Dilemmas
The atlas, applied.
57 contemporary questions, answered by the atlas's coordinates. For each, the 86 schools are sorted into stances by their attribute signatures — turning the catalogue into a reasoning tool you can open when the question comes up. See the coverage matrix to map which attributes each dilemma exercises, or the argument map to see how stances on one dilemma entail stances on others.
When does a person begin?
The political question of abortion sits atop an older ontological one: at what point does there exist a someone — a being with moral standing — rather than merely the materials from which one will form?
Should we edit the human germline?
Whether human nature is a given biological kind, a constructed category, a relational achievement, a family-resemblance cluster, or a conventional distinction within deeper unity is the ontological question the policy debate over heritable gene editing is mostly about.
Are addicts responsible for their addiction?
Addiction looks from one angle like the textbook case of agency failing — a person doing what they don't, in any meaningful sense, want to do. From another angle it looks like agency at work in hard conditions. Which it is depends on what agency is.
Is genetic engineering of food stewardship or domination?
Editing the genomes of the plants and animals we eat is either the natural continuation of breeding — careful improvement of what is given — or a category error that treats biology as raw material rather than as living kind.
Do animals have moral standing comparable to humans?
Whether an octopus's curiosity, a pig's fear, an elephant's grief is the kind of thing that places a moral demand on us — and whether that demand is comparable to what we owe humans — depends on what mind is and what kinds of things can have it.
Could a fetal brain organoid in a petri dish be conscious?
Lab-grown clumps of neural tissue with structures resembling the developing brain are an active research tool — and an active ethical worry. Whether any of them has experience is the question we don't know how to answer except through what we take mind to be.
What makes someone the same person over time?
When dementia hollows out memory, when a coma resolves with no recall, when you imagine being uploaded — the question of whether the surviving person is still you turns on what kind of thing the 'you' was to begin with.
Is the late-stage dementia patient still the person their spouse married?
Loss of memory, of recognition, of the cognitive patterns that made the person — does this end the person, or merely the person you knew? The answer turns on what makes someone who they are.