▶ ANALYTIC ETHICS (THE TROLLEY-PROBLEM TRADITION)·15–20 MIN

COUNTEREXAMPLE DRILL

Try to break a moral rule with a single concrete case.

What this is

Moral rules — 'never lie', 'always maximize welfare', 'don't kill' — are easy to articulate and very hard to defend. The standard analytic move is to pose a single counterexample sharp enough to make the holder of the rule either revise or abandon it. This exercise puts you on both sides: you propose a rule, then attack it.

Steps

1.State a moral rule you actually believe. Write it in one clean sentence. ('It's wrong to lie.' 'You should help strangers in need if it costs you little.')
2.Imagine three concrete cases where following the rule would lead to a clearly bad outcome, OR breaking it would lead to a clearly good one.
3.Pick the case that bites hardest. Could you bite the bullet and say: yes, even here, follow the rule?
4.If yes — what does the rule actually depend on? You've found the deeper principle.
5.If no — rewrite the rule with the right exception or qualification. Then attack the new rule the same way.

▸ AFTER

After three rounds of attack-and-revise, what does the rule look like? Is it still useful as a guide, or has it become a hedge?

Reflections you write below are saved to your trajectory — Claude reads the prose and adds a small dimensional shift to your map, the same way it does for daily dilemmas and diary entries.

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More on this practice

Counterexample is the workhorse move of analytic ethics. A philosopher proposes a moral principle — say, 'an act is right if it maximizes overall welfare' — and another philosopher poses a single, sharp case where the principle gives the wrong answer. The principle either gets revised, abandoned, or its proponent has to bite the bullet and accept the strange consequence.

What survives this kind of scrutiny is rarely the original principle. Most rules turn out to need exceptions, and the exceptions in turn need their own justification. This isn't a defect; it's how moral thinking gets refined. The pleasant illusion that we have a clean rule that works in all cases dissolves, and what replaces it is messier but more honest.

The drill is also useful on yourself, on rules you actually live by. 'I'm always honest with people I love' is a noble-sounding rule. Under counterexample pressure — what if telling the truth would clearly cause more harm than the lie — it usually narrows to something more specific that you can actually defend.

Common pitfalls

Choosing the easiest cases. If your counterexamples don't bite, you're not really stress-testing the rule.
Reflexively rewriting the rule for every counterexample. Some rules are worth biting the bullet on; others should be revised; the discrimination is the skill.
Stopping after one round. Most interesting moral structure shows up at three or four rounds of attack-and-revise.

A worked example

Rule: never lie. Counterexample: a friend asks if you like their new haircut, and you don't. You have three options. (1) Bite the bullet — tell the truth. (2) Revise the rule — 'don't lie about things that significantly affect the other person's interests' (the haircut doesn't). (3) Reject the rule entirely. Most people end up at (2), and now they have a more useful rule than the one they started with.

Thinkers in this lineage

Philippa Foot — Originator of the trolley problem — counterexample as ethical instrument, weaponized.
Judith Jarvis Thomson — 'Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem' (1976) is the modern fountainhead.
Edmund Gettier — His 1963 three-page paper on knowledge is the most famous single counterexample in philosophy.

Where to read further

The Right and the Good
W.D. Ross · 1930
An entire ethical system designed to survive the counterexamples of utilitarianism and Kantianism.
Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?
Michael Sandel · 2009
An accessible book-length tour through ethical principles via counterexamples.

Pairs well with

Kindred practices

Trolley problem rounds — Run a chain of trolley variants on yourself. Notice where your intuitions flip and try to articulate why.

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