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PaperclipPerfector  11hr ago (text post)   328 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'm using a common-sense or consensus definition of evil

What's that? Whence consensus?

I know it when I see it. I think it's not particularly controversial that genocide is generally considered to be, at the very least, in bad taste.

Whence a consensus that evil means "in bad taste"? I guess perhaps you're not incorporating consensus at this level of generality, so are you instead just asserting that your definition of evil is "something done in bad taste, as measured by some vibes about a consensus" or something?

The "bad taste" phrasing was obviously tongue-in-cheek, but the serious point stands. You can be a moral anti-realist and still condemn genocide, because "condemning genocide" doesn't require believing in moral facts. It just requires having preferences about how humans should treat each other, noticing that most humans share those preferences, and being willing to enforce them.

Those are all necessary and sufficient conditions in your definition of evil? We can go through them one by one, but maybe let's just start with the last one. If, uh, someone (who?) isn't "willing to enforce" a "preference", then it's, uh, not evil to go against it? What even is "willing to enforce"? Like, does the enforcement need to be realized? Can it be weighed against other things? If the someone (who?) is like, "Yeah, I'm willing to enforce this, but due to other considerations (other priorities, something inherently difficult about detection or enforcement, etc.), I'm not going to put too much time and effort into it," does that still count for determining whether something is evil or not?

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