Is there a difference between right and wrong?  Sometimes the delineation between the two is a simple, fine line.  Sometimes it can be a blur.  There are many factors that can affect how an individual views an act as right or wrong, but it is believed to be deeply rooted in how that person is brought up and influenced by their environment.  For the majority of people, our consciences are unanimous in problems with murder, theft, etc.  

Today, there are three major areas of ethical study: normative ethics, meta-ethics, and applied ethics.  Normative ethics is the study of moral action.  It investigates how one ought to act ethically.  Meta-ethics is the branch of ethics that questions how we comprehend morality.  Applied ethics attempts to apply ethics to real-life scenarios.

A famous ethical dilemma of applied ethics is the trolley problem.  The basic adaptation of the trolley problem goes as follows: There is an out-of-control trolley traveling at a fast speed on tracks.  The trolley is on route to collide with five people that are tied up.  You are standing a considerable distance away from the tracks next to a lever.  When pulled, the lever switches the trolley to a different set of tracks.  On this second track, there is a single person tied up and unable to move.  There are only two choices: do nothing and indirectly slaughter five people or pull the lever and murder one person.  The obvious answer would be to kill the one person to save the five people.  Although, the trolley problem was not made to have a solution.  The trolley problem is intended to provoke thought in the difficulty of resolving ethical problems.

A difficult deliberation is whether a true delineation of right and wrong exists, and who governs it.  Is it a government matter?  The government makes laws that society follows.  The government makes punishments and risks for “immoral” deeds.  Is it an independent matter?  I believe that people’s perception of right and wrong is possessed by themselves.  Morality is based on a person’s experiences and values.

In a court of law, however, ethics and moral judgment have no place.  I believe that this is the correct approach to law.  When deciding if someone is guilty or not guilty, facts are what matters.  For example, in the Tom Robinson case in To Kill a Mockingbird, the jury acted unethically and with prejudices.  If they had only taken the facts into consideration, Tom Robinson could not have been proven guilty beyond all reasonable doubt.

Ethics and thought experiments are important for collecting data for real-life implications.  Autonomous vehicles are self-driving cars that achieve autonomy with software.  In an instance where car collision is inevitable, who should decide what the autonomous car does?  Car manufacturers want to use empirical data from the public’s opinions and thought experiments’ results to decide on what decisions autonomous vehicles should make because people wouldn’t buy cars that sacrifice their well-being.  Some people want the government to make laws that pertain to this issue, whereas other people believe that ethics would be in their best interest.

In an incident where an autonomous car must either drive into a wall, which could potentially be fatal to the car’s occupants, or drive into a crowd of people, I believe that ethics should be what determines the outcome.  Ethics guide our lives and help us make positive decisions that veer us away from bad outcomes.