Eclectic Views

    
Not me.  I am a big believer in that Klingon saying about revenge
being a dish best served cold.

Sure all animals get a free pass; not much malice there.  With humans,
I think I can forgive almost anything that wasn't done with malice,
but malicious people shouldn't be given second chances AFAIC.  The best
I can do with people like that is to just forget them and not give
them any free head rent.
  

    

Yeah. First, was it done with malice?  If the person sincerely 
intended no harm, or apologized to me for being a jerk or stupid, 
that may be enough to offer a round of forgiveness. The person can 
get an almost clean slate, but the memory of an earlier transgression 
will linger unless it was really trivial and can literally be 
forgotten. If there's clear malice, one strike can be enough to 
make forgiveness impossible.  If not, and my bullshit detectors are not
going off, there may be room to redeem yourself and recover from 
your mistakes.   

Some kinds of actions, like being late, are forgivable but just go 
to reputation... that person gains the rep of a flake, and is not 
to be trusted in more serious situations that come up.    

I don't think this is very unusual.
  

    
Once I believed someone acted with intent to do as I specifically requested
they do not. Of course, we can not control other people's behavior, so I did
not forgive willingly when I was not heeded.  In those instances it can take
a while (months/years) to gain the clarity necessary to see that my requests
need not be granted at every moment of every day.  I mean, it would be nice,
but who am I kidding? Really?
  

    
New question: which is more important--doing nothing wrong, or doing
something right? Which is easier for you?
  

    
Much easier to do something right than to do nothing wrong, but I strive to
do nothing wrong.
  

    
Doing something right.  I'm a selective perfectionist and pretty much
want to make whatever I'm doing at the moment just exactly the way I
want it, while all else sits around collecting rabbit hair and dust.
  

    
How interesting! The usual code is to at least do no wrong, and if 
possible to do right...  

Often the choices are between different blends of right and wrong 
outcomes, or at the point of choice there are only guesses about what 
right and wrong can come of an action. "It won't matter if we are a 
little late..."   Maybe good or bad results from that choice, and 
maybe you never even know that was what caused or else avoided 
unintentional wrongdoing.  

And even in medicine, where the idea of at least no harm arose, there 
are guesses, weighing risks, tough tradeoffs.
  

    
right-wrong.. by whose standards?...the situation dictates
  

    
> Often the choices are between different blends of right and wrong
> outcomes, or at the point of choice there are only guesses about what
> right and wrong can come of an action.

What Gail said.

There's a lot of gray between right and wrong, in just about every
circumstance.  Some actions (murdering a child) are clearly wrong, and some
actions may seem clearly right at the moment, or at least well chosen in
retrospect.  But mostly what pass for stark moral choices don't even come 
close to qualifying as such.
  

    
<Some actions (murdering a child) are clearly wrong>

i'm in agreement...but when i read the above.. could just hear the
whole Pro Choice vs. Rgt to Lifers fight echoing in the background.. 
  

    

And even if you specify murdering a six year old kid, you still have 
something a little bit like a tautology because you have already 
decided it is murder, not manslaughter or an accidental death, 
within the question itself, without benefit of a trial.  

But yes, once society has judged it murder, that's by definition wrong!
  

    
> Pro Choice vs. Rgt to Lifers

That occurred to me after posting and logging off.  Decided to leave it
anyway.

> even if you specify murdering a six year old kid

One, six, ten.  It's pretty much all the same.

> murder, not manslaughter or an accidental death

I was reaching for an example that nearly everyone could agree about, and
the murder of a child was the first thing that came to mind.  It's almost
universally taboo, at least after the age at which infanticide was an
acceptable practice in some cultures.  (Else the survival rate for human
young would be dramatically lower than it is.)  In any real instance, after
the fact, there can be a question whether it was actually murder or
something lesser.

My point was that there are some actions just about everyone agrees are
unequivocally wrong, but you have to resort to a relatively extreme example
to find one.
  

    
Infanticide was common before birth control and abortion. For a long
time, people would abandon children by roadsides, in the hope that
someone who could would pick them up and care for them. In France,
outside an old public hospital, there is a sculpture of one such child,
carefully swaddled and left on the ground, starting to wake up.

When passing by crying babies became intolerable, foundling orphanages
were set up. Since, however, mother's milk was not available in
sufficient quantity, and since all water was full of bacteria, ninety
per cent of babies sent to these orphanages died. The city fathers of
one town, in Belgium, I think, proposed having "Here children are
killed at public expense" carved above the orphanage door.

See Elizabeth Blaffer Hrdy's _Mother Nature_ for further detail and
copious citations.

Which is not to say that they didn't know it was wrong. But there was
no way that many of them could go without sex, and there were only so
many babies that they could feed.
  

    
It seems to me that morality is based on commandments of the form "Let
us, no matter what, never get into that mess again." There are a
number of messes everyone wants to stay out of. Widespread infanticide
is one. Civil war, particularly civil war with neighbors, is one.
Factionalism and tribalism, with everyone out for their own rather than
for the general good, is one. Vendetta, feuds that last over
generations, is yet another. High levels of unpredictable violence or
property confiscation, whether done by the government or by
individuals, is one, too. These are states that societies can drift
into and get stuck in, and in which a decent life is almost impossible.
There are a lot of them, but not an infinite number.

What is paramount, I think, is to live in ways that don't drive one's
society toward one of those bad states. Anything else one does is all
pretty much equally good. Devote your life to feeding the starving and
caring for the ill: good! Devote your life to collecting comic books:
good! Just don't push us toward one of those intolerable states.
  

    
There's a book in that!
  

    
New question: What did you want to be when you were 12?
  

    
13
  

    
-behind the wheel
  

    
In my own apartment with no forwarding address.
  

    
I was between wanting my own horse on a ranch and wanting a rockstar
boyfriend.
  

    
Less isolated and better connected with what was happening at the time.
  

    
More isolated and less connected with what was happening at the time. 

In fact, I wanted to be this guy, though I didn't know that I had till
a girl gave it to me years later.


Liar and bragger,
He had no friend
Except a dagger
And a candle-end;
The one he read by;
The one scared cravens;
And he was fed by
The Prophet's ravens.
Such haughty creatures
Avoid the human;
They fondle nature's
Breast, not woman-
A she-wolf's puppies-
A wild-cat's pussy-fur:
Their stirrup-cup is
The pride of Lucifer.
A stick he carried,
Slept in a lean-to;
He'd never married,
And he didn't mean to.
He'd tried religion
And found it pleasant;
He relished a pigeon
Stewed with a pheasant
In an iron kettle;
He built stone ovens.
He'd never settle
In any province.
He made pantries
of Vaux and Arden
And the village gentry's
Kitchen-garden.
Fruits within yards
Were his staples;
He drank whole vineyards
From Rome to Naples,
Then went to Brittany
For the cider.
He could sit any
Horse, a rider
Outstripping Cheiron's
Canter and gallop.
Pau's environs
The pubs of Salop,
Wells and Bath inns
Shared his pleasure
With taverns of Athens;
The Sultan's treasure
He'd seen in Turkey;
He'd known London
Bright and murky.
His bones were sunned on
Paris benches
Beset with sparrows;
Roman trenches,
Cave-men's barrows,
He liked, impartial;
He liked an Abbey.
His step was martial;
Spent and shabby
He wasn't broken;
A dozen lingoes
He must have spoken.
As a king goes
He went, not minding
That he lived seeking
And never finding.
He'd visit Peking
And then be gone soon
To the far Canaries.
He'd cross a monsoon
To chase vagaries.
He loved a city
And a street's alarums;
Parks were pretty
And so were bar-rooms.
He loved fiddles;
He talked with rustics;
Life was riddles
And queer acrostics.
His sins were serried,
His virtues garish;
His corpse was buried
In a country parish.
Before he went hence-
God knows where-
He spoke this sentence
With a princely air:
"The noose draws tighter;
This is the end;
I'm a good fighter,
But a bad friend:
I've played the traitor
Over and over;
I'm a good hater,
But a bad lover."

  Peregrine, Elinor Wylie


A ludicrously ill-conceived project, as it turned out. I'm no better
as a fighter than as a friend or a lover, and I am completely
incompetent as a hater and a traitor. You have to work at that stuff
all the time.
  

    
!!   thanks(ckridge)  
  

    
New question: what's your favorite room in your home, and why?
  

    
(answering based on the imaginary home I'll probably never have)

The sunny breakfast nook.