I find it hard to believe I've only been working at IBM a week. It feels more like a month. It seems like the older I get, the more easily I fall into routines. Maybe I'm getting jaded.

Most of my time outside of work is taken up with chores and shopping and attending social events, but in the few scattered fragments of free time I've had I've managed to squeeze in the first couple episodes of the TV show Dexter. Honestly, I'm impressed. As a show with a serial killer for a main character, I'd expected it to be going for sheer shock value, but it's actually exceptionally nuanced and a good deal easier for me to stomach than a lot of the crime shows on TV, if only because the callous, stylish way it approaches violent death is meant to be creepy.

I find myself very much absorbed in trying to decide whether the various characters' actions are morally justified or not, much to the annoyance of cubicle-mate who rightly argues that that's not really the point of the show. But then, I'm currently finding morality in general very interesting right now. It often seems so arbitrary, even delusional, but at the same time so absolutely, vitally important.

When trying to decide on a base for my own personal moral philosophy, my first inclination is to go with a John-Stewart-Mill-style modified utilitarianism, but that only gives me the broadest of outlines to work from, really. Although utilitarianism's motto, "the greatest good for the greatest number of people", seems simple enough at first glance, it falls apart pretty quickly under closer scrutiny. Since there's no reliable way of calculating the value of one good relative to another, utilitarianism's supposedly infallible moral arithmetic often comes down to little more than an intuitive guessing game, no more rational than any other system of values.

Maybe it would be better to go with the gut on matters moral anyway. Just treat every individual with compassion and respect and try to cause as little harm as possible. It's an approach that has more relevance to most people's daily lives, and its harder to rationalize atrocities when following such straightforward moral guidelines. Still, on the larger political or international scale resources are more limited, and a more rigorous approach than just "be good to everybody" seems to be required.

Maybe it's foolish to think that there can be a single best answer to this kind of problem, but it seems equally foolish not to even try to find one.