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PaperclipPerfector  9hr ago (text post)   265 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for January 21, 2026

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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 am disappointed tbh. I spend time answering those questions in the best way possible (and they are not written to make that easy, they are loaded with weasel words that make figuring out what they mean very elusive) and what they give me is "if God is good, why suffering exists?" Oh come on, that's weak sauce. No, I mean, theodicy is a real philosophical question, but not exactly a novel one worth spending time answering questions.

But at least it's real. The other "contradiction" is "these two beliefs are not strictly contradictory". Well, dudes, if they are not, why the heck are you listing them as contradictions then?

And the third one I got is a cheap trick on "will you be literally dead instantly if you don't get it? No? Then it's not "necessary"." Ugh. I wonder if that's the same definition of "necessary" that the philosophers use when applying for their next grant.

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