MoraI foundations test, by Johnathan Haidt

[Valka D'Ur]

The part of this regarding vaccinations is the sort of thing our current provincial government would ask.

I'm a sane person living in a madhouse, as far as that's concerned. There are people here who think people like me (disabled, at-risk) should be rounded up and locked in a camp so the "normal" people (ie. anti-vaxxers) can go about their lives, blissfully spreading covid as they continue to be in denial that it even exists, and blaming all the woes in their lives on Justin Trudeau.

There are still people dying from this.

 

[Akka]

I think that the question is actually pretty adequate if it's trying to approximate a general predisposition about the tension between the individual vs the group on the subject of body autonomy.
What I wonder is if it actually takes into account that there could be very different motivations (a person who is anti-drug due to wanting to enforce conformity and a person who is pro-vaccine due to worries about disease spread have obviously not the same take at all on why or how bodily autonomy should be overriden, but both recognize some sort of "society vs individual" weight).

 

[PhroX]

I'd say something like a vaccine mandate actually protects peoples individual freedoms. Being infected with something like COVID by another persons negligence or even malice (i.e. not taking the vaccine) is a far greater impingement on my freedoms that being forced to have the vaccine is. Not only in the sense of bodily autonomy - i.e. I didn't chose to be infected while going about my everyday life - but in the actual impacts of having the disease. Being laid up in bed with COVID or measles impacts my ability to act freely far far more than having to have a vaccine would do.

It's not a question about how much individual freedom there is, it's a question about who gets that freedom.

 

[REDY]

Why I am so boring again?

 

[Gori the Grey]

Why I am so boring again?

I think it might be for a good reason, and so I'm going to bother responding to something of Gorbles that I let pass at the time:

To be fair, my lows would've been even lower and my highs higher had I not downgraded the strength of some answers based on what I felt was poor phrasing in the questions r.e. the weight of examples vs. principle.

In short, I probably spent too long thinking about each one

To this I was going to give a snarky "Because the best moral decisions are always snap decisions, right? We don't want people pondering over the nuances of morally complex matters?" My sarcasm, to be clear, isn't to be understood as directed toward Gorbles, but toward the test. I think his way of approaching it is exactly how one must approach it to have the test yield dramatic results. The more one ponders, the more one is inclined to a "slightly" agree or disagree, because one can imagine circumstances where one wouldn't feel as strongly.

So the test perhaps gets at something about our grounds for moral decision making, but at the cost of misrepresenting moral decision-making itself.

 

[Farm Boy]

Sometimes thinking longer strengthened my answer. Only a few times it went the other way.*

People that advocate prohibition, even that of alcohol, make this argument.

Also the debtor's prisons. They run on that rationale. Prohibition took off as women's lib in an era where they couldn't vote, but they could be beaten by drunks.

*if the test measures anything useful, which is questionable, it's likely the ratio of your answers that matter. (I'm going to tell myself) that a rainbow of filled bars suggests that you can see the moral foundations that the people around you use, and the relative weight is your flavor on them. So, if I remember back when, this foundations test was used to postulate that there are certain subsections of the populace that do not simply disagree with each other on best actions: they are actually blind when it comes to understanding their peers. Which I would say makes sense, when we're taught the Self Is King as a proper ideology. But I'm not super invested in that being right. Just seems like there's a lot of in-group-bias, purity, and authority that dresses up as "care and fairness" when I put on my cynical pants. And it's not no-pants-Friday!

 

[Gori the Grey]

Since we both remember it, I'm going to bring that post over from the other thread.

Here it is:

I've yet to read an accurate word about conservatives written by a liberal on this forum, but Haidt, who is liberal, is extremely accurate. He knows things.

Regarding the moral foundations, left-liberals are shown to value care (aiding those in trouble and nurturing) and fairness (economic and social justice), and less loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Haidt says that while liberalism has always been around in this sense, western civilization has fostered this narrow foundation to an unprecedented extent... in his words, literally WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic.

The liberty foundation was spun-off at a later time in Haidt's project. This foundation draws the essential distinction between liberals and libertarians, who do not agree with the social obligations implied by care and fairness and generally detest liberals. They are also a distinctive western development.

Conservatives are shown to value all the foundations equally. Regarding the conservative foundations, they can seem irrational to liberals. One needs to consider evolution and the enduring strength a balanced moral foundation can impart to a society. Haidt argues that, in the wake of Nazism, group-level selection has been wrongfully discarded from evolutionary theory. He argues that evolution has, in all likelihood, sped up during the course of human history. There is intense feedback between things like nations, religion, and technology, with DNA.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Since we both remember it, I'm going to bring that post over from the other thread.

Here it is:

Conservatives are shown to value all the foundations equally.

I'm interested in the idea that Liberty and Authority aren't necessarily in tension with one another as much as I think they are. As I said earlier, I expected to find some of each in my own answers, and that turned out to be true. I wonder whether my own conceptualizations of liberty and authority are atypical (or just wrong, somehow), or if people who scored high on both measures are holding more conflicting ideas or ideals than I do (on these concepts, not, like, in general).

 

[Nick723]

I'd say something like a vaccine mandate actually protects peoples individual freedoms. Being infected with something like COVID by another persons negligence or even malice (i.e. not taking the vaccine) is a far greater impingement on my freedoms that being forced to have the vaccine is. Not only in the sense of bodily autonomy - i.e. I didn't chose to be infected while going about my everyday life - but in the actual impacts of having the disease. Being laid up in bed with COVID or measles impacts my ability to act freely far far more than having to have a vaccine would do.

It's not a question about how much individual freedom there is, it's a question about who gets that freedom.

There’s a few posts on this, so not singling this one out, but just it’s the most recent.

Covid vaccinations are a bad example of this line of argument as (unlike some other vaccines) their primary benefit is to protect the individual. They do a lousy job of reducing transmission. So there was never any moral argument for restricting the movement of (covid) unvaccinated people.

 

[Gorbles]

There’s a few posts on this, so not singling this one out, but just it’s the most recent.

Covid vaccinations are a bad example of this line of argument as (unlike some other vaccines) their primary benefit is to protect the individual. They do a lousy job of reducing transmission. So there was never any moral argument for restricting the movement of (covid) unvaccinated people.

They still served to reduce transmission (and on top of that, limited knowledge at the time necessitated caution first when it came to policymaking). So yes, in fact, there was. Further attempts at revisionism are probably better saved for other threads though

EDIT - I realise now you're talking about "restricting movement", which while related to the real-world context is distinct from the "vaccine mandate vs. taking of drugs" framing people were actually talking about.

 

[Farm Boy]

I'm interested in the idea that Liberty and Authority aren't necessarily in tension with one another as much as I think they are. As I said earlier, I expected to find some of each in my own answers, and that turned out to be true. I wonder whether my own conceptualizations of liberty and authority are atypical (or just wrong, somehow), or if people who scored high on both measures are holding more conflicting ideas or ideals than I do (on these concepts, not, like, in general).

I like hamhanded comparisons, but really just going for a vibe(not history):

Spoiler They'll be back - because you won't stand together(in group bias, purity/traitor aversion) :

 

[EgonSpengler]

There’s a few posts on this, so not singling this one out, but just it’s the most recent.

Covid vaccinations are a bad example of this line of argument as (unlike some other vaccines) their primary benefit is to protect the individual. They do a lousy job of reducing transmission. So there was never any moral argument for restricting the movement of (covid) unvaccinated people.

Aside from the rather obvious point that a person can't spread a virus they're not infected with...

What do we know about covid vaccines and preventing transmission?

Vaccines that work against SARS-CoV-2 have helped change the course of the pandemic by reducing illness and hospital admissions. But Chris Stokel-Walker asks what we know about their impact on preventing transmission. The range of vaccines developed in record time by pharmaceutical companies...

www.bmj.com

Vaccine effectiveness against transmission of alpha, delta and omicron SARS-COV-2-infection, Belgian contact tracing, 2021–2022

Vaccine effectiveness against transmission (VET) of SARS-CoV-2-infection can be estimated from secondary attack rates observed during contact tracing. We estimated VET, the vaccine-effect on infectiousness of the index case and susceptibility of the high-risk ...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Infectiousness of SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough infections and reinfections during the Omicron wave - Nature Medicine

Analysis of data from California prisons shows that both COVID-19 vaccination and prior SARS-CoV-2 infection reduces the risk of virus transmission to close contacts.

www.nature.com

I like hamhanded comparisons, but really just going for a vibe(not history):

Spoiler They'll be back - because you won't stand together(in group bias, purity/traitor aversion) :

Sorry, man. No idea what this means.

 

[Farm Boy]

I would say it's moral foundations here considered in tension serving the same end. There is no liberty without an in group to work and pay for it, authority to make the group all work in the same direction, and enough mind for purity to not get stabbed in the back by every man willing to lie to get into a woman's pants.

 

[Ronaldo_]

C 81
F 85
L 62
I 62
P 67
A 44

So, for example, on the treatment of prisoners: discipline, yes. suffering, no. So how'm I supposed to answer a question that asks whether I think prisoners should experience "discipline / suffering"?

I won't pretend to have had such reservations about every question, but a lot of them.

How would you discipline criminals if inflicting suffering upon them (whether direct such as flogging, or indirect such as long sentencing) was not a component of criminal justice?

 

[EgonSpengler]

How would you discipline criminals if inflicting suffering upon them (whether direct such as flogging, or indirect such as long sentencing) was not a component of criminal justice?

Discipline and punishment (it's not usually called "suffering") are slightly different things, both in criminal justice and parenting. Punishment is retributive, whereas discipline is instructive (in criminal justice the term "rehabilitation" is used, of which discipline is a part). The effectiveness of punishment is less than we might expect, and if it isn't paired with rehabilitation, the person frequently returns to the bad behavior ("recidivism" in criminal justice). The value of incarceration is partly punishment, but it's also partly preventive (it's harder to commit crime while you're in jail) and it can remove the person from the environment in which they committed the crime, kind of like giving a little kid a 'time out' to cool off (although US prisons are not great for that, as sometimes they serve to make the person a better criminal - e.g. "gladiator school"). But if the goal is reducing the behavior, punishment doesn't have a lot of value if it isn't paired with other things. In some cases, punishment is completely useless, such as with people convicted of drug possession or use, or someone with a behavioral disorder. A person can't simply have their mental illness flogged out of them. In those instances, punishment might even reinforce the behavior. (In a for-profit criminal justice system, performative punishment makes total sense. In that case, rehabilitation would be counter-productive and reinforcing criminal behavior would be good business.)

 

[Bestbank Tiger]

Care 92
Fairness 83
Liberty 96
In Group 69
Purity 73
Authority 48

 

[bernie14]

I'm interested in the idea that Liberty and Authority aren't necessarily in tension with one another as much as I think they are. As I said earlier, I expected to find some of each in my own answers, and that turned out to be true. I wonder whether my own conceptualizations of liberty and authority are atypical (or just wrong, somehow), or if people who scored high on both measures are holding more conflicting ideas or ideals than I do (on these concepts, not, like, in general).

Conflict theory is a TERRIBLE foundation.

This is mine. I found myself having quite a few "no opinion either way".

 

[Bestbank Tiger]

Covid vaccinations are a bad example of this line of argument as (unlike some other vaccines) their primary benefit is to protect the individual. They do a lousy job of reducing transmission. So there was never any moral argument for restricting the movement of (covid) unvaccinated people.

I think people are reading vaccine in the context of COVID, as that's currently the most prominent one, but the question is intended to be broader.

You have the dullards who think the MMR vaccine causes autism. The MMR vaccine has a long track record of being safe and effective, and those diseases (especially measles) are very bad news.

They're trying to develop a vaccine for HIV, but not everyone will need that if the researchers succeed. Mandating it would be immoral given that every pharmaceutical product has at least some potential risk, and HIV isn't airborne or spread by casual contact.

 

[Ordnael]

Interesting exercise,
My results:
Care 81
Fairness 79
Liberty 67
In-Group 60
Purity 62
Authority 65

 

[bernie14]

Top ones, not the bottom ones

That is an authoritarian statement, ironic.