"We had spent so much time building up the levee, and it didn't hold. We would have been better off getting stuff out of there," Sherburne, 29, said Thursday. Perhaps it might be better if private charity supplanted government welfare. It might be better if all nuclear weapons were privately owned. It certainl...(Read more...)
"I spent so much time quoting some unshaven guy in a flooded town, just to make a non-sequitur about the private ownership of nuclear weapons" said a Midwesterner with a hit-and-miss history of interesting comments.
Perhaps it might be better if this poster had a clear point in mind when he posts news items. Perhaps he should be put on moderation, or relegated to dissent.
Such questions ignore whether the issue may be one of mental illness, rather than philosophy. Some people are "neurotic" while others aim (poorly) for "humor" and some so-called posters may just be chatbots trying to pass the "Turing test."
"I am for hire. I am not afraid of ambiguity. My hobbies are obfuscation and melodramatics"
Few off-kilter posts really need to be taken seriously. This was one. So was that. A blowhard just likes to be heard.
Cowardly compromisers fear the opinions of other people so they concoct pseudo-Objectivist spins for repaying other people for their bad choices and hard luck.
Michael, in case you don't realize it, I really enjoy most of what you do here. But sometimes you come across like Spock channeling some inscutable silicon-based horta. The above post was intended as a parody, not an attack. I hope you understand what I was trying to communicate. You are at your best when you bring in your out-of-the-canon knowledge like Aspasia. When you get on these rants and idees fixes, the worst part is not that you sound odd (I am sure I sound odder than you to most) but that you are wasting your obvious talent and intelligence. Imagine how much better it would be to hear what you have found of value (if anything) in Mercier's Handbook. I look forward to your future contributions.
PICHER, Oklahoma (CNN) -- In a year marked by massive flooding, deadly tornadoes and blazing wildfires, Tad Skylar Agoglia has never been needed more. This week, he's on the scene in Iowa.
Tad Agoglia started the nonprofit First Response Team of America to help clean up areas hit by disaster.
Agoglia is the founder of The First Response Team of America, his self-funded, nonprofit, nomadic, four-man cleanup crew that provides immediate, emergency aid to areas hit by disasters.
The First Response Team: Disaster Relief Fund is managed by The Greater Houston Community Foundation (GHCF), a 501c3 organization. Donations are tax-deductable. http://www.firstresponseteam.org/donations/
Now, myself, I would not be motivated to tap out my savings account just to help others. The 501c3 is just another way to do business and I have no problem with that. I would sell this as insurance through a pool, as little St. Paul Insurance does (or did) for the US space program. Any town in American can afford to buy this insurance and know that a team will show up because they paid for it. But (and I say "But") I did not do this. Tad Agoglia did and he has a perfect right to his own motives and motivations, ways and means. This news story will bring him a lot of immediate attention. When it cools off, I will contact him.
I have my own thoughts about the ethics of emergencies: the purpose of morality is to teach you how to live as a human being- but when a disaster strikes, the context may very well make it impossible to remain human- you may have to act as an animal in order to hold on to bare survival (after a nuclear attack, or in some earthquake etc.). Personally, I believe that your goal in an emergency should be to end that emergency as quickly as possible so you can return to a normal moral context: and that you should adhere to your moral code as closely as possible to achieve this so that, when normal life resumes, you can live with yourself.
It's not only your body that you must try to preserve- but your integration as a whole human. If you know the evil of sacrificing others to self, you should not crawl over others to survive in an emergency. Not for their sake, but for your own- so that, when normal life resumes, you can look back at the emergency not with self-loathing and guilt but with pride in yourself.
However, I do believe that situations exist in which behaving morally is impossible or the 'grey area' is so contextual that no philosophy can prepare you for it (think of the movie Alive for example)- in those cases, the goal becomes not preserving your complete psychological integration but preserving as much of it as you can. There's no hard moral lines in nature- (e.g. even eating someone else's dead body that died naturally is morally preferable to killing them for their meat, and on and on). Life as a rational being is the standard by which you judge yourself- and you take the actions you can personally live with. If you go too far, you may survive the immediate danger only to be burdened with mental anguish and suffering the rest of your days, or you may demonstrate your weakness to others in a way that makes it impossible to face your fellow men with pride. Reality will be the final judge as to where your own personal moral line must be drawn. Every man has a limit to what he may forgive himself and none of us should have to learn what that limit is.
In short, philosophy teaches a morality for both body and mind. Emergencies threaten the integration of the two. The degree to which you allow an emergency to split your moral consciousness from your bodily survival is the degree to which afterward you will be psychologically and emotionally torn apart. The proper approach to emergencies is to set the goal of eliminating or minimizing such damage to the greatest possible degree.
