Haha, good catch -- Christianity's fingerprints really were all over my last comment, weren't they?
And oh my gosh, I love your summary of Chidi's own flowchart problem. He's so scrupulous and so willing to consider every possibility that he can convince himself of almost anything, poor guy!
I do disagree about whether someone "should" be able to figure out basic moral questions without a flowchart -- I guess it's more comfortable if the answer is so instinctive that they don't even have to think about it, but I think to me it's much more important whether someone arrives at a good answer, rather than how they do it. With that said, though, my confidence in Jason's ability to think his way through a flowchart is possibly not even as high as yours! So it'll be interesting to see how the show addresses his impulse control issues in the future, if at all.
You say you don't see it as indifference, but then you describe it as a "complete absence of consideration", and to my mind those are the same thing....
Ahh, language might be making this one tricky. We say that someone who's being selfish or unkind is "inconsiderate", but I meant consideration in the sense of "thinking about". And I guess technically you could say that I'm indifferent to things that literally never occur to me, in the sense that they never get a chance to affect my thoughts one way or another? But that's the state of mind I was thinking about for Jason: where instead of noticing all the factors but deciding he doesn't care about the ones that mean he shouldn't do whatever he wants, he never even registers most of them in the first place.
As for Janet enjoying herself, that's how I ended up reading her as well! But I take your point about Superman (and omg, I love the idea of him enjoying the firm massage!), and I completely agree that her psychology seems distinctively other than human -- and that people, including Jason, should respect her identity as she expresses it and use language that reflects that.
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on Sunday, March 18th, 2018 04:21 am (UTC)And oh my gosh, I love your summary of Chidi's own flowchart problem. He's so scrupulous and so willing to consider every possibility that he can convince himself of almost anything, poor guy!
I do disagree about whether someone "should" be able to figure out basic moral questions without a flowchart -- I guess it's more comfortable if the answer is so instinctive that they don't even have to think about it, but I think to me it's much more important whether someone arrives at a good answer, rather than how they do it. With that said, though, my confidence in Jason's ability to think his way through a flowchart is possibly not even as high as yours! So it'll be interesting to see how the show addresses his impulse control issues in the future, if at all.
Ahh, language might be making this one tricky. We say that someone who's being selfish or unkind is "inconsiderate", but I meant consideration in the sense of "thinking about". And I guess technically you could say that I'm indifferent to things that literally never occur to me, in the sense that they never get a chance to affect my thoughts one way or another? But that's the state of mind I was thinking about for Jason: where instead of noticing all the factors but deciding he doesn't care about the ones that mean he shouldn't do whatever he wants, he never even registers most of them in the first place.
As for Janet enjoying herself, that's how I ended up reading her as well! But I take your point about Superman (and omg, I love the idea of him enjoying the firm massage!), and I completely agree that her psychology seems distinctively other than human -- and that people, including Jason, should respect her identity as she expresses it and use language that reflects that.