All generalisations are false, including this one

Morality play

I took most of these since I prefer to use my time on the most trivial and impractical diversions possible. I was interested in several of the conclusions, though they were often merely confirmations of things I've long speculated on. For example the different data/worldview sets that people use to inform their ethical behaviors was glaringly obvious when you looked at a test over something like whether torture was moral and whether it was then somehow moral when it was deemed to be effective (including whether or not it was effective at all). Abstractly, one could certainly say it could be effective. But one also has to ask "compared to what"? At least, all that economic thought has trained me to ask that question. Third degree is probably more effective at gathering information compared to doing nothing at all. But it's definitely not more effective than the alternative methods of coercion which elicit far less distorted information. Ask an interrogator. Or more importantly, ask the people who have to make decisions based on the information (and presumably would not have to care how it is originated).

Much discussed of late is the "Moral Foundations" set of quizzes. The one major odd one is sorting out what loyalty preferences are for liberals and conservatives. When the data is parsed out, in part by using the "Moral Foundations Sacredness" quiz, there's a clear gap in the respect for group loyalties, despite a similar score in an overall foundation. It's pretty obvious that liberals possess some sort of in-group biases, judging from the same rhetorical defences they engage in when their favoured constituencies are shown to be screwballs. There's just a different sort of rallying points, environmental policy instead of abortion for example. This makes it harder to sort out what it is that liberals are actually responding to as the basis of their ethical determinations because it obscures that they have the same institutionalized in-group bias but seem to apply it differently or upon different groups.

Basically what that set of quizzes shows is that libertarians are really hard to sort out. They're like liberals on a lot of ethical thinking, but they're also so strongly anti-authoritarian that they prefer impersonal market forces making all the "ethical" judgments for us rather than any means of persuasion and coercion through the force of laws and authorities who might have something to gain or to game over. Liberals who like markets has been the summed judgment. Of course, it's hard to say that "conservative" is a force for markets at this point either any more than "liberal" has come to mean its opposite, certainly within the "generalisation" method of recent data points. Most amusing on that point was the question on "eating genetically modified foods", which was somehow a parsing of liberal perspectives. I'd like to know what foods we eat that have not been genetically modified by humans over thousands of years and how liberals thus seek avoiding eating anything else. Or how this supposedly liberal crank cause of "toxins in the body" claims over modern genetic agriculture (that feeds billions in the developed and third world and mostly exists because of a nationalistic preference that somehow Americans and Europeans should feed everyone with their somehow superior "organic" crops) somehow gracefully crossed over into the more or less conservative crank cause of anti-vaccination (which spawns more out of a lack of respect for the methods of scientific and empirical knowledge than an anti-market bias, though conservatives have plenty of those too these days).

I pretty much had the most singular preference for the basis of morality possible (harm reduction), rating among the lowest possible scores for loyalty, purity, and authority as a basis for my own ethics. That doesn't surprise me. The gap between me and "conservatives" on purity was such that they had an average score of three times what I scored. Which shouldn't be alarming either, though I suppose it would be if I was actually a hedonistic buffoon. Of the sort where people used to complain about libertarians always railing about the drug war as though this would somehow allow us to become relevant to policy making and as though the drug war isn't a serious mis-allocation of social resources. I did have some consideration for equality of opportunity type ethics. But I'm not all that concerned if people do as I do and fuck it up that we need to institutionally protect against this producing poor outcomes.

The really interesting gap for me personally was the judgment of personal and impersonal violations. I basically score the same on either. Most people score much higher on impersonal violations as being acceptable but personal ones are not (the famous trolley question). I suppose this goes along with my being drawn to Omar and Brouther Mouzone in the Wire over almost anybody else (other than obviously Colvin) or feeling like rooting for De Niro's gang of ruthless bank robbers in Heat. Or it could just be that I use a far too calculated view of morality to determine ethical questions, at least relative to normal people.

Perhaps, rather than Twain I should go with Black Thought to explain where I come from for ethical expectations.

"Sex, drugs, murder, politics and religion
Forms of hustlin', watch who you put all your trust in"