Some things need correction. Using samples composed of overwhelmingly white university students in social research is hilariously and obviously flawed. In that sense, lacking inclusion is like ignoring gravity.
If you're shopping a general theory about morality that encompases Christian morality and non-Christian morality, I don't see what there's to be worked up about.
Unless you haven't actually explored the world beyond your backyard. I have typically found Haidt's moral foundations to be pretty interesting but because he's always sold it as cross-cultural. So this seems a bit odd, honestly.
Extremely likely to be a virtue-signaling publicly stunt, TBQH.
All we need to do to end piracy or pornography is "no-platform" it, right?
Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Rational or not, it's better for bad ideas (ignoring the even more pernicious question of who decides which ideas are "bad") to be examined than have them fester in dark corners.
I suspect that the answer is "it depends on the culture". China seems to have a lot more control over the spread of anti-CCP ideas than Iran has over the spread of anti-regime ideas, and it isn't because of Iranian censors trying less or having worse tools. But the Iranian population seems to be much less conforming and more ready to rebel.
It's still somewhat effective in Iran, it's just not sufficiently effective to prevent protests.
The US has a number of natural experiments that show that censorship is effective at silencing someone. Look at what happened to Trump and Alex Jones after they were deplatformed. Their reach was cut a lot and that wasn't even state censorship.
Russia had a natural experiment after Gorbachev lifted speech codes. People described the renaissance of new ideas being spoken that were previously stifled. Censorship worked.
It makes sense that it works given our understanding of social contagion. People aren't designed to believe facts. They're designed to join a team and believe whatever stuff their team believes in. Things like taboos or censorship or blacklists are effective, however repellent they may be.
Given the choice, many people would rather get something for free rather than pay for it. Rather than simply admitting that there is something at least a little immoral about benefiting from someone else's work without paying for that work, they come up with elaborate rationalizations.
There's a sort of virtue in embracing the intellectual honesty of saying that you took that work because you wanted it and had the means. Call it the Genghis Kahn justification.
Even if the work is completely derivative, someone still put significant effort into compiling and organizing it. And their immorality of taking the work of others doesn't obviously justify the immorality of taking theirs.
The point is, it wasn't immoral of them to "take the work of others" to begin with. This is how culture works: mythology, classic stories like the Arthurian cycle, fables, lots of classic literature etc. came to be by just taking the stories and characters people liked and doing whatever the next artist wanted. (Today's equivalents are all owned by Disney, for example.) This is also how science and philosophy functioned for ages.
The worldview holding the modern copyright system to be the moral reality is the elaborate rationalization, ingrained into people by the interested parties. You can research the history of copyright law if you want.
This is a separate issue from caring about compensating and nurturing the artists, which is often what people who are mindful about this stuff do. Just not necessarily inside the "traditional" framework.
> Rather than simply admitting that there is something at least a little immoral about benefiting from someone else's work without paying for that work
But there isn't anything immoral about benefiting without paying. At least under consequentialist utilitarianism, one of the main doctrines in ethics.
And why would there be? Someone benefits but no one else loses. If someone has planted a try by the road and I relax in the shade for a few minutes, have I done anything wrong? If I admire a fine bit of architecture have I done something wrong? If I pause to watch the kids playing in the playground have I done something wrong?
> Rather than simply admitting that there is something at least a little immoral about benefiting from someone else's work without paying for that work
You've got it backwards. The onus is on you to provide a convincing argument that sharing documents without paying directly the authors is immoral.
If the document is useful and popular, then I see no immorality in sharing it without paying the author. For paper books, the readers do not pay the authors directly either, they pay the distributor the agreed price. In other cases, this agreed price is the marginal cost of file download.
