As predicted, people judged behavior as less risky if they thought the behavior was morally justified or if it couldn’t be helped. For example, in one scenario, "Joe" was stuck in an elevator with strangers not wearing masks – he needed to mail "a crucial work document.” But in another scenario, Joe got stuck in the elevator on his way to pay a hostile drug dealer. They found that people judge how risky an activity is based on what they deem to be moral or immoral behavior. Researchers recently looked at how our moral judgments affect our perceptions of COVID risk. “In this way, perhaps we can just be ourselves again.” If you’re feeling burnt out, read McDougall’s case for uselessness. “It presents an alternative way to think of freedom – we must stop feeling that we have to be useful all the time, or seeing that there is no more to life than utility,” McDougall writes. Edward McDougall, a philosopher at Durham University in the United Kingdom, says this parable offers a valuable lesson about humanity. While useful trees get chopped down, the useless tree survives. In a parable, Zhuangzi explained that an old tree was “too twisted and gnarled to be used for beams or pillars,” with a trunk “too splotched and split to be used for a coffin.” A carpenter encounters the tree and deems it worthless lumber. Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi praised the virtue of uselessness.
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