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Black sky thunder
Jul. 17th, 2005 01:34 am
Today, read Zena Ryder's "Moral Luck and Moral Insurance" (Dialogue 40, 2001). ("Other than philosophy, some of [Zena Ryder's] interests are literature, gardening, and sharks.") She (I guess Zena's are she's?) has what strikes me as pretty decent attempt at a Kantian solution to the problem: as long as your intentions are good, you're "insured" against being blamed for bad outcomes, but if your intentions aren't good, you can't be blamed as long as nothing bad happens. The idea is, Kant's saying that there's nothing good but a good will entails that you can't blame someone for bad outcomes if they have good intentions, but it doesn't entail that you have to blame someone for bad intentions that happen not to produce bad outcomes.
I'm not entirely sure what to say about this. It kind of seems like sophistry where Kant is concerned--I think the logic, if not the letter, of Kant is that blameworthiness is always just a matter of how good or bad your intentions are--but I think it does account pretty well for our actual moral thinking while giving at least a prima facie case that Kant can be saved at the same time, which I'd doubted was possible. She at least gets to the heart of the problem, anyway.
High temp today, here: 26. Dewpoint at that time: 23. High dewpoint: 23.
High temp today in TO: 29. Dewpoint at that time: 22. High dewpoint: 22.
Intermittent monsoons today (with funnel cloud sighted not far away; floods, here, reported on the news but not sighted), interspersed with steamy sprinkles. Best weather day of the summer, bien sur.
Hurricane Emily is now the strongest hurricane ever recorded (since 1860) this early in the season, and is forecast to cross the Yucatan and hit north-central Mexico mid-week, which is another thing I've never heard of. It looks, extrapolating just a bit from the five-day forecast, like the remnants might carry on into the Gulf of California, which leads me to wonder whether it's possible that it could reform off the west coast of Mexico and become a Pacific tropical storm. Which would be completely insane.
Speaking of insane, the squirrels were bonkers today. And there was a bunny. The hawk did not eat all the bunnies.
I'm not entirely sure what to say about this. It kind of seems like sophistry where Kant is concerned--I think the logic, if not the letter, of Kant is that blameworthiness is always just a matter of how good or bad your intentions are--but I think it does account pretty well for our actual moral thinking while giving at least a prima facie case that Kant can be saved at the same time, which I'd doubted was possible. She at least gets to the heart of the problem, anyway.
High temp today, here: 26. Dewpoint at that time: 23. High dewpoint: 23.
High temp today in TO: 29. Dewpoint at that time: 22. High dewpoint: 22.
Intermittent monsoons today (with funnel cloud sighted not far away; floods, here, reported on the news but not sighted), interspersed with steamy sprinkles. Best weather day of the summer, bien sur.
Hurricane Emily is now the strongest hurricane ever recorded (since 1860) this early in the season, and is forecast to cross the Yucatan and hit north-central Mexico mid-week, which is another thing I've never heard of. It looks, extrapolating just a bit from the five-day forecast, like the remnants might carry on into the Gulf of California, which leads me to wonder whether it's possible that it could reform off the west coast of Mexico and become a Pacific tropical storm. Which would be completely insane.
Speaking of insane, the squirrels were bonkers today. And there was a bunny. The hawk did not eat all the bunnies.
