Blond(e)s or Redheads?
Comments are expressly solicited.
In the course of going about living his life, a man notices that he has a disproportionate preference for redheads as romantic interests. Not being a lazy man, he engages in some lengthy introspection and arrives at the following accurate conclusions:
- His preference for redheads makes him more likely to investigate the possibility of romance with redheads than with non-redheads.
- Red hair is not a factor bearing any weight on his decision to engage in, continue, or end a romance.
- His romances with redheads are no more or less healthy and rational than his romances with non-redheads.
- He honestly does not know why he prefers redheads.
- He can find no reason why he ought to prefer redheads, nor any reason why he out not to prefer them.
In other words, for some reason, he likes redheads, and acting in accord with the preference does him no harm. Nor does it help him much, except that he derives marginally more pleasure (again, for an unknown reason) from his relationships with redheads.
Does he have any moral obligation to continue to investigate the psycho-epistemological roots of his preference for redheads? To refrain from acting on the preference until such time as its roots are discovered?
What are your thoughts? I have my own answer, which I will post later.
If he has reason to suspect that an answer will never be known, he should investigate it no further. He should also not worry about observation #1, since either outcome is good: he will engage in a non-red-haired romance where the missing marginal pleasure derived from the red hair is not noticed, or he will engage in a red-head romance where the marginal pleasure is noticed. He should definitely not refrain from acting on the marginal pleasure.
In order, I prefer strawberry red-heads, red-heads, blondes, the black-haired, and the brown-haired. I doubt I will ever know why, and it doesn’t bother me. But in context, the rest usually outweighs the hair color anyway. There are so many beautiful people “styles.”