Reflection on 1/29 Class

Good morning everyone:

Let me just say that I spent some time going back through parts of the book, because some of the things we took as true in our discussion yesterday ended up not quite being accurate - I am going to go add those changes to the wiki after this post.

In class, I liked the fact that we were split into two groups that were able to manage our ideas better. I feel like the quality of the discussion overall was much better, since each subgroup had time to focus in its own direction. For the group I was in, I enjoyed the emphasis put on the fact that morality might not be the right term for a computer; perhaps ethics is more accurate? I am not sure I totally agreed with that line of thought, but its reasoning was well done.

I also enjoyed the comments made part of the way into our discussion that even if morality was the correct way to define the question of mike's actions, did it really matter in time of war/revolution (when morality is shifted across many people anyways)? Having thought about the discussion we had over that point, I have come to a conclusion of my own. In reality, if the morality prevailing over a system needs to be suspended to get rid of that system, then the morality was also flawed in the first place and needs to be educated out of the people (as we discussed in class). In terms of the book, the morality of Earth was strongly against capital punishment (as they say), yet they are perfectly willing to send convicts to the moon, where there is approximately a 50% survival rate in the first few weeks. This is fairly indicative of the morality being skewed, which seems to match the fact that the Loonies eventually prevailed. I am not sure if thats entirely fair, but it seems somewhat accurate to me.

-Mike