There’s a court at my university accommodation that people who aren’t Fellows of the college aren’t allowed on, it’s a pretty medium-sized square of mown grass. One of my friends said she was “morally opposed” to this (on biodiversity grounds, if the space wasn’t being used for people it should be used for nature).
And I couldn’t help but think, how tiring it would be to have a moral-feeling-detector this strong. How could one possibly cope with hearing about burglaries, or North Korea, or astronomical waste.
I’ve been aware of scope insensitivity for a long time now but, this just really put things in perspective in a visceral way for me.
For many who talk about “moral opposition”, talk is cheap, and the cause of such a statement may be in-group or virtue signaling rather than an indicator of intensity of moral-feeling-detector.
You haven’t really stated that she’s putting all that much energy into this (implied, I guess), but I’d see nothing wrong with having a moral stance about literally everything but still prioritizing your activity in healthy ways, judging this, maybe even arguing vociferously for it, for about 10 minutes, before getting back to work and never thinking about it again.
To me it seems more likely that this person is misreporting their motive than that they really oppose this allocation of a patch of grass on biodiversity grounds. I would expect grounds like “I want to use it myself” or slightly more general “it should be available for a wider group” to be very much more common, for example if I had to rank likelihood of motives after hearing that someone objects, but before hearing their reasons. I’d end up with more weight on “playing social games” than on “earnestly believes this”.
On the other hand it would not surprise me very much that at least one person somewhere might truly hold this position. Just my weight for any particular person would be very low.
There’s a court at my university accommodation that people who aren’t Fellows of the college aren’t allowed on, it’s a pretty medium-sized square of mown grass. One of my friends said she was “morally opposed” to this (on biodiversity grounds, if the space wasn’t being used for people it should be used for nature).
And I couldn’t help but think, how tiring it would be to have a moral-feeling-detector this strong. How could one possibly cope with hearing about burglaries, or North Korea, or astronomical waste.
I’ve been aware of scope insensitivity for a long time now but, this just really put things in perspective in a visceral way for me.
For many who talk about “moral opposition”, talk is cheap, and the cause of such a statement may be in-group or virtue signaling rather than an indicator of intensity of moral-feeling-detector.
You haven’t really stated that she’s putting all that much energy into this (implied, I guess), but I’d see nothing wrong with having a moral stance about literally everything but still prioritizing your activity in healthy ways, judging this, maybe even arguing vociferously for it, for about 10 minutes, before getting back to work and never thinking about it again.
To me it seems more likely that this person is misreporting their motive than that they really oppose this allocation of a patch of grass on biodiversity grounds. I would expect grounds like “I want to use it myself” or slightly more general “it should be available for a wider group” to be very much more common, for example if I had to rank likelihood of motives after hearing that someone objects, but before hearing their reasons. I’d end up with more weight on “playing social games” than on “earnestly believes this”.
On the other hand it would not surprise me very much that at least one person somewhere might truly hold this position. Just my weight for any particular person would be very low.