One of my favorite regular columns in the New York Times Magazine is The Ethicist, in which humor writer Randy Cohen thinks through moral quandaries presented by his readers. It’s a handy reminder that the humanities are not something removed from “real life.” That they are quite inseparable from it, actually.
Select columns are available on the New York Times site, which also makes columns available as podcasts. The Ethicist writes a blog, too, called Moral of the Story, which addresses moral questions raised by current news stories.
If you want to know how you measure up, ethically speaking, you might want to visit YourMorals.org, home to a number of quick ethical tests. After you finish each test, the system generates a little graph of how you stack up against everyone else who’s taken it. Here’s how the founders describe their site’s origins and goals:
This website is a collaboration among five social psychologists who study morality and politics. Our goal was to create a site that would be useful and interesting to users, particularly ethics classes and seminars, and that would also allow us to test a variety of theories about moral psychology. One of our main goals is to foster understanding across the political spectrum. Almost everyone cares about morality, and we want to understand — and to help others understand — the many different ways that people care.
Happy clicking, everyone!
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