At the beginning the author was talking about riding a horse. The story reminded me of the first time I went horseback riding, and how during similar situations I was freaking out, but the horse could have cared less and knew the path by heart. Anyways on to the rest of the reading, I like the idea of metaphors being used and being created to in my mind dumb down old philosophies. I grew up playing sports. The sports world is full of metaphors. But its not just sports, everything has metaphors and I think its really good to have them. Having metaphors in an area one is comfortable in make them easier to understand.
Now about the incest on page 21. I found that really weird and disturbing. I don't care what the reasoning is or circumstance I feel siblings should not have sex, let alone the though of having that kind of a relationship with each other. While I do think that, I also agree with what the author says that I have a hard time explaining why. I think its not as much a moral issue as the way we are brought up. If you were raised to feel one way then you would most likely stay that way. Either way I find it disturbing to think of a sibling that way.
So, both you and Ashton comment on the incest point--just to be clear--the author is not promoting incest but using it to help us see that our moral views often issue first from our emotional reactions (the elephant) and then our conscious minds (the rider) seek the rationales. Obviously, incest, is pretty much universally taboo, so, this is an emotional reaction that is cross-cultural. Yet, we have other emotional reactions to other moral questions, such as gay marriage or euthanasia, and while our emotions are valid, as are the choices we make for ourselves about engaging in these acts, does that mean that, based on our own emotional reaction, these are immoral acts for everyone? The question is, if our moral sense is largely based on our personal emotions, can we separate out our personal morality from the collective? Can we agree that there are some moral choices that are personal? Then there are others, like taking the life of another human being, which we deem universal (yet, even here we rationalize exceptions for war, death penalty, etc.)
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