The Moral Intellect

Use your brain.

Morally difficult situations are precisely that... difficult. Very often there is some tension of values, a moment where your priorities are at odds. Most people don't steal food when they have enough money to buy it. With money, they can fulfill their desire to eat and their conviction to not stealing (or desire to no get caught). Take away the money, and the situation becomes conflicted. Now the desire to eat is pitted against the aversion to stealing.

Fortunately, not all moral problems need be solved by violating a priority. Sometimes they can be solved creatively. Just because there doesn't seem to be an answer, doesn't mean there isn't one. Perhaps you haven't thought of it yet.

One of the troubles with being creative in times of moral crisis is that frustration, anger, confusion, and despair tend to hamper the reflection process.

Also, having conflicting feelings about an issue can cause your thinking to oscillate in an unproductive way, lurching back and forth between extremes. A little mental maelstrom can be good for teasing out the limits of the issue, but if it continues it promises dangerous consequences. Not only can it make it difficult to think in any productive way, it threatens to destabilize you sense of what is real.

Now, it hardly helps someone who is freaking out to tell them to calm down. Instead of trying to attack your emotions, just work with them, but make them do actual work.

Here's the plan. Grab a pen. Find something to write on. Write down this question: "What is real?" Draw a line under it, and proceed with the answer.

Describe, bullet by bullet, the reality of the situation. Keep in mind that how you feel and what you want is part of what is real. Describe all the states, no matter what kind of real it is. Start with the thing that is most present in your mind, and then start trying to describe other elements of the situation

Your second question is: "What is good?" Knowing this, your mind will start to jump over to this question while still answering the first. This is ok, and you can take a few interludes, but keep writing on the first. Remember, how can you possibly know how to get things where they should be if you don't know where they are? So finish up with question one.

Question two then. Your answers to this don't need to be one for one reactions to each reality. If you've bulleted right, then they collectively describe the situation. So just read them over and consider what the right choice is. Write it down. Start general and move toward the specific. Don't really fret about the order, but as you finish try to end with some things you can do now.

Do them.