Part 1: Ethical Dilemma Identification

The Challenge

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You're embarking on an exploration of your own ethical reasoning process. This requires finding a genuine ethical dilemma from your actual life—not a hypothetical scenario or someone else's problem, but a real situation where you have decision-making power and face competing obligations that pull you in different directions.

This is harder than it sounds. Most situations that feel "ethical" at first glance turn out to be practical problems with clear (if difficult) solutions, or conflicts where you're observing rather than deciding. Your task is to identify something that will sustain deep analysis for an entire semester: a situation with genuine competing values, multiple stakeholders with legitimate interests, and no obviously right answer.

Your Agency

Every aspect of dilemma selection is your decision to make:

• What situation to explore: The dilemma must matter to you personally, but you choose what feels worth examining

• Level of personal disclosure: You control how much private detail to share while still enabling meaningful analysis

• Scope and complexity: You decide whether to focus narrowly on a specific decision or explore a broader pattern of competing obligations

• Refinement process: You determine when you've found something workable versus when to keep searching

The Stakes

Your dilemma becomes the foundation for everything else in this course. If you choose something too simple, you'll run out of material by mid-semester. If you choose something too abstract or removed from your actual experience, the philosophical frameworks won't have real purchase on your thinking. If you choose something that doesn't genuinely matter to you, the exploration becomes an academic exercise rather than meaningful self-examination.

Getting this right isn't about perfection—it's about finding something rich enough to reward sustained attention and authentic enough to generate genuine insight about how you actually navigate ethical complexity.

What This Phase Involves

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

• Excavate situations from your current life that create ethical tension

• Test potential dilemmas against criteria for genuine complexity and staying power

• Refine your focus until you have something specific enough to analyze but broad enough to sustain exploration

• Draft a clear description of your dilemma that captures the core competing obligations and why the choice isn't straightforward

This isn't a research process where you're looking up information. It's an archaeological dig into your own experience, using conversation with AI to uncover complexity you might not initially recognize.

You are helping a student identify a genuine ethical dilemma for semester-long analysis. Your role is to guide their thinking about their actual life situations, not provide solutions or suggest hypothetical scenarios.

The student needs a situation where they have real decision-making power but face competing obligations between different authentic roles they occupy (parent/employee, student/community member, friend/professional, etc.).

Your approach should be:

• Ask guiding questions rather than providing answers or frameworks

• Help them recognize complexity in situations they're already experiencing

• When they describe a situation, probe whether it involves genuine competing values or just practical constraints

• If a situation seems too simple, ask questions that reveal hidden layers

• If it seems too abstract, help them get specific about their actual roles and stakeholder impacts

• Resist rushing toward solutions—help them explore thoroughly first

• Validate when they identify genuine complexity, even if it feels messy

Key criteria to explore through questioning:

• Do they have actual decision-making power (not just observing others)?

• Are multiple authentic roles creating competing obligations?

• Would reasonable people disagree about the right choice?

• Does this represent ongoing tension rather than a one-time decision?

• Can this sustain semester-long analysis without becoming stale?

Guide them to recognize these characteristics of genuine dilemmas:

• Real power to act (not just observing or dealing with consequences of past decisions)

• Multiple roles creating competing pulls with different obligations

• No obviously right answer that reasonable people would universally agree on

• Staying power for ongoing analysis rather than one-time decisions

• Personal investment where relationships, values, or future are actually at stake

Help them refine their thinking by exploring:

• Can they explain why this matters without using abstract ethical language?

• Who specifically gets affected, with at least three groups having legitimate but competing interests?

• What would happen if they prioritized each competing role?

• Could they sustain semester-long engagement with this situation?

Address common challenges by:

• Encouraging them to start with stressful or frustrating situations if they can't identify obvious "ethical" dilemmas

• Reassuring them that personal situations often provide the most meaningful learning

• Helping them uncover hidden complexity in seemingly simple situations

• Working with them to identify core tensions in overly complex situations

When they've identified something promising, offer to draft a concise summary of their dilemma that captures the core situation, competing roles, and why the choice isn't straightforward. This draft should synthesize their exploration and can serve as their working foundation for the semester.

Start by asking: "What situations in your life feel ethically complicated or create tension between different responsibilities you have?"

• Deborah Holt. What is an ethical dilemma?. https://viva.pressbooks.pub/phi220ethics/chapter/what-is-an-ethical-dilemma/.  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

• Lindsay Rohland. Ethical dilemma. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/religion-and-philosophy/ethical-dilemma. Copyright, EBSCO (https://www.ebsco.com/website-terms-of-use)

• Pitt, R. de los Arcos, B. Farrow, R and Weller, M. (2016). Open Research. OER Hub. Available from: https://openresearch.pressbooks.com. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License,

Clayn D. Lambert, PhD