Chapter 7: Reasoning Through Dilemmas
AI gives balanced, diplomatic, non-committal answers to hard ethical questions. The real world requires you to take a position, defend it, and live with the tradeoffs.
Core Skill: Ethical Reasoning
Ethical reasoning is not about memorizing rules. It is about navigating situations where values conflict, stakeholders disagree, and every option has a cost. AI tools tend to present "both sides" without committing. This chapter trains you to go further: take a position, defend it under attack, and identify exactly who bears the cost of your decision.
Teaching Aid
What You Will Learn
- How to take a clear ethical position and build a Stakeholder Cost Matrix that maps who benefits, who is harmed, and who is ignored
- How to survive three rounds of systematic AI counter-arguments against your position
- How to argue the opposite of your personal position convincingly enough to demonstrate genuine understanding
- How to synthesize an ethical judgment through three visible drafts that document your intellectual evolution
- How to specify concrete reversal conditions that separate conviction from stubbornness
Exercises
| Exercise | Title | Layers Used | What You Build |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Position Lock | Layer 1 | Sealed position with Stakeholder Cost Matrix and confidence statement |
| 2 | The Adversarial Defence | Layer 4 | Three-round adversarial exchange with Position Tracker |
| 3 | The Stakeholder Swap | Layer 3 | Opposite-position presentation with peer feedback and reflection |
| 4 | The Decision Memo | Layer 2, Layer 6 | Three-draft Decision Memo with evolution tracker |
Chapter Deliverable
An Ethical Reasoning Portfolio containing: the sealed Position Lock with Stakeholder Cost Matrix, the three-round adversarial exchange with Position Tracker, the stakeholder swap preparation with peer feedback and reflection, the Decision Memo (all three drafts with evolution tracker), and all AI feedback with responses.