| It would be ridiculous if it were true. The methodology here seems a bit muddled and I’m not confident that they’ve measured what they think they’ve measured. Many people do perceive a difference in how upsetting a death is. For example, we’ve got two people. Kevin killed an able-bodied adult male. Tom killed a 3 year old girl. Based on nothing more than that, do you dislike Kevin or Tom more? Maybe I’m not supposed to have a preference here, but I’m definitely feeling angrier at Tom. The same is true with men and women. There was a rather famous case with John Ellis, the executioner. He’d executed many men and he’d been okay with it. But when he was ordered to execute Edith Thomas, she was so terrified that she collapsed and had to be dragged to the gallows. He resigned the following year and had multiple suicide attempts, and was ultimately successful in taking his own life. He killed people for a living, but killing a woman affected him more deeply. This was over a century ago, so I don’t think this had anything to do with wokeness. Meanwhile, studies have shown that people tend to view things as being more dangerous when they’re tied to immorality. For example, when asked how dangerous it is for a doctor to leave her child in a car for 15 minutes while she performs lifesaving CPR on an accident victim, people thought that was safer than the woman who left her child in a car for 15 minutes to have sex with her affair partner. Obviously the danger to the child is the same, but our moral judgement is different. So questions about ICE agents are probably colored by that. If a poor African villager doesn’t feed their child because the have no money or food, is that better or worse than an ICE agent who doesn’t feed their child because they’re too busy arresting people for “looking like an illegal immigrant?” Is there some kind of bias being measured here? Yes, I think so. But I’m not confident that it’s even remotely comparable to what the author claims it is. |