Blue and Orange Morality: Difference between revisions
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* A literal example from Cold War days. Two power blocs that found it pretty difficult to understand each other's particular ethics and moralities - the capitalist and communist - were facing each other down over a divided German border for over forty years. When NATO had its annual manoevres and field exercises in West Germany, rather than risk offence to the Russians by denoting the "invading from the East" faction the Red Army, and making it obvious by calling the "defending from the West" side the white Army, the convention evolved that called the two sides in NATO wargames "Blue" and "Orange". A whole generation of NATO officers passed through their countries' armed forces thinking of the Warsaw Pact as "Orange Army" and their own side as "Blue Army"...
** Watergate is the perfect example: The Russians couldn't believe Nixon, a powerful and effective national leader, was really brought down by the kind of things that were a matter of course in the USSR.
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* People with certain kinds of psychological disorders and conditions, like autism. Some of these are usually considered amoral, or lack of a recognition of morality; however, there are people like this who hate things that are absolutely normal, accept things that most people disdain, judge other people by things that are usually not associated with morality, and - even for the high-functioning ones who can brute-force through rote memorisation their way into faking normality - simply cannot understand the connotations, insinuations, hidden meanings and unwritten rules that neurotypicals operate under and find obvious.▼
▲*** Not exactly, the [[wikipedia:Chernobyl|collapse of the Soviet Union]] wasn't from Chernobyl alone, it was a multi-faceted situation involving many different elements. Economic collapse looms largest amongst these causes, as they took Reagan's bait and engaged in a major arms race while fighting a major war in Afghanistan, something their economy couldn't afford. Meanwhile, Gorbachev's attempt to liberalize their political system (Glasnost and Peristroika) led to increasing unrest and ethnic disputes that they simply did not have the military manpower available to shut down with force as they'd done for forty years, nor the desire as it was antithetical to the whole notion of Glasnost and Peristroika to begin with. The increasing unrest and apparent failure of Glasnost and Peristroika led to an attempted military coup, which failed. However, it paved the way for the various outlying republics to lose confidence in the central government, particularly given that the central government was resorting to heavy taxation of these provinces to pay for everything in the economic downturn. They began declaring their indepencence, and suddenly, the USSR was no more. Chernobyl, though a tremendous disaster, was not the largest element precipitating the crisis, merely [[Goddamned Bats|one of many]].
▲* People with certain kinds of psychological disorders and conditions, like autism. Some of these are usually considered amoral, or lack of a recognition of morality; however there are people like this who hate things that are absolutely normal, accept things that most people disdain, judge other people by things that are usually not associated with morality, and - even for the high-functioning ones who can brute-force through rote memorisation their way into faking normality - simply cannot understand the connotations, insinuations, hidden meanings and unwritten rules that neurotypicals operate under and find obvious.
* This argument is occasionally used to justify (although not necessarily ''defend'') questionable business practices—why should a corporation operate based on ethics similar to interpersonal relationships when it only exists to make money as efficiently as possible?
* The codes of conduct held by various established organised crime - as opposed to [[Obviously Evil]] street thug gangs - and esoteric groups can often be incomprehensible to "outsiders".
* This can occur quite frequently between atheists and theists, given that the two groups have entirely different precepts that they consider to be axiomatic (i.e. evident, obvious, requiring no proof).
* Even though you might say current Western society is "descended" from them, the ancient Romans (among other past societies) sometimes might as well be aliens to us, between the casual practice of infanticide, fights to the death being a celebrated form of entertainment, and suicide being a much more acceptable reaction to failure. It's part of why works like ''I, Claudius'' and ''Rome'' are so fascinating. Even Saint Augustine, writing "just" in the fifth century, couldn't understand why the legend of Lucretia made the suicide of a rape victim something heroic.
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* Until the end of [[WW 1|WW1]] the British army still regularly used corporal punishments that would be considered barbaric today. Capital punishment for cowardice was common and during the 18th and 19th
* Jonathan Haidt's observations, which became the basis of ''The Righteous Mind'', highlighted this. In essence, there are moral foundations that can be classified under broad categories like care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity. He asserts that not only do these impact one's individual moral framework, but that these can also lead to wildly differing views, beliefs, ideologies, etc. based on what foundations take precedence. As a consequence, this can help explain why Right and Left-leaning people can view the same thing in incredibly varied interpretations and why it's difficult for human beings to talk on the same page.
* Libertarians insist they do not fall under the traditional "right vs. left" scale or, if they do, it's secondary to their primary philosophy. The introduction of a libertarian vs. authoritarian axis has generally been accepted among those that try to quantify political views.
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