Return

 "Well, I'm back." (Sam Gamgee, final line of The Return of the King by JRR Tolkien.)

I had many thoughts along the way while looking at various Piles of Rocks in Ireland. I took the strategy of dictating them into my phone and emailing them back.  It will take some sorting out, and not all of it is about Ireland per se. But for now, there is laundry, and grocery shopping, picking up the stopped mail and doing other errands, mowing the lawn and dong other things about the house. 

In the meantime, there is this from Aporia, Is Human Worth Normally Distributed? by Joel Carini. It tackles full on a topic we have discussed here, the supposed inferiority or superiority according to IQ. It has value as a usefulness trait measurement, but it is technically neutral as a moral category. We have gone farther, arguing that because so many people treat it as a moral category, a decent man has some obligation to undermine that and speak against it. That Carini does, and in one place even argues that it is a moral negative.

He makes distinctions similar to what we have seen, though in his own way, and I think readers will find it moderately informative. Not much of an adventurous new dish, but good wholesome food, mostly.

The moral worth of human actions, I argue, is inversely proportional to our natural endowments, being a function of the difference between accomplishments/behavior and natural capacity. And human dignity, I argue, is directly incompatible with gradations of “worth” and independent of accidental differences. Dignity can be rejected, but it cannot be made scalar.

Bisy. Backson. (Christopher Robin, writing to Pooh, in "Rabbit Has a Busy Day, and We Learn What Christopher Robin Does in the Mornings" in The House at Pooh Corner AA Milne, 1928)