Moralize.us is a site with an interesting concept: users post hypothetical scenarios, and other users vote on whether a course of action is right or wrong, according to their own personal moral codes. It's a nice theory, that we can crowdsourcing our tricky moral dilemmas. In practice, though, the responses mostly seem to hover around the level of discourse you might find in the comments on a YouTube video. For example, someone asked "is it right or wrong to push a fat man off a bridge in front of a speeding train to stop it from killing five people?" The responses ranged from "Right: he's fat" to "Wrong: the fat man is Michael Moore." This is not exactly erudite stuff here, friends. Our recommendation: if Moralize.us is going to be more than a place for lame jokes, they should just ditch the ability to leave a justification, and just ask users to vote right or wrong. The data would probably be a lot more meaningful -- because hey, they're at zero now, and it can only get better.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
7-19-2008 @ 6:58PM
DiRT said...
But it is right to push Michael Moore in front of anything that would kill him. Too bad it might kill the people on the bus.
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7-21-2008 @ 3:07PM
Shariq Ansari said...
Case in point.
7-21-2008 @ 10:12PM
Eric said...
I don't like the site. The questions are all "is it right," when some of them aren't right, and they aren't wrong. It's the wording of the question.
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