wrong end of the stick again

[mrissa]

Tyop of the day: my college advisor is not actually required to storm any large building in any part of the British Isles, much less the type I specified in my last e-mail to him. "Take caer": totally unnecessary. Cancel that order.

I woke up to the sound of a neighbor dog barking. I could smell that our dog was in her bed -- I could hear that our dog was in her bed -- but I still for some reason found it necessary to get up and wander downstairs to make sure the dog was not co-locating. I actually found myself pondering how to get the two to merge again if she was. (timprov: "She's not the Kwisatz Poodlerach." This is true.) At least I'm no longer regularly waking up having dreamed quite vividly that the doorbell was ringing because one of my friends had turned up on the doorstep in trouble. (None of my friends has actually turned up on the doorstep in trouble at 4 a.m. But apparently some part of my brain considers it likely.) And at least I was able to go back to bed after I'd determined that the dog was only in one place and likely to stay that way.

This afternoon, I have a consultation with an oral surgeon about removal of my two remaining wisdom teeth. I am not going into this with the most open-minded attitude about this oral surgeon -- specifically, my dentist has given me the impression that he prefers to work with general anaesthetic, and I prefer not to go under general anaesthetic, and our dental insurance is not particularly biased towards this oral surgeon. So if we don't come to a meeting of minds on this, it's okay. Still, taking time out in the middle of the afternoon to drive to Edina over wisdom teeth that could have been taken last summer and saved me trouble is not my favorite thing, one might say.

Yesterday I ended up in a pretty foul mood about my own prose. I'm hoping things go better today. Maybe I'll work on something new and not just revisions, revisions, revisions.

Oh, and one more thing: sometimes people don't do things because they think they're good or fine or morally neutral. Sometimes people do things because they think they can get away with it, even something they know isn't good, fine, morally neutral, whatever. It's true that many -- most -- people aren't villains in their own heads. But people do things they know are bad or wrong. I don't think it's a good idea to assume that someone thinks something is moral just because they did it. I'm as fond of textured, multi-dimensional villains as the next girl, but sometimes they can be textured and multi-dimensional and still know that destroying the universe* or whatever piece of villainy they're trying is not okay.

*Say it with me, kids: "Destroy the universe? Gosh, I hope not! That's where I keep my stuff!"

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Love T's comment.

And if your poodle *were* acquiring bilocation, I'd worry; wouldn't that mean she's moving up towards sainthood? Or, on Dragaera, godhood?

People often do things because they are expedient, without considering their moral status. Most of the time, really; it's just that society is set up so many expedient things are also moral. For example, it's actually much easier to give the people at the grocery store money than to just run off with the bags (at least if your timescale extends beyond 10 minutes).

People *also* do things they actually know are bad or wrong, on top of that.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And it's smart to set things up so that the right thing to do and the easy thing to do are the same thing, whenever you're controlling the setup. The grocery store example is a fairly trivial case -- you rarely see checkout stands at the back of the store away from all the doors -- but the principle is still a reasonable one all around. Hope for the morality of the people around you, but plan on their laziness.

But anyway, you could see where maybe I would want to check whether the poodle was moving up towards sainthood or godhood. It's not the sort of thing you want to have surprising you.

[pieslut.livejournal.com]

I agree with your last point, but with a caveat. I think people will do things that they consider immoral. But I also think that they manage to rationalize it in their heads as "immoral, but necessary", or "immoral, but the least of the devils", etc. People will come up with some pretty twisted "logic" to explain why their actions are ok, even though they know that they're wrong in the moral sense.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

There are a non-zero, but fortunately small, number of people who glory in being the villains of their own stories, without any attempt at rationalisation towards things being for the good. I've met a couple.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Some people will. But I'm with rysmiel: some won't. In fact, the essence of my last point is that not everybody will. Some people don't feel the need for twisted rationalizations.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

And some people outright believe that folks who need rationalizations are weak and stupid.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Sometimes people do things because they think they're funny.

Not only do I not believe that's a valid justification even if true, quite often they're entirely wrong about the funny.

[warinbear.livejournal.com]

Say it with me, kids: "Destroy the universe? Gosh, I hope not! That's where I keep my stuff!"

That's delightfully metaquotable. Fortunately (or un-), I'm not the type to metaquote.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'm quoting "The Tick," the cartoon version.

It's not my department.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Once, in a research project for a class on environmental ethics, I made up my mind to pick as completely morally indefensible a practice as I could find, to study how the people who did it justified it. I wanted to know what language they used, who they felt the need to say things to, what kinds of principles were invoked to defend the indefensible.

The practice I picked was the regrettably common phenomenon whereby manufacturers of a chemical - often a pesticide - get told by the Feds that they may not market their product because it is destroying the land or killing people or both. Often, it's both. And then the manufacturers who, by US law, can be prohibitted from selling the product but not from making it, instead of stopping or even reducing production, simply shift their sales to 100% foreign markets, generally selling inadequately labelled items to buyers in impovereished countries, where their product goes on destroying the land and/or killing people, often at an increased rate.

What I figured was, there's no way this can be okay. If you've got all the reports in front of you that made a fairly wishy-washy government agency actually put its foot down and ban your product, and you know all the bad things it does, and you find a way to con people into buying it anyhow, that's bad. It was as unambiguous a case in environmental ethics as I could come up with, though I'm sure that there are others much, much worse.

So I read articles from journals and magazines and newspapers. I read press releases and interviews. I read labels and inserts. I read things written by the people who opposed the manufacture and sale of banned pesticides, and I read things written by the people who manufactured and sold banned pesticides.

As much as I was expecting anything, I was expecting arguments about how a company has to make a profit, the much-beloved 'bottom line,' arguments that closing factories would cause loss of jobs, stalling techniques of claiming multi-year plans for phasing the product out of production, or vigorous claims that the pesticide either wasn't as harmful as claimed or was worth it for its miraculous properties. It wasn't that I was looking for arguments which would convince me - I was pretty sure there weren't any arguments that would convince me - I just wanted to know what was being said.

And what I found was...

Nothing.

There were no justifications being made at all.

Maybe I missed them, but I spent over a month scrutinizing every document I could find, and never found a whiff. There were articles everywhere from people condemning the practice; they never refuted any justifications made by the companies involved or referred to the existence of justifications, and they were never, that I saw, refuted themselves. As far as I could tell, the people who made the decisions which resulted in companies poisoning wells as surely as if they'd gone out with little bottles of arsenic on moonless nights, never felt the remotest need to give any reasons for doing so to anyone.

I don't think they had villain mentalities, in any kind of Scooby Doo sense. I think they thought it wasn't their job to worry about that end of things.

To quote Tom Lehrer, "Vonce ze rockets go up, who cares vhere zey come down? Zat's not my department," says Werner Von Braun.

Re: It's not my department.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's very scary. Not surprising, but scary.

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

Having wisdom teeth removed? Well, gosh, it's always good to have something to look forward to! :-\

I'm sure they will approve the local anaesthetic for you. It's cheaper. Me, I like to sleep when having bits yanked out of my head.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have been unconscious enough times without any help that the bloom is really off the rose for me.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

I have a phobia about general anesthetic. An absolute terror.

[(Anonymous)]

I recently had two cavities drilled without any anaesthesia and I have to say it was much better than having anaethesia. I HATE anaethesia and will do whatever I can to avoid it and it's side effects, so I hear you on the requirement of no general. I would probably want a local for my wisdom teeth being pulled, but would definitely nix the general.

Good luck on it.

Heathah

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Looks like it's a go, when I get it scheduled.

[one-undone.livejournal.com]

If you're displeased with your dentist regarding the wisdom tooth removal and general anesthesia leanings, I will happily refer you to mine. I had a wonderful (and conscious) wisdom tooth extraction a couple of weeks ago. I always request nitrous along with the Novocaine, but I was completely awake for the procedure. It was super quick and painless, and I adore my dentist. Hopefully you can get the extraction worked out to your satisfaction with your current dentist, but if not, just let me know, and I'll gladly send you the website for mine.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Thanks, but I did manage to get it talked out with the oral surgeon. Glad yours was a good experience, though!