Ethics
What’s the relationship between evil and stupidity? Stupidity is senselessness at its best, and evil, in the end, is senselessness at its best. (see Judges, under Theology)
What's the relationship between sin and ignorance? I can see that behind every sin is ignorance, but in what way? Sin cannot be completely blamed on ignorance, otherwise, nobody could be held at fault for sinning. At the same time, if people really and truly knew the difference between right and wrong, they would resist temptation. So what's going on here? Jesus himself said, "Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do".
Is it OK to be happy for no reason? Is it better (philosophically-speaking) to be sad for no reason?
A hypothetical question – 2 people; one likes to study and do scientific research, just for the fun of it. This person lives in isolation and doesn’t care to share their discoveries with the rest of humanity. The second person likes to drink booze and watch football in front of the TV, also just for the fun of it. Given the selfishness and isolation of the 2 people’s lifestyles, can we still say that the researcher’s pursuit of knowledge is higher than the loser’s pursuit of booze and entertainment? Logically, I think we can’t, but that’s still a really hard thing to say (intuition-wise). We’re to “love our neighbors as ourselves”, which neither is doing, and while I cast blame on the scientific hermit, their pursuit isn’t completely reprehensible, is it? Does it have inherent value?
But see, here’s the thing. Even a scientific researcher that contributes to society through their research doesn’t do it to benefit humanity or even to contribute to society. They do it because it’s their passion; they have a drive to discover. Now it might give them immense satisfaction to know that what they love has benefited others in practical ways, and yet, that’s not the reason they continue. So then why should I think that the former is in the wrong, while the latter isn’t, though they work from the same motives?
So the purpose of this hypothetical question was to separate the maximization of pleasure from actions having inherent value, and this from love, and this from motive.
Is it wrong to take substances in order to not sleep? I’m reminded of Erdös (20th century Hungarian mathematician), who lived to a great age and was also supremely productive. Perhaps, even, much of his work would never have seen the light of day if he had not kept up his daily regimen of drugs and caffeine to support his frenetic schedule. Especially frightening are the implications of a $500 bet he once agreed to – that he would not be able to leave off his pills and caffeine for a month. Although he successfully went through the one month, he said his brain became just like a normal person’s, and one month of potential mathematical history has been lost to us forever (he was that productive).
The moral paradox of the greater good being sacrificed for responsible good – (You’re responsible to your family, so you can’t give to others as well, no matter how much they need your help and no matter how much you can help them.) (The unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord. 33 But the married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife, 34 and his interests are divided. And the unmarried or betrothed woman is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to be holy in body and spirit. But the married woman is anxious about worldly things, how to please her husband. – I Cor 7:32-34, St. Paul writing on celibacy and marriage)
Which person is worse – a sheep, or someone who’s not a sheep, but is too afraid to go against everyone else?
Who is braver – the one who feels no fear, or the one who’s filled with fear but is brave anyway?
Why do the spiritually-minded enjoy nature more than others do (it seems)?
Who is more evil -- the one who knows perfectly well what is right and wrong but loves evil so much that they continue in their error, or the one who is so evil that they can no longer tell right from wrong? I imagine that Satan is the first, so does this answer the question? If it does, that doesn't mean that I now understand the nature of this.
Men can, and do keep women out of certain spheres (the workplace, for example) through sexual harassment. Considering the gravity of this offense, what is the right thing to do? If the women stay out as their natural inclination is, nothing will change, but if they continue on ahead, their dignity will suffer, and nobody deserves to be treated so utterly inhumanely.
Is it wrong to wear (costume) jewelry when some people in the world can’t? What if we consider that people now live in relative luxury compared to people in the past?
Prv 21:20 Shouldn’t the righteous person’s house have only what’s needed? Not be filled with riches and perfumes?
“This requires an apprenticeship in self-denial ... and self-mastery – the preconditions of all true freedom.” – The Catechism of the Catholic Church (2333)
“Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God.” (I Pt 2:16; emphasis mine)
“Freedom comes with responsibility.”
All these things are counter-intuitive. We all think that freedom is being able to do whatever you want. But the pattern (as I’ve shown above) is clear. There’s something more to this that nobody bothers to teach us. The question is – what?
The opposite of moral luck – moral misfortune. I’d love to be generous, but I don’t have the money for it. I’m so jealous of others who do have the money but only spend it on themselves. So they have the opportunity, but not the will, whereas I have the will but not the opportunity. And then there’s others who have both the will and the opportunity. So why should the one who merely has the misfortune of not having the opportunity be deprived of the moral reward which the one with both the opportunity and the will receives?
If somebody is shocked at having been betrayed, are they right to seriously doubt their judgment? Or should they just get over it and say this kind of thing happens?
Why is punishment effective in bringing about reform?
Should a person be punished even if they've repented and have also lost their memory of their transgressions? Seems grievous to do so, but what should memory have to do with it?
If you can't remember some trauma, or any other memory for that matter, does it matter that you lived it?
What’s the relationship between ignorance and sin?
Why is it that often, it's ourselves that we find hardest to forgive?
Is there anything wrong with using drugs for inspiration?
Let's explore the degree-of-control/natural vs unnatural continuum. For example, on one end you have genetically engineered babies, on the other, birth control. When you genetically engineer a baby you're exerting a lot of control and the whole process (and "product") is highly unnatural. Practicing birth control, however, isn't so extreme. You're still exerting control, and it can still be said to be unnatural, but not to the same degree. Other examples would include makeup and plastic surgery. Most people don't frown upon wearing makeup (well, unless it's TOO MUCH makeup), but most wouldn't get plastic surgery, even if they really think they could use it. (Of course, this also depends on what society you're living in. In many Asian countries, plastic surgery is common and accepted.) However, even these people value the real deal, like how Chinese men have started demanding that women provide pictures of themselves without makeup on online dating sites, to make sure they're not being duped.
But let's think about this -- why is natural beauty so valued? Why should the man care if the face he sees in front of him is naturally pretty or not, as long as it's pleasant to look at at the moment? After all, beauty is only skin deep. What I mean is, the man may object to made-up beauty, not realizing that even natural beauty is only a shell and "nice packaging" of the real person within. After all, no matter how beautiful you are, if you don't die young, you're going to be old and ugly one day, and the man is going to have to decide if he's OK with that. So why does the man insist on the reality of one type of packaging, but not of the other?
The same goes with plastic surgery, or a genetically engineered baby. While I don't think people would object to tinkering with a baby's genome to protect it from a predisposition to breast cancer, people DO have a problem with tinkering with its hair color, height, and possibly even its intelligence. Likewise with plastic surgery. Getting rid of a pug nose is seen as vain, but how is this different from dying your hair blond? If you don't like your mousy brown hair or your pug nose, why live with it if you don't have to? What's wrong with total control of your appearance? We choose what we wear and what style we like, and nobody thinks its wrong to express yourself through your wardrobe (which is something we all do whether we put effort into it or not), so why can't we choose a total makeover, right down to our bone structure and DNA? If your body is just the house for your soul, why can't you change or "redecorate" it to your own liking, just as you choose your clothes to your own liking?
Is education a right?
The irony of extreme altruism – starving your kids so you can feed strangers. (This is a true story.)
Why does punishment work? It causes repentance, and it can even be sincere repentance, but why should this be?
Should a criminal be punished if they get amnesia?
What's wrong with plastic surgery? Why shouldn't we be able to choose what we look like?
Ex of moral luck -- DUI vs involuntary manslaughter.
A cruel dictator says you must uphold communism or he'll kill your family. Which is greater -- truth or love?
Why is it wrong to take marijuana to chill out instead of working on being a chill person? Nothing in life is cheap or easy, but isn't it? What's wrong with taking the easy way out?
Is it bad to be like Sonu if Sonu really didn't care about being treated like an untouchable? I mean, you could argue that if everyone was like Sonu nothing would change, but then, Sonu really didn't care if anything changed.
Why should the hypocrite stop preaching? Because what he says is the truth after all.
Are athletes and entertainers overpaid?
Is punishment punishment if you can't subjectively feel it because you're not aware of your punishment?
If both drug use and VR can and often take hold of a person in the same say, and lead to the same detrimental results to society (as we see in Japan's VR/escapism problem), why have the countries of the world only outlawed drugs but not VR (in all its many forms)? And yet I agree that not all forms of VR should be banned. Something like porn, yes, but what about regular video games? People can also get dangerously sucked into these, and yet, it seems really extreme, even communist/totalitarian, to do so, and so I won't advocate this, but how do we delineate between different forms of escapism, drugs and porn on one extreme (with drugs being banned the world over, for the most part, and porn, unfortunately, only in China [at least that I know of]), and say, TV on the other (though I would say that, at least in America, though I would bet this is also true in any country that has wide access to TVs, the population is definitely kept in a near-vegetable state for hours everyday due to its hypnotic attraction)?
Who's more evil -- Stalin or Ted Bundy?
Why does a filmed rape seem so much more shameful than a porn film? You would think that being innocent/guilty would make all the difference. Rather, it's the opposite. What I mean is, isn't it far more shameful to willingly allow yourself to be filmed having sex than to unwillingly be filmed unwillingly having sex? But that's not the way I feel, and I think most would agree.
On Brain Death
Let me begin by saying that the Catholic Church has really dropped the ball on this one, because it supports organ donation from "the deceased". I put that in quotation marks because the donors aren't really dead, although that's what the medical establishment would like you to believe.
I used to be fooled myself. Although I knew that you couldn't take usable organs from a dead person after a certain point, I had no idea just how soon after death this "certain point" is. I guess I just assumed that as long as the organ hadn't actually started decomposing, it was usable. To be honest, I really hadn't given it enough thought, since I knew about heart transplants, but if they can take a heart from a dead person and put it into a living person while it's still functioning, shouldn't that make you wonder why they would take a "dead" person's heart if it's still working? After all, as long as your heart is working, you're alive. But I didn't even realize this back then. I thought people died for all sorts of reasons -- cancer, accidents, heart attacks. Well, actually, you only die for one reason -- cardiac arrest. Everyone dies from cardiac arrest. That's how you die. Sure, people say "So and so died of lung cancer", which seems to imply that this person died because their lungs stopped working, but actually, they died because the cancer attacked the lungs, which in turn stopped the heart from working. But I didn't realize these things, so that's how I was fooled.
It wasn't until I found out about someone I knew who needed an organ that I looked into organ donation. Although I knew there was a severe organ shortage, I always just thought this was because people were so selfish that they didn't even want to share their organs with anyone else even after they didn't need them anymore. I was perplexed about why people were so reluctant to donate, so I did research into this. The vast majority of information about it lauded organ donation (my original stance), but there were a few kooks out there that seemed to be against it. As much as I thought it'd be a waste of time to look into their side, you have to give the other side a chance, right? That's when I realized that you had to a certain kind of "dead" to be an organ donor -- brain dead. Although I had heard this term before, and assumed I knew what it meant (it must be what it sounds like, right?) I started getting suspicious. Then I came across another kind of dead you could be in order to qualify for organ donation -- what was called cardiac death or circulatory death, and then I got really confused. I thought there was only one kind of dead.
Although I didn't realize it at the time that I was doing this research, just the fact that it took such a long time to figure out what the definition of brain dead is is scary. That's because I now realize that no one really knows what they're talking about. And this was confirmed to me in this article (pg 2, 2nd full paragraph) where the author cites a study in which about 60% of transplant doctors and nurses surveyed didn't use the term "death" consistently, and about 20% used the term in such a way that could be applied even to people in a vegetative state.
Things don't look too good on the other (layman's) side either. Apparently a lot of people confuse the vegetative state with coma, and a large percentage of people even somehow confuse coma with death. However, I'd have to say that I was also once quite confused, since I used to think that it was worse to be in a vegetative state than to be in a coma. This was because I couldn't think of anything worse than being a vegetable. So you can see that how things are worded can really throw people off when they don't know any better. "Vegetable" here is a real misnomer, and so is "brain death", since the brain isn't really dead.
Brain death is "supposedly" when the brain has lost its ability to function. In the US the entire brain must be nonfunctional to meet this requirement, but in the UK it's enough for just the brainstem to not be functioning, as long as the person has also lost consciousness. Now why do I say "supposedly"? Wading through this murky mess trying to sort out what exactly counts as brain death showed me that brain death is just a convenient way to declare someone legally dead so you can harvest their organs. That means the definition of brain death differs from hospital to hospital, and that it's also based on an arbitrary set of criteria. You're supposed to show "total lack of function" by testing for some very basic reflexes, like the gag reflex, pupillary reaction to light, blinking if you're poked in the eye, and being able to breathe on your own. If you don't pass the tests, you're diagnosed as brain dead. Why then was I reading about cases of brain dead people gestating fetuses, growing and going through puberty? You can't do these things if your brain isn't functioning. These are all bodily processes that are controlled, orchestrated and maintained by the brain, so if you see someone doing these things, obviously their brain is working, even if an EEG (brain wave measuring device) were to show a flat line (ie, no brain activity). For some reason the medical establishment had decided to favor certain signs of brain activity over others. Showing reflexes and being able to breathe is considered to be the standard by which someone's considered brain dead, but producing and balancing hormones, metabolic activity and maintaining homeostasis is considered totally irrelevant. This is why the guy who tested Jahi McMath for brain death for a second time (to prove to the court) after her family had long disputed her status was able to declare her brain dead again, against all common sense, because he insisted on sticking to the standard criteria, which only takes reflexes into account, even though he knew that she had started menstruating and going through puberty after being declared brain dead the first time around.
Notice that brain death is defined as the loss of brain function, not as the death of the brain. All dead brains are non-functioning, but not all non-functioning brains are dead. When can see that this is true by comparing the brain with the heart. All dead hearts are non-functioning, but not all non-functioning hearts are dead. This is obvious from the fact of the possibility of resuscitation. Just because your heart has stopped and you're in cardiac arrest doesn't mean that you're gone for good. They can restart your heart if you're lucky. If your heart was really dead, this would be impossible. Nobody comes back from the dead, what we can call irreversible death, or biological death. This is the difference between death and clinical death. Death is irreversible, but clinical death is just the beginning of death, since death is a process. It takes time for individual cells to die. Some take longer than others. Brain cells are the first to go, then the heart and lungs. The liver and kidneys can last half an hour or an hour, and bone and skin cells are the last to go. In the old days, if you went into clinical death, it was over. There was no way to bring you back from that. Nowadays with all the medical technology, they can shock your heart into beating again. So obviously even though it wasn't functioning, it was still alive.
Now if the brain was really dead, then you could appropriately call someone brain dead. I would even go on to say that you could just call them dead. But we have to be careful here. When I say brain dead would be an appropriate term, I mean there has to be actual necrosis of the brain cells. We all know what this means. It's the difference between a fresh brain and a spoiled brain, like spoiled or rotten food. But that's not the standard that the medical establishment is using. I even read of a case of a boy brain dead for 20 years (so, yeah, that means he grew up into a man), whose brain had disintegrated so much that it lacked any structure and the outside of it had even calcified, but obviously, if he grew up, that means that as bad shape as his brain was in, his brain wasn't dead. So even if a scan shows a disintegrated brain, that's still not proof that the person is dead.
To think of it another way, we can compare true brain death with decapitation. After all, the reason people die from decapitation is because their brains have been separated from their hearts. So it's obvious that they've died. You needn't bother to check for a pulse or breathing or a heartbeat. Everyone knows that would be silly, maybe even crazy. If someone's brain really died, the result should be the same as decapitation -- ie, although the person might still be conscious for a few seconds, they'd be dead for good within a few minutes (which is how long the brain can go without oxygen). This means that they'd be in clinical death for a few minutes before the point of no return. With our current medical technology, these few minutes of clinical death is completely meaningless because we have no way of connecting the head to an oxygen supply. If we could do this (and we'd have to be very quick about it), then the person could be resuscitated, although poor thing, they wouldn't have a body. (Soviet doctors tried doing this to a dog, but witnesses say it only lived a few minutes, not a few hours as the doctors wanted to claim. Although I thought the dog was cute, a friend said he was horrified. Don't say I didn't warn you. You can see it here at the 2:32 mark, which will allow you to skip the isolated beating heart and breathing lungs.) So maybe in the future, even if you're decapitated or your body gets horribly mangled, they might still be able to salvage your head/brain. Maybe they could even give you a bionic body.
But that's the head. What about the body? That's the part we're interested in for the purposes of this thought experiment. If brain death is like decapitation, would it be possible for the body to live on without the brain, that is, of course, if we were to keep it artificially alive? If we could keep a decapitated body from bleeding, and hook it up to a ventilator, would its heart keep beating? Even if it did (at least for a while) the body would still have to maintain homeostasis through the endocrine system, which is controlled by the brain, so doctors would have to provide all the right hormones. It would also have to be nourished and hydrated. But assuming that we applied the best of our current technology to keeping this body alive, how long would it last? This is probably impossible to say for sure, since the only way to be sure is to empirically do it and see, but that wouldn't be ethical, unless doctors somehow came upon a fresh decapitated body by chance. So we can only make educated guesses. Given that I don't have a medical background, I can't say. And although I tried researching this, apparently no one has written about this because it's just too arcane. But my guess is that it wouldn't work out. The body is too complicated to keep going by 100% artificial means. Maybe in the future this will be possible for short periods of time, but probably not now. My point here is that if brain death was really death of the brain, it would be much like decapitation, and given that the body dies pretty much instantaneously from decapitation, it should also die instantaneously from so-called "brain death". Given that brain dead people's bodies don't die instantaneously, that must mean their brains aren't really dead, just severely damaged. But that's the whole rationale of brain death -- to be able to say that someone's brain is dead but their body is alive so that you can harvest living organs. Transplant doctors can't transplant dead organs. But you can't get living organs from a dead person, otherwise, they'd still be alive. If the brain was really dead, the body would follow suit within seconds. So what you do is make up this other category of dead people -- brain "dead" people. In fact, when the concept of brain death was first introduced (yes, for the purpose of organ transplantation, a newly advancing field), the 13 person committee that came up with it (at Harvard Medical School, the year was 1968) actually titled their paper "A Definition of Irreversible Coma". The first line of the abstract reads: "Our primary purpose is to define irreversible coma as a new criterion for death." I'm surprised that they were so forthright. Even more surprising was how quickly this bullshit definition was adopted as legal death in all 50 states of the US, then spread all over the world. Although there was some controversy, it wasn't much, and even the Church was hoodwinked, although I can only ultimately chalk that up to either laziness or intellectual dishonesty. Things have gotten so bad that if you try to research what is brain death, and how does it differ from a coma, you'll get circular definitions. One website said that the difference between a coma and brain death is that in a coma, you're alive, but with brain death, you're dead. Well, now that you know the history of this definition that has allowed thousands of people to be killed by organ harvesting, you know what a patently circular lie that is. And yes, the reason I was trying to figure out the difference between a coma and brain death was because I couldn't see any difference. But no wonder! The Harvard committee actually said they were the same thing! Now the medical establishment is saying that coma means you're alive and brain death means you're dead! Brilliant!
What's the relationship between sin and ignorance? I can see that behind every sin is ignorance, but in what way? Sin cannot be completely blamed on ignorance, otherwise, nobody could be held at fault for sinning. At the same time, if people really and truly knew the difference between right and wrong, they would resist temptation. So what's going on here? Jesus himself said, "Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do".
Is it OK to be happy for no reason? Is it better (philosophically-speaking) to be sad for no reason?
A hypothetical question – 2 people; one likes to study and do scientific research, just for the fun of it. This person lives in isolation and doesn’t care to share their discoveries with the rest of humanity. The second person likes to drink booze and watch football in front of the TV, also just for the fun of it. Given the selfishness and isolation of the 2 people’s lifestyles, can we still say that the researcher’s pursuit of knowledge is higher than the loser’s pursuit of booze and entertainment? Logically, I think we can’t, but that’s still a really hard thing to say (intuition-wise). We’re to “love our neighbors as ourselves”, which neither is doing, and while I cast blame on the scientific hermit, their pursuit isn’t completely reprehensible, is it? Does it have inherent value?
But see, here’s the thing. Even a scientific researcher that contributes to society through their research doesn’t do it to benefit humanity or even to contribute to society. They do it because it’s their passion; they have a drive to discover. Now it might give them immense satisfaction to know that what they love has benefited others in practical ways, and yet, that’s not the reason they continue. So then why should I think that the former is in the wrong, while the latter isn’t, though they work from the same motives?
So the purpose of this hypothetical question was to separate the maximization of pleasure from actions having inherent value, and this from love, and this from motive.
Is it wrong to take substances in order to not sleep? I’m reminded of Erdös (20th century Hungarian mathematician), who lived to a great age and was also supremely productive. Perhaps, even, much of his work would never have seen the light of day if he had not kept up his daily regimen of drugs and caffeine to support his frenetic schedule. Especially frightening are the implications of a $500 bet he once agreed to – that he would not be able to leave off his pills and caffeine for a month. Although he successfully went through the one month, he said his brain became just like a normal person’s, and one month of potential mathematical history has been lost to us forever (he was that productive).
The moral paradox of the greater good being sacrificed for responsible good – (You’re responsible to your family, so you can’t give to others as well, no matter how much they need your help and no matter how much you can help them.) (The unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord. 33 But the married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife, 34 and his interests are divided. And the unmarried or betrothed woman is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to be holy in body and spirit. But the married woman is anxious about worldly things, how to please her husband. – I Cor 7:32-34, St. Paul writing on celibacy and marriage)
Which person is worse – a sheep, or someone who’s not a sheep, but is too afraid to go against everyone else?
Who is braver – the one who feels no fear, or the one who’s filled with fear but is brave anyway?
Why do the spiritually-minded enjoy nature more than others do (it seems)?
Who is more evil -- the one who knows perfectly well what is right and wrong but loves evil so much that they continue in their error, or the one who is so evil that they can no longer tell right from wrong? I imagine that Satan is the first, so does this answer the question? If it does, that doesn't mean that I now understand the nature of this.
Men can, and do keep women out of certain spheres (the workplace, for example) through sexual harassment. Considering the gravity of this offense, what is the right thing to do? If the women stay out as their natural inclination is, nothing will change, but if they continue on ahead, their dignity will suffer, and nobody deserves to be treated so utterly inhumanely.
Is it wrong to wear (costume) jewelry when some people in the world can’t? What if we consider that people now live in relative luxury compared to people in the past?
Prv 21:20 Shouldn’t the righteous person’s house have only what’s needed? Not be filled with riches and perfumes?
“This requires an apprenticeship in self-denial ... and self-mastery – the preconditions of all true freedom.” – The Catechism of the Catholic Church (2333)
“Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God.” (I Pt 2:16; emphasis mine)
“Freedom comes with responsibility.”
All these things are counter-intuitive. We all think that freedom is being able to do whatever you want. But the pattern (as I’ve shown above) is clear. There’s something more to this that nobody bothers to teach us. The question is – what?
The opposite of moral luck – moral misfortune. I’d love to be generous, but I don’t have the money for it. I’m so jealous of others who do have the money but only spend it on themselves. So they have the opportunity, but not the will, whereas I have the will but not the opportunity. And then there’s others who have both the will and the opportunity. So why should the one who merely has the misfortune of not having the opportunity be deprived of the moral reward which the one with both the opportunity and the will receives?
If somebody is shocked at having been betrayed, are they right to seriously doubt their judgment? Or should they just get over it and say this kind of thing happens?
Why is punishment effective in bringing about reform?
Should a person be punished even if they've repented and have also lost their memory of their transgressions? Seems grievous to do so, but what should memory have to do with it?
If you can't remember some trauma, or any other memory for that matter, does it matter that you lived it?
What’s the relationship between ignorance and sin?
Why is it that often, it's ourselves that we find hardest to forgive?
Is there anything wrong with using drugs for inspiration?
Let's explore the degree-of-control/natural vs unnatural continuum. For example, on one end you have genetically engineered babies, on the other, birth control. When you genetically engineer a baby you're exerting a lot of control and the whole process (and "product") is highly unnatural. Practicing birth control, however, isn't so extreme. You're still exerting control, and it can still be said to be unnatural, but not to the same degree. Other examples would include makeup and plastic surgery. Most people don't frown upon wearing makeup (well, unless it's TOO MUCH makeup), but most wouldn't get plastic surgery, even if they really think they could use it. (Of course, this also depends on what society you're living in. In many Asian countries, plastic surgery is common and accepted.) However, even these people value the real deal, like how Chinese men have started demanding that women provide pictures of themselves without makeup on online dating sites, to make sure they're not being duped.
But let's think about this -- why is natural beauty so valued? Why should the man care if the face he sees in front of him is naturally pretty or not, as long as it's pleasant to look at at the moment? After all, beauty is only skin deep. What I mean is, the man may object to made-up beauty, not realizing that even natural beauty is only a shell and "nice packaging" of the real person within. After all, no matter how beautiful you are, if you don't die young, you're going to be old and ugly one day, and the man is going to have to decide if he's OK with that. So why does the man insist on the reality of one type of packaging, but not of the other?
The same goes with plastic surgery, or a genetically engineered baby. While I don't think people would object to tinkering with a baby's genome to protect it from a predisposition to breast cancer, people DO have a problem with tinkering with its hair color, height, and possibly even its intelligence. Likewise with plastic surgery. Getting rid of a pug nose is seen as vain, but how is this different from dying your hair blond? If you don't like your mousy brown hair or your pug nose, why live with it if you don't have to? What's wrong with total control of your appearance? We choose what we wear and what style we like, and nobody thinks its wrong to express yourself through your wardrobe (which is something we all do whether we put effort into it or not), so why can't we choose a total makeover, right down to our bone structure and DNA? If your body is just the house for your soul, why can't you change or "redecorate" it to your own liking, just as you choose your clothes to your own liking?
Is education a right?
The irony of extreme altruism – starving your kids so you can feed strangers. (This is a true story.)
Why does punishment work? It causes repentance, and it can even be sincere repentance, but why should this be?
Should a criminal be punished if they get amnesia?
What's wrong with plastic surgery? Why shouldn't we be able to choose what we look like?
Ex of moral luck -- DUI vs involuntary manslaughter.
A cruel dictator says you must uphold communism or he'll kill your family. Which is greater -- truth or love?
Why is it wrong to take marijuana to chill out instead of working on being a chill person? Nothing in life is cheap or easy, but isn't it? What's wrong with taking the easy way out?
Is it bad to be like Sonu if Sonu really didn't care about being treated like an untouchable? I mean, you could argue that if everyone was like Sonu nothing would change, but then, Sonu really didn't care if anything changed.
Why should the hypocrite stop preaching? Because what he says is the truth after all.
Are athletes and entertainers overpaid?
Is punishment punishment if you can't subjectively feel it because you're not aware of your punishment?
If both drug use and VR can and often take hold of a person in the same say, and lead to the same detrimental results to society (as we see in Japan's VR/escapism problem), why have the countries of the world only outlawed drugs but not VR (in all its many forms)? And yet I agree that not all forms of VR should be banned. Something like porn, yes, but what about regular video games? People can also get dangerously sucked into these, and yet, it seems really extreme, even communist/totalitarian, to do so, and so I won't advocate this, but how do we delineate between different forms of escapism, drugs and porn on one extreme (with drugs being banned the world over, for the most part, and porn, unfortunately, only in China [at least that I know of]), and say, TV on the other (though I would say that, at least in America, though I would bet this is also true in any country that has wide access to TVs, the population is definitely kept in a near-vegetable state for hours everyday due to its hypnotic attraction)?
Who's more evil -- Stalin or Ted Bundy?
Why does a filmed rape seem so much more shameful than a porn film? You would think that being innocent/guilty would make all the difference. Rather, it's the opposite. What I mean is, isn't it far more shameful to willingly allow yourself to be filmed having sex than to unwillingly be filmed unwillingly having sex? But that's not the way I feel, and I think most would agree.
On Brain Death
Let me begin by saying that the Catholic Church has really dropped the ball on this one, because it supports organ donation from "the deceased". I put that in quotation marks because the donors aren't really dead, although that's what the medical establishment would like you to believe.
I used to be fooled myself. Although I knew that you couldn't take usable organs from a dead person after a certain point, I had no idea just how soon after death this "certain point" is. I guess I just assumed that as long as the organ hadn't actually started decomposing, it was usable. To be honest, I really hadn't given it enough thought, since I knew about heart transplants, but if they can take a heart from a dead person and put it into a living person while it's still functioning, shouldn't that make you wonder why they would take a "dead" person's heart if it's still working? After all, as long as your heart is working, you're alive. But I didn't even realize this back then. I thought people died for all sorts of reasons -- cancer, accidents, heart attacks. Well, actually, you only die for one reason -- cardiac arrest. Everyone dies from cardiac arrest. That's how you die. Sure, people say "So and so died of lung cancer", which seems to imply that this person died because their lungs stopped working, but actually, they died because the cancer attacked the lungs, which in turn stopped the heart from working. But I didn't realize these things, so that's how I was fooled.
It wasn't until I found out about someone I knew who needed an organ that I looked into organ donation. Although I knew there was a severe organ shortage, I always just thought this was because people were so selfish that they didn't even want to share their organs with anyone else even after they didn't need them anymore. I was perplexed about why people were so reluctant to donate, so I did research into this. The vast majority of information about it lauded organ donation (my original stance), but there were a few kooks out there that seemed to be against it. As much as I thought it'd be a waste of time to look into their side, you have to give the other side a chance, right? That's when I realized that you had to a certain kind of "dead" to be an organ donor -- brain dead. Although I had heard this term before, and assumed I knew what it meant (it must be what it sounds like, right?) I started getting suspicious. Then I came across another kind of dead you could be in order to qualify for organ donation -- what was called cardiac death or circulatory death, and then I got really confused. I thought there was only one kind of dead.
Although I didn't realize it at the time that I was doing this research, just the fact that it took such a long time to figure out what the definition of brain dead is is scary. That's because I now realize that no one really knows what they're talking about. And this was confirmed to me in this article (pg 2, 2nd full paragraph) where the author cites a study in which about 60% of transplant doctors and nurses surveyed didn't use the term "death" consistently, and about 20% used the term in such a way that could be applied even to people in a vegetative state.
Things don't look too good on the other (layman's) side either. Apparently a lot of people confuse the vegetative state with coma, and a large percentage of people even somehow confuse coma with death. However, I'd have to say that I was also once quite confused, since I used to think that it was worse to be in a vegetative state than to be in a coma. This was because I couldn't think of anything worse than being a vegetable. So you can see that how things are worded can really throw people off when they don't know any better. "Vegetable" here is a real misnomer, and so is "brain death", since the brain isn't really dead.
Brain death is "supposedly" when the brain has lost its ability to function. In the US the entire brain must be nonfunctional to meet this requirement, but in the UK it's enough for just the brainstem to not be functioning, as long as the person has also lost consciousness. Now why do I say "supposedly"? Wading through this murky mess trying to sort out what exactly counts as brain death showed me that brain death is just a convenient way to declare someone legally dead so you can harvest their organs. That means the definition of brain death differs from hospital to hospital, and that it's also based on an arbitrary set of criteria. You're supposed to show "total lack of function" by testing for some very basic reflexes, like the gag reflex, pupillary reaction to light, blinking if you're poked in the eye, and being able to breathe on your own. If you don't pass the tests, you're diagnosed as brain dead. Why then was I reading about cases of brain dead people gestating fetuses, growing and going through puberty? You can't do these things if your brain isn't functioning. These are all bodily processes that are controlled, orchestrated and maintained by the brain, so if you see someone doing these things, obviously their brain is working, even if an EEG (brain wave measuring device) were to show a flat line (ie, no brain activity). For some reason the medical establishment had decided to favor certain signs of brain activity over others. Showing reflexes and being able to breathe is considered to be the standard by which someone's considered brain dead, but producing and balancing hormones, metabolic activity and maintaining homeostasis is considered totally irrelevant. This is why the guy who tested Jahi McMath for brain death for a second time (to prove to the court) after her family had long disputed her status was able to declare her brain dead again, against all common sense, because he insisted on sticking to the standard criteria, which only takes reflexes into account, even though he knew that she had started menstruating and going through puberty after being declared brain dead the first time around.
Notice that brain death is defined as the loss of brain function, not as the death of the brain. All dead brains are non-functioning, but not all non-functioning brains are dead. When can see that this is true by comparing the brain with the heart. All dead hearts are non-functioning, but not all non-functioning hearts are dead. This is obvious from the fact of the possibility of resuscitation. Just because your heart has stopped and you're in cardiac arrest doesn't mean that you're gone for good. They can restart your heart if you're lucky. If your heart was really dead, this would be impossible. Nobody comes back from the dead, what we can call irreversible death, or biological death. This is the difference between death and clinical death. Death is irreversible, but clinical death is just the beginning of death, since death is a process. It takes time for individual cells to die. Some take longer than others. Brain cells are the first to go, then the heart and lungs. The liver and kidneys can last half an hour or an hour, and bone and skin cells are the last to go. In the old days, if you went into clinical death, it was over. There was no way to bring you back from that. Nowadays with all the medical technology, they can shock your heart into beating again. So obviously even though it wasn't functioning, it was still alive.
Now if the brain was really dead, then you could appropriately call someone brain dead. I would even go on to say that you could just call them dead. But we have to be careful here. When I say brain dead would be an appropriate term, I mean there has to be actual necrosis of the brain cells. We all know what this means. It's the difference between a fresh brain and a spoiled brain, like spoiled or rotten food. But that's not the standard that the medical establishment is using. I even read of a case of a boy brain dead for 20 years (so, yeah, that means he grew up into a man), whose brain had disintegrated so much that it lacked any structure and the outside of it had even calcified, but obviously, if he grew up, that means that as bad shape as his brain was in, his brain wasn't dead. So even if a scan shows a disintegrated brain, that's still not proof that the person is dead.
To think of it another way, we can compare true brain death with decapitation. After all, the reason people die from decapitation is because their brains have been separated from their hearts. So it's obvious that they've died. You needn't bother to check for a pulse or breathing or a heartbeat. Everyone knows that would be silly, maybe even crazy. If someone's brain really died, the result should be the same as decapitation -- ie, although the person might still be conscious for a few seconds, they'd be dead for good within a few minutes (which is how long the brain can go without oxygen). This means that they'd be in clinical death for a few minutes before the point of no return. With our current medical technology, these few minutes of clinical death is completely meaningless because we have no way of connecting the head to an oxygen supply. If we could do this (and we'd have to be very quick about it), then the person could be resuscitated, although poor thing, they wouldn't have a body. (Soviet doctors tried doing this to a dog, but witnesses say it only lived a few minutes, not a few hours as the doctors wanted to claim. Although I thought the dog was cute, a friend said he was horrified. Don't say I didn't warn you. You can see it here at the 2:32 mark, which will allow you to skip the isolated beating heart and breathing lungs.) So maybe in the future, even if you're decapitated or your body gets horribly mangled, they might still be able to salvage your head/brain. Maybe they could even give you a bionic body.
But that's the head. What about the body? That's the part we're interested in for the purposes of this thought experiment. If brain death is like decapitation, would it be possible for the body to live on without the brain, that is, of course, if we were to keep it artificially alive? If we could keep a decapitated body from bleeding, and hook it up to a ventilator, would its heart keep beating? Even if it did (at least for a while) the body would still have to maintain homeostasis through the endocrine system, which is controlled by the brain, so doctors would have to provide all the right hormones. It would also have to be nourished and hydrated. But assuming that we applied the best of our current technology to keeping this body alive, how long would it last? This is probably impossible to say for sure, since the only way to be sure is to empirically do it and see, but that wouldn't be ethical, unless doctors somehow came upon a fresh decapitated body by chance. So we can only make educated guesses. Given that I don't have a medical background, I can't say. And although I tried researching this, apparently no one has written about this because it's just too arcane. But my guess is that it wouldn't work out. The body is too complicated to keep going by 100% artificial means. Maybe in the future this will be possible for short periods of time, but probably not now. My point here is that if brain death was really death of the brain, it would be much like decapitation, and given that the body dies pretty much instantaneously from decapitation, it should also die instantaneously from so-called "brain death". Given that brain dead people's bodies don't die instantaneously, that must mean their brains aren't really dead, just severely damaged. But that's the whole rationale of brain death -- to be able to say that someone's brain is dead but their body is alive so that you can harvest living organs. Transplant doctors can't transplant dead organs. But you can't get living organs from a dead person, otherwise, they'd still be alive. If the brain was really dead, the body would follow suit within seconds. So what you do is make up this other category of dead people -- brain "dead" people. In fact, when the concept of brain death was first introduced (yes, for the purpose of organ transplantation, a newly advancing field), the 13 person committee that came up with it (at Harvard Medical School, the year was 1968) actually titled their paper "A Definition of Irreversible Coma". The first line of the abstract reads: "Our primary purpose is to define irreversible coma as a new criterion for death." I'm surprised that they were so forthright. Even more surprising was how quickly this bullshit definition was adopted as legal death in all 50 states of the US, then spread all over the world. Although there was some controversy, it wasn't much, and even the Church was hoodwinked, although I can only ultimately chalk that up to either laziness or intellectual dishonesty. Things have gotten so bad that if you try to research what is brain death, and how does it differ from a coma, you'll get circular definitions. One website said that the difference between a coma and brain death is that in a coma, you're alive, but with brain death, you're dead. Well, now that you know the history of this definition that has allowed thousands of people to be killed by organ harvesting, you know what a patently circular lie that is. And yes, the reason I was trying to figure out the difference between a coma and brain death was because I couldn't see any difference. But no wonder! The Harvard committee actually said they were the same thing! Now the medical establishment is saying that coma means you're alive and brain death means you're dead! Brilliant!