AI Tutor
Imagine an autonomous car facing an unavoidable crash: should it swerve into a barrier to protect three pedestrians, killing its own passenger, or protect its passenger and hit the pedestrians?
Amateur essays treat this as a simple contest of 'good versus bad,' but a true ethical dilemma is a conflict between two valid, mutually irreconcilable moral principles where neither option is cleanly right.
To turn emotional debates into sharp philosophical prose, what foundational tools do we actually need?

The Three Normative Frameworks

When academic essays evaluate moral choices, they rely on normative ethics—the systematic study of what makes actions right or wrong. The three major traditions evaluate actions through duty, consequences, or character.
In 1785, Immanuel Kant argued that morality rests on unconditional duties called categorical imperatives, while Jeremy Bentham proposed in 1789 that the only rational metric for justice is maximizing aggregate pleasure over pain.
Knowing the theories is only half the battle—how do you transform these opposing philosophies into an airtight essay structure?

Constructing the Dialectical Thesis

A philosophical thesis statement must never take an unearned side; it must first name the moral tension between two competing frameworks before defending a specific resolution.
Let's see what happens when we put this architecture to work on a concrete collegiate-level prompt.

Worked Example: Autonomous Crash Algorithms