where they won't be discovered.

Bah, I care too much. It makes my head hurt sometimes.

I'm not a complete idiot, some parts are missing.

If all is not lost, then where is it?

I used to have a handle on life, but it broke.

Offline Kelda

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Re: The Morality Quiz
« Reply #97 on: January 12, 2008, 02:40:33 pm »
I was reminded of this quiz a few days ago - and for the life of me I can't not remeber what programme I was watching or what I was reading - think it may have been something about Rwanda or the likes - but it was talking about how trhis woman had been hid with her family by a local priest to stop them getting killed - and the priest had given the kids sleeping pills to keep them quiet so that they wouldn;t be discovered.

It made me think I would stalk up in such a thing should I ever be in that situation......
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Offline Kerry

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Re: The Morality Quiz
« Reply #98 on: January 12, 2008, 10:35:18 pm »
I was reminded of this quiz a few days ago - and for the life of me I can't not remeber what programme I was watching or what I was reading - think it may have been something about Rwanda or the likes - but it was talking about how trhis woman had been hid with her family by a local priest to stop them getting killed - and the priest had given the kids sleeping pills to keep them quiet so that they wouldn;t be discovered.

It made me think I would stalk up in such a thing should I ever be in that situation......

Might have been the recent tragic events in Kenya, Kelda. All those poor people who took shelter in the church and were incinerated.  :'(
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Offline Kelda

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Re: The Morality Quiz
« Reply #99 on: January 13, 2008, 07:28:10 am »
No it was a historical article.... I remember that - talking to three different people -one from the bosnia herzogovina war, one this african lady and one a guy from... somewhere.....

But yeah the Kenya situation is not good - to think ther may be these ,morality questions going on right now......   :'(
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