Filed under: Internet, Social Software
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 have the ability to 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 cease 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 superior.
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