Actually, I said above "There is no objective force for morals," so I've contradicted myself. OK. Let me put it like this, if there is no objective force for morals (as I clearly thought a couple of days ago!) then Breadmaster is correct and my arguments have fallen apart.

The funny thing is, this discussion has made me question in myself whether I really believe there is no such thing as objective morality, and I can't really say for certain one way or the other. Within the human world, I don't think there is anyone who has in themselves, or has determined in some other way, an objective sense or code of morality. So, I suppose I'll have to fall in line with Breadmaster's view that moral values are not logical propositions. Well done Bm! Certainly made me understand my reasoning a bit more.

[CdM] So having perfect pitch makes you Oriental! I always suspected this was the case! :)

[Raak] I understand that you're suggesting your personal insights into this come from experiences which you can't describe here, so you are rather hamstrung in terms of pursuing this hypothesis of objective morality, at least in this forum. But I am inclined to ask you some skeptical, pedantic questions, such as what a "moral universe" is, how you think the whole thing might work (in just the way you can't find here). If a moral intuiter steps out of the way of immoral actions because they perceive risk to themself (as in your car analogy), that is one thing (but implies self-interest being at the heart of morality, which would make it subjective, surely?); if a moral intuiter senses moral danger, what sort of process do you speculate might be going on in their heads that doesn't appear to go on in mine? Further, if you have some experience of this, maybe - without having to talk about the experience - you could tentatively specify an example of an objective moral rule...?

[Projoy] I knew someone was going to say that.

[Darren] Yayy! Thank you. By the way, I inexplicably can't access this page (alone of all in the Morniverse) from work any more, it seems, which is why I fell silent. Bear in mind that even moral statements are not propositions, it does not necessarily follow that they are not universally applicable. "Don't murder!" could be normative for everyone even though it does not express an objective fact. Perhaps there could be "objective commands". But what those could be, and how they could be, I don't know, and explaining them is a task for someone else.
[Raak] You surely know that your gravity analogy doesn't apply! Floating ships and space probes aren't "breaking" the law of gravity any more than I am when I hold my leg in the air before taking a step. Rather, the law of gravity is simply one of many physical laws which are inter-related, or interact. But that's beside the point. More to the point is that even the list you link to contains much that is arguable. I, for example, don't set much stock by "duties to ancestors" even though the average Confucian might regard it as a central moral imperative. There is nothing that has been universally accepted as a moral imperative, and even if there were, it wouldn't prove anything other than that people all thought it was right. The most such things can show is that human beings have evolved - either biologically or socially - to think that certain things are right or wrong, presumably because those who didn't think this didn't develop stable societies. Thus most people think that murder is wrong because if they didn't they wouldn't have survived. We can therefore explain moral imperatives - or at least their basic outlines - quite adequately in a historical or evolutionary way, without needing to posit that moral views express some kind of "truth" about the world. And the sorts of questions that Projoy asks indicate that there are big problems with the view that they do. After all, there are many people who think that there are moral facts, but no-one seems able to agree what they are. Is abortion a fundamental right or is it one of the blackest crimes there is? The fact that people disagree doesn't prove that there isn't a matter of fact at dispute, of course, but it does raise the question - how, even in principle, could the dispute be settled? What "evidence" (even if in practice it could not be collected) would prove it one way or the other?
Another point that might be relevant - the Tao website states that "For those who do not perceive its rationality, even universal consent could not prove it." Well, I'm afraid I don't perceive its rationality. I may perceive its utility or practical application. But David Hume pointed out that morality isn't to do with rationality, and vice versa - he said something like "There is nothing irrational about my preferring the destruction of the entire universe to the scratching of my finger," and he was right - such a preference may be morally wrong in whatever sense you have of the word, or it may be highly unuseful, but it's not, strictly speaking, irrational.

[Projoy] Self-interest is at work in stepping out of the path of a car, but that doesn't make it subjective in any useful sense. Everyone will step out of the way of that car, except only children who have not yet learned that it is dangerous, the drug-addled, and the suicidally depressed. This is only subjective to the degree that every thought we have is subjective. What is objective is that the car will kill you if you don't get out of the way. Opinions and wishes are irrelevant. Reality is like the Terminator: you can't reason with it, you can't argue with it. You only have power to choose your actions, not their consequences.
       (Repeat earlier caveat that I'm taking this horse out for a ride to test its legs.)
       Thus it is with morality. The enlightened do good and avoid evil, because, from their point of view, the first person that good acts benefit and evil acts harm is oneself, consequences as undeniable as traffic. It applies to everything from not mugging old ladies for their pension money to getting out of bed in the morning. The idea has a long pedigree, e.g. Socrates and the Buddhist canon (and in a debased form in the Religions Of The Book, where all the consequences are deferred to a supposed later life, despite the statement by one of their prophets that "the kingdom of heaven is within you"). It doesn't give instant answers to all questions, any more than the laws of physics will immediately tell you how to build a kilometer-tall skyscraper.

[Bm] You give two arguments that undercut each other: that there are no universally accepted moral principles, and that universally accepted moral principles arise for evolutionary reasons. You can't have it both ways, but I'll ride this horse over both of them anyway.
       No scientific truth is universally accepted either, if you define "universally" narrowly enough. There are, nonetheless, substantial areas of agreement on moral issues that can be found throughout all civilisations. That doesn't prove they are true (as Lewis himself says), merely that they exist. Perceiving their truth is a separate matter.
       I could take the evolutionary explanation as evidence on my side -- the consequences of right and wrong action are exactly your presumed evolutionary pressures. Not getting run over is also evolutionarily adaptive, but that does not mean that personal decisions and the laws of physics have nothing to do with it.
       How do you perceive the utility of the Way? If it is useful to follow the Way, what is it useful for? And what in turn is that useful for? Utility offers no foundation. Likewise rationality. Look hard enough, and all attempts to find foundations lead only to an infinite regress. Ideas can only justify ideas in terms of other ideas. Morality is about actions, and actions cannot be deduced from thoughts, any more than an ought from an is.
       Hume also claimed not to see causation, but he wouldn't have survived to write his books if he hadn't dodged horse-drawn carts now and then.

[Raak] Maybe Hume was just very, very lucky.

[Raak] Your supposition that evil acts harm the doer is where it all falls down for me. Sort of repeating Bm's point, but a car will run people down according to the laws of physics, which can be reliably shown to operate universally (at least as far as we can observe), but mugging someone for their pension cannot be shown universally to have negative effects for the individual (unless you start invoking some unknowable afterlife or karma or whatever). In other words, some people get away with breaking moral rules, in just the way that a car can't get away with braking the rules of physics in order to save a life. There is merely a certain probability that a system of law exists that will make mugging disadvantageous to the perpetrator. This is not 100% (in fact taking human history as a whole, I'm tempted to speculate it is less than 50%). Is there any real evidence whatsoever to the contrary?

You might come back with the argument that the fact people get away with breaking moral rules is irrelevant to the truth of those rules, but if so then the truth of those rules is irrelevant to us if we are searching for objective standards, since the rules cannot be shown to have reliable consequences, and therefore do not admit of predictions.

I also think that rational suicide is a very interesting example in the objective/subjective debate, because it's always struck me as a very interesting example of higher-order thinking successfully overruling all the lower-order evolutionary thinking with which we come pre-installed. If our sense of objective morality rests on self-preservation, why would it admit of contradiction in this way?

Raak] (Following on from Breadmaster's reply) It's also the case that all of these moral traditions arose in societies whose rulers did not follow them, yet all of these moral traditions preached acceptance of those rulers. "Thou shalt not kill" actually become "Thou shalt not kill unless thou art the state". If these are absolute moralities, shouldn't the rulers obey them? And if the rulers are immoral, shouldn't the moral organise to get rid of them and impose the rule of the moral?
My second objection is that I don't see what makes these an objective rule-set, as opposed to the many other moral precepts you could have instead (for example, sexual equality, environmentalism).
Lastly, illustrating Projoy's point, I'm reminded by the weather of the Belloc (?) poem:
The rain it falleth on the just
And on the unjust fella
But more upon the just, because
The unjust stole the just's umbrella
One of the lessons of experience (both direct and indirect) is that crime or acting immorally very often does pay.

Darren] You're right to pick me up on the creationist implication of my argument (not at all what I think). I was with your argument all the way until "In other words, we don't need a rule-set, because the proposition itself, if true, implies the existence of one." I think that's circular reasoning, because the truth or otherwise of a proposition can only be tested by reference to a rule-set.

[Irouléguy] Not circular, but certainly flawed. We don't need, and nor can we infer the existence of, a universal rule-set, however we do need a rule-set which covers at least the special case(s) covered by the proposition we know to be true in order to test it, as you say, but we can say (and this is what I was getting at) that if the proposition is true, then such a special-case rule-set must exist, even if its only rule is the true proposition itself. Bringing in the special-case rule-sets, a proof that there is no universal rule-set doesn't discount the possibility of a special-case one which covers only finitely many possibilities, and therefore it is possible for a proposition to be demonstratively true or false even if there is no universal rule-set.

(At this point I'm no longer talking about objectively moral rule-sets.)

(Er... by that I mean the focus of what I'm talking about has shifted away from morality into how logical propositions [can] be members of larger sets of rules mapping one class of items to another.)

[Irouléguy] The moral organising to remove unjust rulers happens now and then, for example, in Iraq. (I am not joking.) Imposing the rule of the moral, though, is a contradiction in terms. Rule can only be imposed on an unwilling populace by killing enough of them to intimidate the rest. What is moral about that? Re your second point, you see it or you don't. That is the key difference between empirical knowledge and moral knowledge: one is demonstrable and the other is not. On your third point, why didn't the just man thump the unjust when he tried to make off with his umbrella? Sometimes crime pays and sometimes it doesn't.

[Projoy] Indeed, mugging someone cannot be demonstrated to have those negative effects upon the soul that have nothing to do with the courts. The world-view I'm arguing is one that can only be held as a matter of faith. That, it occurs to me, is what religious faith really is. It is not belief in stories about empty tombs or dictating angels; it is the belief that not only are good and evil knowable, but the knowledge is closer than your own heartbeat.
       But to return specifically to mugging, muggers are not notably well-off, materially successful people, are they, even if they never go to jail? There are no rich muggers.

ISIHAC is back, and a good one too. Carry on.

The supposed negative consequences of sin are not some sort of consolation for the good -- "he stole my wallet, but he'll burn in hell for all eternity, so that's ok". Morality only has application to oneself. Other people will do whatever they do, whatever one thinks about what they do.

[Raak] *holds his position in the discussion while he looks online for the biography of a mugger who becomes very rich*

Any chance of a recap for someone who's not been able to follow this discussion closely whilst it's been ongoing? From what I can gather my thoughts are

• What's the definition of morality? I've seen a few arguments as to what it's not, but what is it?
• Without knowing what morality is, I can't decide whether there's any sense in talking about an absolute one or not.
• What I do find interesting, though, is why people seem to have converged on having similar feelings about certain things (such as killing other people to be 'bad' [which I am happy to try and define, should that be necessary]) despite having in other ways entirely different social backgrounds and upbringing. I appreciate that there are two possible explanations for this: one, a higher "moral" force. I'm more interested in the other explanation.

But I don't want to say any of these aloud without being sure I'm not just retreading old ground.

(within, I should say, the confines of this discussion. I'm sure this ground has been trodden more generally by many others before. But few of us, presumably, were there, so...)

[Raak] Well, you're a bit unfair to say that the points I made contradict each other - I don't think there are any universally accepted moral mores, but those which are predominantly accepted can be explained in an evolutionary way. But I don't see that this is backing for your position, or as you put it, "the consequences of right and wrong action are exactly your presumed evolutionary pressures". Seems to me more reasonable to say that "right" and "wrong" are simply words that human beings have learned to apply to actions with such consequences. But if that is so, why should we do "right" and avoid "wrong"? I think this is the problem with the position you're defending, that "right" actions help the doer and "wrong" ones harm him/her. That isn't morality, it's prudence. Prudence means doing what is sensible, essentially, from one's own point of view. Many accounts of "ethics" have really been about this, the most famous being Aristotle's, which is all about how to achieve "eudaimonia" or "happiness". But this isn't what most of us understand by "morality", for two reasons. The first is that prudence often conflicts with what most people would understand as morality. For example, a soldier who throws himself on top of a grenade to save his friends is clearly not acting prudently, but most people would want to say he acts morally. Second, prudence does not have the force of imperative that I was talking about earlier. A moral value is, in some sense, a command. "Murder is wrong" means "Don't murder people!" You can ignore it or disobey it if you want, but the command still demands a response (and this, I think, for rab's benefit, must be part of the definition of a moral statement). By contrast, "If you mug people it will redound against you" isn't a command, it's simply a statement. It's not telling you to do something. What I want from a decent account of moral statements is an explanation of that imperative, and it seems to me that appealing to consequences in this way - or indeed in any way, such as that of utilitarianism - does not do this.

To put that point a slightly different way, moral values can be transgressed, whereas ones of prudence cannot. "Do not murder people" can be obeyed or disobeyed - "Murder will ultimately harm yourself" cannot.

[Projoy] Look at it this way: muggers are literally stealing people's pocket money. How is anyone going to get rich doing that?

[Raak] Whyever not? One mugger doesn't just mug one victim. They do it over and over again, as long as they don't get caught (that's probably the only practical limiting clause). There's also always the possibility they'll hit a minor jackpot, too, of someone who's carrying more than just "pocket money." I would imagine, for instance, that some of us going up to Rugby had a fair amount in cash. (As the guy collecting money for T-shirts, this is more than mere speculation!) Once they've got some money, there's no reason they couldn't invest their ill-gotten gains wisely, either, and make it grow a bit. True, I doubt most muggers are smart enough to know how to do that, but I don't think you can say it's inherently impossible to become rich through it.

[Raak] Oh, and I think you're also ignoring the way they tend to take other things the person has on them, such as credit cards, watches, jewellery, etc. The latter two probably aren't worth very much for most people (let's be honest, most people wear crap), but cards can lead to all kinds of nastily profitable shenanigans.

[Breadmaster] How about the sense of guilt? Doing something you know to be wrong makes you feel guilty. So, to put it another way, if something makes you feel guilty, it's something you feel to be immoral (this can be irrationally so, of course, insofar as any morality can be said to have a rational basis). Obviously, this isn't objective because different people feel guilt for different things.

[Darren] Ok, one can imagine how to make a lot of money at street crime, but I seriously doubt if anyone does. It's just not a real career option for anyone wanting to do more than just live hand to mouth.
[Bm] What is a "should"? What are commands? The moral person would no more thrust his hand into another's pocket than into a nest of vipers. Shoulds and commands are for those who lack insight and must be told what to do. I have not (yet) read Aristotle (is this the Nicomachean Ethics?), but morality as enlightened prudence sounds right to me.

You see - you can prove it, with one of these. You just need to know the wavelength of the light which will tell you where it is on teh spectrum which will (in most cases) be able to be proved to be a certain colour (except for those "No it's yellow" "no it's not it's orange" conversations.)

[st d] Whether you can prove it or not wasn't the point - it was whether you needed to prove it, or indeed whether you even needed to know a proof was possible.

of course - silly me.

[st d] Well done though.

Wow, this moves fast...
Raak] If by the case of Iraq you mean the resistance against the US/British occupation, then I'd agree that they are morally justified (without necessarily meaning that each and every one of the resitance's actions are morally justified). I suspect that's not what you mean though.
I think the core problem here is where you say "That is the key difference between empirical knowledge and moral knowledge: one is demonstrable and the other is not." If moral knowledge is not demonstrable in some way, then how do we learn it, other than by faith? And given that there are lots of possible belief systems, many of which disagree very strongly with each other, how do we distinguish between right and wrong belief systems?

Darren] I still don't see how you can know whether a proof is possible, without knowing how you are testing it.

[Irouléguy] I think we've moved slightly from rulesets to proofs... the thing is, I don't think you need to prove a mapping is anything other then a mapping. It could be totally arbitrary, with no proof possible, but as long as you had a consistent mapping from one category to another, or, as I said above, a subset of one to a subset of the other, then that's sufficient. A ruleset doesn't need to be grounded in the real world to be a ruleset. It can be entirely abstract, but as long as it doesn't contradict itself then that's good enough as far as the logical proposition is concerned.

[Irouléguy] Indeed it wasn't! This may be getting into the stuff of flame wars, but I had in mind (as you no doubt guessed) the removal of Saddam as the moral act, and cannot see any of the resistance "actions" (i.e. suicide bombing, suicide bombing, and suicide bombing) as moral acts, especially given that the resistance is coming from the Sunni minority whose goal is Islamic dictatorship. Which of their actions do you think are morally justified?
       How do we learn morality? Upbringing, practical experience, revelation, and reason applied to those. As someone once put it: "If you get it, it will be in spite of any method. You must have a method."

[Raak] Hm, I don't think I'll bother continuing with this. Nothing you've suggested as an example needs more explanation than simply that humans enact moral (and legal) consequences upon one another according to the collective effect of shared or accumulated beliefs. This is the main reason muggers (nowadays) can have little success (even ignoring the fact that poverty is probably as much a cause of mugging as vice versa). Sure, all this might be the manifestation of some deeper mechanism, but it could just as easily be a bottom-up emergent phenomenon (rab can correct my terminology if I'm using this expression wrongly) that arises out of our brain chemistry and its interactions with the environment etc. etc. From what we know, this seems to me the most conservative and most available explanation. Why invoke absolute good, absolute evil? It still seems to me that you might as well invoke God. Certainly the notion of absolute good and evil, once you start trying to define them to the letter (in the case of say, the actions of Iraq's invaders and Iraq's resistance), admit of as many conceptual problems as the notion of God. Unless you can tell us more about the reasons for your willingness to entertain your leap of faith (and you've said you can't), I feel we're really just pushing words around.

[rab] Good idea re defining morality. We could take our pick from the 11 definitions, some claimed obsolete, offered by the OED. The ones it thinks are current are:

• Moral virtue; behaviour conforming to moral law or accepted moral standards, esp. in relation to sexual matters; personal qualities judged to be good.
• Moral discourse or instruction; a moral lesson or exhortation. Also: the action or an act of moralizing.
• Conformity of an idea, practice, etc., to moral law; moral goodness or rightness.
• The quality or fact of being morally right or wrong; the goodness or badness of an action.
• The branch of knowledge concerned with right and wrong conduct, duty, responsibility, etc.; moral philosophy, ethics.
• A particular moral system or outlook; moral thought or conduct in relation to a particular form of activity.

Rather a hazy selection, no?

[Projoy] Quite. I had a think about definitions, came up with one and devised a framework for thinking about this whilst queuing in the bank this morning. Then the teller muttered something about ISAs and it all vanished. Oh dear. I also have more pressing things to worry about, in that I have in two weeks an interview for a job I really, really want and for which I expect the competition to be fierce. So I really need to pull out the stops, so if you don't hear from me it's cos I'm doing my homework.

Not posting on MC sites! Is this moral? :)

[rab] Morality: that which does not involve ISAs.

[Projoy] "Emergent phenomenon" isn't an alternative to other explanations -- it exists alongside them. For example, I am of the opinion that the mind is literally a physical process of the brain, which assembles itself by knowable (though currently almost entirely unknown) physical processes, so all the stuff we do is an emergent phenomenon of the molecules. That doesn't mean that that stuff -- thoughts, sensations, consciousness, etc. -- doesn't exist, although discoveries about the physical stuff can call into question our naive ideas about our experiences of our minds.
       As a last remark, I don't want to give the impression of hinting at mysterious mystical revelations (and I cynically suspect that a lot of accounts of such are describing nothing more mysterious than a minor stroke). The experiences that I can find no adequate way of communicating are no more than a few personal development courses I've taken, following which some religious language became a lot more comprehensible, and reading in a couple of quasi-religious traditions of disputed provenance (the works of Gurdjieff and Idries Shah).

Ahh. So you're saying that objective morality is a high-level description for a de facto emergent phenomenon? Well, we agree, then! It's only if you're insisting it's transcendent of the nuts and bolts of human behaviour and psychology that we have a fundamental disagreement.

I did say I'd shut up, didn't I? I will now shut up.

[Projoy] Actually, I'm agnostic about what it is. It might be that, and it might not be.

[Raak] You're right in a literal sense that "commands" are for those who need to be told what to do, but the point I was trying to make is that morality, if it is real, is normative. That is, it carries an implicit command in itself, irrespective of whether anyone is standing there articulating it. If it is true that there are people with moral insight who can "see" these truths, then they would also be able to "see" this implicit command and respond to it one way or the other (would you, incidentally, accept the existence of people with moral insight who nevertheless act wrongly?). Enlightened prudence (and yes, it's the "Nic Eth" I was thinking of, but any other kind too) doesn't cover it. When people say "Murder is wrong" they don't mean that it's in your interest (or even in the general interest) not to murder people - they mean that it's wrong, that you shouldn't do it, not even in an extraordinary case where it's beneficial. That's what Crime and Punishment is about. I haven't seen any argument explaining why, in the example given before, a soldier should sacrifice himself for his friends. I haven't even seen an argument explaining why I should not murder. I can imagine an argument setting out the undesirable effects of my murdering, but that's not the same thing. Jesus said "Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these other things will be given to you" - but he meant that happiness comes as a result of doing what's right, that is, as a reward. He didn't mean that happines literally is doing right, and I wouldn't have thought many people would either. Purely from an empirical standpoint, how many people would agree that the happiest people in world are also the most moral?
[Darren] The guilt point is a good one, but you'd have to argue that the guilt of doing something you believe to be bad would always outweigh any happiness you derived from the benefits of the bad act, which I think would be unlikely - people generally rationalise such things eventually. Plus, of course, it's no use when trying to make an objective account of morality, as you point out, because different people feel guilty about different things.
A shame Projoy's bowing out as I think he's been entirely right throughout this. But like him I'm not sure that much headway is being made in any direction, so perhaps I'll do the same!

[Bm] In which case, perhaps it's time to draw the whole question of "what is morality" to a close.

[Bm] Here's a thought: if immoral actions are those which we feel guilty about, then perhaps as guilt wears off the actions become less immoral! Has anyone ever claimed that a given action is (im)moral for perpetuity, or is it allowed for its status to change with time? Note that I'm not putting this idea of transient immorality forward as anything too serious, I'm just playing around with the concept to see what happens.

After all, most people would say (I think) that once you've done a particular immoral action once or twice, it becomes easier to do it later. I'm talking here about personal morality rather than any kind of universal morality, of course.

[Bm] "Command", "normative force", and "should" are just different labels for the same thing, whatever that thing is, if it exists. You can't get an ought from an is, so there are no arguments proving that one should do this or that, except from assumptions about what one should or should not do. There isn't an argument proving that you should get out of the way of a car either, only a description of the consequences, on the basis of which everyone is free to make their own response to the situation. "Enlightened prudence" (with an emphasis on the enlightened) doesn't bridge that gap, but neither does anything else. The only way to get there is to be there.

[Raak] Well, that is precisely one of the key reasons for supposing there is no such thing as objective moral truth!

Some people don't seem to have quite got the hang of this, you could say.

[Bm] I left moral truth off that list, because although one view is that it's just another name for the same thing, in the view I'm arguing, it isn't. It's...it's moral truth, that's what it is! And one still has a choice about whether to follow it or not.

Last night I had dinner at a nice restaurant called Baltic, with , among others, Sarah Atkins, who is Head of Legal at London Underground.

[st dogmael] Did you ask her about the meaning of morality?

Yes. She said that it was buried deep in the foundations of the Jubilee Line Extension, somewhere near Canary Wharf, and that LU owned the IP rights to it.

got hit with one on the M4 on Friday eveniing - doing 45ish in a temporary roadworks 40mph zone. BATFISH.

Greetings from deepest Vermont, where the speed limit is 25mph and the hire car does almoat 20 mph without complaining. And the weather's pretty bloody hot too.

[st d] Why do I suspect that when you add "-ish" to your speed, you actually mean "+30"? :-)

Well I've just got back from Inverness and a lovely time I had too, despite it being work. It appears the Highlands haven't yet discovered speed cameras if the taxi I got from the airport was anything to go by. Rab might be interested to know the flightpath in takes you directly over Inverness Sewerage Treatment Works.

[Botherer] Did you buy a cape?

CdM] Funnily enough, loud mouthed as I am, I do try to drive safely. The signs were all over saying 40MPH SPEED CAMERAS etc etc so I dropped to about 50, then saw the camera and braked and got flashed so I assume I was doing about 45. To be honest I would have braked a hell of a lot harder and probably been okay if I though it would have been safe but there were cars behind me. (a speeding tikcet, caught on camera, with brake lights showing and a Nissan crashed up my ass and HGVs jackknifing left right and centre would have been a bad look)

I was almost caught by a static camera on my way into Liverpool on Sunday; I'd been travelling down the East Lancs road at 40 (the limit), and always forget that it changes to 30 on a ridiculous junction where it's really far more prudent to be looking at the five con/di-verging pieces of road (and persons alongside/between them) than at the signage and the speedometer. It remains a 30 zone, with no real need to be so. I only thought to ask my girlfriend on imminent approach to the camera what the limit was at that point, and I think I managed to take 10mph off before it could see my plate (there were no flashes that I could discern). Thankfully there was no-one close behind. The camera is placed on a flyover between the run-offs to and from one of the tunnels, so again my concentration really would be more use on other aspects of my driving than the speedometer and signage.

I was also pulled over for the first time on the M62 on Friday for (in my eyes, obviously) mostly unjustified reasons, at least partially caused by the officer doing the pulling. Thankfully he was only in the mood to administer a lecture, and then had to extricate me from the far more dangerous situation he'd left me in - he'd pulled me over behind a broken down van in the hard shoulder on a exit filter lane to Warrington. This involved both of us reversing down the hard shoulder(!), then him madly waving people out of the filter lane before pulling out into it at 3mph(!) so that I could get out and 'safely' build speed and pull back out of the filter-off lane. Which I'm fairly sure is an offense, due to the markings on the road, but that was what he'd told me to do(!).

I wrote an overly long-winded explanation. Click here to see it.My girlfriend was the one to suggest that he'd actually engineered the second point he laboured over - both vehicles joined the M62 from the M6, he got into the middle lane, I was stuck behind a lorry doing 60 (remember, in a lane that almost immediately filters off the motorway to Warrington, so it's necessary to get out of it quickly). In effect, he was blocking me moving out, so I indicated. He slowed down, and when I was sure he was letting me out and it was as safe as it would get I moved out smoothly (who does anything unnecessarily boistrous in the presence of a traffic car?). I turned off the indicator, raised a hand in thanks and started accelerating only to get the pretty flashy lights. Apparently I was 'nipping in and out' of traffic (yes, by changing lane once, legally, at 60, and in front of a traffic officer who'd just moved back to give me space). From his vantage point of somewhere else entirely he could tell that I couldn't see what was going on next to the lorry; apparently there could've been a crash happening or anything. Except, of course, *that he had gently slowed on the engine in response to my indication*. According to him, I was taking undue risks. If you don't want risk, don't go anywhere near a car! I pretty much know what's going on around me, even when I haven't been able to see into a spot for a second or two. It's called induction and extrapolation. Well, I think it is, and on that point I think I'm in pretty much the ideal place for correction. Sorry, I needed to vent. My girlfriend got sick of it after about half an hour.

[PJ] Cape and Top Hat, brushed up my tails...

nik] he sounds like a cunt of the very first order. You should write a letter of complaint.

If he'd actually booked me for something, then maybe. As it was, he just seemed to be something of a busy-body. I think I've pretty much worked it out of my system now. Only taken a week! :/

(Nik) Dear me, pulled over by a bumptious cop and given a lecture. Get over it FFS.

Er, did I not say I'd gotten over it? In the post before yours? Which was days before your post? In response to st d, posting several days after my original post? Can I direct statements including the word 'fuck' at you too? Can I? It's big and clever.

nik] sounds like he didnt give you a ticket because he knew he wouldnt get away with it. Still ranks pretty highly with me or he wouldn't have pulled you over at all.

(Nik) Try www.upmyownarse/pettymotoringwhinges.com

[Rosie] Careful now, it's been a pleasingly long time since we had a full-blown flamewar.