Hi S,

 

I have no problem with honoring scenarios and playing ‘what if’ games, especially if they serve to augment or strengthen the mental body; but as they like to say around here the map is not the territory.

 

The map is just a description of the territory, a notion deeply compounded by paradox; how can something without limit, call it Spirit if you like, manifest in the human body with all its limitations? Others can speak for themselves but for me it's akin to always having one foot in the visible world and the other in the invisible, and being required to maintain both balance and locomotion, while forsaking neither.

 

Meanwhile i salute your sense of inquiry; it represents a treasure beyond price.

 

Warmly,

 

Charles

88W18'28" 41N58'02" 

Yeah no shit the map is a description of terriotory, and you still didnt answer the question. You are however beating around the bush in a very polite sense, and that gives me the green vibes comming from you big time, you probably wont see it that way or you might see that aspect in youself who knows.

The mild frustration that is present for me with your types (or better put, present meme display not actual type) is part of the game, im aware its there. Anyways I really dont see you playing the hypothetical game except with the ever elusive well meaning non answers. So I'll drop it and let you have the last word (this last statement is very passive agressive)

BTW the whole tone of this reply should be taken from the perspective on the relative side of the street something like "yeah big mind everything is perect and questions dont even arise in big mind but what the hell does that do for me!?"

so if you truly understand it you will feel the frustration (relative side of the street) and the the lightness or amusing aspect at the same time (absolute side of the street).

And to talk like this is not common where im from, so the whole closet turquoise not able to express ideas and opinons in a tangible community (all that lumped into a feeling) might be seeping though my words.

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Keep cool ma babies!

The question is easy to answer if you are a blue deontologist (it's wrong to kill anyone, at any time, for any reason, ever) and troubling but probably managable for an orange consequentialist (while the thought of killing someone is unpleasant, it's better to achieve the greater good and let as many people as possible have a chance). At green, I'm not so sure, because who is to say what the value of one life is in relation to the value of many lives. Depends on the perspective you're taking, doesn't it? I guess you might choose not to kill a sacrificial lamb, but for different reasons than blue. That's probably as far as I can go with this one. I really have no idea what a second-tier response to this question would look like - sad but true indication that my moral line is still lagging in its development perhaps. Maybe at second tier, one would seek to honour the subjectivity of the killer, in a clean, clear way, without any twisted naive relativism attached to it.

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This is self contraction contracting upon itself in infinite ripples of self-liberating torment.

I took several philosophy courses in college, and questions like this always irritated me.  No matter how you answer you're funneled into a particular school of thought, and then the smarmy bastards (otherwise known as philosophy professors) extrapolate from there and pigeonhole you as a this or a that kind of thinker.  It's absurd.  People don't behave rationally most of the time, we behave according to conditioning, or make quick assessments of a situation and then still behave according to conditioning, and then analyze it (rationalize it) later and call it philosophy.

Think about what happens over the course of a few weeks or months as philosophers discuss these kind of things in journals: one philosopher finds a way out of the scenario, so another refines the scenario, closing that loophole, and this goes back and forth until the scenario is that your hand is taped and chained to a stand, the gun is placed in your immobilized hand where the only part you can move is your triggerfinger, and the terrorists or whatever parade all the hostages in front of the gun until you shoot one.  You have no option to try to escape, no option to shoot yourself, no option but to kill one or watch them all die, and then yourself.  The whole point of it is to create a situation that embodies some abstract philiosophical divergence and then make you choose.  It's sometimes an interesting insight into yourself, but more often it's just a silly exercise that serves no broader purpose than to teach what the different schools of thought entail.

Even though it's taken as a tongue-in-cheek kind of witticism, I don't think it was too far off the mark when Alfred North Whitehead said, "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."  Socrates (through the writings of Plato) said over and over again that morality is not concrete and quantifiable, so we should be humble and exercise caution when making moral decisions, especially when those decisions will affect others.

What I'm getting at is that decision-making of this sort is determined more by who you are than by what you think.  It comes back to the classic spiritual precept we've all heard before: the best thing you can do for the world and anyone in it is work on yourself.

 

K