Ever since I first discovered utilitarianism, it has been my favourite model for morality. In case you aren’t familiar with it, I’ll give a quick outline now: utilitarianism says that, when faced with a decision, the actions which is the most moral, is the one which will cause the most happiness and that an action is only wrong if it causes suffering or unhappiness to others. I’m sure you can see why it’s so appealing. I especially like it because, by utilitarian reasoning, it essentially allows people to live life as they please, without judging them for their decisions (unless they want to hurt others). Maybe somebody wants to live a certain way which society would look down on, well, it would only be right to live that way because then it would make that person happy and increase the overall happiness!
    The problem people have with utilitarianism is that it does technically allow a majority to abuse a minority for the greater happiness. If, for example, a small group of people could be enslaved in order to provide luxury for the majority, that would add to the overall happiness and therefore be right by utilitarianism. So clearly, a rule is needed which can stop the exploitation of a minority in order to increase the happiness of a majority, without ruining the whole framework.
    I think the solution to this problem is consent. If a minority (however small) is in a position where they could be made to suffer in order to increase the overall happiness, they can’t be forced to suffer in order to make everyone happier, because they haven’t given their consent. I think adding consent to the utilitarian framework covers the problems it had before. If an action can only result in happiness, then yes, it is the one which must be taken, but if it will also causes suffering, then consent needs to be had first, before the action can be undertaken.

(Don’t miss today’s Finger Puppet Show!)

(Also, be sure to read Bath Spa University’s 2014 anthology Writers Unblocked, featuring five pieces by me!)

Every day I like to walk ten thousand steps (which is about five miles) and I absolutely love it. I do all this in an evening walk and sometimes an afternoon walk too. Recently, however, I have started having a morning walk. This might be the nicest one of all. The truth is, I don’t actually go for a walk in the morning (unless I’m doing something, I normally get up at 12 p.m.) but several times lately, just before I’ve woken up, I’ve dreamt that I’m out on one of my walks. Things are different than normal though, everything is silent and perfectly serene and I’m wrapped up in my duvet in my pyjamas and feel as comfortable as somebody lying in a warm bed on a cold morning. Then I just shuffle along and peacefully enjoy my walk until my alarm wakes me up. One time I dreamt I was in a large unknown city, another time I walked all the way to Bath (and it looked very different when I got there), but normally it’s lovely old Corsham. It’s not a lucid dream, I’m not fully aware, but in it I know I’m out having a walk ‘before I wake up’, and I just think it’s very nice that I’ve been having this recurring dream lately. I hope it continues.

(Today is CFS/M.E. Awareness Day, read David Tubb’s blog post on The Hidden Tower about his own trouble with that particular illness. I only hope I’ll have something of such high quality to post on here one day!)

Recently I’ve been watching a very good television programme called The Walking Dead, but there’re a few things which bother me about the show, the main one being that the heroes often kill people needlessly and I don’t like it very much. If I were in that world, I often think to myself, I’d be much less violent about it.
    Well, it just so happens that I had a dream where I was the living in a zombie apocalypse and so I had a chance to apply my morality to this new setting. I remember, for whatever reason, I was staying inside a giant warehouse and I had a nice little bed set up on the ground near the entrance.
    One morning, I was just waking up when I saw a gang of three tough looking armed men walking into the warehouse.
    “Good morning,” I said, getting up quickly and walking towards them.
    They all pointed their guns at me, but I said “Don’t worry, I don’t have any weapons in here, so you won’t need to use your ones either.”
    “Give us your food!” the man demanded.
    “You don’t have to steal it from me, I’m quite happy to give you a nice portion, just so long as there’s enough for me, and I don’t eat much,” I said.
    “Well, alright then,” he said.
    I popped into the back room and filled up a few sacks with food, one for each of the three men.
    “I hope that will be enough,” I said.
    “Thank you,” their leader said kindly.
    “Feel free to come back in future,” I said as they left. “Look out for zombies!”
    And as they happily walked off into the distance, I woke up and found myself in my regular bed. Of course, I then instantly recorded it in my dream journal and so it was remembered long enough to become this blog entry!

(Don’t miss today’s Finger Puppet Show!)

Most nights in Corsham there is a group of teenagers who sit around in the empty town and listen to very loud and explicit songs like this. They’re often riding around on their bikes and chatting to one another with a lexicon full of obscenities. I often see them when I’m with one or both of my brothers and after we’ve passed them they’ll always say that they’re idiots and so on, but I always tell them that they shouldn’t judge them because, for all we know, they’re actually really nice people. After all, the only thing they know about this group is their choice of pass time.
    Well, it just so happens that they were sitting around outside Co-Operative Food the other day and I had a small interaction which proved one of us right. There had been a lot of rain that day and so I was wearing my extra big rain jacket with lots of buttons.
    “Your buttons are done up wrong,” said a girl in the group.
    “Oh yes?” I said, thinking I’d been wearing the jacket wrong all these years. “How should it be?”
    “Well, you see,” she stepped forward to where she could clearly point at the buttons, “you accidentally put that button through that hole.” It seems it was just a one off mistake and not a long standing problem after all.
    “Oh, yes, I see! Thank you very much, I shall fix that up right away,” I said, thankful that somebody had been kind of enough to point out my error for me so that I could fix it.
    “That’s alright,” she said, kindly.
    “Bye bye!”
    “Goodbye.”
    And so we parted ways. Of course, while I did enjoy our very short conversation due to the fact that somebody was helping me with a fashion related problem out of the kindness of their heart, I was especially pleased with the fact that she was a member of the group that my brothers perceived as nothing but no-good trouble makers. Now that we know that one of them was nice all along, perhaps they’ll accept that they aren’t all the stereotypes they think they are?

(Don’t miss today’s Finger Puppet Show!)

One day, in early 2012, I was out in the university café having nice lunch with a good friend of mine. The food was delicious (I ate a cheese and onion bap), the company marvellous. All in all, I was having a wonderful time. Sadly, it seems that I was the only one of us who was having a nice time. Shortly after I’d finished eating, my friend clutched her stomach and started crying.
    “Oh dear,” I said. “What’s the matter?”
    “It’s fine,” she said, almost out of breath due to pain.
    “Well, that’s clearly not true,” I said.
    “Hey, shall we go for a walk now?” She tried to sound upbeat, but I think she was embarrassed to be around all the people there.
    “Yes, okay then, so long as you’re up to it!”
    We left the cafe but then my friend stopped moving, clutching her stomach again.
    “Would you like to sit down?” I asked.
    She insisted otherwise, but then a few minutes later collapsed onto the floor. A member of staff spotted us and, after helping up my friend, led us into a nearby building. He explained that, by the university’s policy, he had no choice but to take us to the hospital. My friend was very insistent that we not go there, but he took us all the same and after a short ride in the car, we were both waiting in the emergency room.
    “I’m sorry I couldn’t do anything to help,” I said, feeling quite sad about it. “I was really quite useless.”
    “No, don’t be silly,” my friend said. “I’ve had this happen before and anybody else would just get all worried and make matters worse, but you were just really casual the whole time, like nothing was happening. It’s very reassuring.”
    I always thought that was very kind. Since my friend was seemingly feeling much better, I was feeling much less concerned too. Sadly, however, she soon started having a panic attack because she was worried about it all and urged me to go and get a bag for her to hyperventilate into, so I got up and headed towards the nurse behind the check-in.
    “Excuse me,” I said, “my friend is having a panic attack and they’d like to borrow a bag, do you have one?”
    “What, to breathe into?” she asked.
    “Yep,” I replied.
    “Hmm,” she looked around and then spotted something. “This is all we have.”
    She gave me a bin bag.
    Since I wasn’t likely to get anything else from her, I said “Thank you, I’m sure that will be fine.”
    I went back to my friend.
    “I’m afraid she only gave me a bin bag,” I said.
    “Great,” she said, and discarded it.
    Thankfully, a few hours later we were all done there and my friend and I left the hospital. I always thought it was quite funny how a bin bag was offered by a professional nurse for hyperventilation purposes.

(Don’t miss today’s Finger Puppet Show!)

I mentioned before that a friend of mine once randomly decided that it would be fun to tie me up, well, about a year later he had a new fun idea. One morning as I got out onto the school playground with my friends Ben and Sarah, I found that he was doing a sleeper hold (which he had recently learned) on several people I knew. When the three of us arrived, he approached us to say hello.
    “Hey, Ben. Can I try it on you?” he asked, eagerly.
    Ben, very excited, agreed. A few seconds later, Ben was in his arms, and then, after a small spasm, he was unconscious and lowered gently onto the floor. He was awake and fine again a few seconds later.
    “I guess you’ll never let me do it to you, will you, Randall?” he said.
    “Well, I suppose I don’t mind too much,” I said, not wanting to let him down.
    “Wow,” said Sarah. “I really can’t imagine it happening to you. It would just seem so weird to see you so vulnerable like that.”
    I always wondered why she said that, and at the time I said that I thought it seemed odd. I hardly seem a very powerful person! But I remembered it, because it always seemed nice.
    He wrapped his arms around my neck and started squeezing tightly. However, unlike everybody else, after a few seconds there was no spasm and I didn’t become unconscious, but he kept squeezing. He was doing it for so much longer on me, waiting for it to happen.
    “I think you’re just strangling me,” I said, but I’m not sure he could understand me because it was getting harder and harder to breathe and therefore harder and harder to speak!
    Eventually the bell rang and he gave up. I felt extremely cold after he let go, as if I had just gotten out of a warm bed and then been dumped outside, but I never once passed out. I wonder how long he’d have kept trying had the bell not rang?
    Anyway, the story all seems nice and light-hearted until we jump forward in time three years and it gains a rather more sinister twist. In the time that passed, I’d left school and Ben and Sarah were very sadly more and more becoming memories of the past. But, of course, change isn’t all bad and I was happily at a new friend‘s house and we were both sitting on the sofa having a nice chat about various things. I happened to mention the time that somebody had once tried to do a sleeper hold on me but it had failed to work.
    This quite excited her, and she was keen to try it on me herself to see if it would work. Obviously, as I was a little older, I was more reluctant, but as I had let a friend do so in the past, I felt I should let one do so in the present. I described how he had done it, and she looked it up online to see how it was done. In the end, she decided not to, because when we looked up that specific method we discovered several sites explaining that it was ‘potentially fatal’. Oh my.

(Don’t miss my latest article for Avoid Drowning.)

I remember that one winter’s day back in 2008, I was standing out on the school field with a small group of friends. It was raining a little and, of course, most people don’t like rain and so most of my friends were inside avoiding it. I, on the other hands don’t really mind rain at all, but I don’t particularly enjoy enormous crowds and since enormous crowds were inevitably inside on rainy days, I was outside.
    “Hey, let’s tie up Adam!” one of my friends said, producing a roll of duct tape.
    This was a little unexpected.
    “Yeah, great idea!” somebody added.
    Hmm.
    The person who had proposed the idea approached me and said sweetly, “You don’t mind do you?”
    Who was I to rob him of his fun? I reluctantly agreed to let him do it.
    So, I was backed against the leg of a rugby post and the whole roll of duct tape was wrapped around me.
    My friends all found this to be absolutely hilarious.
    “Very good,” I said, smiling.
    Then, the school bell rang and it was time to head inside for the post-lunch lesson. Sadly, it seems that my friends didn’t quite have time to release me before heading back inside. I supposed I wouldn’t want them to get in trouble for being late anyway. Better only one person get told off than four!
    So there I was, tied to the pole while everybody else headed inwards. I should probably be doing something about it. I thought that a good idea would be to take my Trusty Water Bottle and to squirt it down the front of the tape and hopefully loosen whatever it was that made it sticky. The plan seemed sound, other than the fact that both of my arms and my water bottle were tightly under the tape.
    In the end, I just had to push forward as hard as I could to tear it away and it worked quite well, although it was very tricky. I got in, late, and told the teacher that I had a very good reason, but they didn’t even need to hear it because I was a good student and they trusted me, so, no punishments for me!

(Don’t miss today’s Finger Puppet Show!)