Moral parsimony

Ethics, Morality, and Sin

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Diagoras
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Moral parsimony

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Post by Diagoras »

To have ‘high moral parsimony’ means you have a small number of moral principles which apply over more circumstances without modification.

For example, when faced with a moral choice whether to help an injured person or not, you wouldn’t change your decision based on factors like whether they were a family member, a known criminal, etc.

Question for debate:

Is high moral parsimony desirable?

I encourage anyone who’s keen to join the debate to first take the ‘Morality Play’ test, here:

https://www.philosophyexperiments.com/m ... fault.aspx

As well as quantifying your own moral parsimony score relative to others, the site offers some interesting insights into common factors that might influence a person’s answers.

Important to note: the site doesn’t take a position on moral parsimony itself, so I believe this is a suitably unbiased way to gauge the strength of feeling toward high moral parsimony on this forum.

I’m willing to share my own score if there’s enough interest in the thread to generate a representative sample.

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Difflugia
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Re: Moral parsimony

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Post by Difflugia »

I ended up with a 66%. At first, I thought that some of the questions presented as binary shouldn't be, but then that's probably what someone with 66% moral parsimony would say.
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Re: Moral parsimony

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Post by Diagoras »

Thanks for taking the time. Seems I have not many takers.

Perhaps the thread title’s not clear, or people don’t trust these kinds of online ‘tests’. In any case, I ended up at 42%, so I was naturally intrigued to read of someone else who scored so differently.

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