Surfing around this evening, I stumbled upon this page of games and quizzes developed for the online version of The Philosophers' Magazine. As noted previously, I'm a sucker for quizzes so I randomly clicked on one called Taboo.
I won't go into too much detail on the quiz except to say that they present some scenarios and ask if you think the actions are morally wrong, if the actions should be prohibited by law, and a cultural consistency question. The scenarios all involve actions that cause no physical harm to anyone and, since I had decided going in that my definition of immoral would be any action that caused another physical harm, I came out like the worst sort of libertine.
My Moralising Quotient is: 0.00.
My Interference Factor is: 0.00.
My Universalising Factor is: -1.
The analysis ended with the following line, "Probably, in your own terms, you were right to adopt a morally permissive view."
All that was so-so but the fun part came when they made demographic comparisons. For my religious preference I had responded, "Christian: Other," so I got to see a comparison between my answers and the answers of other Christians.
One of the scenarios involved a brother and sister having sex (without the possibility of pregnancy). I didn't see the physical harm in the situation so I judged there to be nothing morally wrong with this act. 85% of Christians disagreed with me. Another scenario involved a man using a frozen chicken to get his rocks off. Once again, I saw no harm anywhere in that equation and answered accordingly. 67% of Christians disagreed with me. I figure that most of the people who have a problem with sibling action would also have a problem with poulty loving.
But (to draw a completely inaccurate and unsupported conclusion), 18% of the Christians out there see nothing wrong with getting it on with a frozen carcass and everything wrong with two consenting adults engaging in safe sex. Why am I not surprised?
