"Ethicists say voting with your heart, without a care about the consequences, is actually immoral"

QUARTZ:   “The purpose of voting is not to express your fidelity to a worldview. It’s not to wave a flag or paint your face in team colors; it’s to produce outcomes,” says Jason Brennan, a philosopher at Georgetown University and author of The Ethics of Voting. “If they’re smart, they’ll vote for the candidate likely to best produce the outcome they want. That might very well be compromising, but if voting for a far-left or far-right candidate means that you’re just going to lose the election, then you’ve brought the world further away from justice rather than closer to it.”

Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, says it’s important for voters to balance their principles with the consequences of their actions. He suggests creating an equation to multiply how much one favors a candidate by that candidate’s chances of having a positive impact. (read the whole thing)

Study: 1 in 6 Young Americans Have Stolen Something in the Past Year

"Geoffrey Fain Williams, an economist at Transylvania University, used data on self-reported thefts from Ohio State University’s National Longitudinal Study of Youth, which followed more than 8,000 people who were 12 to 16 years old when the survey launched in 1996. In the 15 years that followed, participants were asked about a variety of topics, including stealing. The subjects were regularly asked whether they had stolen something in the past year and if so, how much it was worth."

Williams found that theft is relatively common, with about 16% of the participants reporting having stolen something in the past year. One in 5 men have swiped something; 1 in 10 women report doing the same. But people generally only steal for a short period of time, with less than 5% continuing to steal for more than a year.

“For the majority of offenders, property crime may simply be an exploratory phase,” Williams wrote. Once offenders entered their late teen years, their interest in continuing to steal dropped off dramatically, with most thieves under the age of 24, the study found. One reason the young thieves may have lost interest is that they mostly stole objects of little value, only netting about $37.50 per theft. And the thieves generally didn’t need the money; most of the thieves were well off, and being poor didn’t drive the study participants to steal more.

One potential issue with the study is that stealing was self-reported, so actual numbers could be higher.

Is tax cheating worst, better or about the same?

"Psychologists Have Uncovered a Troubling Feature of People Who Seem Nice All the Time"

"The irony is that a personality disposition normally seen as antisocial — disagreeableness — may actually be linked to 'pro-social' behavior,'" writes Psychology Today's Kenneth Worthy. "This connection seems to arise from a willingness to sacrifice one's popularity a bit to act in a moral and just way toward other people, animals or the environment at large. Popularity, in the end, may be more a sign of social graces and perhaps a desire to fit in than any kind of moral superiority."

Boston Globe Jeff Jacoby: "Democrats losing moral clarity on Israel"

"[B]elow the surface, America’s Israel-friendly consensus is splitting along the same left-vs.-right fault line that has polarized so many other issues. While support for Israel is overwhelming among Republicans and conservatives, it has been shrinking among Democrats and liberals. “The partisan gap in Mideast sympathies has never been wider,” reports Pew, with 73 percent of Republicans sympathetic to Israel in the ongoing conflict, but just 44 percent of Democrats. Respondents identifying as liberal Democrats were five times as likely as conservative Republicans to sympathize more with the Palestinians."

Thus is the Democratic Party losing its way on one of the great moral issues of our time.

For roughly the first third of Israel’s existence, Democrats tended to support the Jewish state more strongly than Republicans did. In a compelling new book, “Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel,” foreign-affairs thinker Joshua Muravchik writes that during the run-up to the Six Day War in 1967, “Israel was above all a cause championed by liberals.” So heartfelt was this support that even ardent Democratic opponents of the Vietnam War, such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Eugene McCarthy, advocated US military action on Israel’s behalf.

Only over the last 25 years has support for Israel grown so much greater among Republicans than among Democrats. The reasons for the divergence are many. On the right, they include the high value Republicans have attached to Israel as a stable ally in a very unstable region, as well as the migration to the GOP of evangelical Christians, many of whom support the Jewish state as a matter of transcendent conviction.

But on the left, the Israeli-Arab dispute itself has been redefined. (read more)

Video: Top 10 Reasons why Mario is NOT a Hero!

My nephews play and consume everything Mario Brothers video games. A while back I caught them watching this video. The Morality of Mario.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: 'You need a tandem social moral code to go along with it'

"Renowned astrophysicist and StarTalk Radio host Neil deGrasse Tyson has some pretty wild ideas for how we should improve the human body, but he turns serious as he explains how we should appreciate the fragility and finiteness of life."

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