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To be an ethical person requires confronting situations when the right decision isn't always clear.

Like would it be morally defensible to actively kill one person to save five others from certain death? Or is it better to stand by and do nothing,

knowing we could have saved the five? There's a reason philosophers have been grappling with

these dilemmas for millennium. From KERA in Dallas, this is Think.

I'm Chris Boyd.

If living a good life has never exactly been easy, though, our distant ancestors, living

together in fairly small groups, could get a pretty concrete sense of how their actions

affected other people.

Steal a neighbor's food hear that neighbor's children crying from hunger.

If they didn't do their fair share of wood gathering, the whole band might be at risk

from predators once the fire burned out in the night.

These days, a lot of the moral choices we make involve actions that indeed contribute to other

people suffering, but it is suffering we may never directly witness.

And it's possible, impossible, to quantify

how much we're helping if we avoid those choices. Like you can sacrifice to reduce your carbon

footprint, but there are still 8 billion other people walking through the world. So what's

the case for doing the right thing anyway? Travis Reeder directs the Master of Bioethics degree program at the Johns Hopkins

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