I recently came across an app built around moral dilemmas. The premise is simple enough: you're presented with a series of impossible choices—would you steal medicine to save your dying child, would you save your spouse or your mother, would you destroy a rainforest if it meant curing cancer forever—and based on your answers, the app supposedly tells you something about your personality.
I never actually downloaded it.
Instead, I spent the evening debating the questions with ChatGPT, and somewhere between cancer, rainforests, lotteries, juries, and stolen medicine, I discovered that the interesting part wasn't my answers at all. It was the way I kept questioning the questions themselves.
The dilemma that stayed with me was deceptively simple.
Scientists discover the only cure for cancer, but the compound required to make it exists in only one place on Earth. Harvesting it would permanently destroy an entire rainforest and drive 2,000 unique species to extinction. If you refuse, humanity will never discover another cure for cancer.
Do you harvest the rainforest?
My instinctive answer was no, but probably not for the reason most people would expect. I wasn't weighing cancer against 2,000 species. My first thought was that the cost of this cure is too high for me to call it a cure. If the price of eliminating one disease is permanently destroying an irreplaceable ecosystem, then we've simply exchanged one tragedy for another. A cure should leave the world better than it found it. This one doesn't. Science has always found another path, and my instinct was that we'd eventually find one again.
ChatGPT immediately pointed out that I had rewritten the dilemma instead of answering it.
"Fine," it said. "Assume there will never be another cure. This is humanity's only chance."
That should have settled it. It didn't. Instead, ChatGPT changed the dilemma.
"What if the rainforest is going to be destroyed by climate change in thirty years anyway? Harvest it now, cure cancer, and at least humanity gains something before it's gone."
For the first time, I hesitated.
Maybe, I thought.
But then another question immediately came to mind. If the rainforest only exists for another thirty years, doesn't that make this cure little more than a stop-gap? If the compound disappears with the rainforest, we've only delayed the problem. Worse, we've created another one. Humanity still has to solve cancer, and now we've also inherited the impossible task of saving the rainforest and the thousands of species that depend on it. That didn't feel like solving a problem. It felt like borrowing time while making the bill even larger.
ChatGPT smiled—or at least as much as software can smile—and calmly removed another assumption. "The compound can be synthesized forever once it's harvested," it replied. "The rainforest only has to be destroyed once."
I paused again. This time I wasn't thinking about cancer at all.
I found myself wondering whether destroying an entire rainforest really meant "only" losing 2,000 species. Could anyone honestly know that? Rainforests aren't just collections of plants and animals. They're unimaginably complex systems. Species depend on one another in ways we barely understand. They regulate rainfall, store enormous amounts of carbon, and influence ecosystems far beyond their own borders.
My mind immediately wandered to another question I'd heard countless times growing up: aren't rainforests the lungs of the Earth? Even if that phrase oversimplifies the science, the point remains that these ecosystems perform countless functions we still don't fully understand. Could anyone honestly promise that destroying one wouldn't have consequences far beyond the extinction of the species living there?
The more I thought about it, the less convinced I became that anyone could confidently predict the outcome.
Perhaps eliminating cancer would save millions of lives. Perhaps destroying the rainforest would ultimately cost even more.
How could we possibly know?
Every time ChatGPT removed one assumption, I uncovered another. Eventually it laughed and pointed out that I didn't really dislike difficult decisions.
I disliked false dilemmas.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that was probably true.
Looking back, my life has rarely been lived in simple either-or choices. I married a man twenty years older than me who was already living with a terminal illness. Loving him meant accepting that joy and grief would exist together from the very beginning of our marriage. After his death, there were no "good" decisions to make, only the best decisions I could make while grieving, raising a young son, and trying to build a future that looked nothing like the one we had planned.
Long before horse rescue became part of my life, I worked as a paralegal, where every case taught me that there is almost always another fact waiting to change your perspective. For more than thirty years I've built websites, often pushing against the limits of what technology could do at the time. Every new feature affected five others, every solution created new challenges, and every project required thinking several steps ahead. More recently, building a nonprofit and an equine rescue has reinforced that same lesson over and over again. People often ask why we don't save every horse at an auction, but that question assumes every horse exists in isolation. In reality, saving one horse affects whether we can save the next ten. A major veterinary expense changes what resources are available next month. Every decision becomes part of a much larger system.
Perhaps that's why the rainforest dilemma never felt like a comparison between humans and animals. It became a question about interconnected systems. Could we really separate one ecosystem from the countless consequences it supports? Could anyone honestly know enough to make that trade? The more I considered it, the less convinced I became that the dilemma was actually about cancer at all.
I still don't know how I would answer if every assumption were somehow proven true. Maybe I would eventually accept the cure. Maybe I wouldn't. What surprised me wasn't my uncertainty; it was the realization that uncertainty itself wasn't bothering me.
What bothered me was pretending that impossibly complex decisions can be reduced to a single clean choice with perfectly understood consequences.
For years I've joked that I overthink everything. Maybe that's true. Or maybe decades of law, technology, family, grief, history, and horse rescue have simply taught me that almost nothing in life exists on its own. Every decision pulls on something else. Every answer changes another question. Every thread is connected to another.
I'll also admit that this way of thinking can drive people crazy. I have a habit of responding to seemingly simple questions with, "Well... it depends." Friends, family, and coworkers have all watched me spend ten minutes dissecting the assumptions behind a question before I ever attempt to answer it. It also explains why making decisions can be so exhausting for me. My brain rarely sees two choices. It sees dozens of interconnected consequences branching out from each one.
Every once in a while, though, someone lets me finish explaining. Those are the moments I enjoy most, because even if we still disagree on the answer, we've often found a better question. That's really what I hope these essays become. Not a place where I tell you what to think, but a place where we explore why we think the way we do. If nothing else, maybe one of these moral dilemmas will send you down a rabbit hole you never expected to find.
Perhaps that's why I found myself arguing with the assumptions instead of answering the dilemma.
And perhaps that's exactly the point.
Photo by Mandy Choi on Unsplash
