Moral vs Rational

RICHARDSON, Texas, March 26 (AScribe Newswire) -- In an awesome display of power and mastery, chess players from The University of Texas at Dallas thoroughly dominated their opponents to win the 2007 Final Four of Chess tournament, held this weekend in Fort Worth, Texas.

With the victory, UT Dallas won the President's Cup trophy, emblematic of the Final Four champion, as well as the right to continue calling itself the best collegiate chess team in the land, a title the university reclaimed last December by winning the 2006 Pan American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship, the most prestigious college chess competition held each year in the Western Hemisphere.

UT Dallas finished the round-robin Final Four without a loss and beat the closest competitor, archrival University of Maryland, Baltimore County, by a margin of five and one-half points (10.5 versus 5)- a huge gap in chess competition and the widest margin ever in the seven-year history of the Final Four. In the three rounds held over two days, UT Dallas compiled an overwhelming record of nine wins and three draws. The other two competitors, Miami Dade College (4.5 points) and Duke University (4 points), finished third and fourth, respectively.

Easy money indeed :)

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Pride? Stubbornness? Fear?

Yes we have strong urge to be righteous. Just look at kids, they love to be proven correct and they usually assume they are correct. One of life's hard lessons is learning that we're often not correct and that people will often have different opinions from us and want to fight us to prove they are right and we are wrong. This is the basis of competitive sports. Of course one would expect a creature born of natural selection/survival of the fittest to have this characteristic strongly ingrained. We want to get one up on our fellow man, to have some advantage.

Imagine if you worked in an office and one worker had a simple message on his door :

"I know the secret !"

How would you feel?

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On another subject, when do you think moral reasons for taking a particular decision outweigh rational reasons for the decision? Always? Thoughts please!