Philosophers have studied moral concepts of right and wrong for
             millennia. During this time, great thinkers like Plato, Aristotle,
             Bentham, and Kant have developed a number of carefully reasoned and
             eloquent approaches to moral questions. These approaches in the field of
             ethics can span from metaethics (the core of ethical principles or
             universal truths) to the field of normative ethics (which takes a much more
             practical approach to solving specific problems) to the field of applied
             ethics (which looks at specific issues like abortion or animal rights) (The
             Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Each of these fields of ethics has
             sparked some often surprisingly elegant approaches to difficult ethical
             problems. However, in the real word, moral decisions are often much more
             difficult and confusing than they appear during reasoned ethical analysis.
             Moral dilemmas like the following illustrate the profound difficulty
             in coming to an ethical decision under truly trying and confusing
             circumstances. Imagine that you are an inmate in a concentration camp, and
             your son is about to be hung by a sadistic prison guard for attempting to
             escape. The guard wants you to pull out the chair from underneath your
             son, effectively killing him. The guard says that if you refuse to pull
             out the chair, he will kill your son and another, innocent, inmate as well.
             There is no doubt that the guard will carry out his actions.
             If you decide to pull out the chair from under your son, there are a
             number of potential consequences, both good and bad. Importantly, if the
             guard is true to his word, you will have saved the life of another innocent
             inmate. This is clearly a positive moral action, as preserving human life,
             especially innocent human life is essentially universally morally
             desirable. In saving this man's life, you spare both his personal agony,
             but spare his family and friends f...