A moral question

Blood on the tracks via ALDaily

MORAL PHILOSOPHERS and academics interested in studying how humans choose between right and wrong often use thought experiments to tease out the principles that inform our decisions. One particular hypothetical scenario has become quite the rage in some top psychological journals. It involves a runaway trolley, five helpless people on the track, and a large-framed man looking on from a footbridge. He may or may not be about to tumble to his bloody demise: You get to make the call.

That's because in this scenario, you are standing on the footbridge, too. You know that if you push the large man off the bridge onto the tracks, his body will stop the trolley before it kills the five people on the tracks. Of course, he will die in the process. So the question is: Is it morally permissible to kill the man in order to save five others?

In surveys, most people (around 85 percent) say they would not push the man to his death.

Often, this scenario is paired with a similar one: Again, there are five helpless people on the track. But this time, you can pull a switch that will send the runaway trolley onto a side track, where only one person is standing. So again, you can reduce the number of deaths from five to one-but in this case most people say, yes, they would go ahead and pull the lever. Why do we react so differently to the two scenarios?

Happy Independence Day!!!

"Hope is like the bird that feels the light
and sings when the dawn is still dark."
-Tagore

Bombay as is...

A Paean To The City Of My Life from Intentblog writen by Rahul Bose

Excellent write up on bombay/mumbai.

The title says it all

Apple takes shots at Vista from CNET

photo slide show.

Home grown terroist in INDIA??!!???

India Fears Terrorism May Attract Its Muslims from NYTimes

It is an intresting... NO it is a serious matter. It will be so much more difficult to fight these terror attacks if the "terroist" we were killing or being killed by were our fellow countrymen/women. This probelm if not dealt soon will result in many more blasts like the once in the recent past. Wonder what can be done... politician will do nothing other than make it a vote bank issue.

Who needs it !!! :)

Arriving soon, an "anti-stupidity" pill from sify.com

friendship....

Friendship Among the Intellectuals via ALDaily

“It is painful to consider,” wrote Samuel Johnson about friendship, “that there is no human possession of which the duration is less certain.”

Too true. Some friendships die on their own, of simple inanition, having been quietly allowed to lapse by the unacknowledged agreement of both parties. Others break down because time has altered old friends, given them different interests, values, points of view. In still others, only one party works at the friendship, while the other belongs to what Truman Capote called (in a letter to the critic Newton Arvin, his ex-lover) “some odd psychological type . . . that only writes when he is written to.” And then of course there are the friendships that end when one friend betrays or is felt to betray the other, or fails to come through in a crisis, or finds himself violently disputing the other on matters of profoundest principle.