This is the famous carving of the Three Wise Monkeys on the stable at the Nikko Tosho-gu:
Looking at that suggests a possible question for a non-dorky poll, analogous to the dork classic “what superpower would you want?”:
If you could go through life either seeing no evil, hearing no evil, or speaking no evil, which would you pick?
(It’s non-dorky because it’s a question of ethics and morals, and there’s nothing dorky about ethics and morals…)
It would sort of depend in the mechanism by which evil went unseen or unheard– if it involved some sort of evil suppression field in your immediate vicinity, that might be the way to go. If it involved blindness or deafness, not so much.
Without a ruling on that question, I’d have to go with “speak no evil.” Ignorance of evil is not a good thing, but controlling your own actions to prevent doing evil is an unambiguous good. But I’m sure there’s some sort of monkey’s paw (heh) catch to that one, too.
So, which is it?
(Monkey picture taken from this photoset, which I haven’t got around to labelling yet.)