Ethical Question

[Dancing David]

I think they may be hardwired in. Humans seem to have a compulsion to finish an ambiguous picture or explain an ambiguous situation so they can make sense of it. Probably a survival trait, since so much of real life makes no sense at all.

I wouldn't say it is a survival trait. It is just the most powerful part of the way the brain works.

The brain is a pattern matching and generating machine. It searches for patterns, it sees patterns, it makes patterns.

Real life does make sense if one does not try to 'headline' or 'reduce' everything all the time. Each object in the universe has three traits, uniqueness, connection and contingent hsitory. Real life becomes confusing when we try to reduce things to a 'single cause' and forget that no thing is exactly like another, exists by itself or in absense of it's history.(Of course there are many more than those three traits, those are the ones some people forget the most.)

That said the scientific method is a great way (and maybe the only way) to determine the validity of all the human thoughts and associations about the behavior of the world.

 

[dacium2007]

The answer to this question is... it depends on what the men did to earn the money to begin with. Money is a credit, so they must have done something to earn it. If the rich man worked more than 1/100th as much as the poor man for that $100, he is surely giving more. If the rich man did nothing to earn the $100, he is giving nothing in my opinon, likewise to the poor man about the $1. The question does not give enough information about either man to saw which did the better deed. Depending on how hard it is to make $1, you would probably still have to say the rich many did more work to earn the money he gave away than the poor man.