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The magic genie has appeared to grant you your wish. What small thing do you wish for that would have the biggest positive impact on the world? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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[–] 22 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (6 children)

Every one gets a strong moral compass that they can't ignore.

Sure we won't all have the same morals but I believe that most bad things in the world happen because people ignore morals and act selfish and only a small part of our issues stem from actual moral differences.

Edit: Seems I am much more optimistic than I thought.

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  • [–] 29 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Rates of religiously based terrorism would go through the roof. The problem is that people that, e.g., bomb abortion clinics believe that they are doing the morally correct thing, because it's better to murder a few people than to allow those people to "murder" thousands of innocent "babies". Likewise, you'd suddenly have people that are casually racist now immediately turn to full-on race war shit, because if you believe that nonwhite people are causing harm to the "white race" simply by existing, and you have a moral compass that you can't ignore, then the moral thing to do is to prevent that harm by killing the people committing the harm, esp. when you believe that they're irredeemable by virtue of genetics.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago*

    You could argue that "moral compass" means more than just a strong sense of right/wrong. Presumably, most people have that, even if we don't describe it as such. I think OP intended something more like a "strong sense of harmony" wherein everyone has a shared common understanding of some greater good and therefore work towards it with common cause.

    It's still a fairly naive notion, but for an entirely different reason. Rather than self-righteous chaos, such a wish would lead to a sort of moral tyranny imposed by one single person's preconceptions of what constitutes a moral life.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    There’s a ton of really shitty people with strong moral compasses they can’t ignore. Most of them follow faiths ending in ity, ism, or lim

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Depends what you mean by moral compass. I don't think anyone's conscious tells them "man, we really shouldn't be mixing these textiles". They might feel guilty for breaking rules they want to follow, but that's it.

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