We might be on the verge of seeing a black hole. That’s a big deal because black holes swallow light. The goal is a high-resolution image from short-wavelengths detected by eight telescopes in a network that runs from Europe to Antarctica through South America, North America, and the Hawaiian Islands. Combined, the telescopes make one big eye called the Event Horizon Telescope.* Actually, it will probably at the very best reveal some details about the Event Horizon, the margin between the accretion disk and the actual hole. As for the hole itself? Well, if you want to see the absence of light, just go on a cave tour where the guide turns out the lights and says, “This is what the cave looks like without artificial light.” Duh!
 
We have long lived with the metaphors of light and darkness as analogs of good and evil. In many instances, we have difficulty agreeing on the boundary between the two because of different perspectives. If we argue from strict dogma, we think we can delineate both clearly, but in everyday life, we frequently encounter an unresolved fuzziness. Someone’s good fades into another’s evil. That event horizon between what is good or bad can be difficult to resolve.  
 
You might not care about the effort to see the black hole, its event horizon, or accretion disk, but there’s a lesson in the effort for all of us currently lost in the darkness of enveloping evil. More eyes on a subject can reveal more details and see what might be missed by just two eyes and a single perspective. Remember that whenever you believe your perspective differs from that of someone else. If we could just get people from all over the world to look in unison, there’s a chance that either the unknown or the misunderstood will manifest itself. True, we might end up seeing the absence of something, but that, in itself, might be worth a look into the darkness of current knowledge. That event, that unity of perspectives focused on the darkness that envelopes us, is still over the distant horizon, but it might be the ultimate human event.
 
Until humans link their moral telescopes, the fuzziness of that moral horizon will keep us all in the dark.
 
* https://news.uchicago.edu/article/2017/04/21/virtual-earth-sized-telescope-aims-capture-first-image-black-hole  

Austrian composer and pianist Franz Liszt was a prolific composer and letter writer. Known as one of the nineteenth century’s most civilized figures, he seemed to express genuine concern for others. In a letter to Carl Czerny, he expressed his regret over failing to show gratitude he believed he owed his mentor, a man he referred to as “my dear Master.”
 
            “When I think of all the immense obligations under which I am placed towards you, and at the same time consider how long I have left you without a sign of remembrance, I am perfectly ashamed and miserable, and in despair of ever being forgiven by you! ‘Yes,’ I said to myself with a deep feeling of bitterness, ‘I am an ungrateful fellow; I have forgotten my benefactor, I have forgotten that good master to whom I owe both my talent and my success.’"*
 
Take your cue from Franz. You don’t have to be as verbose or flowery, but you should consider thanking those who cared both for and about you.

*Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: Years of
Travel as a Virtuoso" by Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated by Constance Bache. Online at http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3689/pg3689-images.html
​

There is some evidence that the first people to inhabit North America might have been subject to a comet impact. H. G. W. Burchard* reports that a comet seems to have hit about 13 millennia ago, creating, among other features, parts of the Great Lakes and the Carolina Bays, the latter those mysterious circular and oval water-filled depressions on the coast. At the time, North America had very few residents. Those who inhabited the continent had dangers like wolves and bears on their minds, probably not objects from outer space. To protect themselves they gathered in shelters.  
 
Of course, a similar impact would devastate the economy from the Great Lakes to North Carolina today. That another such strike hasn’t occurred since North America’s population explosion has been the good fortune. Such events are rare though the airburst of a tiny asteroid over Chelyabinsk in 2013 probably has current residents occasionally checking the skies for a now unlikely but expected danger. A bit of ice or rock that travels thousands of miles per hour doesn’t have to hit the ground to create a harrowing shockwave or to harrow the minds of those who live through the event.  
 
Since the time of comet that Burchard identifies there have probably been other impact events across the planet, most of them small and in the oceans and definitely most of them unreported.  Near misses also occur all the time. That we who live outside Chelyabinsk don’t concern ourselves much over whether an asteroid or comet or roving band of wolves will ruin our picnic is a testimony to the rarity of such dangers capable of impacting human life. But, of course, someday a wolf will bite someone or an asteroid will hit with more devastation than the Chelyabinsk rock.
 
Our concerns are generally more earthbound and centered more on collisions with people. Therein lies our sense of helplessness that mirrors our inability to prevent a comet or asteroid impact or to completely avoid a chance encounter with dangerous animals. It seems that collisions are built into human interactions and that most people who are struck by a human bolide are like the people of Chelyabinsk: Relatively innocent of any malice and unsuspecting that they are in the path of an incoming object, but afterward always aware that a collision is possible. From serious home invasions through road rage incidents and arguments over the placement of hedge between yards, all such impacts make us residents of a worldwide Chelyabinsk. We are a species that is somewhat edgy because an apparently random event can disrupt life in both small and large ways. Maybe the people of Chelyabinsk should keep in mind that their city was founded as an area of protection from Bashkir bandits whose unprovoked attacks on trade routes were no more predictable than a rare comet strike.  
 
That we increasingly look for an impact after being impacted is natural. Conditioning is a reality to which we all succumb. Reconditioning is especially difficult when an impact is both unexpected and life-altering. Surviving without constant anxiety is difficult in a highly populous country that is also open to natural dangers. Wolves, coyotes, and bears aren’t really a problem for the majority of people in North America, but ticks and mosquitoes are, and inimical viruses and bacteria can show up anywhere anytime, just like bolides.
 
Those few residents of North America 13,000 years ago might not have been either directly or indirectly impacted by Burchard’s comet. Maybe all they heard and saw was a loud bang and a flash. In contrast, our vast numbers make almost daily human impacts inevitable. It’s one thing to be hit by a ball of random space rock or ice or bitten by a wolf and quite another to be impacted by a conscious individual with harmful intentions, such as Bashkir bandits going after goods along a trade route.
 
Probably 13,000 years ago those same unexpected human impacts occurred. Our largely gregarious and interdependent nature makes even small populations gather, as some did in the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter at the time of the comet’s strike. No doubt the early residents of the shelter were mutually concerned about attacks by bears and wolves. Those in the shelter chose the inevitable human impacts over nature’s. The people of the Urals also chose interpersonal impacts of their community over the dangers of roving bands of bandits. As a coincidence, Bashkir derives from the term “main wolf.”
 
Our nature seems to make an even redistribution of population across the stretches of any country unlikely. We might lessen, but we won’t eliminate anxiety by decreasing the number of people per acre. It just takes two people to make a society. That is, we’re not going to change the interdependent and gregarious nature of our species. We will continue to gather in shelters for convenience and protection. The gathering will always indicate a choice: We seem to prefer human impacts over Nature’s, regardless of the potentially greater danger and more frequent nature of the former over the latter.
 
Natural disasters like tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and animal attacks occur. Occasionally, a comet will strike. But gathering together in a common shelter in spite of the penchant to impact one another negatively, appears to be our only recourse to find mutual protection. It’s us against the wolves, even the ones that might unexpectedly fall from the sky.  
 
Burchard, H.G.W. (2017) Younger Dryas Comet 12,900 BP. Open Journal of Geology, 7, 193-199. https://doi.org/10.4236/ojg.2017.72013 

You believe in personal freedom. But you also believe that others probably need some imposition of limitations on their freedom. You also believe in “rights.” But you know that not everyone deserves the same rights. Oh! Come on. You do so. Right to life? What about enemies, really serious enemies who harm you or your loved ones? You don’t hold any exceptions? Everyone’s equal at all times and in all places regardless of personal behavior, you argue. Okay. How did you come by that belief? Is there an innate goodness that underlies your thinking? What if someone thought the foundation of morality was evil?
 
In the second half of the eighteenth century first Danish and then British members of a Christian missionary group went to the Nicobar Islands to convert the native population. One missionary, the Rev. John Gottfried Haensel, wrote letters about the islands and Nicobar’s residents to the Rev. C. I. Latrobe.
 
Haensel made observations about the beliefs of the people he encountered there, noting in “Letter V” that “The natives of these islands are a free people, perfectly independent but have a captain in every village…Yet no one is bound to obey him, for all of them, male and female, consider themselves under no control whatever….”* Then Haensel addresses their “religion.”
 
            “They have not even a word in their language to express their idea of God. They use the word Knallen when they speak of Him, but it only signifies ‘above, on high’: for instance, they say, Knallen maade, ‘on the hill’; Knallen uniga, ‘on top of the tree’; Knallen gamalee, ‘on the surface of the sea’…this ‘unknown God’ is good…but wherein His goodness consists, they neither have, nor seem to wish to have, any understanding, nor ever trouble themselves about Him” (p. 51).
 
Haensel says that when his missionary group tried to convert them to Christian beliefs by telling them about a crucified savior who had sacrificed his life for their “sins,” “They observed that they could not believe that the sufferings of one man could atone for the sins of another…but they insisted that they were good by nature, and never did anything wrong…”(p. 53).
 
Of course, the mission of missionaries is to convince. Hearing that the islanders believed they never did anything wrong, Haensel related to them that the missionaries had witnessed murders and the abuse of corpses. He asked, “…was this a proof of their natural goodness?” Their response: “…you do not understand, those were people not fit to live, they were Gomoy, cannibals!” (p.51)
 
Let’s recap. Missionaries with western and Christian values visited an archipelago between the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea, where they attempted to persuade people to think and act in ways alien to their culture. On the Nicobar Islands the missionaries found a different concept of God, a justification for murder, and a society where individuals believed in their own “goodness” and exercised freedom from authority.
 
Wait! For Westerners, it gets stranger. In Letter VI Haensel relates that the islanders believed that disease is the work of “the devil,” Eewee, a “wicked agent,” whom sorcerers, or Paters, control (p. 52). The sorcerers performed rituals akin to exorcisms on sick people. If an exorcism failed to cast out the Eewee, the sorcerer said the devil had possessed a local person, typically a person the sorcerer hated. You guessed it: Salem Witch Trial Time in the islands and death to the suspected possessed “witch.” Strangely, in a people that prided themselves on their personal independence and freedom from authority, the locals had no problem handing the power of life and death over the accused to sorcerers.
 
Eewee was the Creator, by the way, and that freed the islanders from personal moral responsibility. Their common expression was, “The Eewee did not make me perfect, or better” when they were accused of some atrocious crime (p. 53). Can’t blame someone who was created by a devil for doing devilish things, right? Personal responsibility for “sins” passes to Eewee in a belief system that was the antithesis of Christianity.
 
Does any of this make you pause to think about the meaning of “good,” “sin,” and “personal freedom”? Does a society that sees no value in the life of a Gomoy, that has no seeming sense of personal accountability for “sin,” and that looks nowhere for some supreme Goodness have a moral foundation?
 
Should a Gomoy have a right to life? Should an accusation of witchcraft that carries an unchallenged death sentence have moral weight? Where do you stand on personal responsibility?
 
Bring it forward to our time. Have you noted in the news the rioters dressed in black with black face masks attacking other people, supposedly because the other people are as unworthy of rights as Gomoys? Are the masked rioters incarnations of yesteryear’s Nicobar Paters?  Do they attempt to purge society of evil by violence they justify without having to take personal responsibility? Do we assume complete and unfettered freedom yet give to “sorcerers” control over certain lives?
 
Are we different from those nineteenth-century islanders? Of course, you are going to say “Yes, because we are ‘civilized’ and rational. And,” you continue, “we think everyone has inalienable rights, especially the right to life.” But don’t we find at least pockets of Nicobar Islanders giving over to anonymous people the power to hurt and kill in our own society? And don’t we also argue that personal freedom doesn’t count as a ground for personal responsibility in a world where society is as influential as Eewee? We’ve all heard the expression “victim of society” applied to evildoers. How do we respond?
 
Do we assume an underlying evil or an underlying good? The former eliminates personal responsibility; the latter demands it. Or should we assume that the world is fundamentally amoral and that all morality is simply a matter of culture with no absolutes and no inalienable rights? Now what are you going to do with those Gomoys? 
 
* Haensel, John Gottfried, Rev. Letters on the Nicobar Islands, Their Natural Productions, and the Manners, Customs, and Superstitions of the Natives: With an Account of an Attempt Made by the Church of the United Brethren To Convert Them to Christianity, Addressed by the Rev. John Gottfried Haensel (The Only surviving Missionary) to the Rev. C. I. Latrobe, London. Printed for the Editor, No. 10, Nevil’s Court, Fetter Lane, by W. McDowall, Pemberton Row. 1812. Online at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26781/26781-h/26781-h.htm

Why do you have family pictures on your walls and tables? What do you accomplish by devoting some of your personal income to memorializing fleeting moments? Is it just a matter of vanity? Are you a narcissist?
 
Silly questions. Obviously, you believe that the moments you enshrined in photos and mementos were personally significant. And now you overwhelm yourself with so many digital images that your smart phone has, depending on memory, hundreds to thousands of such mementos, mostly memorialized moments that have significance for you alone.
 
Braddock, Pennsylvania was the site of a 1755 battle east of current Pittsburgh during the French and Indian War. Both the French and the British leaders were slain during the conflict that the French and their Indian allies won. General Braddock’s participation was memorialized in the city’s name, but there is no physical remnant of the battle, no scar on the landscape now buried by buildings and roads. There is, however, a plaque that memorializes the battle now more than three centuries into the past. But that’s the way with battles. People fight. Ensuing generations largely forget both the reason for the fighting and the place of the battle—with some exceptions like Gettysburg, now made into a National Battlefield. (Carl Sandburg captured such forgetfulness in his poem “Grass”)
 
If there is any evidence that people can act as a single personality, it definitely lies in memorializing. Thus, we have “pictures” hanging in remembrance in the form of plaques, tombstones, and statues. Some group at some time tried to preserve a moment they found significant. For the group one moment, such as a battle, was significant, if only more or less generally so—no group can know all the details in the absence enforced on them by time.
 
Braddock did not die where the city of Braddock now covers the battleground. He died on the road cut through dense forest near Fort Necessity, Pennsylvania. We don’t know exactly where. George Washington made sure of the grave’s secrecy by having horses and men walk repeatedly over it to keep anyone from knowing its location and possibly desecrating the site. Interesting and ironic. The people associated with Braddock and who fought under his command did what they could to hide his body out of respect for him. They “memorialized” him by imposing a “forgetfulness.”
 
Yes, today there is a memorial near the suspected gravesite. And yes, Braddock seems to be memorialized in the town named for him, but probably few residents of the community know much if anything about their community’s namesake. And that’s probably true of most memorialized people and places.
 
Today is September 11, a day set aside by some to visit memorials to those who lost their lives in attacks on New York and Washington, D. C. In a field at Shanksville, PA, there is a memorial to those who thwarted another attack at the expense of their lives. One wonders whether or not some three hundred years from now that memorial will still have meaning or fall into forgetfulness. Certainly, time erases the purpose for memorials. You probably can’t, for instance, name two of the three pharaohs the pyramids memorialize.  
 
The significance of place fades without memorials as new denizens find personal significance there, and their significance will also fade unless someone hangs a picture. So, I guess there’s nothing wrong with your hanging pictures where you live; you’re not narcissistic, just human. At the time you hung those pictures, you believed the moment you captured to be significant enough to preserve in some way.   

The problem is distraction. With an otherwise focused mind, you have to contend daily with “everything else.” And the “everything else” that is a part of twenty-first century life is mind boggling. You are aware of everything because you are in constant contact with everywhere. It’s very difficult to be just in the place where you are.
 
“A report by the BBC…”
“NBC reports…”
“Fox News reports…”
“MSNBC reports…”
“ABC reports…”
“CBS reports…”
“The NY Times reports…”
“The Miami Herald reports…”
“The You-Name-It reports…”
 
You know of bombings in the Middle East and earthquakes in Italy. You know of threats by foreign nations, economic upturns and downturns, breakdowns by Hollywood starlets, new fashion, suicides of locals, store robberies, Twitter feeds, leaking gutters and uneven sidewalks, sports outcomes, the need to restock the freezer and the checking account, political intrigue…
 
The Guardian reports on an eruption on Sumatra in Indonesia, “Three people also remain in a critical condition after Mount Sinabung, a highly-active volcano on Sumatra island, unleashed a series of eruptions on Saturday afternoon, disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said. ‘Nine people were struck by the hot clouds. Six died, and three others remain critical with burns,’ he said, adding the injured had been taken to [the] hospital.”*
 
There you were minding your own business, trying to focus, and ‘Holy Distraction’! Now you have to think for a moment first about the spokesman’s name and second about people dying in a pyroclastic flow. Pyroclastic flow? You studied that in school, but you can’t seem to remember the details. You look it up. Oh! Now you remember. And you just get to the other side of distraction when your phone rings (or sings, or buzzes, or beeps, or chimes—the noises themselves distractions that you planned into your life during a distraction to make such a distraction). You hope it isn’t Sutopo Purwo Nugroho calling.
 
You don’t have a problem with attention deficit. You have a problem with distraction. You want it to go away. You want order for at least an hour or two. You go on vacation to a tropical resort. There you find the lack of distraction distracting until you settle into a new routine free from outside... “No, thank you, I haven’t finished this drink yet. No, really, I’m fine. Thanks, but I’m going to pass on pool volleyball with strangers. No, truly, I am happy just sitting here trying to figure out which restaurant I should choose and how I need to dress appropriately. I wonder if the maid has finished cleaning the room. What is going on back home? No, I can’t think about that. I told myself just to relax; they have WiFi on the beach. Huffington reports what? Drudge says ‘it’ is a big problem. Oh! The sun just went behind a cloud, the surf is a bit rougher than usual, and no, though it sounds like fun, I’m going to pass on the catamaran cruise around the island. What time will I have to leave ‘paradise’ to go through the security hassle at the airport?”
 
You need a deficit of distraction to find order. But, sorry, not in this life, and possibly nowhere on this planet.
 
* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/22/people-killed-as-mount-sinabung-volcano-erupts-in-western-indonesia

At the beginning of the seventeenth century Galileo introduced a new way of seeing heavenly bodies, and he also confirmed the Copernican model of the Solar System. About a half century before Galileo constructed a tube with lenses on either end, Gerolamo Fracastro (d. 1553) wrote, “For which reason those things which are seen at the bottom of water appear greater than those which are at the top; and if anyone look through two eye-glasses, one placed upon the other, he will see everything much larger and nearer.”*
 
How is it possible that Fracastro was blind to the potential of his knowledge? He seemed to have grasped the principle of two lenses acting in unison, but he never explained how to put the two together in a useful form. Didn’t he ever think of using the cylindrical cardboard doot-ta-doot inside a toilet paper or paper towel roll?* Hey, Gerolamo. Duh! Telescope. At least something to hold lenses steady, if not a telescoping tube.
 
I suspect that Galileo also didn’t have cardboard cylinders from a package of toilet paper rolls he obtained at Costco, and he could not claim to be the first to make a telescope. He developed and improved on the 1608 design by Hans Lippershey. Galileo, however, did something more than invent: He found a practical use that changed the way we see our world—and other worlds.**
 
It’s interesting how many of us have not seen the significance of our piecemeal insights: Fragments never turned into sentences; thoughts never turned into philosophies; bits of material never turned into inventions. We’ve all missed those opportunities. I guess I can’t fault Gerry Fracastro for failing to see a telescope in its parts.
 
Those little insights that spring upon you are very much like seeing an object magnified by water or chance alignments of glass. That’s the nature of our brains. Always active but mostly preoccupied, we don’t take time to fashion our insights and observations into some useful philosophy or invention. Then, later on, upon seeing someone’s else’s production, we say woefully, “Shoot! I thought about that, but….”
 
Maybe your un-invented inventions would exist if you had a mindset to pursue your little insights to their logical conclusion or to the fulfillment of their potential. If you marvel at how Fracastro failed to realize that he was on the verge of a new and useful instrument, you might telescope your amazement inward. Maybe those little insights of yours are also the first stages of a substantial philosophical or physical invention.
 
Your brain is already equipped with telescoping ability. Use it to magnify your insights, to see what others can’t see, and possibly to put together parts into wholes.
Who can tell? Your next invention might be as close as the nearest doot-ta-doot tube.  
 
*For toddlers, the cardboard cylinder might be as important a musical instrument as an overturned pot and spoon.
 
**Not everyone, of course could see the value of seeing through a telescope. The Inquisition’s clergymen, blinded by adherence to a tradition, saw only what Ptolemy said they should see.

There are those who in every decade since the late 1800s have argued that all forms of organized government and society are repressive. Among those, certain people have stepped forward to justify “disorganization.” Ironically, they have become the “leaders” of anarchy. One oxymoronic “leader of anarchists” was Errico Malatesta, who published Anarchy in 1900.*
 
Errico’s diatribe against government and organized society has a number of unprovable assumptions, such as cooperative animal life as a workable analog for human co-existence. He believes that no overriding set of rules imposed by a governing body is necessary because the animal world has none, yet they survive based on self-preservation and species-preservation. What he doesn’t note is that a species can survive even if its individuals are at war over food or shelter. Numbers dictate the survival. Most (probably billions) of the species that have occupied this planet over the past 3.5 billion years are now extinct. Using for an argument the behavior of the current 5 to 50 million living species as a model of survival without “government” will fail as our contemporary denizens, probably including us, go extinct even as we voluntarily “cooperate.”
 
That anarchists organize should tell them something about the nature of their fundamental philosophy. But do they have some legitimate arguments?
 
Malatesta argues that it is governments that cause wars, and he has a point. In his view an ordinary  citizen cannot call up an army and provide the logistics to fight another and distant country. Were he alive today Errico would see that cartel and tribal wars can do considerable harm within a region and terrorists can hurt others around the world under the instructions and influence of terrorist leaders. Malatesta also argues that where there are strict laws crime increases. You can devise arguments against that conclusion, also, since no one has a definitive list of crime's causes.** Although pacts and constitutions can precede crimes against their restrictions, most laws are in response to behaviors and perceived needs after the fact. But there’s another argument, the William Golding one. In Lord of the Flies Golding assumes an innate savagery that only societal restrictions can keep in check, even though that same uniformed society wages a savage war in that story.
 
Maybe Errico should have sat with Jane Goodall as she observed chimpanzees attacking neighboring chimpanzees. There was cooperation within a group, but not, obviously, between groups. Errico’s arguments come in the context of his time. Socialism was on the rise, and the Tzar was about to be overthrown. But anarchy? Does it assume an innate goodness in the individual all the while advocating violent overthrow by organized groups?
 
And today’s “anarchists”? They organize online and over the phone. Strange. They use public transportation and highways. Stranger. They have “leaders.” Strangest.
 
*Malatesta, Errico. Anarchy. The Free Society Library, 1900. Online at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/40365/40365-h/40365-h.htm

**Engelen, Peter-Jan, et. al., What determines crime rates? An empirical test of integrated economic and sociological theories of criminal behavior, Journal of Sociology, September, 2015, DOI: 10.1016/j.soscij.2015.09.001.
“Research on crime has by no means reached a definitive conclusion on which factors are related to crime rates.” Too late for poor Errico; he died in 1932 long before Engelen and his co-authors conducted their study. But, doesn’t that always seem to happen? We hold certain assumptions, never bother to flesh them out with concrete information, and write and act upon them. Errico saw crime in crowded cities and assumed an overriding government authority and a set of laws had instigated people to act criminally. See Engelen’s abstract online at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282468675_What_determines_crime_rates_An_empirical_test_of_integrated_economic_and_sociological_theories_of_criminal_behavior
  

You might be aware that Earth’s iron interior generates a magnetic field that compasses obey. That field has been known to shift. It is shifting now, and might even flip flop as it has many times. If it were to flip, then your compass needle would direct you to some place in the Southern Hemisphere instead of to an area around Bathurst Island in the Northern Hemisphere.
 
Do you think you have a moral (or ethical) faculty? You know, something deep inside enables you to distinguish among behaviors as being either “good” or “evil.” Do you have that? Do you have a “moral field” that guides you as the magnetic field guides a compass needle? If so, do you think it, like the magnetic field, can shift?
 
The question is not irrelevant to your (or my) life. Here’s an example that Joseph Butler gave in 1873. Let’s say you see someone suffering from an injury caused by another person. Do you feel concern? Pity? Empathy? Sympathy? Would your feelings (or the degree to which you experience them) change if you find out that the sufferer is not a victim but a bad guy who was injured during an assault on someone else? You’ve seen YouTube videos that show “bad guys” getting their comeuppance. How did you feel about their suffering injury? You’ve read the stories of home invaders being shot and even killed by those whose houses they invade. How do you feel?
 
Do you believe, as Butler does, that “we are constituted so as to condemn falsehood, unprovoked violence, injustice, and to approve of benevolence to some preferably to others, abstracted from all consideration, which conduct is likeliest to produce an overbalance of happiness or misery” (pp. 307)?* In short, are you inclined toward sympathy for “good guys” and disinclined from feeling for “bad guys”?
 
Got one more for you: What about Robin Hood? What if someone takes from another through treachery, violence, or injustice, and gives what is taken to someone else, depriving the former of happiness while ensuring the latter of happiness? Is there any moral “constituent” that makes you reject the behavior or its result?
 
If you argue that “It’s always the context that matters,” are you arguing that there is no deep-seated moral compass and that all moral compasses point toward poles that can shift?
 
*Butler, Joseph, The Analogy of Religions, to the Constitution and Course of Nature, To Which Are Added Two Brief Dissertations: I. On personal Identity.—II. On the Nature of Virtue., Philadelphia. J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1873. The quotation comes from the second dissertation.

Seems that experimentation, regardless of what the historians tell us about the rise of modern science, has always been with us. It’s in our nature to be curious. We lift up rocks to see what lies beneath; we open seed pods; we…
 
Without some legal and moral protections, we have experimented on one another just to satisfy our innate curiosity. History is filled with cruelties perpetrated by “experimenters” who justified their actions on the basis of “furthering knowledge.” Regimes like Hitler’s were infamous for the Mengele mentality. And Nazi Germany wasn’t the first place where experimentation negatively affected individual humans. Herodotus tells in Euterpe, his second book of the “histories,” of the Egyptian king Psammetichos who isolated two babies because he wanted to see what language they would speak when left without contemporary influence.
 
Psammetichos wanted to test the notion that the Egyptians were the oldest of human “races.” Although Egyptians of the time believed in their primacy, Phyrgians also believed in their primacy among human races. To test these beliefs, the king had two newborns put into a room by themselves, receiving milk from she-goats and being tended to by a lone shepherd who never spoke when he entered the room. Psammetichos wanted to hear what language the children would speak when they became toddlers. One day the shepherd entered to hear the children say bekos. After searching through the languages of all neighboring peoples, Psammetichos’ “linguistic anthropologists” informed him that the Phrygians’ word for bread was bekos. “Ah!” Psammetichos might have uttered, “the Phrygians were first!” In Herodotus’ words: “...guided by an indication such as this, the Egyptians were brought to allow that the Phrygians were a more ancient people than themselves.”* Psammetichos recognized the primacy of others.
 
Nice of him to acknowledge the results of his cruel and unscientific experiment. Imagine the two children’s lives during and beyond that experiment. They had a feral life imposed on them. Typically, feral children have trouble becoming “civilized,” regardless of attention given by well-meaning adults. Language has been a particular problem for some. The brain seems to need some early exposure to words and syntax for successful mastery. But that’s beside the point here. Experimentation on others is the focus, and there seems to be little that restricts humans in that regard save an overriding set of rules.
 
Even our attempts to “civilize” others might be seen as cruel experiments. Take the story of Orundellico (AKA Jemmy Button, Jeremy Button, 1815-1864?), the Tiera del Fuegan taken from his native village and family by highly religious Captain FitzRoy of HMS Beagle. Fitzroy believed the farther one’s endemic country was from the Garden of Eden, the more primitive the race of humans. Tierra del Fuego is pretty far from the supposed place of the Garden, so Orundellico was assumed to be primitive. FitzRoy took him to England, dressed him in English clothes, made him a celebrity, and taught him English. When FitzRoy returned with Charles Darwin to Tierra del Fuego, Jemmy left the Englishmen, shed his English clothes, and rejoined his wife and village, never expressing a desire to return to England and “civilization.” FitzRoy took this as proof of the effect of distance from Eden. In doing so, FitzRoy acknowledged his own primacy. Amazing, isn’t it, that FitzRoy was traveling at the time with one of the premier scientists of the nineteenth century yet still held his own anthropologically erroneous beliefs. Poor Jemmy. All he wanted to do is live with his family.
 
Take from these two tales what you will but consider both in light of how we view past and contemporary humans. Each of us is an anthropologist or sociologist of sorts, and each runs experiments on other humans, seeking both to understand their own origins in light of our own and to assimilate them to our way of thinking and acting. In almost all instances the experimenter believes himself or herself to be superior in some way to the subjects of the experiments. It seems that proof of primacy is the prime motivation.
 
All human experiments say as much about the experimenter as they say about the experimental subjects. Regardless of his faulty methodology, Psammetichos was willing to acknowledge that his people held a faulty view with regard to their primacy. In contrast, FitzRoy continued to believe that distance from the Garden of Eden determined the primitiveness of a people. By today’s standards, both operated unethically. But the ancient king seemed willing to acknowledge his and his people’s fallibility as he accepted the results of his anthropological-sociological experiment, whereas the more modern Captain FitzRoy refused to relinquish his beliefs.
 
When will we ever learn that our experimental interference in other lives isn’t always a good thing?
 
*Macaulay, G. C., Translator, The History of Herodotus by Herodotus: In Two Volumes, Vol. 1, Book II, The Second Book of the Histories, Called Euterpe, MacMillan and Co., London and New York, 1890. p. 1.