Six Lenses. Six Questions. One Case.

When serious people disagree about a hard case, they are usually not making errors — they are asking different questions. Ethics gives you six well-built questions. Each is a lens; each lights up different facts; none is the single right answer. Rigor is arguing cleanly inside a lens, not smuggling between them.

Rights — Whose rights are at stake, and were they respected? Dignity, consent, autonomy. A minor, a vulnerable user, the right to be protected from a manipulative design.

Justice — Is everyone treated fairly; who bears the burden? Equals treated equally; the cost not dumped on those least able to refuse it.

Utility — Which action produces the greatest good over harm, for the most people? Weigh the comfort companion bots give millions of lonely people against the harm to the vulnerable few.

Common good — What kind of society does this build? Not individual gain but shared conditions — what does a world of engagement-optimised companions do to how we all relate?

Virtue — What would a person of good character do; what does this make us? Would an honest, caring designer ship this? What habits does using it build in a 14-year-old?

Care — What do our relationships and the vulnerable actually require of us? Start from the concrete people in the web of need — the boy, the mother — not the abstract rule.

A strong argument names its lens and stays in it. The tribunal next lesson is won by the side that argues most rigorously in frame — not the side that was “right.”