Have been ill all week - nothing too bad, still been at work since Monday, but have had to take sleeping pills every night. Except last night, 'cause I went to bed pretty late (shortly after 2) and then slept for over 11 hours. Still feel a bit tired, but better than usual.
Dave came round and trashed me on 'race mode' of Crash Nitro Cart. Then I trashed him at 'last cart driving battle mode'. Then we played Backgammon, which I'd played a couple of times against a computer years ago, and he'd never played at all. We got some of the rules wrong, but it was cool, and we got one game each. Think he's better at it, though. It's nice to have a game where you can blame random elements for losing! Less pressure...
Suspect I'll have put this down before, 'cause it's an old idea, but have been thinking (again) about the following hypothetical situation:
Lots of ways to state this, so let's go for the nice 'chivalric tradition' version. There's a big scary dragon terrorising your town. The dragon agrees to stop killing people if it's given one maiden per year, as per standard (somewhat sexist) fairytale rules. Wonder if you can do a dragon for discrimination?
So the questions is: are you justified in effectively murdering one person to keep hundreds safe? This would have been a real situation for a pagan community trying to prevent natural disaster, or a scientific community considering animal experiments - the painful, fatal variety - to find a cure for painful, fatal human disease.
The point is that it's a mistake to simply calculate in terms of numbers, or the 'value' of species. The point is that there's a potential difference in 'moral value' between pain and death caused by outside events, and pain and death caused by you. Moral beliefs tend to be a matter of choice (including your choice to believe what God says on the subject) - I'm simply saying that the question isn't as straightforward as some scientists would have you believe. I'd personally consider it wrong to torture a single dog to prevent a thousand human deaths.
Note that I'd consider it okay to kill someone to prevent them killing other people themselves - the hypothetical example I'm considering involves a relatively innocent victim.
Just a thought, anyway. My bath's just run - gotta go.