NSEW

A few years ago, when quite a few of us were procrastinating during our PhD’s, we stumbled upon the Political Compass web site. It defined your political leaning not just by traditional left/right categories, but also whether you were social libertarian/ authoritarian. It then placed your position on a Cartesian grid and you could compare yourself to dictators, humanitarians, etc. Most of us turned out to be left leaning libertarians. My score was –7 (ie left) and –6.05 (ie social libertarian).

Anyway, recently I was thinking whether the following two scales would also form a compass of some sort. Maybe it’s exactly the same as the political compass, I’ll have to think about it. Here are my two scales.

1) The first one is in regards to legislative law.

After the fact ----------------------------------------- Preventative

Examples.
After the fact: The law against murder exists to provide justice after the act has been committed It is assumed that a person will murder someone whether or not the law exists.
Preventative: The law against murder exists because, if it didn’t, everyone would go about murdering willy-nilly.

2) The second scale is with respect to your social conscience.

Selfish ------------------------------------------------------ Selfless

Examples.
Selfish: You only do things to benefit yourself and this ultimately benefits society as a whole.
Selfless: You only do things to benefit others and this ultimately benefits you.

Do you think this would make a good compass? Where would you put yourself?

Aside: I think the second scale may also apply to relationships. I have seen couples where one is at one end, and the partner is at the other. Seeing these couples and how they have gone, only one seems to get hurt, the selfless one. I think you need to be on the same side for both to be happy. Is this too simplistic?