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
🖥️ Fullscreen
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.
Continue to The Position Lock →