Flickers of Freedom

Some Replies to Comments

Apologies for the radio silence – a lot a lot has been going on, and thanks to the folks who have provided comments.

About the latter: (1) Yes, Florian, you are correct about my error in the chart that appears in the 4.11.15 post. It should look like this:

Subject’s response	YES	NO
Crude philosophical descriptor	Utilitarian response	Deontological response
fMRI data	Areas A, B & C light up 'Reason areas’	Areas X, Y & Z light up 'Emotion areas'
Dual Processing View	System 2	System 1

(2) Thomas, thank you for nudging me to mention Jennifer Cole Wright’s work on moral development, which as you say, is quite unique. I particularly welcomed her paper with Karen Bartsch detailing an initial study of young children’s moral sensibility that drew on the CHILDES database. This vast repository of information regarding children’s speech in naturalistic settings is the perfect place to begin to discover how children themselves talk about morality, and especially to see when, where, and how they themselves notice and remark on what strikes them as morally salient. Such an investigation would tie in nicely with other views that hold that children’s peer-to-peer interactions play a crucial role in the real-time growth of their capacity for moral judgment.

[Could some enterprising grad student and their supervisor please get a nice big grant to mine that CHILDES database for the purposes of moral psychology?]

I agree that young children’s peer interactions constitute a rich dimension of the environment in which all their cognitive faculties develop, however, on account of my rationalist commitments, I am dubious about a strong constructivist view that would have children literally building moral concepts from scratch, albeit together. Still, I do think that paying attention to the juvenile moral milieu – as opposed to how children interact with adults about moral issues – might offer a fabulous source of information about moral change and is necessary in order to develop a realistic account of how certain things – but not all – are morally salient to kids.

On the matter of moral change, consider the phenomenon of creolization: speakers of different languages interact and a new language begins to emerge. Might something like this be operative in the moral case? Kids might talk about amongst themselves about moral issues in ways that are at odds with the ways in which their caretakers speak about those same issues. Or they might fail to speak about an issue as a moral at all. Such peer interaction will have overt consequences for their moral judgments and pronouncements as adults.

[Note in passing in this context that connects with the poverty of stimulus suggestion from an earlier post is this: children may mimic facial expressions, body language, and utterances of caretakers (and of their peers), but they cannot mimic judgment – since judgment is internal to judgers and hence not observable.]

(3) Josh, yes, Greene has tempered the descriptor and now writes about characteristically deontological judgment. That’s a good move.

I have also hinted that I would like to temper the use of the phrase “linguistic analogy”. It has been unfortunately misleading, and has positively invited folks to offer alleged counterexamples to my view that really just take the form of stating all the ways in which morality is not like language. But, of course, that was never the claim.

What inspires me, at least – it would wrong for me to speak for John Mikhail and Marc Hauser – about looking to linguistics is that it is a highly successful branch of cognitive science, that (1) is advanced at the right level for our current state of neuroscientific knowledge, (2) never loses sight of the fact that speakers of a natural language grow from infants to adults; and (3) understands that the object of study (language faculty) must be internal to speakers and understood as a set of procedures (functions in intension).  

Ok, so next week, I hope to be able to write a bit about what I’m teaching (absolutely for the first time) about a central theme of the Bhagavad Gita – acting without attachment or “desireless action” – and to at least poses some questions about how this quite different moral psychology and the metaphysics which undergirds it could be useful for western philosophers thinking about action and moral responsibility.

Sources of Skepticism 3

[My apologies for the misleading title of last week’s post: “Sources of skepticism 2”. The post was in fact merely a continuation of a single line of concern I had called the under-articulation problem in my initial post. But I since this is the third non-introductory post, it’s called what it is, anyway.]

Okay, the other theme I wanted to raise concerns the ways in which one’s view of the nature of the human mind influences how one thinks about moral judgment and about how to study it.

Very roughly, the long-standing dispute between rationalist and empiricist conceptions of the mind is no longer about whether the mind brings anything to the world (think of your favored innate category – capacities, dispositions, beliefs, constraints, etc.), but how much it brings. Contemporary empiricists are happy to concede the existence of some innate endowment – say, a general purpose learning mechanism, perhaps something like a Bayesian engine, and contemporary rationalists certainly do not deny the significant contribution a child’s environment makes to the development of her cognitive (and perhaps other) capacities. Indeed, the contemporary rationalists I hang out with agree that what grounds the capacity to speak and understand a natural language is an interaction effect of Universal Grammar and a child’s linguistic environment. [BTW, two things by Norbert Hornstein’s are essential reading here: his Introduction to the 2005 edition of Chomsky’s Rules and Representations, and “Empiricism and rationalism as research strategies,” in The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky, edited by James McGilvray (2005).]

I have very strong rationalist tendencies. How many types of human capacities are made possible only on the basis of some dedicated innate endowment is an empirical question. But, for my money at least, the question has been settled with respect to language. It may be true about morality as well.

My thinking about whether the capacity to make moral judgments depends on an innate moral faculty really did begin by reading around the psych literature about what was known about very young children’s abilities to (a) apparently take a moral interest in the world, and (b) engage in the moral evaluation of actions. (I mentioned Turiel’s work earlier.) It seemed to me that something like a poverty-of-the-moral-stimulus argument could be developed. And I have “sketched” such a thing elsewhere. I emphasize “sketched” (see earlier post about under-articulation), since absent a very detailed account of something like the structure of moral judgment (compare: syntax), it difficult to assess whether a child could pick up from her environment all that she would need to in order to make moral judgments. John Mikhail has made a very good attempt to address this problem by providing an account of the ‘elements’ of moral cognition.

My foil was social-learning accounts of moral development (and certainly most of those that advert to ‘internalization’), which presuppose an empiricist view of the mind. It’s not that they are committed to blank-slatism, but they do rather think that an awful lot has to find its way into the minds of young children. Hence, according to such views, explicit instruction about morals do’s and don’t’s, and patterns of reward and punishment (for behaviors) play a crucial role in a child developing into a competent moral judger.

A rationalist like me doesn’t have to deny that explicit instruction, for example, is relevant to a child’s social development, and punishment and reward may very well serve to alter a child’s behavior. What puzzles me is how (a) explicit instruction of the kind “Don’t lie”, or “It’s nice to share your toys” and (b) getting sent to one’s room for hitting one’s sibling play a causal role in the development of the capacity to make moral judgments. It seems to me that the capacity to judge simpliciter cannot be ‘taught’ – either a creature is innately prepared to do this or it isn’t. And since kids appear to be able to make all sorts of moral assessments at a very young age (see Kiley Hamlin’s lovely work), arguably, the capacity to make moral judgments might grow in children as opposed to getting taught to them.

But there is another motivation for being a rationalist about moral psychology. This motivation connects up with some of my previous remarks about identifying the ‘right’ explananda for empirical moral psychology, and it is also grounded in what (I think) I understand about the cognitive science of language.

Putting things very simply, a competent speaker of a natural language is a creature that pairs certain signals with certain meanings and not others. The empirically discoverable rules that constitute a speaker’s I-language (the state of Universal Grammar in her) articulate the constraints that explain competence. Providing an explanation requires more than saying ‘Well, this how a creature might pair signal S with meaning M1’. It requires saying ‘This is how and why a creature pairs signal S with M1 and not with M2.’

Similarly, we might think of moral judgment as pairing an action- or event-description with an evaluation. And we might think of a competent moral judger as a creature that pairs certain action- or event-descriptions with elements in range of evaluations E1, but never with elements in a range of evaluations E2.

It seems to me that whenever we are interested not just in how some cognitive action might work, but, crucially, in why it does not work in some other logically possible way, we are committed to positing an radically head-internal mechanism (a dedicated faculty, if you will). The effects of the operation of that faculty can be overt – out there in the social world for all to see, but what constraints constitute the operation of the faculty are simply not recoverable from overt behavior (including utterances). It is awfully tempting, then – what else might one say? – to posit those constraints as brought to the world by the mind, not put into the mind by the world.

Okay, now once one is in for innate faculties, then one is for a certain methodological approach. My 2009 Mind & Language paper spells out that argument. For now, just let me say that the one place a rationalist won’t look – at least in the short term – if she is interested in the empirical investigation of the nature and content of an innate moral faculty –– is to the wetware of the mind (viz., neuroanatomy or neuroscience). Rather, she will take David Marr’s advice very seriously and wait to get a decently detailed and plausible account of the computations involved in moral judgment before heading off to the MRI machine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sources of skepticism 2

In the last post I talked a bit the importance of nailing down what we are talking about when we talk about moral judgment - do we mean to be asking after the nature of 'entities' or 'units' like utterances and beliefs, or about some kind of mental process or mental action? I said this was one dimension of what I called the under-articulation problem that attaches to the vast majority of work in empirically informed moral psychology. Today, I'll try to say something about the other two dimensions I mentioned last week - viz., 

(2) Models pay insufficient or the wrong kind of attention to the developmental etiology of the target explananda, and 

(3) Models are anchored in considerations that were not designed for thinking about the psychology or cognitive science of moral judgment.

About (3), first. Greene et al.'s 2001 paper that I cited last week deployed standard trolley problem cases. And hundreds of subjects around the world have now been asked to considered all manner of scenarios that build on basic trolley-logy.

What has largely gone un-noticed, however, is that these kinds of scenarios (indeed, Philippa Foot's and Judith Jarvis Thomson's initial exchange about runaway trolleys) were not designed to test hypotheses about moral psychology. They were used in the service of testing the plausibility and import of a distinction between killing and letting die. When some undergraduates are confronted for the first time with the basic runaway trolley case and are asked whether it is morally permissible for the driver (or bystander) to redirect the trolley from 'the five' to 'the one', they change the subject if they answer in terms of what they would do, or in terms of what someone might feel if they did or did not redirect the trolley. So far as I know, the considerable pre-2001 philosophical literature deploying trolley-logy was in the service of moral epistemology. (The last part of Nagel's "War and Massacre", however, starts to hint at what our judgments about killing and letting die might reveal about human psychology.) [Foot, P. Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect. Oxford Review, 1967; Thomson, J.J. Killing, Letting Die and the Trolley Problem. The Monist 59 (1976): 204-217; Nagel, T. War and Massacre. Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1972): 123-144.]

Now, people are at liberty to appropriate trolley-logy scenarios in their empirical work. With that I have no beef. My concern is that two very crude (philosophical) distinctions were imported along the methodology. Right from the beginning, subjects' responses to trolley cases were described in terms of the distinction between "deontology" and "utilitarianism", or in terms of the relative contributions to moral judgment of "reason" and "emotion". Once fMRI images of subjects' brains, showing that different parts of the brain "light up" when subjects give the utilitarian response to a scenario rather than the deontological response, those crude philosophical distinctions were unfortunately reified into some sort of psychological facts. And this status has been strengthened by the deployment of so-called Dual Process Theory, according to which there are two (!) types of mental processing. System 1 processing is fast, unconscious or implicit, and automatic; System 2 processing is slow, conscious or explicit, and effortful. (All sorts of questions about DP Theory, but I will resist the tangent.)

We've been delivered the following picture of human moral judgment (here, I think, referring to a process):

Probe: Is it permissible to turn the trolley? 

Subject’s response	YES	NO
Crude philosophical descriptor	Utilitarian response	Deontological response
fMRI data	Areas A, B & C light up 'Emotion areas'	Areas X, Y & Z light up 'Reason areas'
Dual Processing View	System 2	System 1

Tastes differ, I know, but where some people see the chart above as revealing converging lines of evidence for an explanation of moral judgment, I see converging re-descriptions. 

About (2). It is striking (and puzzling), when you think about it, that philosophers have paid so little attention to the fact that epistemic and moral agents were once children. We (adults) were not always the epistemic and moral agents we are now, and it would be surprising if our current adult capacities were not constrained in some ways by the ways in which those capacities develop. The point is related to Owen Flanagan's "principle of minimal psychological realism", which he argued ought to constrain normative theory. Very roughly, while a moral theory is normative (setting out regulative ideals about how live), it isn't worth its salt if it is something that creatures like (with our psychological capacities) are unable to implement. Similarly, if we are genuinely interested in human moral judgment, we need to think about how the capacities to (a) take a moral interest in the world, and (b) make moral evaluation of aspects of that world develop. [Flanagan, O. Varieties of Moral Personality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.]

Now, of course, a entire sub-field in psychology is devoted to moral development, and the "Big Daddy" of this sub-field, Lawrence Kohlberg (influenced by Piaget) certainly had quite a bit to say about moral maturity and immaturity. But Kohlberg rigged the game from the start by assuming the truth of some kind of Kantianism. Morally mature individuals, Kohlberg's view, made moral judgments in light of considering universal and impartial moral principles, which they endorsed independently of social pressures to conform, and reasoning their way to a conclusion about what actions are morally permissible. This picture, by the way, is what most social psychologists have in mind as the referent of "moral rationalism". Qua philosopher, I prefer to reserve "rationalism" to refer to a view about the nature of mind -- roughly, having to do with the degree to which the operations and contents of the mind are innately constrained. More on this in the next post.

Other extant views about moral development (within psychology, at least) typically are not premised on a particular normative theory. Rather they assume that the moral norms and rules of a society are whatever they are and that children come to "internalize" those norms. The discussion turns, then, not surprisingly, to talk about the mediating roles of parenting, explicit instruction, punishment and reward strategies, peer influence in the process of internalization.  I have looked and looked and have not yet found a substantive account of what it is to "internalize" anything. Does it mean 'come to believe', 'remember', 'understand and endorse'? This is not a pedantic quibble. My point is that talk of internalizing moral rules and norms offers us a re-description of the phenomena for which we seek explanations. How do children develop into moral judgers? It is no answer to this question that they internalize moral rules and norms, if one does not flesh out what psychological/cognitive process internalization is.

Now, Kohlberg is Haidt's target in that 1991 paper I cited last week. And while it was certainly nice to see the beginnings of an alternate view moral judgment, Haidt loses completely Kohlberg's concern with how the capacity to make moral judgments develops.

Concerns (2) and (3) are related. 

Haidt's paper was quite reactionary. It is too easy to establish -- and surely most of us knew this already -- that human beings rarely explicitly reason their way to a moral judgment by articulating a precisely-worded moral principle (or two)  along with an accurate description of the event or action to be evaluated. Hence, the mere 'discovery' of moral dumbfounding -- the (apparent) inability of individuals to reconstruct the 'reasons' for their moral judgments -- does not, by itself, show that moral judgments are nothing more than 'gut reactions', or 'instincts'. But Haidt's "findings" played right into the framework represented by the table above. Just as Kohlberg rigged his view about the developmental psychology of moral judgment by presupposing a (crudely) Kantian picture of what how moral judgment is arrive "correctly", the vast majority of contemporary empirical investigation into the nature of moral judgment bears the marks of being hobbled at the outset by several problematic assumptions.

 

 

 

Sources of Skepticism 1

A little intellectual autobiography

My interest in moral psychology – particularly, in the idea that the study of moral judgment might be usefully pursued by borrowing some ideas from linguistics –was an opportunistic development. As a grad student at MIT, one could not help but notice the parallel between being asked for native speaker acceptability judgments by Linguistics grad students and being asked for permissibility judgments about trolley problem cases by Judy Thomson. My dissertation was about tacit knowledge of language, but my first job had me teaching quite a bit of moral philosophy – using, by the way, John Fischer and Mark Ravizza’s wonderful 1992 text. So, quite naturally, I was led to think more about what moral judgment is, what makes it possible, about whether linguistic diversity might be a model for moral diversity, and so on.

Coming across Elliot Turiel’s work in the early nineties prompted me to consider whether the typical child’s (moral) environment is impoverished relative to the moral abilities she acquires, in other words, whether a poverty-of-the-moral-stimulus argument was at all motivated. Mark Baker's work got me thinking that it might be worth investigating the idea that moral differences might be explicable in terms of something akin to linguistic parameters. And, more recently, John Collins’ superb papers in the philosophy of linguistics proved immensely helpful in thinking about the relation between native-judgers’ moral judgments and moral theory. (See esp., Faculty Disputes. Mind & Language 17 (2004): 300-333, and Linguistic Competence Without Knowledge. Philosophy Compass 2/6 (2007): 880-895.)

I always believed that empirical findings could be brought to bear on some of the claims about moral judgment I was entertaining: for example, that moral judgment is made possible by the operation of a domain–specific faculty of the mind; that the intractability of some moral disagreements might be understood in terms of constraints (parameters) that emerge early in ontogenetic development as interaction effects of the child’s innate endowment and certain features of her environment. But I was not trained as an experimentalist and at least my version of the so-called linguistic analogy model (cf. Mikhail’s version 2011) remained insufficiently articulated to hand off to friends in social psychology or anthropology to design the relevant experiments and field studies.

The explosion in the empirical investigation of moral cognition or moral judgment was not triggered by proponents of the linguistic analogy, but rather (it seems to me) received its impetus from two papers published in 2001: Josh Greene et al.’s fMRI study of subjects considering trolley problem cases and Jon Haidt’s paper attempting to rattle the Kohlbergian hegemony in developmental moral psychology. (Greene, J.D. et al. An fMRI study of emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science, 293 (2001): 2105-2108; Haidt, Jonathan.The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review 108.4(2001): 814-834.)

In my first post, I advertised that I’d try to explain my skepticism about this experimental work on moral judgment. That skepticism has two sources: (1) the models of moral judgment that are tested or challenged in a good deal of extant work are, like my own view, under-articulated; and (2) the majority of experimental moral psychology either assumes an empiricist conception of the human mind and/or falls prey to the “seduction of reduction”. (1) and (2) are not completely independent, but I’ll treat them as such for ease of exposition.

Today, then, a start on the under-articulation problem.

As I see it, there three dimensions to this problem. (Since I intend only to raise questions and not to attack particular individuals, I am not going directly to cite many specific studies, unless they happen to be usefully illustrative.)  

1. Target explananda are not precisely identified; in particular, across and sometimes even within studies, there is equivocation about a central expression, viz., “moral judgment”.

2. Models pay insufficient or the wrong kind of attention to the developmental etiology of the target explananda.

3. Models are anchored in considerations that were not designed for thinking about the psychology or cognitive science of judgment.

I’ll start with #1.

To say that one studies moral judgment, period, is to leave it unclear whether one is interested in (A) a particular kind of product or (B) a particular kind of process. I’ll use the lower case moral judgment to refer to products, and upper case Moral Judgment to refer processes.

Construed as products, moral judgments might be any or all of the following:

a. utterances

b. beliefs

c. attitudes

d. speech acts

e. intuitions

f. propositions

If your concern is meta-ethical, and you’re worried about whether moral judgments are truth evaluable or intrinsically motivating, then you’ll be careful to disambiguate. But that kind of care is absent in the vast majority of empirical work in moral psychology – even when investigators manage not to equivocate between “judgment”, “reasoning”, and “decision-making”.

But what comes out of people’s mouths may bear only a tenuous relation to their attitudes or beliefs. And I know of no clear account of how, empirically, to distinguish intuitions from beliefs.

Construed as a process, Moral Judgment is variously described as something that

a. generates moral judgments

b. drives moral judgment

c. plays a role in forming moral judgments

d. produces moral judgments,

 or, as

 e. the process of reasoning to moral judgments

 or, in some sense,

 f. responsible for an individual coming to have or finding herself with a moral judgment.

These lists are no doubt only partial, but the potential for question-begging and for confusion of other kinds should be obvious.

Of course, I get it that if you’re running a study about “moral judgment”, you’ll need to operationalize the notion. But even here, investigators have employed quite different methods: subjects have been asked to enter rating on a Likert scale about whether an imagined action is permissible or forbidden; they've been asked how wrong an action is; they’ve been asked how severely an agent ought to be punished for performing an action; they’ve been asked whether an action is ‘okay’. We should be cautious in drawing conclusions about the nature of moral judgment from ‘converging’ bodies of evidence when that ‘evidence’ has been arrived at on the basis of quite different assumptions. Indeed, it is challenging even to try to compare various studies.

Still, it is not as if philosophers don’t get into the same sort of pickles. “Moral judgments require backing by reasons. . . . One must have reasons of else one is not making a moral judgment at all (Rachels, 1993; see also Kennett & Fine, 2009)”; moral judgments are intrinsically motivating (Smith, 1994); moral judgments have a distinctive phenomenology (Horgan & Timmons 2007; Glasgow, 2013); moral judgments are performatives (Gibbard 1990).

This is stipulation of a quite different kind. And I understand why people engaged in the empirical investigation of moral ‘judgment’ – heavens, I've made it difficult to use the term myself – would be impatient with the (sometimes too quick) dismissal of their work by philosophers who are sure about the necessary conditions for any judgment being a genuine moral judgment.

In any event, notice two other matters that require some kind of resolution before we can articulate a model of moral judgment (and of Moral Judgment) that could be used to test how Moral Judgment works in human beings. First, there is the question of what it is to make a judgment or engage in judgment. And second is the question is what (if anything) makes a judgment or an event of judging moral (as opposed to non-moral).

On the former, I encourage readers to take a look at the essays in Mental Actions, edited by Lucy O'Brien and Matthew Soteriou (Oxford: OUP, 2009). I may have some more to say about this anon.

On the latter, I don't pretend that it's news that there is no definitive account of how to individuate a distinctly moral domain, and that might have serious implications for how to think seriously about and empirically investigate moral judgment and moral cognition. See Josh Greene's recent notes on this. Something else on which I might comment anon. (The Rise of Moral Cognition. Cognition 135 (2015): 39-42.

But the long and short of it is that there is very little agreement about what, precisely, is being studied under the general rubric of 'moral judgment'.

How to address this:

People are at liberty of course to stipulate what they shall mean by the expression “moral judgment”. And it would be a step towards clarity if they would do just that.

But there is an wide open invitation here for philosophers to revisit the question of what a judgment is, whether judgment is a mental action. This is all for now fully consistent with the idea that there is no domain specific thing moral cognition.

We should never lose sight of the fact that how adult abilities bear the marks of their development. So the children are important, as are other populations. But what we want to know is not how could this phenomenon exist, but why does this exist rather than something else. More on that issue next week when I take on the views about the mind and reduction.

What are we studying – object of inquiry and development (always a plus of the LA for me)

How to find a way to talk about the conflation of psychology and philosophy?

 

Greetings

Acting on my acceptance of Thomas' gracious invitation to guest blog at Flickers this month takes me well out of my comfort zone. I am grateful for that. And as the month moves on, I would ask only that you don't put too much store by the fact that this – my very first post – arrives on April Fool's Day!

Since it’s probably my work on the nature of moral judgment that comes closest to the interests of readers of this blog, I will have something to say about the trajectory of that work and why I now prefer not to use the term ‘linguistic analogy’ to describe it. Along the way, I will try to explain why I was and continue to be quite skeptical about experimental work on moral judgment and closely related topics.

From someone who believes that philosophers ought to engage with the “real” world (vide my work in applied ethics and public philosophy), this skepticism might seem surprising; for, hasn’t this empirical work at least gotten philosophers out of their armchairs and challenged them to put their theories about moral judgment and how it works to the test? Well, yes and no. While scores and scores of studies about moral judgment are now widely discussed, I worry about whether those studies are sufficiently informed by careful philosophical labor.

I see the current literature as pulled between two extremes. At one end is runaway (pun intended) excitement about “results” – a rare product in philosophy, outside of some areas of logic. As the publications about trolley problem experiments have multiplied, alleged theories about the nature of moral judgment have acquired, in my view, premature credibility. Mind you, at the other extreme, we find a kind of dig-in-your-heels a-priorism about what moral judgment or moral agency is. From this perspective, experimental work could never show us anything interesting about moral judgment.

For better or worse, my Aussie philosophical training instilled in me a life-long aversion to middle grounds, and I shan’t propose that we seek anything of the kind this month. Rather I would like to use this opportunity to express some of my concerns about empirically-informed moral psychology and moral psychological a priorism, and see what bites back.

The other topic – or set of topics – I am hoping to write and talk about emerge from some very – and I mean very – new teaching I am doing on classical Indian Philosophy. Questions about individual agency – what it is, in what sense humans embody it, and its relation to desert and thus to (second- and third-personal) moral judgment – are at the heart of the Bhagavad Gita (and other major Indian texts as well). They emerge against the backdrop of a metaphysics that distinguishes between the self and the True Self (cf. the True Self of evaluative agency, which has just been under discussion). The self is utterly material; the True Self is not. But both act – the former typically by being pushed and pulled around by desire, which itself is materially determined; the latter, how? In addition, there are juicy issues of accruing karma and the possibility of the Gita’s recommended remedy for suffering, so-called “desireless action.”

So it will be a bit of a mixed bag – Chomsky to Krishna, and back again. Most of all, I hope it will be fun.

(And, for the record, "Sue" is fine -- unless, I am in trouble, in which case I usually get called "Susan".)