Morality exercise

I felt an itch ever since I listened to this program regarding Morality and its origins. Mind you that what I'm am addressing occurs with in the first 5 minutes of the show Radiolab. My discomfort started early with the mental problem of the track workers. In the description of the problem we are told that what we have are two similar situations where the sacrificing of one person will ensure the life of five. The difference is in distance, in the first instace the sacrifice is far away in the next he is next to you. This is not the same situation, that distance changes everything and the question changes so that you are no longer asking if one life is worth multiple lives but if multiple lives are worth YOUR life. In the following "man on the street" interviews people predictably stated that they would kill the long distance sacrifice and were repulsed by the neighbor sacrifice but could not explain the difference or why it made any. The difference is that your neighbor has the same choice as you. Your life is in danger. In the first part of the problem the single trackworker is far away and can't deffend his life or sacrifice yours, in the second part the question of few vs. many is being pondered by two people at the same time. The question has changed to; Why are you not sacrifcing your own life? To save five you need to sacrifice one life but because of the distance there are now two choices as to the instrument. Do you jump and use your own life? or do you use someone elses? Still we forgett that the other person is in the same situation. The only solution is to do nothing. To preserve your life, both of you make that decission because as we saw everyone makes that decission. Two lives vs Five lives, that is the new question. To save the five lives someone has to sacrifice theirs. You will notice that the response is emotional because emotions are thought processes that happen too fast for us to be concious of it. Your brain literaly pulled all the information, debated outcomes, weighed options, and came to a logical (what ever that means) conclusion. Instead of a lengthy monolougue you get a sensation. Or minds are smarter than we give them credit for.

Ubik

The third Philip K. Dick book that I will have read. As with any of his books to describe the plot of this one is futile, things get complicated very fast. It is in this book that I noticed a similarity Dick has with Borges. Both authors include points in their stories where as a reader, definitely as a character, you have to decide when exactly did you go through the looking glass.