If so, you might be a Kantian.
Do you believe that you should act based on what is likely to happen as being a good outcome or a bad outcome?
You might be a modern consequentialist.
Or do you put more stock in doing things guided by subjective principles of what "we owe each other"?
You could be described as a contractualist.
In her New Yorker Magazine article about philosopher Derek Parfit, Larissa MacFarquhar, using the following scenario to illustrate the difference in ideas of right and wrong:
A murderer asks you where your friend is, so he can kill her.
The Kantian would tell the murderer where the friend is. The consequentialist would not tell because it would mean the possible death of a friend. The contractualist would base his subjective and practical decision based on what he owes his friend vs. what is owed to society on being truthful or deceptive in this instance: lying or betraying a friend.
Parfit was looking for a way to satisfy all three positions with a convergent principle:
An act is wrong just when such acts are disallowed by some principle that is optimific [leading to best results], uniquely universally willable, and not reasonably rejectable.
It may the mother of all answers to moral dilemmas but not too helpful in the world of ministry.
The objective in bring people together around ideas probably shouldn't be an answer that satisfies everyone (let's face it, a Sunday school answer).
The objective should be for the consequentialist to understand why a Kantians is so Kantian and what experiences the contractualists had to make her so very...consequentialist.
Maybe then we can start to understand why we do what we do and have such strong feelings about what's right and what's wrong.
