Say you are walking around Nara Park and see a small child struggling to swim in the pond. You stop to process the scene and realize that the child is drowning. The right thing to do seems clear: you must jump into the pond and save the child from suffocating… right? Well, how do you prove that? How can you say with 100% confidence that saving the suffering child in that scenario is the right and correct thing to do? Consider another case: you are the emperor of Rome, and your servant informs you that ten innocent Christians will be thrown into the Colosseum to be brutally killed by gladiators and exotic animals in front of a crowd of around 50,000 to 80,000 Roman spectators that evening. What should you do? Should you save the handful of Christians from suffering, or should you let the momentary spectacle proceed for the pleasure of the tens of thousands of Romans? Now consider this case: you are a captain of a sunken ship and are on a tiny lifeboat with four surviving crewmates. It has been days since your last drop of fresh water and weeks since your last proper meal. Your sight has started to blur, and tomorrow doesn’t seem as promising as it was yesterday. Fortunately (or unfortunately), one of the crewmates has imbibed some seawater to quench their desiccating thirst and had completely gone unconscious yet was still somehow breathing. Should you kill (or sacrifice) that lost fellow for the guaranteed survival of you and the three other hungry men? Would that action, even if it is murder, be justified under those circumstances? These are the questions that face the fundamental questions that philosophers have debated for hundreds, if not thousands of years: can means justify the ends, and can ethical statements be true? In the three thought experiments, one of which played out in real life, I hope you sensed the central tension I would like to explore in this article. Some answers to these cases feel crystal clear, yet others prove nebulous. I acknowledge that we feel moral certainty in individual moments, but moral philosophy has largely failed to produce rules that hold universally across all situations. Kantian rules that base themselves in the means produce monstrous edge cases, but utilitarian calculations dispel us for its cold and trivializing characters. And worse yet, relativism abandons the search for truth entirely. I believe that the answer lies somewhere in between. I believe that there is a way to preserve moral truth and universality without the rigidity that makes ethical rules collapse. The key is to apply universalization not to rules, but to individual cases. Let us first establish the metaethical ground my claim stands on. I see that moral truths exist, but they are permanently inaccessible in full by human nature. In fact, I think we could expand this premise beyond moral truths to most, if not all, abstract ideas. Think of something that you believe is true with complete certainty. The drowning child case from a moment ago? That felt pretty certain. But notice what that certainty is: a convergence of moral intuition and reason. You cannot derive it from first principles the way you might a geometric proof from freshman year. You may only feel it, but that feeling must not be dismissed; it is the same intuition by which we recognize injustice in every culture throughout every century in situations none of those cultures shared. The near-universality of certain moral perceptions may not serve as proof of moral truth, but it stands as evidence of it. Likewise, we triangulate toward truth without ever fully arriving at a clean destination, and that is not a failure of moral knowledge but an honest condition.
I will assume this premise to move forward my claim, but if you object to my assumption, you no longer need to read any further. Despite being unable to know truths in their entirety, we are able to triangulate towards moral truth through emotion (moral intuition as practiced in the beginning) and through reason (logical consistency and universalizability). Neither tools nor moral truths are sufficient alone: pure emotion lies vulnerable to manipulation, and pure reason produces the Kantian monster we are hoping to conquer. When used together, however, they approximate something real. Emotion aided by reasoning allows us to remain consistent while considering others and ourselves as individuals, and reason complemented by emotion opens us up to honest amendments to our logic toward optimal ways we live by. The key discipline in the search for the truth is consistency. Inconsistency signals the constant search for convenience, self-interest, or pleasure over the truth. I will now explain the cracks in the existing frameworks and what my claim solves. Kantian deontology first sounds great until you actually test it out. The categorical imperative proposed by Kant is the universalization machine that operates at the level of rules. He says if we could all agree that lying is bad, then we mustn’t ever lie. Ever! The categorical imperative universalizes cleanly until you’re hiding refugees, and a soldier asks where they are. The rule breaks the moment the case becomes ever so morally complex. Kant responds that the rule still holds, and his defense is where most intuitions revolt. Utilitarianism, on the other hand, collapses the individual case into a simple aggregate calculation. The math justifies torturing one to save two, and that conclusion is the design operating with its exact purpose. I reject utilitarianism for feigning coherence by diminishing the moral weight of the individual case. Finally, on moral relativism, I must also reject the search for truth. It preserves flexibility at the cost of abandoning truth, and if justice is just whatever a culture agrees on, then there is no basis for condemning any historical atrocity from the outside. Hitherto, I explained the need for a revised framework and will establish the case for case ethics. For any specific moral case, there is a single truthfully right action, and that action would be right for everyone given that circumstance. To explain, I believe in universalization, but at the level of operation per case rather than the rule. The problem of generalization can be resolved by specifying and differentiating similar-looking cases on the surface. To compare, consider the lying-to-a-clear-murderer case against the lying-to-spare-uncomfortable-feelings case. They are similar in sharing the action of lying, but fundamentally differ in morally relevant features. A rule governing the action of lying fails because it cannot sense that distinction. Case ethics, on the other hand, sees it and breathes it. Case ethics holds that the right action in each case is universally right for that case without pretending the two cases are the same, thereby sustaining the promise of consistency. Now, you may wonder, ‘What makes a case a case?’ I will try my best to address the individuation issue. I see that cases are individuated through their morally relevant features that may again be contested and later elucidated: the relationships involved, the stakes, and the common practices at risk. Common practice draws on the sentiment that injustice could be defined as the robbery of a common practice. To flesh this notion out, imagine a neurotoxin contamination in your sewage system. Now, compare two victims of this neurotoxin: one was a first grader at Blanchard Memorial and the other, an eighty-year-old retiree. Which of these two tragedies would you consider more unjust? If you agree that if the first grader feels more unjust, that sentiment could be explained through the assumption that the child carried more potential and was expected (commonly practiced) to live for a longer time than the elderly victim, who we would assume to be approaching the end of their life. When a common practice is at stake, it becomes a principled and morally relevant feature that individuates the case. To contrast with Dancy’s particularism, which also resists rule-level universalization and expands the idea that moral weight can shift entirely depending on the context, I see it at risk of sliding toward relativism, which I have dismissed earlier. If you have agreed with all of my claims and arguments thus far, I would like to finally explain what case ethics asks of us practically. First, it demands moral seriousness about particulars that reach beyond a single application. Every situation requires detailed and specific attention to its morally relevant features, and I advise that it would be harder than following rules, as it demands “moral vision” as described by Murdoch to see a situation clearly, than filtering it through convenient categories. Second, case ethics begs for consistency across cases. If two situations share the same morally relevant features, then you must reach the same conclusion for both, even when consistency is uncomfortable. To be truthful requires logical consistency, and case ethics could not forgive convenience over truth. Finally, I would argue that case ethics implies intellectual humility. Since moral truth is unchanged but remains inaccessible in full, case ethics requires holding your judgments with reasonable confidence without certainty against revision. Now, let’s return to where we began. The drowning child in Nara Park is the easy case with good reasons. The morally relevant features unite without friction when a life is immediately at stake, you have the capacity to act, and no competing obligation of comparable weight exists. Case ethics confirms what you knew by heart. The right action is universal for anyone in that situation, and you did not need a rule to find it. The Roman case is a bit harder. The morally relevant features pull against one another: the dignity and innocence of the Christians, the scale of the Roman civic life, and the emperor’s particular obligation to both. Case ethics does not hand you an easy answer, but that is the point. It forces you with the full weight of the hard question rather than resolving it through facile calculation. What it does promise is that for any emperor under those circumstances, only one right action exists. Now on the starving lifeboat, I will not pretend it is easy. The case took place in real life and broke the English court in 1884, with fierce debates continuing to this day. Once more, case ethics cannot guarantee you a painless answer. However, it does offer the method we have practiced before: identify the morally relevant features with honesty, apply consistency without shying away, and hold your conclusion with confidence without a concrete certainty. For the better part of a century spent building machines that promise to relieve us of the burden of moral judgment, moral philosophy refuses to settle with an answer. With case ethics, I hope to ponder harder. Consider the situation given before your eyes, reason consistently, and act on what you believe. The search for truth may feel like an interminable one, but the thrill of loving truth honestly and consistently is one worth chasing. And I think that is enough.
