Morality Survey Coming Soon 100 Questions for Academics Adults and Children
A good morality survey should do more than collect quick opinions. It should invite careful thought, use clear language, and make room for different ages and levels of experience.
Our morality survey is now being prepared and will be available for completion shortly. It will include 100 questions for each of three classes of people, as defined on the home page:
Academics
Adults aged 14 and over
Children under 14
The aim is to create a thoughtful, structured way to explore moral judgement across key areas of human life. The questions are being organised into ten categories, covering personal values, social duties, difficult choices, technology, future generations, and moral learning.
The survey is being prepared with three groups in mind
The survey will not use one single set of wording for everyone. It is being prepared for three different classes of participants, each with 100 questions suited to that group.
That structure matters because moral questions can be understood in different ways depending on age, training, vocabulary, and life experience. A question written for an academic audience may need more precision. A question for a child under 14 may need simpler wording and a clearer situation. A question for adults aged 14 and over may sit between those two levels, using everyday examples while still asking serious moral questions.
The three classes are:
Class of participant | Survey approach |
Academics | Questions can explore concepts, reasoning, and distinctions in more detail. |
Adults aged 14 and over | Questions use clear language and practical moral situations. |
Children under 14 | Questions are shaped to be age-aware, direct, and easier to understand. |
Each group will receive 100 questions, giving enough scope to cover a wide range of moral topics without relying on a single issue or narrow set of examples.
The survey is being designed so that every category has a clear purpose. Some categories focus on personal character, such as honesty and integrity. Others focus on social relationships, such as compassion, consent, fairness, and responsibility. Other sections look outward, towards technology, future generations, animals, the environment, and the ways people learn moral wisdom over time.
The 100 questions are split into ten moral categories
The questions are divided into ten categories. This gives the survey a stable structure and helps ensure that morality is treated as a broad field, not reduced to one kind of issue.
Each category will contain questions that ask participants to reflect on values, choices, responsibilities, and consequences.
Category | What it covers |
Foundational moral principles | Basic ideas about right, wrong, duty, value, and moral reasoning. |
Empathy and compassion for others | Care, kindness, concern, and responding to suffering. |
Truthfulness and integrity | Honesty, promises, consistency, and personal character. |
Fairness, rights, and justice | Equal treatment, rules, punishment, freedom, and responsibility. |
Consent and boundaries | Respect for choice, privacy, personal limits, and clear agreement. |
Trust and social responsibility | Reliability, community, shared duties, and keeping faith with others. |
Harm, risk, and difficult choices | Trade-offs, uncertainty, danger, and moral pressure. |
Technology, power, and responsible AI | Digital systems, influence, decision-making, and the ethical use of advanced tools. |
Future generations and other beings | Duties to children yet to be born, animals, nature, and long-term effects. |
Moral learning and wisdom | Growth, reflection, judgement, humility, and learning from mistakes. |
This structure allows the survey to move from basic ideas to more complex situations. It also avoids treating morality as only a matter of rules. Rules matter, but moral life also includes care, trust, judgement, courage, restraint, and the ability to learn.
Foundational principles set the base for the survey
The first category focuses on foundational moral principles. These are the ideas that often sit beneath more specific moral questions.
Questions in this area may explore ideas such as:
Whether some actions are wrong in themselves
How intentions affect moral judgement
Whether consequences should guide decisions
How duties and rights should be understood
Whether moral rules should apply to everyone in the same way
This category is especially useful because people often disagree about moral issues for deeper reasons than they first realise. Two people may reach different answers because one gives more weight to consequences, while another gives more weight to duties, fairness, or personal rights.
For academics, this area may invite more precise reflection on moral theory. For adults aged 14 and over, it may use practical examples. For children under 14, it may focus on simple situations involving promises, sharing, kindness, and responsibility.
The goal is not to force one moral theory onto every participant. The goal is to ask clear questions that show how people reason when they face moral choices.
Care, truth, and fairness form the social core
Several categories focus on how people treat one another in everyday life.
Empathy and compassion for others looks at how people respond to need, pain, vulnerability, and distress. These questions may ask when people should help, how far care should extend, and what kind of duty people have towards strangers as well as family or friends.
Truthfulness and integrity examines honesty, trustworthiness, and the link between words and actions. This category is likely to include questions about lying, keeping promises, admitting mistakes, and acting consistently even when nobody is watching.
Fairness, rights, and justice deals with one of the most contested areas of moral life. People care deeply about fairness, but they do not always mean the same thing by it. Fairness can mean equal treatment, need-based support, respect for rights, proportionate consequences, or giving people what they have earned.
These categories belong together because they shape social life at every level. A family, school, workplace, community, or country cannot function well without some shared expectations about care, truth, and justice.
The survey will give participants a way to think through those expectations without reducing them to slogans. Moral judgement often becomes clearer when a question moves from an abstract principle to a specific situation.
For example, people may strongly support honesty in general. A more difficult question is whether honesty should change when telling the full truth may seriously hurt someone, protect someone, or expose wrongdoing. The same is true of fairness. Many people support fairness, but disagree about what fairness requires when resources, responsibility, or risk are unevenly shared.
Consent, boundaries, and trust receive careful attention
Consent and boundaries are central to respectful relationships. This category covers personal choice, privacy, bodily boundaries, emotional limits, shared spaces, and clear agreement.
The wording of these questions needs care, especially for children under 14. The aim is to handle the subject in a way that is clear, respectful, and suitable for the participant group. At its simplest, consent includes understanding that people can say yes, say no, change their mind, and expect their boundaries to be respected.
For adults and academics, this category may also raise more complex issues. These can include power differences, social pressure, informed consent, privacy, and situations where silence or confusion should not be treated as agreement.
Trust and social responsibility sit closely beside consent and boundaries. Trust is not only a private feeling. It is also a social practice. People rely on one another to tell the truth, keep promises, follow shared rules, and take reasonable care not to harm others.
Questions in this category may explore duties such as:
Returning something that does not belong to you
Speaking up when someone is treated unfairly
Keeping a confidence
Taking responsibility for a mistake
Helping maintain safe and respectful shared spaces
These questions are practical because moral life is practical. Most people do not live inside abstract debates. They make choices in classrooms, homes, online spaces, friendships, communities, and public life.
Difficult choices test how values work under pressure
Some moral questions are simple to state but hard to answer. The category on harm, risk, and difficult choices deals with situations where every option may carry a cost.
These questions may involve:
Choosing between competing duties
Weighing short-term harm against long-term benefit
Acting with uncertainty
Deciding who should bear a risk
Responding when no option feels fully right
This part of the survey matters because moral judgement is often tested under pressure. People may agree on broad principles, then disagree when those principles come into conflict.
A question about harm may ask whether it is better to prevent a large risk to many people or protect one person from a certain smaller harm. A question about responsibility may ask whether someone is blameworthy for a bad outcome they did not intend but could have foreseen.
The survey will not treat difficult choices as puzzles with neat answers. Instead, these questions help reveal how participants balance duties, outcomes, intentions, rights, care, and responsibility.
This category may be especially important for comparing patterns of reasoning across the three participant groups. Academics may use technical distinctions. Adults aged 14 and over may draw on life experience. Children under 14 may focus more directly on harm, fairness, and whether someone meant to do wrong.
Each form of reasoning can reveal something valuable.
Technology, AI, and power are part of modern morality
Moral questions now extend into digital life. The survey will include a category on technology, power, and responsible AI.
This area recognises that technology is not morally neutral once it affects choices, relationships, opportunities, privacy, and public life. AI systems can sort information, recommend actions, generate content, support decisions, and influence what people see or believe. That gives technology a moral dimension.
Questions in this category may explore issues such as:
How much control people should have over automated decisions
Whether AI should be used in sensitive areas
Who is responsible when a system causes harm
How privacy should be protected
How power should be limited when technology affects many people
For academics, these questions may involve careful distinctions about agency, accountability, bias, and governance. For adults aged 14 and over, they may focus on daily digital life, online choices, privacy, trust, and responsibility. For children under 14, questions may be framed around simple examples such as games, devices, images, messages, and asking permission before using or sharing information.
This category is included because moral education cannot stop at older examples. People now make moral choices with tools that can reach far beyond a room, a school, or a neighbourhood.
Future generations and other beings widen the circle
A moral survey should not only ask how people treat those close to them now. It should also ask what people owe to those who cannot easily speak for themselves.
The category on future generations and other beings looks at duties beyond immediate human relationships. This may include children not yet born, animals, ecosystems, and people affected by long-term decisions.
Questions in this area may ask how far present choices should take account of future harm. They may also ask how people think about non-human animals, nature, shared resources, and the limits of human power.
This category can be challenging because the beneficiaries of moral concern may be distant, silent, or unable to respond. A future person cannot thank us. An animal cannot argue in human language. A damaged ecosystem may not show the full cost of harm straight away.
That makes the questions more demanding, but also more necessary. Many serious moral issues involve delay. The effects of a choice may appear years later, or fall on someone who had no say in the decision.
The survey will give space to those questions because a full account of morality must include more than immediate personal preference.
Moral learning and wisdom bring the survey back to growth
The final category is moral learning and wisdom. This section asks how people change, learn, repair harm, and develop better judgement.
Moral life is not only about choosing correctly in a single moment. It is also about becoming more honest, more careful, more compassionate, and more responsible over time.
Questions in this category may explore:
Whether people can learn from moral mistakes
How apology and repair should work
What makes someone wise
Whether good judgement improves with experience
How people should respond when they realise they were wrong
This category gives the survey an important balance. Without it, morality can sound like a test that people either pass or fail. Real moral life is more complex. People grow. They misunderstand. They apologise. They change their habits. They learn from others.
For children, this area may focus on saying sorry, making things right, and learning why an action hurt someone. For adults, it may include responsibility, reflection, and humility. For academics, it may raise deeper questions about moral development, virtue, education, and practical wisdom.
What happens next
The morality survey is being prepared now and will be available for completion shortly. Once ready, it will offer 100 questions for academics, 100 questions for adults aged 14 and over, and 100 questions for children under 14.
The ten-category structure is intended to make the survey broad, balanced, and useful. It covers the foundations of moral judgement, the care people owe one another, honesty, justice, consent, trust, hard choices, technology, future responsibility, and moral growth.
When the survey becomes available, participants will be able to complete the version that matches their class as defined on the home page. Until then, the current work is focused on preparing the questions carefully so the survey is clear, respectful, and meaningful for each group.
A strong morality survey should help people think, not simply answer. That is the standard this survey is being prepared to meet.
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