The past few days

[mojosmom]

I've been off at a seminar on defending death penalty cses for the last couple of days. It was mostly good, but a couple of the speakers were godawful. Do not expect me to pay attention if you misuse the phrase "beg the question", say "acronym" when you mean "abbreviation" and refer to the Compiled Statutes as the "combined" statutes. It also helps if you don't just read your presentation off the power point slides in a boring monotone.

Weird coincidence: I'm reading Alexander McCall Smith's latest Isabel Dalhousie novel, The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday, in which she has to decide whether to publish a paper on the Trolley Problem. So one of the speakers yesterday, a neuropsychologist, talked about some testing which involved . . . the Trolley Problem! (I wasn't reading the book at the time; he was actually quite interesting.)

Saturday, I went and got my flu shot. I had put it off but realized this was the last Saturday clinic. Surprisingly, the place wasn't full. I guess other people are more organized than I am about such things.

Comments

[mojosmom.livejournal.com]

I think most people have no problem choosing. What was interesting was that the Trolley Problem arose in the context of a discussion of traumatic brain injury. It seems that studies show that certain parts of the brain are more active in considering "Moral-Personal" dilemmas than "Moral-Impersonal or Non-Moral dilemmas, and that people with damage to those parts of the brain are more likely to find personal moral violations acceptable, and make such judgments more quckly, than the rest of the population.

Which, although it was not the subject of the discussion, raises the interesting question of whether what we call "morality" is hard-wired in us, and also what the evolutionary benefit is to this.