Background. During the COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers appeared to shift toward more efficiency-oriented medical decision making as resources became increasingly scarce. However, it remains unclear whether this shift was driven by the experience of scarcity itself or by the use of more concretely formulated ethical principles. This study investigates whether a national crisis influences public support for health care priority setting principles, and whether abstract versus concrete formulations of these principles affect that support. Design. We conducted a pre-registered online experiment (n = 1,404) to examine public attitudes toward three ethical principles formalized in the Swedish ethical platform—human dignity, needs-solidarity, and cost-effectiveness—in both crisis and non-crisis contexts. We also manipulated how the principles were presented, using either abstract or concrete formulations. Results. In the crisis condition, support for the human dignity and cost-effectiveness principles decreased, while support for the needs-solidarity principle increased. However, these effects were small, and the overall ranking of the principles remained stable. Notably, the level of abstractness had a stronger impact than the crisis context: support for needs-solidarity was higher when described abstractly, whereas support for cost-effectiveness increased when it was presented in a more concrete, action-oriented way. Support for the human dignity principle was unaffected by the abstractness manipulation. Conclusion. The findings suggest that people’s moral views are relatively stable in the face of crisis. Rather than the crisis context itself, the way ethical principles are formulated—abstractly or concretely—may be a more powerful driver of shifts in public support for different moral values in health care priority setting.