The current culture of user engagement with media. When a news story breaks out, it's always framed from a moral standpoint and the outlet (whether it's network news, BuzzFeed, or some celebrity sharing an article) tries to foster user engagement by asking, "Is this okay? Why should or shouldn't this happen? What's your opinion?"
If this is how users digest and engage with the stories of the day, it's no wonder we're so polarized and exhausted with each other. All we ever do is bicker over fickle, diverse morals. Why not deeply examine policy? Why not talk about effectiveness, efficiency, whether something does what it's intended to do? Numbers, data, returns. Most people don't get a chance to exercise those analytical muscles, but they
love reacting and sharing opinions. They've been trained to, encouraged to. It's partly why we're so quick to pitch strawmen, to draw caricatures of each other, to evaluate political candidates based on how good they make us feel, not whether their methods achieve what they say they do.
Morality is important. But morality is also subjective. And moral stances on certain issues unfortunately tend to predict moral stances on other things, encouraging partisanship (which, if we're evaluating effectiveness, is a great way to ensure user engagement -- but a terrible way to get anything else done).
TL;DR: Let's flirt with objectivity by asking "Does it?" and "How?" more often than "Is it okay?" I'd like to think we'd have a better time finding common ground that way. We may still not agree on everything, but surely we can agree on a hell of a lot more than we've been led to believe.
/endrant
