Viti

Another 0, 0, -1

I had serious "ooh icky" reactions, but I couldn't make a case against any of the scenarios.

vixstile

Results

Your Moralising Quotient is: 0.00.

Your Interference Factor is: 0.00.

Your Universalising Factor is: -1.



From My results:

kctan

0, 0, -1

Most of the questions are hilarious. Especially the chicken humping guy.

Maybe if they add a question as below could it've change the results ?

Q) One of the parents had died & instead of cremation or burial, the whole family elected to have a weekend BBQ special by having BBQ dead parent for lunch.

Do you think it's morally wrong ?

Should the family's behaviour be punished ?

Should the society impose restrains inorder to prevent future occurances ?

You can elect to change "dead parent" to "dead baby" for different degree of yuckiness.

Pyrrho

I found a couple of the questions problematic in the way they were worded. For example:

What counts as an "entirely private" act? trillian1 suggests above:

However, I would not regard such actions as "entirely private", as they have the potential for harming others. But what did the writers of the question mean by that phrase?

Furthermore, what, exactly, counts as "harm"? Is "potential harm" included in this idea, such that trillian1's examples are to be regarded as "harmful"?

And consider this question (part of 8):

In the one country, are they required to have sex with each other, or is it merely optional? I took it as them being expected to do this, whether they wanted to or not. Something being "normal" often conveys the idea that it is expected of one, rather than simply a possible option. (In fact, by saying that it is normal to do this ONCE is strongly suggestive that doing more or less is not acceptable.) But maybe those who wrote the test had other ideas.

Indeed, all of the questions dealing with cultural norms were somewhat problematic in this way: Is the norm required behavior, or is it merely permissible?

Arken

0.04, 0.00, 0.00

Apparently, I just don't give a damn.

The reason I think I didn't get a -1 is because I voted 'a little wrong' on the cat eating things because, IMO, eating the corpse of something you loved just because you heard it might be tasty is a little cold-hearted.

viscousmemories

Surprise, surprise.

0,0, -1. Fully Permissive.

Like Pyrrho, trillian1 and others, I too had a problem with some of the hypotheticals.

For example: "Is it possible for something to be immoral even if it harms only the individual?"

Wouldn't the only way for that theoretical circumstance to occur be if the damage to the individual could in no way be shown to have an ill effect on the environment, society, or other individuals?

The scenario they used to illustrate something that harms only the person committing the act was smoking. However it clearly can't be denied that the effects of smoking on the environment and on the individual who smokes directly impact everyone who shares that environment and/or has an investment in that person. No?

Oh, and also... When they said, "Is it possible for something to be immoral 'cause god says so", did they mean a hypothetical god? 'Cause naturally I said it was impossible given that god doesn't exist and all.

vm

phaedrus

umm....the game/test is analyse your intuitions and consistency. The extreme nature of the examples/scenarios has been explained by the creators of the game.....The other tension in moral reasoning that we hope this activity helps to elucidate has to do with the role of reason and emotion in moral judgements. One of the interesting things which Haidt et al found when exploring people's reactions to the scenarios featured in this activity is that people who have very strong emotional responses to these stories frequently find it difficult to provide an explanation or justification for what they are feeling.

And in Yuk Factor - There is a famous morality tale in Herodotus. 'Darius...called together some of the Greeks...and asked them what they would take to eat their dead fathers. They said that no price in the world would make them do so. After that Darius summoned those of the Indians who are called Callatians, who do eat their parents, and, in the presence of the Greeks..., asked them what price would make them burn their dead fathers with fire. They shouted aloud, "Don't mention such horrors!" These are matters of settled custom, and I think Pindar is right when he says, "Custom is king of all."' [3, 38. David Grene translation] Herodotus noticed twenty-five centuries ago what people go on noticing today: customs and taboos differ from one society to another, one town to another, one household to another.

And from the paper which started it all.......Affect, Morality and Culture or is it wrong to eat your dog?

What sort of issues do people treat as moral issues? Harm broadly construed to include pyschological harm, injustice and violations of rights may be important in the morality of all cultures. But is a harm based morality sufficient to describe the moral domain for all cultures, or do some cultures have a non-harm based morality, in which actions with no harmful consequences may be moral violations? This question is being debated in the literature of moral judgement. Researchers in the cognitive-developmental traditions <snip> have argued that particular rules may vary from culture to culture, but in all cultures moral issues involve questions of harm, rights or justice. An opposing view has been taken by cultural pyschologists <snip>. They have argued that the domain of morality is culturally variable and it extends beyond harm, rights and justice in many cultures. The present research contributes to this debate by investigating a class of issues that have not yet been studied : harmless yet violations of strong social norms. While we explore this debate, we focus attention on the comparatively neglected role of affect in moral judgement

Aquila ka Hecate

Yet another 0,0,-1 over here.

Although to be fair I'd read most of the other answers to this thread, so I was perhaps a little more prepared to put my knee-jerk revulsion on hold and consider the questions more objectively.

What decided these for me were the clear assurances that no harm was done at any time to anyone in any of these situations.
Once I had that firmly in the front of my mind, I failed to see anyting morally wrong in any of the given scenarios.

Pyrrho

I suspect that how seriously one takes those assurances that no harm is done to anyone else is very influential in many cases of how one would respond to the questions. As viscousmemories pointed out, some of those assurances were necessarily false, as, for example, smoking involves many more things than just the lone person.

I also suspect that many would react quite differently in actual practice than they would respond in a questionnaire of this type. Think about the people who said that there was nothing wrong with having sex with a dead chicken. How do you think most of them would react if they came home and found their spouses engaging in that activity? Or their child?

Buddrow_Wilson

Possibly one would be emotionally damaged from such a discovery, therefore negating the premise.

I also found that eating a dead pet merely because you heard it tastes good to be somewhat immoral, however doing so because its a societal norm I couldn't say is immoral.

My score was 0.17/0.00/1.00 resulting in this insulting tidbit...
Hey buddy F you and your opinion of my ability to justify my moral misgivings!