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PaperclipPerfector  9hr ago (text post)   265 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 a score of 13 when compared to an average of 27. Interestingly, I correctly anticipated which of my responses it would say were in tension with each other. Obviously, I'm now required to pedantically justify myself as to why my responses are not really in tension with one another.

>So long as they do not harm others, individuals should be free to pursue their own ends vs. The possession of drugs for personal use should be decriminalised

I agree these are slightly in tension with one another. To justify myself, I would argue that many drugs cause harm to people other than the user (e.g. drug-induced psychosis causing people to behave violently) and also cause distributed harm to society as a whole. The comparison to legal alcohol and motor vehicles is a valid counter-argument to this line of reasoning, although I'm perfectly willing to argue that motor vehicles being legal passes a cost-benefit analysis. Does alcohol pass such an analysis? I don't think it's an obviously ridiculous question, but I concede that I may be falling victim to status quo bias in this particular instance.

>Judgements about works of art are purely matters of taste vs. Michaelangelo is indubitably one of history's finest artists

I feel on much firmer footing with this one. I don't believe that one artwork is "objectively" better than another (except, perhaps, in the sense that some art is unfalsifiable and some isn't). When I responded in the affirmative to the latter question, I simply meant that Michelangelo has widely been considered one of history's finest artists for centuries, without making any commentary on his "objective" merit as an artist. Accurately citing an opinion poll that found an approval rating of 60% for $Politician doesn't in any way imply that I personally approve of said politician, nor that the politician in question is "objectively" good at his job.

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