Science Tuesday: Standards Set by Communities Deeds Freak Out Community

When jurors are asked to determine if the defendent in an obsenity trial has "violated community standards," they are seldom given a definite heuristic to evaluate these standards. But in one case in Florida, the defence is arguing that community standards are nothing more than behavior that is standard for the community and has found a novel way to assess these behaviors.

Rather than showing broad availability of sex-related Web sites, he is trying to show both accessibility and interest in the material within the jurisdiction of the First Circuit Court for Santa Rosa County, where the trial is taking place.

The search data he is using is available through a service called Google Trends (trends.google.com). It allows users to compare search trends in a given area, showing, for instance, that residents of Pensacola are more likely to search for sexual terms than some more wholesome ones.

“We tried to come up with comparison search terms that would embody typical American values,” Mr. Walters said. “What is more American than apple pie?” But according to the search service, he said, “people are at least as interested in group sex and orgies as they are in apple pie.”

The idea of community morals being determined by the average morality of the community is sort of frightning. The lowest-common-denominator morality this seems to promote is hardly what we should aspire to. Laws don't exist to enforce or create guidelines for moral action, but rather to regulate behavior that infringes inappropriately on the choices and actions of others. The real danger is that having a better picture of what we are will promote moral complacency. The actions of others have nothing to do with guides to moral behavior.