Rates of religiously based terrorism would go through the roof. The problem is that people that, e.g., bomb abortion clinics believe that they are doing the morally correct thing, because it’s better to murder a few people than to allow those people to “murder” thousands of innocent “babies”. Likewise, you’d suddenly have people that are casually racist now immediately turn to full-on race war shit, because if you believe that nonwhite people are causing harm to the “white race” simply by existing, and you have a moral compass that you can’t ignore, then the moral thing to do is to prevent that harm by killing the people committing the harm, esp. when you believe that they’re irredeemable by virtue of genetics.
You could argue that “moral compass” means more than just a strong sense of right/wrong. Presumably, most people have that, even if we don’t describe it as such. I think OP intended something more like a “strong sense of harmony” wherein everyone has a shared common understanding of some greater good and therefore work towards it with common cause.
It’s still a fairly naive notion, but for an entirely different reason. Rather than self-righteous chaos, such a wish would lead to a sort of moral tyranny imposed by one single person’s preconceptions of what constitutes a moral life.
I think OP intended something more like a “strong sense of harmony"
Or, more succinctly, the wish was “everyone has my moral compass, and can’t ignore it”. Unfortunately, the foundations upon which people build their “moral compass” is almost as varied as people themselves. It’s one of the reasons politics exists, so that we can sort out where to draw the legal line in between differing beliefs, without resorting to the age-old practice of deciding who is right through a war which sorts out who is left.
Rates of religiously based terrorism would go through the roof. The problem is that people that, e.g., bomb abortion clinics believe that they are doing the morally correct thing, because it’s better to murder a few people than to allow those people to “murder” thousands of innocent “babies”. Likewise, you’d suddenly have people that are casually racist now immediately turn to full-on race war shit, because if you believe that nonwhite people are causing harm to the “white race” simply by existing, and you have a moral compass that you can’t ignore, then the moral thing to do is to prevent that harm by killing the people committing the harm, esp. when you believe that they’re irredeemable by virtue of genetics.
You could argue that “moral compass” means more than just a strong sense of right/wrong. Presumably, most people have that, even if we don’t describe it as such. I think OP intended something more like a “strong sense of harmony” wherein everyone has a shared common understanding of some greater good and therefore work towards it with common cause.
It’s still a fairly naive notion, but for an entirely different reason. Rather than self-righteous chaos, such a wish would lead to a sort of moral tyranny imposed by one single person’s preconceptions of what constitutes a moral life.
Or, more succinctly, the wish was “everyone has my moral compass, and can’t ignore it”. Unfortunately, the foundations upon which people build their “moral compass” is almost as varied as people themselves. It’s one of the reasons politics exists, so that we can sort out where to draw the legal line in between differing beliefs, without resorting to the age-old practice of deciding who is right through a war which sorts out who is left.