Suspension to set up at -30 deg

[Gra_factor]

A novel sounds like a good idea for getting those kinds of ideas across. To the best of my knowledge that's hardly been done before. Have you read Sam Harris's latest book, the Moral Landscape? He claims answers to ethical questions can be found by science, but it seems to base it on a starting premise of what ethical conduct is in the first place. I liked his other books so I will probably get around to reading it, or listening to the audiobook.

Your situation makes me think of the Arcade Fire song:

"we let our hair grow long
and forget all we used to know,
then our skin gets thicker
from living out in the snow."

[Dussault]

I haven't listened to that album in a long time, but I'm sure my perception of it will be changed when I soon listen to it. Thanks .

I will definitely read the book at some point. I am not familiar with writing on the topic, but I see ethics as dependent on neurobiology. Here is a line of thought behind this:

We all strive to preserve ourselves by moving away from what is bad and towards what is good (this is dependent on our power of action, which is in turn dependent on our knowledge of potential actions). When our pH is too low, or too high, the body needs to react to ensure its preservation. Hence our body's capacity to detect its pH level and regulate it. Sometimes this does not happen and health problems ensue; sometimes we tend towards the bad, and sometimes we are destroyed. Likewise with the mind: a person who handles risk in a rash or cowardly manner (rather than a balanced/rational one) is at greater risk of destruction. The cowardly systematically fails to take risks that are worth taking, and the rash systematically takes risks that are not worth taking. The risk of an action (such as climbing up a tree for honey) must be evaluated in relation to our personal properties (such as strength, flexibility, reaction to bee stings), so the ideal course of actions will differ amongst individuals. However, it is rare and perhaps impossible for a person to be perfectly balanced in all ways, at all points in time. Thus there is room for improvement. Just as we have means to balance our pH, we have means to balance our conscious ways of being, such as the way we handle risk, the way we interact with others, the we feed ourselves (both as in the foods we choose, and the work we do to obtain them), the way we raise our children, the way we cultivate our knowledge, etc. I would call these conscious means of balancing ourselves "the ethical system". Ethics thus exists within a biological framework.

Now, ethics is distinguished from biology in that biology looks at how we actually preserve ourselves, while (normative) ethics looks at how we should preserve ourselves, and creates theories to direct such thinking (the novelist, on the other hand, offers a case-study of how we actually preserve ourselves and, either by creating a good or bad example, ends up informing us how we should preserve ourselves. Each individual is a novel in this sense, but the novel offers us insight that is difficult to find elsewhere).

So, ethical theories are dependent on our knowledge of how we actually preserve ourselves — otherwise, there is a greater risk of creating prescriptions that cannot be carried out.

I seem to have drifted off topic (I wasn't writing this from my hammock, though one of my camping spots is on campus and has wifi...) I'm not sure what the forum etiquette is on off-topicness, but if you want to continue this elsewhere, feel free to mail me at shndssltATgmailDOTcom