The Ethical Trilemma: Integrity, Duty, and Utility

Posted: August 9, 2025 | Author: Dr. Ernie | Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: debate, philosophy, systems, truth, values |Leave a comment

Use Integrity, Duty, and Utility for a standalone blog post on the ethical trilemma, with references. Make the case for the hardness of the problem, and the insufficiency of proposed solutions, without offering any of your own. 

ChatGPT Prompt (condensed)

1. Introduction: Three Competing Pillars of Moral Thought

Moral philosophy has long been dominated by three great traditions: virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism. Each approaches the question “What should I do?” from a different starting point:

• Integrity (virtue ethics / aretic tradition) — Be the right kind of person; cultivate character and moral wholeness.
• Duty (deontology) — Do what is right, according to universal rules or obligations, regardless of consequences.
• Utility (consequentialism) — Bring about the best possible outcomes; maximize overall good.

These three pillars are not simply different flavors of the same theory. They rest on incommensurable foundations and often deliver contradictory prescriptions. Philosophers from Aristotle to Immanuel Kant to John Stuart Mill developed them in isolation; later thinkers such as Elizabeth Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre have argued that this fragmentation reflects a deeper, perhaps irreconcilable, conflict at the heart of modern ethics.

This is what I will call the Ethical Trilemma: in any complex moral situation, these three demands — integrity, duty, and utility — cannot all be fully satisfied.

---

2. The Structure of the Trilemma

2.1 Integrity (Virtue Ethics)

Rooted in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the integrity axis asks: Who am I becoming through this action? It values harmony between motives, emotions, and actions — what Michael Stocker called the unity of “motive” and “reason.” A virtuous act must flow from a good character, not just from rule-following or result-chasing.

2.2 Duty (Deontology)

Championed by Immanuel Kant, this axis holds that morality is defined by adherence to universal principles. Some actions (e.g., lying, killing the innocent) are wrong regardless of outcome. For Kant, the “good will” acts from duty for duty’s sake, even if doing so produces no tangible benefit.

2.3 Utility (Consequentialism)

As articulated by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, this axis judges actions solely by their outcomes. The right act is the one that produces the greatest net good for the greatest number — no matter what duties it violates or what it does to the agent’s moral self-conception.

---

3. Why the Trilemma Is Hard

The problem is not that the three approaches sometimes disagree — it’s that their core commitments pull in different directions by design:

• Integrity vs. Duty: A virtuous person might lie out of compassion; a strict Kantian says lying is always wrong (Kant’s “murderer at the door” case).
• Duty vs. Utility: Saving five lives by killing one may maximize good but violates the prohibition against killing innocents (trolley problem).
• Utility vs. Integrity: A utilitarian calculus may compel you to betray personal convictions if doing so increases net welfare (Bernard Williams’ Jim and the Indians case).

These are not mere surface tensions. As Bernard Williams argued, utilitarianism can “alienate” us from our integrity; Kantianism can demand actions that feel cold or inhuman; virtue ethics can seem parochial or indifferent to broader harms.

---

4. The Failure of Unifying Theories

Many philosophers have tried to reconcile the three pillars:

• Rule consequentialism claims we should follow the set of rules that maximize good in the long run — but to a deontologist, rules justified by outcomes aren’t truly duties.
• Kantian virtue ethics incorporates virtues as traits that help fulfill duty — but here, virtue is instrumental, not central.
• Pluralist theories like W.D. Ross’s prima facie duties acknowledge multiple irreducible moral principles, but leave their resolution to individual judgment, offering no ultimate reconciliation.

Even ambitious syntheses like Derek Parfit’s On What Matters succeed mainly in drawing parallels between deontology and consequentialism; virtue ethics remains a stubborn outlier. As Alasdair MacIntyre observed in After Virtue, modern moral discourse is an “interminable debate” among fragments of incompatible traditions.

---

5. The Persistent Incommensurability

The stubborn fact is that each axis defines moral success differently:

• Integrity asks: Was I true to the right kind of person I want to be?
• Duty asks: Did I obey the moral law?
• Utility asks: Did my action produce the best outcome?

No single decision procedure can preserve all three when they conflict. Choosing one may mean betraying another — and the regret that follows is not a sign of moral immaturity but of facing values that are, in Isaiah Berlin’s words, “equally ultimate, and claims equally absolute, the realization of some of which must inevitably involve the sacrifice of others.”

---

6. Conclusion: Naming the Trilemma

To call this an Ethical Trilemma is to acknowledge that integrity, duty, and utility are each essential moral goods — yet they resist being harmonized into a single system without remainder. The tension is not a bug to be fixed, but a feature of moral life in a plural world. Recognizing this does not solve the problem; it only names it. But naming it may help us face the real work: living with, and thinking through, the conflicts that define what it means to act well.

---

References

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics.
• Kant, Immanuel, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals.
• Mill, John Stuart, Utilitarianism.
• Anscombe, G.E.M., “Modern Moral Philosophy.” Philosophy 33, no. 124 (1958).
• MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue. University of Notre Dame Press, 1981.
• Williams, Bernard, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Harvard University Press, 1985.
• Berlin, Isaiah, “Two Concepts of Liberty.” In Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford University Press, 1969.
• Stocker, Michael, “The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories.” Journal of Philosophy 73, no. 14 (1976).
• Ross, W.D., The Right and the Good. Oxford University Press, 1930.
• Parfit, Derek, On What Matters. Oxford University Press, 2011.

---