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

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• published: 17 Oct 2016
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Making ethical decisions is a process that starts in our gut, i.e with our automatic response. But it is essential to also think about moral dilemmas, says Harvard Law Professor Glenn Cohen.Read more at BigThink.com: http://bigthink.com/videos/glenn-cohen-on-ethics-101-and-being-our-best-selves Follow Big Think here: YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BigThinkdotcom Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink Transcript - 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 of 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. Read Full Transcript Here: https://goo.gl/HdLxyt.