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Wellness Wednesday for November 8, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Well, I ended up taking the test three times.

The first run through was entirely vibes-based and I tried to really weigh out what felt like a triple-immoral vs. a double-immoral vs. a single-immoral, and vice-versa, usually trying to pick a direction one way or the other. This one was also probably the most influenced by the order I got served the questions in, because I think I got less decisive over the course of it.

That run matched me to Left-Liberal:

  • Care - 83%
  • Fairness - 67%
  • Loyalty - 36%
  • Authority - 28%
  • Purity - 17%
  • Liberty - 64%

The second run through I tried to keep with a strong preference for "neutral/not applicable" and only give any affirmative push either way if something about the situation particularly moved me strongly.

That run also matched me to Left-Liberal:

  • Care - 63%
  • Fairness - 58%
  • Loyalty - 31%
  • Authority - 28%
  • Purity - 31%
  • Liberty - 58%

For the third run I went maximalist and selected (three thumbs up) if I would fight for someone's right to not face legal consequences for the action, (three thumbs down) if I would fight for the threat of legal consequences to be imposed on someone for the action, and (neutral) in all other cases.

That run matched me to Libertarian:

  • Care - 33%
  • Fairness - 50%
  • Loyalty - 8%
  • Authority - 0%
  • Purity - 0%
  • Liberty - 83%

To me the scale itself is a little confusing. I can get an intuitive sense of what three different levels of morally wrong should feel like. But, I had trouble imagining what it means for something to be a little morally okay, quite a bit morally okay but not fully, or extremely morally okay.

I didn't interpret any of the options as communicating "this is a morally good action" so I wasn't really confident about my choices on that side of the scale.

In all three attempts I ended up giving a lot of "this is morally okay" answers to a lot of actions that would absolutely negatively impact the way I thought about a friend, colleague or stranger if I knew that they had done the action. I don't know if that means I've missed the point of the exercise or not.

(Sorry for the deletion of the previous iteration of this comment, I'm on mobile and replied as a top level instead of a comment accidentally.)

Thanks for taking the time to redo it multiple times, there's no clear guidance as to whether something is morally laudable/condemnable or whether you personally approve (assuming hypocrisy of some sort where the two diverge), so I personally went with the latter, since there were examples, like the officer covering up a friendly fire incident, where I think it would be morally superior for him to come clean, but I personally think it's excusable if he knows there will be severe consequences for an accident of war.