My Owner had a date at home last weekend w/ a new boyfriend
she’s acquired… so the Puppy was kicked out of the house for the weekend. I could have gone to Atlanta to spend time w/ Sir and the pack…
but they were planning to do this “Warrior Challenge” race through 3 miles of
mud and obstacles… which sounds about as much fun to me as – well, as running
through 3 miles of mud and obstacles. No
thanks. So I opted to head to Tennessee instead to
hang out w/ friends there.
As soon as I got off work Friday, I packed a bag and hit the
road on two wheels. I was a little
worried about the weather b/c I had to cross under a thunderstorm while going
over the mountains. The FZ6 and I did get a bit
drenched… but it only lasted only about 5-10 minutes. Once I got on the other side of it and wound
my way down, out of the wet mountains, then I soon found sunlight again, and my
leathers dried off quickly. The rest of
ride into Tennessee
was nice, and Ma’am had packed me some sandwiches for my trip, so I had a
little picnic stop along the road.
Saturday, the weather was great! I spent the day w/ “my bff,” Max. We did a 10 mile hike along the Tennessee River . I
got a bit sunburned, but nothing too bad.
The only problematic aspect is that I had my collar locked on… and so I
ended up w/ a sun-tan pattern in the shape of my collar and tag. LOL. Fortunately
it’s not too noticeable… or else that could have drawn some unwanted questions
at work.
We talked completely nonstop for the whole hike – mostly about
science & technology. Max is a mad
scientist (and an official super-villain), so he updated me on on all of his
own science projects… but he’s also obsessively plugged-in to the latest science
and engineering news from all over the world.
After a quick shower, it was off to spend the evening with
more friends at their regular philosophy salon.
I have a degree in philosophy (among other things), so this sort of
thing is right up my ally. One of my
friends also has a strong interest in philosophy, so about a year ago, she started
this “salon” where the gang would gather at her place, she would cook, usually
they would watch part of a philosophy lecture on Youtube, and then that would
become the spring-board for conversation.
Saturday night, we watched about 20 minutes of a lecture on Kant’s moral
theory and took from that our springboard: the question of whether there’s an
ethical difference between a deliberately misleading but literally true
statement (we called it “true-ception”) and an outright falsehood. Kant’s categorical imperative states that it
is always bad to lie (a questionable
claim in-itself)… but Kant himself felt it was okay to mislead people as long
as what you said was literally factual. Kant’s ethics is painfully lawyer-like! And Max had the perfect, concrete example,
b/c a few years ago he was the star witness in a federal criminal trial… and he
was placed in a situation where it would be pretty bad to tell the “whole
truth,” but he also didn’t want to commit perjury… so he had to craft some of
his answers as “true-ceptions.” He said
that while he didn’t exactly lie, he
still feels morally ambivalent about what he did.
We had a variety of perspectives represented and that made for
a lively discussion. (For my own
2-cents: I don’t think there is any ethical distinction between a “true-ception”
and an overt lie; if you intentionally deceive people by what you say, then you
are lying -- period. On the other hand, I also
reject Kant’s categorical notion that lying is always bad. If I’m hiding Jews in my attic and the Nazis
come and ask, “Are you hiding Jews in your attic?” then of course I’m morally
justified in lying to them!)
The weather was also perfect Sunday, so I took the scenic
rout home through the mountains. Not
surprisingly, there were a lot of other bikes on the road… so I did a lot of
barking on my ride home. I tend to bark at
motorcycles. :) *Ruf! Ruf!*
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