From: johnny moral (johnnymoral@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri Jun 13 2003 - 18:25:23 BST
Hi Steve,
You wrote:
>Your philosophy of expectation seems to be falling flat here. You say that
>people should do what is expected of them, but when as you point out, it is
>no longer expected that couples will stay together in marriage forever that
>there is something wron, that this is sad. What's the deal? Can something
>"expected" still be immoral? I think so.
Only when we are expecting a specific case to behave contrary to the general
expectation. And though the action we expect may be an immoral action,
there is a sense that it is moral for that immoral action to take place (the
action itself remains an example of an immoral action, but that it takes
place fulfills a larger sense of moral order).
Well, we all agree that we've lost any expectation we had that a marriage
should stay together. This explains the 50% chance that it will fail. We
don't have an expectation that marriages should break up either, we are
nuetral about what should happen. There is no expectation one way or the
other. (On this tac, I am one of the few Jerimiahs to predict that sexual
orientation will also become a 50/50 split, as people profess to have no
expectation about another's orientation, even though they have every reason
to believe, based on current estimates, that there is 95% probability that a
person is "straight". People today insist everyone act as though there is
a 50% chance that a person might be in that 5%, which will have a propulsive
effect on achieving their deluded expectation.)
The reason I say it is sad is because all marriages now suffer from this
lack of expectation. There is nothing immoral going on to provoke my
sadness, I am sad for the morality that was lost, the patterns that were
destroyed, the loss of expectation, the imposition of arbitrary choice and
the resulting angst and misery.
No, I don't think something expected can be immoral. I mean, sure, we
expect a person known to be an immoral person to continue to be an immoral
person, but that's not what you mean is it? When our expectations are
fulfilled we are sublimely happy, even if our expectation was for something
to happen that is terrible for us personally. In the same sense, we are
sadenned by unexpected serendipity even as we are happy for its effects
because it shakes our foundation, sets us mometarily adrift.
Johnny
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