Dragons

I'm depressed and need hugs. But fortunately it hasn't been long enough since my last whiny post, so instead I'll cheer myself up by listing all the reasons I like dragons:

1. Tradition. There are other popular monsters. Vampires are in vogue. But if martians wanted to characterise humanity with a fictional beast, I think they could do worse than a dragon.

2. Coolness. They're big (even the little ones), beautiful, bad-ass... We love whales and dinosaurs and elephants. I'm always moved by Kipling's descriptions ("An elephant doesn't run. If he wants to catch up a steam train he will, but he won't run.") It's just amazing that something natural can be so powerful.

3. The metaphor. In so many different stories dragons mirror us in some way. Does anyone sufficiently important have a corresponding dragon form? Are dragons and humans different evolutions from the same being? Are dragons our darkness taken form? Are they a greater intellegence completely unconcerned with us? Whichever way, they're a philosophical point as well as an animal.

4. Relatedly, they inevitably have magic resistance, or magic, or psionics, or wisdom, or kevlar skin, or whatever local equivalent keeps them from being easy prey to things other than direct force.

5. The physics. OK, it falls down here. Every attempt to make dragons pseudoscientific, from Pern's teleporting firestone-eating dragons, to Chess with a Dragon's implausibly large dragons, to starfaring dragons, to flammable-gas regurgitating dragons is at best satisfactory. None ring true and many are awful. Maybe PTerry got the best explanation with the "They're a disaster area without magic, but with it they're amazing" schtick, only by recognising the problems and invoking magic.

6. The independence. A human one day chatting to a thief and the next razing a village would be ill or evil. Smaug is just who he is, and seeing someone acting outside the moral framework is both refreshingly straightforward, and puts your species in perspective.

7. The cult. So many powerful symbols are ruined by casual use, but almost any variation on the word dragon is an acceptable and often impressive name for an illdefined boding :)

8. The cachet. If you kill a demon, you almost certainly used some sort of trick with a mirror. If you killed a vampire, you probably staked it in a weak place near the heart, or brought it to light in a crowded place and robbed its mystique. If you kill a tiger you probably didn't need to. But if you killed a dragon, big or small, you'll get respect anywhere. And dragonhide clothing is mockable by *no-one*

Responses to Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is a very useful way of thinking, I think an advance over my previous conceptions. It might even be an ideal (say to incorporate into a non-sapient robot). It may be a reasonable (but imho flawed) representation of my ultimate moral aims. But I have a number of problems:

0. As normally stated, it's a bit unclear whether intentions or results matter. I normally interpret it as doing what is most likely to improve happiness (math: having the greatest happiness expectation).

1. It generally doesn't help in thought examples like Simont's.

2. How do you quantify happiness? And if you can, how to compare it between people? If two of us rate our happiness on a scale of 1-10, and they have different distributions, can you put them on a common scale?

3. Do you take into account people's feeling, like satisfaction at helping someone else? Or just your own? Do you consider contributions to far future happiness, eg. not-dropping-litter sets a good example, meaning fewer people overall drop litter? Obviously you should, but I defy you to know how much weight to put to that.

If you use these arguments you can fit utilitarianism to any situation, but it doesn't actually help you decide because you have to know the answer to know how much weight to put to the more intangible benefits.

5. I don't like the ruthlessness. According to the statemnet, if you arrest one (innocent) person as an example, which improves crime and makes life better for lots of people, that's good. Possibly that's bad in the long term, but you can't show that. And yet I don't agree with doing it.

6. What about death? Or, for that matter, not being born? You don't then experience any unhappiness, is it bad? How much so? Is it different for different people?

7. What about animals? Do they have the same consideration as humans? Any at all? I say somewhere inbetween, but how do you quantify that?

8. Anything I do in this country is probably irrelevent goodness-wise compared to getting a £40k job and sending it *all* to Africa. But most people don't, should a moral system let them choose between other options, or just stay like a broken compass pointing south-east?

Legal hypothetical: Guilty of one of two crimes

Note: I'm merely curious. I have no intention of doing this.

Suppose it's certain that I'm guilty of one of two crimes, but it's uncertain *which*. And there's no overlap. Is there any legal mechanism which will convict me of one-or-the-other? Can I be tried and sentenced to the lesser sentence? What happens?

The best example I can think of is I shoot someone with a hypodermic gun, then send the body abroad in my friend's boat. I'm found with two ampouls, A fatal, B not. If I used A, I'm guilty of murder (and tampering with a corpse, etc). If I used B, I'm guilty of kidnapping (and assault). Can I be convicted of either of the major crimes, given that it's not certain I committed it?

I think in most jurisdictions I can be convicted for assault if I also murder, but if I'm tried for murder that takes precedence. So I might get any lesser charge which certainly happened.

Am I obliged to testify? I thought the current situation in the UK was that it could be held against me if I don't testify, but that it's not automatic guilt, it's just that if it makes me look guilty it can be evidence against me, but here it's not conclusive.