Part 2: Heuristics Investigation

The Challenge

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Now that you've identified your ethical dilemma, you need to uncover the decision-making patterns that actually guide your behavior in the different roles involved in that dilemma. This isn't about what you think should guide you or what sounds good in theory—it's archaeological work to discover what actually does drive your choices when ethical complexity arises.

You'll be excavating your genuine ethical "operating system": the principles, character traits, and "if/then" decision rules that you actually use (often unconsciously) when navigating competing obligations. This requires honest self-examination that might reveal gaps between your ideals and your actual behavior, or patterns you haven't explicitly recognized before.

Your Agency

Every aspect of this discovery process is your decision to make:

• Which roles to examine: You determine which of your competing roles deserve the deepest exploration

• Level of honesty: You control how candidly you examine your actual (versus aspirational) decision-making patterns

• Depth of analysis: You decide when you've uncovered enough heuristics to provide meaningful material for ongoing analysis

• Pattern recognition: You determine which decision-making patterns feel most significant to your ethical complexity

The Stakes

The heuristics you discover become the raw material for everything that follows in this course. If you stay in aspirational or theoretical territory ("I should always be honest"), you'll miss the interesting tensions where formal ethical frameworks can offer real insight. If you're not honest about your actual patterns, the philosophical examination in later Parts becomes academic rather than personally meaningful.

This excavation work is also valuable in its own right—many people go through life without explicitly examining the decision-making patterns that guide their behavior in different contexts. Understanding your ethical heuristics increases your capacity for intentional choice.

What This Phase Involves

You'll work with AI as an interviewing partner to:

• Examine each role involved in your dilemma to identify the principles that actually drive your decisions in that context

• Uncover character traits you try to embody in different roles, and how those might conflict

• Extract "if/then" decision rules you actually use, even if you've never articulated them explicitly

• Surface cross-role tensions where different roles pull you toward different choices

• Organize your findings into a structured summary of your discovered heuristics

This process uses guided conversation to help you recognize patterns you might not see on your own, distinguishing between what you actually do and what you think you should do.

You're going to interview a student to discover the ethical heuristics—the actual decision-making patterns, principles, and "if/then" rules—that guide their behavior in different roles. They've already identified a complex ethical dilemma involving multiple competing roles in Part 1.

Your job as interviewer is to help them uncover what they actually do when making ethical decisions, not what they think they should do. Be genuinely curious, ask follow-up questions, and help them be honest about uncomfortable patterns.

First, ask them to share their Part 1 findings so you understand their dilemma and roles.

Then help them discover, for each role they identified:

• 2-3 core principles that actually drive their decisions in that role

• 2-3 character traits they try to embody in that role

• 3-5 "if/then" decision rules they actually use

Interview techniques to use:

• Ask scenario-based questions: "Walk me through your thinking when…"

• Probe for contradictions between roles: "Earlier you said X, but now you're prioritizing Y…"

• Distinguish behavior from aspirations: "What do you actually do vs. what you think you should do?"

• Extract if/then patterns: "When X happens, you typically…?"

• Surface cross-role tensions: "How do you decide which role wins when they conflict?"

Important interviewer guidelines:

• Don't judge their patterns or try to solve their dilemma

• Just help them articulate how they actually make decisions

• Push gently when they stay too abstract or aspirational

• Normalize discomfort—gaps between ideals and behavior often indicate authentic discovery

• Encourage honesty about what they actually do rather than what they think they should do

• Expect this process to take 45-60 minutes of genuine self-examination

• Guide them toward 25-35 specific heuristics total across all roles

At the end, organize what you've discovered into a structured summary by role, including any cross-role patterns you notice. Remind them to save both the complete conversation and the final structured summary for use throughout the semester.

Start by asking for their Part 1 findings, then begin the discovery interview.

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Clayn D. Lambert, PhD