Morality Quiz
Today, while eating lunch with my friends/coworkers, we had an interesting discussion about morals in different situations. I remembered reading about a morality quiz a week or two ago. Some quick googling found the quiz at philosophersnet called Morality Play. I spent about two minutes flipping through some questions, and it made me squirm.
Before starting the quiz, I thought my own sense of morals was fairly rational and self-consistent. As I clicked through the questions,I could see my answers waver in response to very minor differences in what was fundamentally the same basic scenario. I found this both mildly disturbing and humbling. A few of my coworkers tried the quiz and became so uncomfortable that they had to stop part way through.
Sample Question
Q: A charity collection takes place in your office. For every UK£10.00 given, a blind person’s sight is restored. Instead of donating UK£10.00, you use the money to treat yourself to a cocktail after work. Are you morally responsible for the continued blindness of the person who would have been treated had you made the donation?
A. Responsible/Partly Responsible/Not Responsible
What do you find out?
If you complete the quiz, it presents a report of what factors you tend to consider when making moral decisions. The factors that this quiz measured are:
- Geographical distance (someone next door versus the other side of the world)
- Family Relatedness (your mother or child versus a stranger)
- Acts and Omissions (if performing an action is better/worse than doing nothing)
- Scale (hurting 1 to save 10 different than hurting 500 to save 50000)
- Cultural distance (someone from a similar culture versus a very different culture)
I really recommend you give the quiz a shot, it takes about 10 minutes and definitely will get you thinking.
January 23rd, 2008 at 9:24 pm
Very interesting. I took it, very thought provoking.
January 23rd, 2008 at 10:00 pm
indeed very interesting… I’m tempted to take this multiple times. It be interested to see if I am morally consistent. I also wonder how much mood would tend to change the answers. Surely life experience would change things too. Would be interesting to see metrics broken down by age, etc.