TABOO

Here is an interesting ethics questionairre.

My results:

Your Moralising Quotient is: 0.50.

Your Interference Factor is: 0.25.

Your Universalising Factor is: 1.00.

There was no inconsistency in the way that you responded to the questions in this activity. It is likely that you think that what makes any of these actions morally problematic has to do with God or some other source of morality external to nature, society and human judgement. You indicated that an act can be wrong even if it is entirely private and no one, not even the person doing the act, is harmed by it. There is nothing contradictory then in a claim that the actions depicted in these scenarios are morally problematic.

What do the results mean? Take a look:

Your Moralising Quotient is an aggregate measure of your tendency to condemn the actions described in these scenarios as morally wrong. A score of 1.00 indicates a fully moralising position. A score of 0.00 is a fully permissive response. (See below for more on these.)

Your Interference Factor is an aggregate measure of your tendency to judge the actions described here as being the legitimate target of societal interference in the form of prevention or punishment. A score of 1.00 indicates that you think that every act described in these scenarios is subject to societal interference. A score of 0.00 indicates that you think that these acts are essentially a private matter, and that societal interference is inappropriate.

Your Universalising Factor is an aggregate measure of your tendency to judge moral wrongdoing in universal terms. A score of 1.00 means that every time you have determined one of the acts depicted in these scenarios to be morally wrong, you have universalised the judgement of moral wrongoing; that is, you have indicated that the act is wrong regardless of prevailing cultural norms and social conventions. A score of 0.00, on the other hand, means that where you see moral wrong in the acts depicted in these scenarios, you have not once universalised the judgement of moral wrongdoing; that is, you have indicated that whether an act is to be thought of as wrong is largely a matter of social norms, and that it is quite possible that what is wrong in one culture may not be wrong in another. A score of -1 means that you saw no moral wrong in any of the activities depicted in these scenarios, and so it is not possible for this activity to determine the extent to which you see moral wrongdoing in universal terms.

In line with Haidt, Koller and Dias (1993)* – though implemented in a much less rigorous way in this activity – it is possible to combine the interference and universalising factors to establish a more sophisticated picture of a person’s moral intuitions (see diagram on main page). A fully moralised position endorses full interference, and universalises across the board. A fully permissive position rejects both interference and also any universalising tendency. An enforceable-conventional response sees interference as legitimate (presumably as a mechanism to enforce important social norms), but rejects any universalising tendency. A personal-morality response makes use of universal claims about right and wrong, but tends to see these as being a private matter and not as being a legitimate target of societal intervention. Where you fall in terms of these four factors is indicated by the blue square on the diagram on the main results page.