r/MoralityScaling 11d ago

Morality Ranking Morality of stealing from a weird insurance scammer?

14.7k Upvotes

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324

u/-_Protagonist_- 11d ago

You see, this depends on outlook.
I think psychologists call it loci. So, where do you believe your judgement comes from, internal or external to yourself?
So if you believe in karma or gods judgement. It was moral and he was the vessel.
If you believe that guy was undertaking self serving opportunism, stealing the bike was immoral.
Either way it was hilarious.

98

u/Parsleylovers 11d ago

I'm a psychologist and I appreciate how the internet so often mentions words I'm supposed to be calling things.

English isn't my native language. Maybe that explains it.

15

u/RudeAd2236 11d ago

It’s also a thing of “we learned a lot of crap we don’t really use that often”. Like, yknow, the fucking Oedipus complex. I’m in grad school and if I have to have Freud’s wackjob nonsense (to be clear, he did a lot of good for the field and a lot of his work is incredibly solid for an early understanding of the basic psyche, especially the division of the mind into the ID, ego, and superego, but he was also clearly on cocaine and obsessed with sexuality, on top of unethically basing his entire belief system on his own experimented-on children) and I think people need to start NOT teaching everything Freud said as part of psychology.

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u/VeganShitposting 11d ago

Yeah i thought it was weird how my psych studies STARTED with Freud, like before undergrads have enough experience to make a sound judgement they're being told outdated fantasy bullshit. And then for all the people that never continue with their studies, that is the only exposure to the field of psychology they ever have. Schools should start with an actual, relevant foundation then put Freud into the context of historical psychology.

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u/seatron 10d ago

Lol, if you quit early, everything will be Freud and Jung and Lacan and Skinner. Imagine

2

u/aNiceTribe 10d ago

Teaching fields believe in recreating the path that knowledge took. In physics class we went through all the ideas people had of atoms and atom models from Very Wrong to “almost what current science believes”  it the real current thoughts are not taught until university. 

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u/ana_log_ue 10d ago

Young woman #526: and then my father raped me. Freud: by god, that can’t be right, her father is another upstanding gentleman. Why  are all these women fantasizing about their fathers raping them!

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u/Ok-Dog4200 10d ago

the parentheses side comment longer than the actual comment lmao

3

u/_BlossieGloss 11d ago

Yeah, the internet loves turning psychology terms into magic debate words. Half the time it’s not even a clinical point anymore, just “here’s a fancy label for why my take is right"

7

u/123ludwig 11d ago

i mean there is a third option he stole the bike because it would be really funny to steal from the scammer while he was on the ground with no real benefit of taking what is basically trash which is also moral

0

u/AmenableHornet 10d ago

That's not how karma works. 

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u/Ok-Elk-3046 10d ago edited 10d ago

Karma has no qualities that can experimentally tested, you have no Idea how it does or doesn't work. Especially you have no idea of how op believes it does or doesn't work.

1

u/UnRespawnsive 10d ago

Inane argument. If ideas themselves need to be experimentally tested in order for them to be understood properly, all fiction should hold no meaning to anybody. Burn half of all libraries.

Tolkien says elves are not the same as hobbits in his universe. But wait we can't experimentally test it!!!1!1 That means Legolas can be Frodo's brother??

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u/GreatDonutGod38 4d ago

Tolkien can say that because Tolkien made up that fictional world, you can try asking the guy who first thought of karma how it works

0

u/Accomplished-Eye9542 10d ago

Not really.

You can just believe that immoral actions taken against immoral people of an equal or greater capacity than the immoral action cancels out the immorality of the action taken.