One of the most popular and long-standing discussion forums on Reddit is called Am I the Asshole? (“Am I the asshole?”) and has been around for over ten years. It is made up of users who tell personal facts, anonymously but in quite detail, to discuss the appropriateness of their behavior in particular circumstances. There are those who ask if they are wrong to treat their daughter differently from how they treat their spouse’s daughter, for example, and those who ask if it is wrong to go to dinner alone with their mother for her birthday, without inviting their mother. own wife.
In an article shared in preprint format (which has yet to be submitted to peer-reviewed) a group of researchers in philosophy and psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill analyzed just over 369 thousand questions described on Am I the Asshole? and the related 11 million comments. To do this, it used artificial intelligence software which made it possible to identify a series of regularities in the topics discussed by users and to sort the dilemmas into different categories, extracting information deemed significant.
Regardless of the results of the study, the idea shared by the group is that the dilemmas proposed by users on Reddit are a useful tool for those involved in philosophy and moral psychology. In some respects, the team says, they are more useful than thought experiments known as “trolley dilemmas” (trolley problem), studied and used in particular in the analytical philosophical tradition widespread in the English-speaking world. Unlike the abstract moral situations imagined in shopping cart dilemmas, those typically described on Reddit actually have the advantage of being able to happen to anyone in everyday life.
The American researcher Daniel Yudkin, one of the authors of the study, had conducted research with other colleagues on the social costs of not keeping a secret, published in January in the journal Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. The research showed that the decision to reveal a secret is often judged negatively by other people, even when those same people believe that revealing it is the right thing to do. Also on that occasion Yudkin and the others had used data collected from the subreddit Am I the Asshole?and this had allowed them to notice relevant variables.
Revealing a colleague’s misconduct to a boss, for example, was not judged the same as revealing to a stranger a personal secret confided by a close friend. The perception of moral obligation in one case was very different than in the other, although in general people had an overall negative opinion of those who share secrets. The differences between one case and another, according to the research group, allow us to study the moral compromises that need to be faced when the dilemmas involve people we really know, and not hypothetical subjects to be saved by hijacking an imaginary train from the tracks (the classic example in the trolley dilemma).
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“If we live in a society that neglects the importance of relational obligations, there is a risk of seeing ourselves as individual atoms and not focusing enough attention on what we owe to each other,” Yudkin told the site Vox, talking about the limits of shopping cart dilemmas. The tools used for the preprint study instead made it possible to analyze the various concrete situations described on Reddit and group the most common ones into six groups and 29 different subgroups of moral issues.
Discussions about whether queuing is morally permissible, for example, have been categorized under the subgroup of “procedural fairness” (procedural fairness), in the “equity and proportionality” group. In another group called “honesty”, in the subgroup “breach of secrecy”, there are discussions of a completely different type: those proposed by people who ask themselves whether or not it is wrong to want to tell a father that the son he believes is his he could be someone else’s child.
The researchers then analyzed the frequency of each moral dilemma in relation to the link between the person who proposed it on Reddit and the person involved in the dilemma. And they discovered that in family ties, dilemmas of a certain type tended to emerge (“relational obligations”), while in professional ones, dilemmas of another type (“procedural fairness”) emerged. The study supports a fairly common perception, but traditionally neglected by the analytical approaches of philosophy and moral psychology focused on abstract examples: the relational context is an influential variable on the judgment of the morality of actions. In fact, different categories of people – sisters, colleagues, bosses or strangers – tend to correspond to different moral obligations.
The relational context is an essential part of human behavior and customs studied by philosophy and moral psychology. Historically it has been neglected by a specific approach, which is one among many but very influential: the philosophical doctrine of utilitarianism and other currents of thought that are inspired by the idea according to which the criterion of moral action must be utility. , understood as the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Saving thousands of lives of unknown people every year through donations, according to this perspective, would have a higher moral value than saving your neighbor by escaping from a burning building.
But as he explained to Vox in 2019 the American neuroscientist Molly Crockett, author of many studies on the perception of morality, moral judgment changes not only depending on the action but also on the agent. A woman who could easily provide a meal for a child but does not, for example, may be subject to different moral judgments depending on her relationship to the child.
If the baby is your child, then not feeding it is something morally wrong for many people. “But if she owns a restaurant and the child isn’t starving, then they don’t have a relationship with any special obligations that require her to feed the child,” Crockett said. She says globalization has made being a “moral agent” more complicated because it makes people think about how their actions might affect people they will never meet. Being a good citizen of the world, she said, “now clashes with our very powerful psychological tendency to prioritize our families and friends.”
The use of data obtained from Reddit – for the study of moral dilemmas as for that of any other social science phenomenon – requires particular care and caution relating to both the survey methodology and the composition of the analyzed sample. That said, Yudkin and other researchers’ approach still captures how often moral dilemmas in everyday life come in the form of questions about our responsibilities toward friends, neighbors, and family, rather than questions about abstract subjects and hypothetical scenarios. It also allows us to understand how the moral evaluation of these experiences can change depending on the social context.
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