My brother Nicholas* has set up his weblog, because I badgered him into doing it. He's going to Swansea soon, and the start of university is a much more sensible time to start a blog than just before the last term, so that should be fun. The link's above. He doesn't have comments yet, but he says they should be coming soon.
Well, I haven't read my bible for a little while, but when this came to my attention, it was bedtime; I had promised myself that I would go to bed at 2200, but Nick came online, so I talked until he felt it necessary to retire. Anyway, I thought I'd see if anyone had done mp3s of the bible. And they have. Here's the first one I came across, which seemed to do the trick. So I fell asleep listening to Joshua, and when I woke up this morning, I listened to the bits I couldn't remember. The guy's voice was less than inspiring, but hey.
I had a lie-in too, as part of my don't-study-to-become-a-hollow-shell-of-a-man plan, until mum phoned me to see how I was getting on, after which I thought I might as well get on with the day. My impulse purchases are getting a bit wussy these days. Unplanned purchases today included:
- Greek yoghurt, sweetened with honey
- A snack pack of "cranberry & banana fruit mix: snacking fruit mix, bursting with jumbo flame raisins golden sultanas, sweetened, dried cranberries sweetened, dried pineapple chips & dried banana chips"
- Another snack pack of melon slices
- 1 punnet blueberries
I finished the cranberry and banana thing whilst note-taking from Metaphysics, and discovered that I had thereby ingested 6 and a bit portions of fruit, 5 being the RDA. Oops.
I usually ignore the BBC News Ticker, but today it said that "Animals 'are moral beings'", which grabbed my attention, so I had a look. Given the fact that I don't see any reason to assert the existence of any meaningful morality based purely upon scientific inquiry, I was sceptical right off the bat, but it wasn't half so silly as I was expecting. The argument, as presented by the BBC, is that some animals (communal) may be seen to sacrifice themselves for the sake of their community. Apparently there are claims for sentience as well, "possessing a level of conscious awareness, and able to have feelings", but I know nothing about that, so I won't go into it. What I do know is that a tendency for self-sacrifice does not imply morality as it is generally understood, in either animal or a human.* On it's own terms, self-sacrifice is merely a fact. It only means something moral if it is good to do so, or if it is a thing which ought to be done. A friend of mine told me once that he thought morality was essentially an evolutionary adaptation, a way of bringing stability and avoiding pain. If this is all there is to it then I wouldn't hesitate to call any animal moral, but (needless to say) I don't think that it is, so I'm more inclined to be hesitant. This is to say that any more grand conception of "morality" is just a deeply-rooted expression of a desire for the species to continue, worth as much inherently as my current desire for tea. Well, I think that animals are worth preserving, and that we should protect them from suffering, which puts me in the messy realm of a supra-naturalistic conception of morality and means that when someone works me over with a baseball bat on a whim, I can consistently think them a bad person rather than merely an unpleasant one. What I believe, which leaves the possibility of animal morality open, is that in every species which God has lovingly created, there is an imperative towards preservation, expressed in instinct, but which, because it places value on life, is also moral (on God's part). Now the same thing can be said of people, but in addition to moral behaviour, I'm sure we also have moral sense. Animals? [to be enlarged - betcha can't wait... update: actually, I think I'd better get on with the old blog before it getting bogged down in making the perfect post about animal morality]
