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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 2164560" data-attributes="member: 27012">Absolutely.  And I think that some of the insights offered by Celebrim earlier in the thread were quite interesting and can be true in some cases.  My objection was to the idea that a person's answer can always be interpreted in one or two particular ways.  I simply don't think that's true, so I'm trying to explain other reasons why people might have given the answer they've given that have nothing to do (or nothing directly to do) with their own moral compass.Absolutely.  But I'm not sure that's what a lot of those people are thinking.  Instead, I think they are considering that little part of their brain that coldly says things like, "Take off and nuke it from orbit.  It's the only way to be sure."  It's the part of the brain that, to take an example of the research, allows us to consider smothering a baby to death so that a basement full of refugees won't get caught and killed if the soldiers searching for them hear the baby crying (a subject of the final episode of M*A*S*H, by the way).  And there are also plenty of philosophers and ethicists who advocate positions that are often ruthlessly utilitarian and many people do think they are Evil (e.g., Princeton's Peter Singer falls into this category).Not necessarily true.  Celebrim offered one motivation earlier in this thread when he discussed people who play their opposites -- being a rebel.  It's all a matter of objectives and priorities.  Oh, that's fair enough.  Just about anything a person says or does can tell your *something* about that person.  My objection was to the idea that these answers were somehow a reliable channel into a person's psyche, seemingly without even considering their explanations of why they answered the way they did.</blockquote>

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