38 Questions

What is suffering? Closely related: what is evil? Are the two interrelated? Interdependent? Is one neccessary and/or sufficient for the other? Can we quantify it? Can we evern hope to compare it? Is it a growing experience? Or is it a degrading experience? Is it some aspect of both? Does suffering justify jockeying for victim status? Or does it spur one to sit there and "take it"? Are there occasions where we welcome suffering? Even a little bit? If HIV causes untold suffering, is HIV evil? Or can we justify it by some naturalistic appeal? Does natural mean moral? In other words, does the naturalistic fallacy hold? Are we looking at a levels of analysis problem? Is physical suffering relatively easier to quantify than mental anguish? Are they the same thing? But wouldn't that leave us in a strange amoral monist putty? Or are we looking at the wrong level of analysis? Closely related: where do ethical judgments come from? Are they social intuition? Or are they also raisins embedded in metaphysical jello? Should the weight of ethical judgments be proportional to status? (Of course, it is, but should it be?) Should we just pretend our ethics are absolute? In a world where the pace of change is outstripping human ability to deal with it, isn't that insane? Closely related: how likely are we to actually be able to take control of our minds and their tendencies? Does the iceberg metaphor completely prevent it? Or is the iceberg metaphor more hopeful than that? Has it been implanted in the public consciousness by an ideologically-driven Freud? Does it even make sense to ask the question of whether human nature should be seen in a posisitve or negative light? Are endless barrages of questions just an intellectual hemorrhage? Or are they pointers? Is it justified for me to imply the answers to some of my questions by the context they are found in?

Consider: "It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper."