Even the potentially gag-worthy moral of the story — love yourself — goes down like a lump of sugar, with a just a splash of bitters.
An inborn guilt-worthy moral limp--in other words, a contradiction in terms.
Then there was the time, and time again, when there wasn't any profound, commencement-speech-worthy moral, but we just stayed up chatting, ordered Wenzels at 3 a.m., and we were here.
The idea of a good will is supposed to be the idea of one who only makes decisions that she holds to be morally worthy, taking moral considerations in themselves to be conclusive reasons for guiding her behavior.
To say, for instance, that an impartial choice is one that is free of bias or prejudice is to presuppose that we are dealing with a certain sort of impartiality, that which is required or recommended by morality, or at least worthy of moral approbation.
While primitive man tended to view only his clan or tribe as fully human and so worthy of moral consideration, the ties forged among peoples via their cooperative interactions encouraged them to expand the moral circle from tribe, to ethnic group, to nation, and ultimately to all human beings.
It suggests that such a crime would be more explicable, more easily rationalized, less worthy of moral outrage.
In this sense, even as a broader conception of personhood validates other beings as worthy of moral considerations, it does so by evaluating whether their essence sufficiently resembles our own.
In the late 18th century the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham asserted that the suffering of animals, like the suffering of humans, was worthy of moral consideration, and he regarded cruelty to animals as analogous to racism.
Machines have been the definitive 'other,' not worthy of moral consideration, but as we contemplate the prospect that future machines might be conscious and perhaps even have feelings, we are forced to think deeply about who (or what) should be included in the moral order.
