Avoiding the Issues

In my Ethics class today, we discussed our final papers, in which we will write about contemporary moral problems or issues and the best solutions to them. Picking a topic has been the hardest part so far. There are plenty of moral issues to choose from, and most of the students had an easy time choosing one that they wanted to write about. The rest of us struggled to find a problem that we wanted to choose as our topic. The problem wasn't that there weren't enough moral issues; the problem was that many of them were too tragic for us to want to study.

I don't like to dwell on problems. I don't mind addressing problems, but I'd rather do it from a safe distance or in an abstract sense. When things get too real and too personal, I'd typically rather not think about them any more than I have too.

Unfortunately, closely examining a tragic problem is sometimes the only way to find a real solution. We sometimes need to understand a problem thoroughly in order to understand how to solve it, and that sometimes means getting too close for comfort. People shouldn't shy away from heavy issues, as I've been doing. We can never solve persistent problems by ignoring them. We often have to face problems head on, face-to-face, in order to solve them. I can't avoid these issues indefinitely. Eventually, I'm going to have to pick an issue, study it, and write about it. I just hope I'll have the heart and the stomach to be able to examine the issue more closely than I'd like to.