An interesting test, evaluating your moral judgements towards some bizarre situations. The situations presented are activities which are harmless (at least in a narrow sense), private and consensual, yet violate strong social norms. For example, how would you morally evaluate the actions of a family, which cat has been killed by a car in front of their home. Instead of diving in to grief for the dead pet, the family cooked it and ate it for dinner.
The intention of the test is to demonstrate that there are tensions in the way that people reason about morality. There three dimension towards each situation, aiming to show your level of tolerance towards those situations, your judgement whether on not the society should interfere to punish or prevent that behaviour and whether morally wrong actions depend on a specific culture, or they are universal.
The other tension in moral reasoning has to do with the role of reason and emotion in moral judgements. One of the interesting things is that people who have very strong emotional responses to those stories frequently find it difficult to provide an explanation or justification for what they are feeling. People have gut feelings that give them emphatic moral convictions, and they struggle to rationalize them after the fact. The dangers of rooting moral attitudes in emotion are obvious. It means that a “yuk-factor” might lead us to condemn actions – and even people – we have no good reason to condemn.