Have a Moral Dilemma? Start with Your Gut Reaction, but Don’t Stop There | Glenn Cohen | Big Think

When thinking about an ethical problem, first of all, you should start always with your gut intuition. What's my intuition about this case? You never stop there. You have to keep pushing yourself to say, "Why do I think this?" First thing to do, I think, is to think about cases that are somewhat similar and somewhat different. Sometimes it's varying one fact.

So a great example from this classic one in philosophy is the trolley problem. There's a trolley coming at – you're the conductor of a trolley; it's coming at a branch in the road; you're heading towards five people, but if you flip the switch, you can redirect it so that it kills only one person. What should you do is the problem. Well, when you start with that case, we then begin with variations: what if it's three people versus one person? What if, in fact, there are three tracks and not two, and one of them would lead to your own death, for example? What if, in fact, instead of having to just flip the switch, you'd have to push a fat man off a bridge in the way of the trolley?

So these are all variations in the case, and you begin by thinking, does my answer change by that variation? Why would my answer change in that variation? Can I derive a principle from this? So there are principles like action versus inaction. The greater versus the fewer. The question of how at proximity I am. Did I cause the problem to begin with, or am I just coming on the scene at a time when I can help, for example?

So you push yourself to derive principles. You then test those principles out in new cases that are alike and unalike again. That's one way of approaching the problem. The other is a much more top-down way, which is to start thinking about big schools of thinking in ethics. And really, the big schools are, on the one hand, consequentialism, of which utilitarianism is probably the most common, which says that which maximizes good is the right thing to do.

So do that, which maximizes good, and we aggregate across people. We think of individual as containers of utility in the classic utilitarianism. The second big school is deontology, of which the most famous version is probably Kantianism. And here there is an idea that even if something would maximize good states and affairs, it would produce the most welfare; we sometimes have obligations to do something different.

We have constraints in what we can do. And for Kant, it was a question of whether the maxim behind your action could result in a universal law of nature. That was his test, or one of his tests under the categorical imperative. So Kantians think about things like rights. They think about things like dignity, and they think about it in a way that is freestanding from welfare and utility.

And the third big division I would call virtue ethicists, who really have their roots all the way back to Aristotle. And these folks think that instead of thinking about the right or the good, instead we ought to think about character. We ought to think about what it is to be a virtuous person. What are the virtues of being a good human being? Just as we can say a piece of clothing was excellently made, or a horse is an excellent horse, they think that there are characteristics of human beings that make human beings better versus worse.

And when we think about what to do, we ask ourselves what would a virtuous agent do in this situation? So that's another way of approaching the problem, a little bit more abstracting. And in an ideal world, those two approaches kind of meet in the middle.

And we think about also other kinds of problems we've encountered in our lives and what's helped us thinking about that. So, in the ancient Greeks, there is a famous philosopher who was known for actually dressing in rags and walking around ancient Athens. He was kind of known as a crank and a fool, and he had a lantern, and he was struggling always towards the truth.

And I think that's really where we are. It's the ethicist. We have to realize that we're struggling through these conversations. We can't avoid making decisions. Where in a position, we have to d...