Laughter.
Friday, July 25, 2008
♥ Friday, July 25, 2008
The guffaws that happened in kenny rogers, Genting, were a language that only we understood; for it was us who started and it would have been us who would end it- it was on a topic that came from an understanding that was unique to only those who knew him. And not many did for there are just way too many levels of understanding a person; whilst we constantly proclaim we know a person we only know something about that person, as if when we know an accumulation of things, we eventually come to know him. The strings of laughter that echoed along the hallways of First World hotel merely represented the presence of an inexplicable knowledge of what one meant to another. For whilst one knows what the other meant, language in all its glories of literature would fail to capture that moment in its entirety, and one would simply fail to express all he or she felt at the overwhelming warmth at what we loosely and flippantly call friendship. Its precisely this lack of liguistic ability that we choose to indulge in what is ticklish with occasional punctuations of vulgarities- the refusal to take the boy out of the man. And that is deeper than any so-called sharing that one might choose to have with the intention of knowing that person.Laughter becomes a testament for the oxymoronic concept called the "deep shallow". Who would call a laughter an action worthy of any philosophical reflection? Who would wonder about the depth behind a person's jerking forward and backward in utter lack of dignity and out of sheer response to a conversation void of anything that resembled meaning? Yet in dismissing this key instrument of expression, one loses the rich reflections that could be derived out of it. Whilst one can laugh with another, can one laugh to another? Like how one chuckles to himself, can one laugh to a fellow homo sapien? For the laughing to represents a knowledge of. Like how i laughed to my friends the stupidity that befell me, it was only a product of that knowledge of my friends that allowed me to. And that opening one's mouth to release the sporadic, unintelligible bursts that on various occasions chokes one (which is why you sometimes hear people laugh to the point they end up coughing) and on other occasions suffocates them (those incredibly long strings of laughter that one has to force himself to stop in order to breathe) tells Ivan, Torrence, Desmond, Yiming, Linus, Chian Yee and me what 'wanting to be no where else' really really means.
A comparative moral analysis of Organ Sales
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
♥ Tuesday, July 08, 2008
The difference between a contract and a covenant is the same difference between marriage and prostitution- Scott Hahn, Theologian, Catholic Convert. Whilst one (marriage/covenant) exists for the good of the other, prostitution exists for the good of the agreement (prostitution/contract). It is in this fine line that maybe we can distinguish the morality between organ donation and organ sales.This line i am talking about is highlighted in the example of a teenager's contribution to an old folk's home out of sheer generosity, and another's contribution to an old folk's home for the CIP points he would subsequently get. Many would think that the former teenager's contribution deserves moral praise, whilst the latter perhaps deserves to be frowned upon. If you have heard anyone including yourself wonder whether people involved in any form of altrustic activity are motivated by these tangible incentives, you would know what i mean. Organ donation, like the person helping out for sheer generosity, like what the institution of marriage was conceptualized to be (the heralding of this symbolic giving of one person to another) is premised on the good of the other individual. That, as what many would agree, is what makes organ donation good. One gives life to another for the sheer sake of the other.The intention behind organ sales is completely different. One gives oneself (in Kantian terms the body is part of man's personhood, and that Man's body is a subject and not an object for which one possesses, which means that the manner in which Man uses his body is inherently tied to the moral assesment of himself) for the upholding of a contract. It is not so much the use of money here that is an issue- one could return the generous favour of organ donation with a heap of cash and that would be morally permissible; it is the formulation of agreements between 2 individuals that one's body (or part of) could be used by another. This is where the moral blur is. Let me attempt to throw up this moral dilemma with this hypothetical of three men being in a stranded boat and dying of hunger unless one would sacrifice himself for the other two (this is an American criminal law case of R v. Dudley and Stephenson). Seeing how none of them were willing to be meat for the others, they decided to enter into a verbal contract letting 'fate' decide- they threw dice. Now obviously someone lost and that person was subsequently eaten. Would one justify their actions by saying the person 'contractually' allowed it? Or would an argument be that it is fine because 2 men survived as a process? These could be utilitarian arguments, but if one put on his moral lens, he could not possible conclude that killing him as a result of either his consent, or so that the other 2 could live was the morally right action to take. It is in that same line of thought that Organ sales should not be allowed even though it benefits some other, and even though there is consent, because morally it is still not right.A senior writer from Straits Times have mentioned that the morality behind the intention and morality of the act are two exclusive concepts. That is not completely true: in America, doctors are allowed to increase the morphine dosages for the purposes of easing the patient's discomfiture, and this is not criminalized even though a certain side effect is that the patient's life is shortened dramatically by the morphine use. However, if the intention is to end a life using morphine dosages, the crime committed is essentially murder. The moralilty behind two similar actions is judged differently by intentions! The intention to have sexual intercourse for the purposes of human procreation (sex within marriage) is dramatically different from that of financial gains (prostitution) and the moral take on both actions differ as a result. One would think that even though the goverment has legalized prostitution in Singapore the moral opinion towards prostitution has not been exactly a very liberal one; it would even be startling to know that quite a number believes that prostitution in Singapore is illegal! That is the conservative mindset that we still have, and maybe a reflection of our moral take on the issue of how one should use his or her body. So where it comes to Organ sales, the take should logically be the same as well only if we can swop our utilitarian lenses and put on lenses of morality.
The Law's faith in Faith.
Friday, July 04, 2008
♥ Friday, July 04, 2008
The common law works in this way- nothing is being touched by it, until an incident which results in a trial judgment expands the current law further to include a certain scenario. What do i mean? There was never a reasonable man test, until Lord Atkin and his neighbour principle came in. With that test, came in the notion of a reasonable driver...and then what a reasonable contractor should do, and further on what the reasonable actions of a doctor should be so on and so forth. The metaphysical impositions of tort law started first with a principle, and with each case expanded to encompass the actions of persons in different walks of life, and today, the law seemed to have entered into the realm of the clergy as well.And thus the notion of the reasonable priest. What a priest would or should do in a case of an exorcism? If he did not check whether or not the person was suffering from a mental condition prior to carrying out the exorcism ritual, would he then be seen (by the law) as negligent? Whilst the priest's defence was that all he did were saying some prayers and that no such ritual actually took place (and thus no need to check whether or not she was suffering from some mental illness), the plaintiff's lawyer went on with the notion that as long the alleged evil spirit was expelled through the actions of the priest, exorcism would have taken place. So, put it into philosophical perspective: in the course of this trial, the innocuos and intangible actions of a prayer gets pulled out of that spiritual relam in to the conceptual analyses of the law on negligence. Where does faith and the law collide? Does it seem ridiculous that if a person's faith was exercised in the wrong protocol, and that had affected a person's emotional well being, the law should 'come down' on him? Hypothetically speakin, if person A in saying a prayer did not mutter certain words that according to the authority of religion must be said, and such actions somehow or another affected person B's state of mind would there be such a law that says 'you had better pray more completely the next time round!" We can stretch this to a point of ridiculousness, but the idea is the same- this trial is a reflection of the law's qualifying the unqualifiable, the conceptualizing of a person's faith in the language of the law on negligence. Whenever we touch on the idea of faith, we somehow allude to the fact that alot of it lies in what we can neither see nor touch nor even feel, alot of that lies in what maybe escapes logic. Faith and the law thus conflict when logic makes its attempt to become 'unescaped'- when the law says that logically speaking, as long a dialogue with an 'evil spirit' takes place, some form of exorcism must have been carried out (by sheer definition of the word 'exorcism'), regardless of the rituals that a priest must have undertaken. Prayers for deliverance, in very simplistic terms, is a subjective activity. The observation is subjective, the belief in the prayers to expel the certain spirit, the person's relationship with God are all subjective. Faith is premised on such subjectivity. Thus when the law's attempt to be objective actually kicks in, and the question of how the faith was exercised and whether or not it was done in an objectively right manner, we can almost anticipate the head on collision.I am not saying that the law should not intervene. I am saying that the law should not attempt to make tangible what human logic finds inexplicable.
