Moral Flexibility

Morality is one of those vague concepts that's defined loosely enough to provide hours of meaningless debate. Allow me to clarify the issue here, and hopefully you can shut down anyone who poses vague hypothetical morality questions.

I recently tried to take this morality quiz: http://www.philosophersmag.com/bw/games/taboo.htm Here's the first question:

A small boy is playing happily on a swing in a local playground when an older girl pushes him off and hurts him for no other reason than that she wants to play on the swing. Are her actions morally wrong?

The options are Yes or No. This question is frustrating, because it is not clear what is being asked, is it asking:

1) From the girl's perception of humanity's viewpoint, are the girl's actions moral?
2) From my perception of humanity's viewpoint, are the girl's actions moral?
3) From the abstract viewpoint of the girls' relevant community, are the girl's actions moral?
4) From the girl's perception of the viewpoint of the girl's relevant community, are the girl's actions moral?
5) From the girl's personal viewpoint, are the girl's actions moral?
6) From my perception of the viewpoint of my local community, are the girl's actions moral?
7) From my personal viewpoint, are the girl's actions moral?

Morals are a set of guidelines that define what behavior is right or wrong. The problem is that each person has a different set of guidelines that they are using. These guidelines must be justified: with a set of beliefs, religious or otherwise; by adopting what they perceive to be the generally accepted collective morality of the populace at the local, national, and/or global levels; or with a combination of the two. Got it?

So obviously whether or not the girl's actions are moral depends entirely on what specifc question 1-7 we're asking. Let's discuss the differences between these viewpoints.

Whenever someone asks: "Is it moral if..." what they're really asking is if the behavior exhibited by the scenario is right or wrong when set against some moral guidelines. It is not always obvious which moral guidelines they are referring to, so it is important to narrow it down:

Are we talking about personal, local community, national, global, or humanity based moral guidelines?
Are we talking about how my or the involved person's morals would evaluate the situation?
Are we talking about actual or perceived morals (for the cases of collective morals)?

It is important to distinguish actual from perceived morals when talking about the behavior of other people. A person's actions may be moral according to what they perceive to be the moral guidelines of a community, but may not hold up against the actual moral guidelines of the collective community. It is important to note that the actual collective morality of a collection of people is a worthy topic of debate.

Most people justify their morals at least partially upon what they believe are the morals of their local communites. Because of this correlation, it is clear why some people are confused and don't see the difference between personal and community morality. This problem is exacerbated by what I believe is the common perception that, based on the moral guidelines of humanity, it is not moral to not base your morals at least partly on the morals of humanity.

Since it is not clear what is being asked in the quiz, I refused to ignore the absense of a "You're not making sense" selection and optioned to vote with my feet. The web site seems to know that the quiz is ambiguous but I don't think they realize that this makes the quiz useless.