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5 December 2001 
Morality Play
From TPM Online comes Morality Play:
In this activity you will be presented with 19 different scenarios. In each case, you will be asked to make a judgment about what is the morally right thing to do. When you have answered all the questions, you will be presented with an analysis of your responses which should reveal some interesting things about your moral framework and how it compares to others who have completed the activity.So as not to bias your answers, if you're interested in taking the quiz, go ahead and do it before reading further.
The first thing that strikes me is how all the questions ask about your level of responsibility to other people. "What is your level of obligation to someone else in situation X?" is the form of most questions. And all the scenarios concentrate on what effects your actions will have on others.
You pass someone in the street who is in severe need and you are able to help them at little cost to yourself. Are you morally obliged to do so?
You are able to help some people. Unfortunately, you can only do so by harming other people...
You are contacted by a refugee group which desperately needs somewhere to house a person seeking asylum who is being unjustly persecuted in a foreign country....And so on.
Every moral issue these guys could think of involves how you treat other people. In other words, altruism is taken for granted. It's some one else's well-being that should be your standard of value. There were no questions concentrating on your well-being, what choices you would make about your career or family when you alone are the main person affected by your actions. What level of "obligation" you have to yourself in a particular situation is a question that does not occur to the TPM folks. Either that or they consider it outside the realm of morality.
The second thing I notice is a related bias in their scoring method of "moral parsimony." As they describe it,
Moral frameworks can be more or less parsimonious. That is to say, they can employ a wide range of principles, which vary in their application according to circumstances (less parsimonious) or they can employ a small range of principles which apply across a wide range of circumstances without modification (more parsimonious).I've never heard of this concept before, but it sounds like an interesting measure of how you make moral decisions. (And though they make no judgment either way, I think that given the right principles, the more parsimonious framework is superior. Pragmatists, I suppose, would be at the "less parsimonious" end of the spectrum.)
But look at one of the things they use to gauge parsimony: family relatedness:
In this category, we look at the impact of family loyalty and ties on the way in which moral principles are applied. The idea here is to determine whether moral principles are applied without modification or qualification when you're dealing with sets of circumstances and acts that differ only in whether the participants are related through family ties to the person making the judgement.Well, I can see this being relevant to determining parsimony in some kinds of questions. But many of theirs were of the sort "You can save the life of your wife or a thousand strangers. Which do you choose?" Presumably, a person's parsimony score would decrease if it seemed he was favoring his wife over others. But it's not necessarily the case, as this implies, that such a person has one principle for strangers and another for family. An equally plausible explanation is that his single guiding principle is what furthers his own life most. But again, this possibility doesn't seem to occur to people whose conception of morality is so inextricably linked with altruism.
(For what it's worth, my parsimony score was a higher than average 80% which they evaluate as follows: "you have utilised a somewhat smaller range of moral principles than average in order to make judgements about the scenarios presented in this test, and that you have, at least on occasion, judged aspects of the acts and circumstances depicted here to be morally irrelevant that other people consider to be morally relevant.")
11:22 PM |
Hoff Sommers Told to Shut Up
Kevin pointed me to this interesting article on how Christina Hoff Sommers got some pretty rough treatment recently from more of those tolerant leftists.
CSAP official Linda Bass summarily interrupted, and commanded Sommers to end her talk. Minutes later, as Sommers was forced by a hostile crowd to defend her claim that scientific studies ought to be used to help evaluate the effectiveness of government drug-prevention programs, Professor Jay Wade, of Fordham University's Department of Psychology — an expert on "listening skills" — ordered Sommers to "shut the f*ck up, bitch," to the laughter of the others in attendance.
08:55 PM |
BerstAlert
ALERT! Dave Winer says he's debating "some Ayn Rand guy" tonight on Jesse Berst's radio show. The description from the show's web site:
How Microsoft Is Destroying the Free World. Gotta hand it to Microsoft. First it tramples all its competitors. Then it kicks the government's butt and escapes virtually scott-free from the anti-trust conviction. Now it is using its monopoly profits to invade several new markets. Some experts say this is a good thing. Others warn that Microsoft is stifling innovation. We'll hear both sides tonight.Hmm. No doubt about Jesse Berst's opinion on the matter, is there? I hope the "Ayn Rand guy," whoever he is, creams them. It's on starting at 8:00 PM Pacific.
UPDATE: The "Ayn Rand guy" is Dr. Edwin Locke. Should be good. (Thanks to Betsy for the detective work.)
06:20 PM |