BABYLON 5

Stuart Hannabuss has five questions for Mr Morden.

Even the simplest questions we ask ourselves can imply the deepest meanings and the direst consequences. The 'how' of the ways things work or the 'why' of the way things are crowd through the busy day for us all. Often there are no answers - or at least they are provisional, tentative, provocative, or unsatisfying. The questions we ask ourselves about past actions, present dilemmas, future plans are sometimes fleeting, sometime recurring; sometimes products of a stream of consciousness, other times the outcome of focused attention. They seem contained within our selves until we express them in words or action. Then others get involved, and they ask questions too, so that things get interactive and performative, and we become accountable and even transparent. We act knowing we are actors. We cannot hide from self-knowledge.

What Do You Want?

Two of the recurring questions we ask ourselves are what we want, and what we want to be. Implicit in them is what we believe we already are, and also what we think we might become instead.

We acknowledge that we have needs (like food and love) and wants (power and influence, youth and beauty perhaps, and more food and love). We know, too, that there are things we should want, shaped by the roles we know we have to play socially say as parents, or by moral or religious frameworks about mutual responsibility and environmental stewardship.

We know that some of things we might want we cannot have, or shouldn't be given, such as absolute power over others, or some scarce resource that if we had it, would cause many others to be dangerously deprived. We ask whether we have a right to be happy while others are not, or why we should live while others die. Yet we know that, if push came to shove, we would try to live even while others died. Most of us, at least. This classic collision of self interest and altruism is the crux of moral philosophy.