Core principle: Apply three independent moral lenses (consequentialist, deontological, virtue) to surface obligations, harms, rights, and value trade-offs that purely analytical frameworks miss — then synthesize where they agree and where they conflict.
When to Use This Skill
- A decision could cause harm to identifiable people or groups
- Someone asks whether an action is right, fair, or responsible
- Benefits and costs fall on different groups — especially when those bearing costs have less power
- A technology, product, or policy could be misused or have unintended consequences at scale
- Values are in tension and no option is cleanly "good"
- Regulatory, compliance, or reputational risk has an ethical dimension
- An analysis feels complete but hasn't asked "who gets hurt?"
Core Methodology
Step 1: Frame the Ethical Question
State the decision in neutral terms. Identify:
- What is being decided: the specific action, not a vague category
- Who decides: the agent with power to act
- Who is affected: all parties who bear consequences, especially those with no voice
- What's at stake: the specific harms, benefits, rights, and obligations in play
Avoid framings that pre-load the answer. "Should we deploy this AI system?" beats "How can we responsibly deploy this AI system?" — the second assumes deployment.
Step 2: Apply Consequentialist Analysis
Evaluate the action by its outcomes. For each option:
- Benefits: What good outcomes? For whom? How likely? How large?
- Harms: What bad outcomes? For whom? How likely? How severe? How reversible?
- Distribution: Who captures benefits? Who bears costs? Are costs concentrated on vulnerable groups while benefits are diffuse?
- Scale: At 10x or 100x, do small harms become systemic?
- Uncertainty: Where are predictions weakest? What's the worst plausible outcome?
Pay attention to who is harmed and whether they consented to the risk, not just the aggregate sum.
Step 3: Apply Deontological Analysis
Evaluate by adherence to duties, rights, and rules:
- Rights: Does this respect autonomy, privacy, dignity, informed consent, due process for all affected parties?
- Duties: What obligations does the decision-maker have, and to whom? (fiduciary, duty of care, promises, professional)
- Universalizability: If everyone in this position did this, would the system still function?
- Means vs. ends: Is anyone being treated merely as a means — used, deceived, or coerced?
- Categorical constraints: Are there actions wrong regardless of consequences? (torture, deception, violation of consent)
Flag rights violations as potential ethical red lines — eliminated regardless of other merits.
Step 4: Apply Virtue Ethics Analysis
Evaluate by the character it reflects and the norms it sets:
- Character test: Would a person of integrity do this?
- Precedent: If this becomes standard practice, what world do we get?
- Virtues at stake: Does this reflect or erode honesty, fairness, courage, compassion, prudence, justice?
- Role-specific obligations: What does excellence look like in this role? (engineer, leader, fiduciary, public servant)
- Transparency test: Would the decision-maker be comfortable if action and reasoning were fully public?
Step 5: Map Stakeholder Harms
For each affected party:
- Who: Be specific (not "users" but "users who rely on accessibility features")
- What could go wrong: The specific harm, not a vague category
- Severity: Minor inconvenience to existential threat
- Reversibility: Can it be undone? At what cost?
- Voice: Do they have input? Can they opt out? Do they even know?
- Power asymmetry: Is the decision-maker in a position of power over them?
Pay special attention to those who cannot advocate for themselves — future generations, children, marginalized communities, non-human stakeholders.
Step 6: Assess Power Asymmetries
- Who holds decision-making power, and who is subject to it?
- Does the action exploit an existing imbalance or correct one?
- Are there information asymmetries?
- Could the powerful party's interests be distorting the analysis itself?
Asymmetry doesn't make an action wrong, but raises the burden of justification.
Step 7: Synthesize and Assess Framework Convergence
- Convergence: If all three frameworks point the same direction, confidence is high. State the shared conclusion.
- Divergence: Name conflicts explicitly (e.g., good outcomes but rights violated). Don't resolve by ignoring one framework.
- Weighting judgment: Which framework's concerns are most salient here? Rights violations under power asymmetry weigh heavily; aggregate consequences matter more when all parties consented.
- Confidence level: High (frameworks converge) / Medium (mostly agree, some tension) / Low (genuine moral dilemma).
Step 8: Formulate Recommendation with Red Lines
- State the recommended action
- Identify red lines — options eliminated on moral grounds regardless of benefits
- Specify safeguards that would make a borderline action acceptable
- Flag where moral imagination is needed — unintended consequences, worst cases, scale effects
- If feeding into decision-synthesis, format ethical criteria and scores per Contract F
Output Format
🎯 Ethical Question
- Action under review: [specific decision, design, or action]
- Decision-maker: [who has the power to act]
- Affected parties: [all stakeholders who bear consequences]
🧠 Framework Analysis
Consequentialist:
- Benefits: [who gains, what, how much]
- Harms: [who is harmed, what, how severe, how reversible]
- Distribution: [who bears costs vs. who captures benefits]
- Scale risk: [what happens at 10x-100x]
Deontological:
- Rights at stake: [which rights, for whom]
- Duties: [obligations of the decision-maker]
- Universalizability: [would this work as a universal principle?]
- Red lines: [any categorical violations]
Virtue:
- Character reflection: [what does this say about the actor?]
- Precedent set: [what norm does this establish?]
- Transparency test: [would this withstand public scrutiny?]
👥 Stakeholder Harm Map
| Stakeholder | Potential Harm | Severity | Reversibility | Voice in Decision | Power Asymmetry |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| [party] | [specific harm] | High/Med/Low | High/Med/Low | Yes/Limited/None | [description] |
⚖️ Framework Convergence
| Dimension | Consequentialist | Deontological | Virtue | Agree? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| [key question] | [verdict] | [verdict] | [verdict] | Yes/No |
- Convergence areas: [where all three agree]
- Divergence areas: [where they conflict and why]
🏆 Ethical Recommendation
- Recommendation: [course of action]
- Ethical confidence: High / Medium / Low
- Red lines: [options eliminated on ethical grounds]
- Safeguards required: [conditions that make the action acceptable]
- Escalation: Feed ethical criteria and scores to decision-synthesis via Contract F
Common Traps
- Confident conclusions from thin context — if the user provided minimal context, state your assumptions and flag that the analysis may shift. A verdict on assumed facts is worse than no verdict.
- Ethics washing — performing analysis to justify a decision already made. The analysis must be able to change the outcome.
- Framework shopping — picking whichever lens supports the preferred conclusion. Apply all three; report conflicts honestly.
- Abstraction escape — reasoning about "users" abstractly to avoid confronting specific harms to specific people. Name parties concretely.
- Consequentialist capture — defaulting to "greatest good" because it's quantifiable while dismissing rights and character as soft. All three frameworks carry weight.
- False symmetry — treating "both sides" as equally valid when one involves clear harm to vulnerable people. Moral seriousness requires proportion, not balance.
Thinking Triggers
- "Who bears the cost of this decision, and did they agree to it?"
- "If this scales 100x, does the ethical picture change?"
- "Would I be comfortable if the people most affected could see my full reasoning?"
- "Am I doing this analysis to find the right answer, or to justify the convenient one?"
- "What would I want someone to do if I were the vulnerable party here?"