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PaperclipPerfector  8hr ago (text post)   236 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for January 21, 2026

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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Interesting site:

https://www.philosophyexperiments.com/health/Default.aspx

It asks you 30 agree/disagree questions on a variety of "philosophical" topics, and then outputs a score calculating the inherent "tension" or cognitive dissonance in your answers.

The average score is 27% out of 100%, I score a pleasant 7%, but only because:

There are no objective moral standards; moral judgements are merely an expression of the values of particular cultures And also that: Acts of genocide stand as a testament to man's ability to do great evil

The tension between these two beliefs is that, on the one hand, you are saying that morality is just a matter of culture and convention, but on the other, you are prepared to condemn acts of genocide as 'evil'. But what does it mean to say 'genocide is evil'? To reconcile the tension, you could say that all you mean is that to say 'genocide is evil' is to express the values of your particular culture. It does not mean that genocide is evil for all cultures and for all times. However, are you really happy to say, for example, that the massacre of the Tutsi people in 1994 by the Hutu dominated Rwandan Army was evil from the point of view of your culture but not evil from the point of view of the Rwandan Army, and what is more, that there is no sense in which one moral judgement is superior to the other? If moral judgements really are 'merely the expression of the values of a particular culture', then how are the values which reject genocide and torture at all superior to those which don ot

I'm using a common-sense or consensus definition of evil, and I don't think this is an actual contradiction. So I'm pleased to say I have zero philosophical dissonance? Who knows.

I got one disagreement but once I saw it I changed my mind on one of the questions (an atheism one). So basically no disagreements. Maybe would have been more interesting to see more disagreements.

The "WW2 was a just war?" Also seemed like a bad question. I just answered it from Hitler's perspective. No he shouldn't have started WW2 for more living room for the Germans, or out of his weird race war ideology. For other countries defending themselves or acting in defense of others it seems like a just war though.

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