A snippet of conversation: Moralometers Vs. Dolphin Judges
Some years ago, my friend Paul was visiting Vancouver, and he and I found ourselves at my best friend BJ's place. We were having a fairly weighty discussion about morality and government, revolving around whether a government ought to have a greater responsibility to its people or to the cause of justice as a whole, and what, ultimately, one ought to expect out of a government in this arena. BJ, who had in large part been quiet and a little disengaged up to this point, tossed in his two cents, which derailed the conversation, but in this very act spawned a much more interesting conversation. It's been long enough that I'll have to be just a little creative in re-creating the conversation from memory, and indeed after a certain point I remember the flow of the conversation better than which contribution was made by which specific person, and so I might be slightly inaccurate in my attribution.
"Just to bring this conversation down to my level, you know what I think society knows? Every community ought to have, like, a guy with a dolphin in the place of his head to make moral judgements over the community. Dolphin Judges."
Me: "An entire dolphin? Not just a dolphin's head, but like a reverse-centaur sort of arrangement, where it's a complete human body up to the neck, and then from that point up it's an entire dolphin, minus the tail or something?"
BJ: "Something like that, yeah! Dolphins, you know, they have a much simpler and less-complicated view of the world, but they know right from wrong, and they could communicate this through clicks and whistles and stuff."
Me: "You know what I think would be even better? An old village wise man who has a machine affixed to their head, with a big LCD display screen on it, and they hear peoples' grievances, and then the device on their head measures the relative morality of one path or another and then reads out and displays a numerical rating for them. Like a... a 'Moralometer'. And that way, if someone has a problem with a ruling, you can be like 'Hey, listen, man, one option has a morality rating of 4.3, and yours only has a 2.7. You want to tell me 4.3 ISN'T higher than 2.7? You go get me a calculator and I'll show you, buddy."
Paul: "But then someone says 'Oh, these moralometers are all well and good, but where's the HEART? Bring back the dolphin judges, I say!'"
Me: "Why, they have TWO hearts! One in the dolphin torso, and one in the man-torso! You want to tell me two isn't larger than one? Go get a calculator! And the old men with the moralometers are all desperately pointing out that bringing back the Dolphin Judges has a much lower morality rating than keeping the Moralometer Judges, but nobody is paying attention, and anyways they're drowned out by the delighted clicks and whistles of the Dolphin Judges, who are being brought back in from the wilderness after their long years of exile."