Actually, the question involves two situations: One where it's just yourself, and the other when it involves other people.

If it's just you, then in order to answer that question you have to take it to the ultimate price.

Would you die for your principal?

If someone's offering you nonessential luxuries... stuff you can live without... then it's easy to stick to a principal, and anyone who can be bribed away from their principals with jewels and luxuries obviously don't have any.

But when those material bribes involve stuff you need to survive, that's when your principals are really put to the test.

If you know you would die for a principal - that no amount of material bribery like food is going to change your mind even though you're starving - then okay, you can't be bribed, and it can be known that you will stick to your principal, and that's impressive, because not many people can, although it's heavily factored by whether or not that death also comes with a lot of pain...

Pain uber-complicates the evaluation, not just because extreme pain can be measured to mess up a person's head to the extent where they don't really know what they're doing, but also because with extreme pain comes a point where you just want to die... which is why you have to distinguish torture from lethal bribery when evaluating a person's dedication to his principals... with lethal bribery you still know what you're doing, but with torture you won't.

If you don't think you'd die for a principal, then you've got a price, somewhere in the range of jewels and luxuries for no principals on one side to death for absolute principals on the other.

But none of that really amounts to a conundrum. Where it becomes a real conundrum is when maintenance of a principal involves someone else's life.

Most everyone will say without flinching that they would dump a principal if sticking to it will cause someone else to die, but actually, when you support a politician sending soldiers to die over principals, you are doing exactly that, and those soldiers are not even dieing for a person-level principals... they're dieing for the principals of a meta-entity called the state.

So, if it's just you, and you can be bribed with non-essential luxuries, then you have no principals. If you cannot be bribed even at the cost of your life for a principal, then you will stick to it, and everything else in-between amounts to knowing your price...

BUT... ask yourself what principal you would stick to at the cost of someone *else* life, and take note of whether you're as principled about it as you thought.