Do your principles hold when the framing shifts?
Consistency measures whether your principles survive contact with different contexts. It's easy to be principled in the abstract — consistency reveals whether those principles hold when the framing shifts, the stakes change, or the social pressure pushes differently.
Inconsistency is the most common ethical failure — not because people are hypocrites, but because they genuinely don't notice when the same principle demands the same action in a different costume. Consistency is the difference between having values and performing values.
Companies that publicly champion social responsibility while using aggressive tax structures to avoid contributing to the societies they profit from. The principle of 'paying your fair share' applies consistently — or it doesn't apply at all.
People who defend speech they agree with but want to restrict speech they find offensive. The consistency test isn't whether you support speech you like — it's whether you support the principle even when the content makes you uncomfortable.
We use mirror-pair scenarios: the same ethical dilemma presented with surface-level changes (different people, different contexts, different framing). Your consistency score is the inverse of the gap between your choices on matched pairs.
Write down three principles you believe you hold strongly. Over the next week, notice every time a situation invokes one of them. At the end of the week, review: did you actually apply the principle every time, or only when it was convenient? The gap between belief and application is your consistency frontier.