Morals and Evil Felines

Yay! A glorious weekend in which to slave away at blog posts! Question number 1:

At the beginning of the semester, the class, in general, expressed a great deal of disdain for NASA. NASA is the societal level technology driver for the US and arguably the world. What has lead to this disdain and mistrust? What would it take for NASA to regain your respect?

I am fascinated by almost everything (probably because I'm just dumb), so I'm ok with NASA taking my tax dollars simply for the sake of accumulating knowledge. But also, if we continue to use the earth as if it's disposable, we're going to need the information NASA collects for our survival. We're going to need it anyway when the sun dies (the Nahuas were right all along!), because it will fry the earth to a crisp when it expands.
I think the reason we don't have a lot of interest in NASA anymore is because we no longer have an enemy to compete with. When the U.S. and the Soviets were escalating the space race, the government and people were all for exploration and discovery, although it wasn't really about these things. So, as soon as we didn't have that excuse anymore, we wondered why we were so interested in the first place. Plus the whole thing about insane astronauts driving 900 miles wearing a diaper to kill a romantic rival really looks bad.

Next question:

No one has answered Adam's question fitfully - not even Adam. Do technics that are designed and created for the soul intention of doing something immoral inherently immoral themselves? Does form follow function? If the function is immoral, is the form as well? Can you come up with any other or "better" examples than a radar detector?

I don't think that objects created for an evil purpose are inherently evil. I think that humans are the only things capable of good and evil, and we sometimes try to project our human traits to other things. I have a cat and I often say that she is an evil little monster, but the cat isn't really bad. Humans tend to think of things in human terms, so when my cat leaps onto my face in the middle of the night, I might say she's mean, sadistic, and psychotic. However, the cat certainly doesn't think in terms of morals, so her evilness exists only in my own mind (at least I think so . . . ). I think it's the same kind of thing with radar detectors and nuclear bombs. We think of them in human terms, so our reaction is to call them evil or immoral, but these objects probably think in terms of good and evil even less than my cat.

If you're brave enough to gaze upon that pure, incarnated evil, here she is. . . .


Strikes fear into your heart, doesn't she? I really hope she never reads this. . . .

On to the next question:

How would you make an argument for sexual abstinence before marriage and faithful monogamy after marriage in the context of a natural law ethicist who argues from the viewpoint of evolutionary biology that man is driven to have sex with as many females as he can in order to propigate the species and that women perform similarly in order to propigate the species. Wouldn't abstinence and faithful monogamy lead to a contradiction of the natural right/need to procreate?

I think that if propagation of the species was all that was necessary, sexual promiscuity would certainly be acceptable. However, I think that the dimension of mental and emotional health are often overlooked. Yes, people are driven to propagate the species, but they (I exclude myself because I detest children and babies) are also driven to raise healthy young. So, yes, abstinence and monogamy go against the need to procreate as many children as possible, but they promote the social and mental well-being of the next generation. So from an evolutionary standpoint, it is better to produce few, healthy offspring than to produce many offspring who may have social or mental problems.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to make a phone call. The Bundle of Fur from Hades gets angry and accuses me of having a second cat if I don't talk to her at least once a day. . . .