Why Ethics Classes Don’t Give Answers

When I started doing philosophy, I was convinced that if I studied it long enough, I might be able to solve moral problems with some degree of certainty. When I first encountered the trolley problem and found myself stumped by all the competing justifications, I assumed that with enough time I would eventually know what I should do, for real, if I ever had to decide whether to pull the lever.

It did not take very long for me to realize that this moral certainty I was chasing is most likely a fantasy. As I sit here some fourteen years later, the truth is that ethicists have not solved the trolley problem, at least not in the way we think about solving other kinds of problems. What we have instead is a range of carefully argued, though often mutually incompatible answers. And even with those answers, there is a whole lot of baggage that comes with accepting them.

This realization often returns to me when I teach ethics. Clearly, I am not teaching students how to solve moral problems the way a math teacher teaches students to solve quadratic equations. When I teach ethics, I rarely teach students the correct answer to moral questions. So what, exactly, am I teaching them?

Last year, in a medical ethics course, I asked students to discuss a morally controversial case involving the treatment of an incapacitated patient. When some students struggled to reach a conclusion, they confidently suggested that the morally responsible thing to do would be to defer the decision to the attending physician. I then asked a simple follow-up question: What if you were the attending physician? Their faces sank. In that moment, many seemed to realize that their profession may someday demand that they make decisions where the stakes are literally life and death and the answer about what to do falls to them.

Medical ethics is especially revealing in this respect because it overlaps so closely with law and policy. Many students enter the course expecting to learn what the law requires or what hospital policy dictates. But that is not the primary aim in my version of this course. We are examining how moral questions arise within medical practice, even when legal and institutional guidance is already in place, and how to work through ethical problems in a way that might lead to law and policy in the first place.

I do not take pleasure in making students uncomfortable, but moments like the one in my medical ethics class reveal something important about what ethics education is really doing. Learning ethics involves learning to take moral decisions seriously, and that means confronting our own role in other people’s lives. It also means understanding the complexity that can arise with a morally charged event. It requires understanding moral terminology and being able to cordon off moral reasons from non-moral reasons.

After discussing difficult cases, students often want to know what the real answer is. At that point, I usually have to shrug and admit that I do not know. I can explain how a utilitarian might answer, or a deontologist, or a Buddhist, or even how I myself am inclined to think about the case. But I cannot tell them the correct answer.

If the value of teaching ethics depended entirely on delivering unassailable answers to moral dilemmas, then ethics might not have very much to offer (as far as I can tell, nearly every answer that has been given to a moral question is assailable). But this misunderstands what ethics is for. The value of ethics does not lie solely in providing solutions for the students to memorize and apply; it lies in helping them understand the precise nature of the problems we are facing in the first place.

One of my favorite examples of this in medical ethics comes from Judith Jarvis Thomson’s famous argument about abortion. One of the strengths of her argument is not that it definitively settles the issue, but that it reframes it. Thomson shows that acknowledging a moral right to life within the fetus does not automatically resolve questions about what others are morally required to do. In doing so, she helps clarify what is actually at stake in debates about abortion, even for those who ultimately disagree with her conclusions.

All of this is to say that ethical theorizing can be valuable even when it does not deliver final answers. Its point is not merely to tell us what to do, but to help us see more clearly what we are doing, what we are responsible for, and why certain decisions deserve our contemplation. What I want my students to take away from ethics classes is not how to solve moral problems with absolute certainty, but rather how to face moral problems in their entirety and with precision.

I cannot help but think about all of this in the shadow of AI. As debates continue to rage over whether students should use AI, whether workers should rely on it, or whether it provides genuine benefit at all, I find myself returning to the human work of reflection about how we ought to live. Socrates told us that the unexamined life is not worth living; Aristotle argued that the good life consists in the activity of the human soul in accordance with virtue. I think they were onto something and suspect this is why we don’t spend much time teaching students the right answers.