#morality

It's a really good manual of brahmavihārā practice as it is taught in the tradition of the Insight Meditation Society. It covers everything one would want to start a practice and it's plenty deep enough for experience practitioners looking for a refresher. The four sublime abidings are complemented well by two chapters on #generosity (#dāna) and #morality (#sīla), so in a sense it's a bit like going backwards through the ten #pāramī

#brahmavihārā #IMS #meditation #lovingkindness #mettā #compassion #karuṇā #sympatheticjoy #muditā #equanimity #upekkhā

Instead of trolley problems (), maybe we should be talking about Rube Goldberg problems. Imagine you're confronted with an extraordinarily complex Rube Goldberg machine. On one end is a switch that can be flipped to start it going, after which it will run through its various complicated motions and finally stop. On the other end is a person who will be seriously harmed or killed by the machine if the switch is flipped. Imagine there's a person who knows all this and decides to flip the switch, and the person at the other end is harmed or killed with certainty. Do you hold the switch flipper responsible for the harm?

What if the machine were 10x more complex? 100x more complex? What if part of the machine could misbehave in such a way that the person at the end isn't harmed with certainty, but only with some probability? What if the machine has 10 switches, all of which have to be flipped by 10 different individuals before the machine starts and harms the person; do you hold any of the individuals responsible for the harm?

#morality #ethics #TrolleyProblem

() Trolley problems are silly because they are decontexualized, and so are the proposed Rube Goldberg ones. I am satirizing them all, in part, though I do think if you're going to play around with thought experiments RG is a bit closer to modern lived reality than a runaway trolley.

Raymond Chandler wrote in "The Big Sleep" (1953):
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"There ain't no clean way to make a hundred million bucks," Ohls said. "Maybe the head man thinks his hands are clean but somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut from under them and had to sell out for nickels, decent people lost their jobs, stocks got rigged on the market, proxies got bought up like a pennyweight of old gold, and the five per centers and the big law firms got paid hundred-grand fees for beating some law the people wanted but the rich guys didn't, on account of it cut into their profits. Big money is big power and big power gets used wrong. It's the system. Maybe it's the best we can get, but it still ain't any Ivory Soap deal."
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Using an inflation calculator, I found the $100 million in 1953 is worth just over $1 billion in today's dollar, so Chandler's character Ohls is talking about billionaires.

Today, Forbest listed the 400 wealthiest Americans:

https://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/

Unfortunately, wealth has some bad side-effects:

https://leisureguy.wordpress.com/2012/03/25/dangerous-side-effects-of-wealth/

#wealth #psychology #compromise #ethics #morality #billioinaires