Mitt, Mass., and My 2.4 Morality Rank June 4, 2012June 3, 2012 TODAY’S MOVIE Four minutes on Mitt’s Massachusetts Miracle. Where he took job creation from 37th out of 50 down to near-dead-last 47th. (Under today’s Democratic governor, it’s somewhere around 11th.) I have nothing against the Harvard Business School Class of 1975. I sat in those same swivel chairs myself, albeit a few years earlier. But having had one Republican member of the class of ’75 running the economy from 2001 to 2009, do we really want another from the same class, with many of the same advisers, proposing more tax cuts for the wealthy, running the country from 2013 to 2017? Before you shout “Yes we do!” check out his record in Massachusetts. YOURMORALS.ORG I’m disgusting. No, wait, strike that – I’m 2.4 on the scale of how easily disgusted I am – which is to say, more easily disgusted than most. Yourmorals.org is a nonprofit, academic site on which you can take all kinds of morality surveys and see how you compare with others. I liked the “disgust” survey in part because it offered a comments section in which to note or complain about questions you find unclear. The “sacredness” survey (and I assume lots of the others) allowed no such comments, and that’s a bit frustrating. It asks, for example, whether you’d insult someone for being fat if, in return, you were given $10. Or $1000. Or $10,000 (getting tempted?). Or $100,000 (that’s where I cracked). Or $1 million. Or “for no amount of money.” (It also gives the option of $0 – “I’d do it for free.”) Well, I’d do it for $100,000 — and probably should have answered $10,000, the more I think about it (you lard ass) — because I’d then tell the insultee why I did it and give him or her $1,000, or maybe more, to make sure he or she was happy I had done it. But is this allowed? Some of the questions make those boundaries clear (you insult your father and have to wait a year to explain why you did it) but in others, it is not. I said I would kill a member of an endangered species for $1 million, but only because I would then give every penny to an organization that helps protect endangered species. (Presumably, this is an endangered, not a “practically extinct” species.) My calculation there being that not to do so would set that species back further than if I had. No comments section to make this clear. And also no way to adjust the scale for one’s personal circumstances. Am I really more moral because I’d turn down $1 million others would not be able to resist? I don’t think so – it’s just that I’m already so fortunate, I can afford the luxury of, in effect, “paying” $1 million not to go deaf for a year (one of your choices), sit in a tub of ice cubes for 10 minutes (another), or be confined to solitary for a month with nothing to read (a third). Still: interesting stuff.