Moral Dilemmas

I was stumbling again today and I came across a Website called Some Moral Dilemmas. This websites gives a list of moral dilemmas from a book called Moral Reasoning, by Victor Grassian (Prentice Hall, 1981, 1992).

Reading this website brought back memories of an Ethics class I once took where I argued with a professor that ethics and morals have a religious background. If you don't know right from wrong because you were never taught as a child what God considered right or wrong than how can you know what is ethical or moral? This professor did not agree with my theory and brought up the question of atheists who don't believe in God, weren't taught right or wrong as decided by God. Did that mean atheists didn't know how to be ethical or moral? It made me think. But I think what I was trying to say is that for me, making ethical or moral decisions is based somewhat on WWJD - What would Jesus Do, even way before that saying became popular.

So in reading some of the moral dilemmas on the website I noticed that my decisions are based on my faith, my religious upbringing and WWJD. Read some of them and see what you think? For instance...here's a random one:

A Parent's Agonizing Choice
You are an inmate in a concentration camp. A sadistic guard is about to hang your son who tried to escape and wants you to pull the chair from underneath him. He says that if you don't he will not only kill your son but some other innocent inmate as well. You don't have any doubt that he means what he says. What should you do?

My immediate reaction is that God says Thou Shall Not Kill. He doesn't say Thou Shall Not Kill unless your children are in mortal danger. So morally and ethically according to my religious upbringing I answered that I would not do what the guard wanted me to do. Not because it was my son, but because it's not in my hands to take another person's life. Even if taking that life will save another.

But then I got to thinking further, that peace officers and soldiers and doctors make those decisions everyday. Sometimes you have to take the life of someone to save the life of someone else. Peace officers may have to shoot a bank robber who has taken hostages in order to save the lives of the hostages. Soldiers may have to take lives of innocent bystanders in order to save the lives of even more humans in the community. A doctor may have to terminate a pregnancy in order to save the mother.

It's interesting to contemplate all these different dilemmas and choices that can be made and why. For instance, this dilemma:

The Fat Man and the Impending Doom
A fat man leading a group of people out of a cave on a coast is stuck in the mouth of that cave. In a short time high tide will be upon them, and unless he is unstuck, they will all be drowned except the fat man, whose head is out of the cave. [But, fortunately, or unfortunately, someone has with him a stick of dynamite.] There seems no way to get the fat man loose without using [that] dynamite which will inevitably kill him; but if they do not use it everyone will drown. What should they do?
Since the fat man is said to be "leading" the group, he is responsible for their predicament and reasonably should volunteer to be blown up. The dilemma becomes more acute if we substitute a pregnant woman for the fat man. She would have been urged by the others to go first out of the cave.

What do you think? How would you vote?

Weird Shoes I Stumbled Upon

I think I've mentioned before this cool little program called StumbleUpon. You simply download the program and install the toolbar into your browser, super simple. Then you personalize to the things you are interested in from a whole list of different things. For instance I personalized with things I am interested in such as:
Cooking
Food
Crafts
Humor
Catholic
Women
Health
Fashion
Clothing
Shopping
Puzzles
Quizzes, etc...you get the picture right? So then whenever I want to I simply click on the STUMBLE button in my toolbar and the Great God the of Web will locate a website it thinks I would be interested in depending on my choices. So I may get a really cool website about blond jokes or word puzzles or Bible Verse of the Day, etc etc. So if I like that website then I click on the "I like it" button and I will get more websites similar to that one. If I don't like it then I click on the "thumbs down" button and I won't get anymore like that one.

The reason for me going into such detail is twofold

1. I think you should download StumbleUpon

2. I want to show you something I StumbledUpon just today at this website...

Can you believe these shoes? And there are other ones to view if you click the link above! But these two were definitely the weirdest. See StumbleUpon knows that one of the interests I have is in fashion and that's probably why they showed me this website or could it be my interest in humor? Or maybe it's a puzzle...how do you get the flies inside the shoe to feed the live tarantula without it biting you? Go see the rest of these and you decide! Ugh!

Look what I found!

Ok, so I haven't posted in awhile. There are quite a few reasons, one of them being that we've been kind of busy at work and I've been coming home really tired. But the real reason is that I found this super cool new computer toy that I love and am totally jazzed about. It's stumble.com. I don't remember how I found it, but I'm going to put a link on my blog for it.

Stumble is this little program that you install and it creates a toolbar on your browser. You personalize it by choosing several different topics you are interested in. For instance I chose:

Cooking
Food
Puzzles
Art
Photography
Computer programs
Humor
Politics
Literature (and some others I can't remember)

The cool thing is you click the button on the toolbar that says STUMBLE and according to the topics you are interested in, it will show you a website you might like. If you like the website you click on "I like it!" and it saves that website to your favorites so you can access it again and it shows you more web pages similar to it. If you don't like the website, you click on the thumbs down button and it won't show you anymore websites similar to this.

So I've been having a lot of fun with this because it gives me lots of options I might be interested in without my having to search for them. Tonite I found a really cool little website at http://www.zefrank.com/

If you want to go there, click under interactive toys and string spin and then just draw in the box. You get something that looks similar to this:

I did a bunch of them. I wish you could save them, but you can't. But go there and try it and look at the other things this blog offers. I plan to do so tomorrow, but for now I'm going to go wash my face and brush my teethies so I can watch CSI Miami.

Tata!