Here is a nifty piece I wrote about ethicability and Moral DNA back in 2010:

Does ethicability methodology do justice to the existential moral value of trading, itself an expression of intrinsic human integrity. Take, for example, Love.

Many people these days think that compassion/love require the successful to give to the unsuccessful — and that if the successful are loath to give as generously as the unsuccessful want, the successful should be forced at gunpoint to do so.

But what if the very act of compassionate giving by the Giver serves to create a self-absorbed sense of entitlement to receive on the part of the Receiver, thereby turning that transaction completely away from the solid moral basis of fair trade or even mere generosity/kindness to something looking much more like serfdom — where the Giver is the serf?

What is the role of Love in all that? Is a stern parent who lays down strict rules and often tells children ‘No’ really less loving than the parent who gives children too much freedom and sweeties on demand?

And what to call the work done by entrepreneurs who toil to invent new products and sell them honestly? Isn’t that a form of Love, sharing one’s energy and mind generously and fairly with the wider mass of humanity?

Now there is a new Moral DNA test. So Crawf Minima and I have taken it. I ended up as a Philosopher, she as an Angel. Sounds right!

Other less worthy if not odious categories available are Teacher, Judge, Enforcer and Guardian. For no obvious reason the category Jerk is not included, even though many people fit it perfectly.

What exercises like this miss is the idea of scale and timescale. Take, say, compassion as opposed to (say) excellence.

You can have as much compassion as you like for people you can see, but what about the people you don’t see? Is it compassionate to borrow at stupid rates from the future to pay for the present? What about the vulnerability of modern society to tiny disruptive forces? How to manage risk?

Here is a blistering article by Brendan O’Neill on the Cult of Emotional Correctness as evinced by the mawkish reaction to the Hillsborough football disaster by self-pitying Liverpudlians:

Thou must make a public performance of sorrow. Thou must never deviate from the emotional script. Thou must not question why we weep, year in and year out, and just get on with weeping. Thou must wallow in one-off tragedies forever and severely chastise anyone who says “Life moves on”. Those are the stifling, speech-restricting, thought-policing, miserable, mawkish rules of emotionally correct modern Britain, and they were written and made gospel on the back of the Hillsborough disaster 22 years ago. God help anyone who deviates from them…

Somehow these Moral DNA questionnaires seek to categorise our moral responses in little tidy boxes of Emotional Correctness.

Still, it’s all good clean fun. And Angels are angelic.