Member-only story
The difference (or why utilitarians have a harder time)
What difference does our ethics framework make to anything, and what difference can we ourselves make to anything?
It was already past dinner time on this warm late spring day, but my friend and I were still playing on “the mountains”, the steep, wooded patch of land across the street from where I lived. And then we heard a subdued chirping, emerging from underneath a bush: a young blackbird, fallen from the nest we presumed, and clearly unable to fly. We carefully picked it up and took it to my house. Now what?
My grandma’s old canary cage served as a temporary home, and we found out from a friend of my parents’ that worms from the garden and tinned cat food would be a suitable diet for this young blackbird. ‘Whistler’ (my imaginativeness was boundless back then) thrived, and quickly migrated from the cage in the dining room to a larger one outside on the patio, that my dad had constructed from chipboard and chicken wire. Soon he was ready to fly into the wide world (though my childhood imagination was adamant he stayed around in our garden).
Intriguing motives
This article, however, is not about ornithology or the care of fledglings, but about behaviour and decisions. Why did I decide…
