The Most Important Unresolved Questions in Ethics

Why Some Ethical Questions Matter More Than Others

Philosophy is full of questions, but not all of them carry equal weight in shaping how we live, govern, and plan for the future. Some debates are abstract and remote from daily life; others, if answered clearly, could transform global priorities, policy design, and even the trajectory of civilization. The most pressing ethical questions are those that, if resolved, would change what we consider the most important problems in the world and how we should respond to them.

These aren’t just academic puzzles. They’re practical decision-making tools in disguise. How we answer them determines whether we prioritize near-term suffering or long-term survival, how we weigh risks with tiny probabilities but enormous stakes, and how we act when we’re uncertain about which moral framework is correct. This article outlines a set of such high-impact, still-unsolved problems in ethics that deserve far more attention than they currently receive.

How Should We Value Future Lives?

One of the most consequential open questions in ethics is how to treat people who don’t yet exist. Should a life lived a century from now matter just as much as a life lived today? If so, then the sheer number of potential future people could make long-term risks—like nuclear war, engineered pandemics, or unaligned artificial intelligence—overwhelmingly important, even if their probability is low.

But many plausible ethical views don’t treat future lives this way. Some argue that we should discount future welfare, either because of uncertainty about the future or because of a special moral weight given to present suffering. Others suggest that creating new people is morally neutral or even suspect, raising deep questions about whether bringing more people into existence is a good thing at all.

These aren’t just theoretical preferences. They directly affect how we allocate resources. If future lives matter a great deal, then preventing human extinction or civilizational collapse becomes a top priority. If they matter much less, then our focus should remain on improving the lives of those already here. Resolving this question would clarify whether longtermism—the view that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority—is correct, and if so, how much weight it should carry in policy and philanthropy.

When Should We Act on Extremely Small Risks with Huge Stakes?

Modern technology has created scenarios where tiny probabilities are associated with outcomes of staggering scale: global catastrophes, astronomical numbers of future lives, or even infinite value. Standard decision theory says we should maximize expected value, which means that even a one-in-a-billion chance of an outcome worth trillions of lives should dominate our choices.

But this leads to counterintuitive results. Should we ignore almost all other moral concerns and focus exclusively on the most extreme, albeit improbable, risks? If so, how do we avoid being paralyzed by ever more speculative scenarios? And if not, what alternative decision rule should we use?

Some philosophers have proposed alternatives, such as:

• Rejecting linear aggregation of value at extreme scales
• Applying risk-aversion or risk-weighting functions
• Imposing upper bounds on how much any single outcome can dominate our choices

But none of these approaches is clearly superior, and each has its own problems. A better account of how to handle small probabilities of huge stakes would help us decide how much to invest in existential risk reduction, whether to fund speculative but potentially transformative research, and how to balance caution against opportunity in high-stakes domains like AI, biotechnology, and climate engineering.

What If Value Is Infinite?

Another profound challenge arises if the universe is infinite in space, time, or both. If there are infinitely many people, or if value can be generated without bound, then standard aggregative moral theories—those that sum up welfare across individuals—run into serious trouble.

Consider a simple version of utilitarianism that says we should maximize total welfare. In an infinite universe, any action we take might leave the total sum unchanged, because adding or subtracting a finite amount from an infinite total makes no difference. If that’s right, then no action matters in terms of total value, which seems absurd.

Some responses include:

• Shifting from total to average or prioritarian measures of value
• Restricting moral concern to a finite domain (e.g., our light cone)
• Adopting a non-aggregative framework that doesn’t rely on summing value

But each of these has costs. Average utilitarianism can imply that creating more people with slightly lower welfare is bad, even if they’re still very well off. Prioritarianism and other alternatives struggle with how to define the relevant comparison class. And non-aggregative views may fail to capture the intuition that more suffering or happiness is worse or better, all else equal.

Clarifying how to handle infinite value would help us understand whether certain cosmological or long-term scenarios are genuinely morally relevant, and whether our current moral frameworks can survive contact with modern physics and cosmology.

How Should We Handle Moral Uncertainty?

In real life, we rarely have full confidence in a single moral theory. We might think utilitarianism is most likely correct, but also worry that deontology or virtue ethics might be right. How should we act when we’re uncertain about which moral view is true?

One prominent idea is to apply something like expected utility theory to moral theories: weight each theory by our degree of belief in it, and choose the action that scores best in expectation. But this raises difficult questions:

• How do we compare values across theories? Is a unit of well-being in utilitarianism equivalent to a duty fulfilled in deontology?
• Should a theory that assigns extreme stakes (e.g., infinite disvalue to certain actions) dominate our choices even if we assign it low probability?
• Does moral uncertainty justify more cautious or conservative behavior, or can it license radical actions if high-stakes theories are taken seriously?

These questions matter in practice. For example, if we’re even slightly uncertain about views that treat animal suffering as extremely important, that might justify major changes in diet, agriculture, and research funding. Similarly, if we’re uncertain about views that prioritize future generations, that could push us toward much stronger climate or existential risk policies.

A better theory of moral uncertainty would help individuals and institutions make more robust decisions under ethical disagreement, and could provide a principled way to navigate deep moral pluralism in both personal and political life.

How Much Should We Trust Moral Intuitions?

Many ethical arguments rely on intuitions: our immediate sense that certain actions are right or wrong, or that certain outcomes are better or worse. But intuitions are shaped by culture, evolution, and personal experience, and they often conflict with each other or with systematic moral theories.

Consider the tension between:

• Common-sense morality (e.g., strong prohibitions on lying, killing, or breaking promises)
• Theoretical virtues like simplicity, generality, and consistency (which often favor more abstract, consequentialist-style theories)

Should we revise our intuitions to fit a simpler, more elegant moral theory? Or should we treat intuitions as a primary source of moral data, even if they make our theory more complex or less unified?

This isn’t just a methodological question. It affects how we evaluate real-world issues. For instance, if we prioritize theoretical elegance, we might be more willing to accept counterintuitive conclusions like:

• That it’s sometimes permissible to sacrifice one person to save many
• That creating more happy people is always good, regardless of their average welfare
• That small probabilities of huge benefits should dominate our choices

On the other hand, if we give strong weight to intuitions, we might reject these conclusions and accept a more pluralistic, less systematic ethics. Resolving this tension would help clarify the proper role of intuition in moral reasoning and guide how we build and test ethical theories.

Which Problems Should We Treat as the Most Important?

Even if we had a clear moral theory and a good way to handle uncertainty, we’d still face the practical question: given what we know, what is the biggest problem in the world right now?

Different ethical views point to very different answers:

• Some prioritize extreme poverty and global health
• Others focus on animal suffering in factory farming
• Still others emphasize risks that could permanently curtail humanity’s future, like unaligned AI or nuclear war

Answering this question requires not just moral theory, but also empirical and strategic reasoning. We need to estimate:

• The scale of the problem (how many lives or how much welfare are at stake?)
• The neglectedness (how much attention and resources are already devoted to it?)
• The tractability (how likely are additional resources to make a difference?)

A more systematic approach to identifying the most important problems would help individuals, charities, governments, and researchers allocate their time and money more effectively. It would also help resolve disputes about priorities by making the underlying assumptions and trade-offs more explicit.

What Are the Highest-Impact Policies and Research Areas?

Once we have a clearer sense of what the biggest problems are, we can ask: what policies and research areas offer the highest leverage for addressing them?

For example:

• Could institutional reforms like prediction markets or epistemic incentives improve policy quality across many domains?
• Would targeted taxes (e.g., on animal products or luxury consumption) do more good than broad welfare programs?
• Which scientific fields—tropical medicine, AI safety, economic modeling, or moral philosophy itself—offer the best return on investment in terms of long-term impact?

These questions sit at the intersection of ethics, economics, and political science. They’re not purely ethical, but they depend heavily on ethical assumptions about what kinds of outcomes matter and how much they matter. A better understanding of high-leverage interventions would help direct public and private resources toward the most effective ways of improving the world.

How Should We Choose Careers and Charitable Giving?

For many people, the most immediate ethical question is: how should I live? What career path, cause area, or pattern of giving will allow me to do the most good?

This depends on:

• Which problems we consider most important (see above)
• Which skills and opportunities we have
• How much we value personal fulfillment, family, or other non-moral goods

Some frameworks suggest that the best careers are those that:

• Directly address the most pressing global problems
• Allow for high earnings that can be donated to effective causes
• Build influence or expertise in high-leverage domains (e.g., policy, technology, or research)

Similarly, charitable giving might be most effective when focused on:

• High-impact, evidence-based interventions (e.g., global health, animal welfare, or existential risk)
• Meta-charities that improve the effectiveness of the broader philanthropic sector
• Long-term investments that grow over time to support future priorities

Clarifying the ethical principles behind career and donation choices would help individuals make more deliberate, impactful decisions, and could shape how institutions advise and support people in their moral and professional development.

FAQs: Common Questions About Unresolved Ethical Problems

Why focus on these particular ethical questions?

These questions are selected not because they are the most famous or traditional, but because they have unusually high stakes and are potentially solvable. If we could resolve them, it would change how we prioritize problems, design policies, and make personal decisions on a global scale.

Can’t we just rely on common sense morality?

Common sense is a useful starting point, but it’s often inconsistent, culturally contingent, and poorly equipped to handle novel, large-scale problems like climate change, AI, or global poverty. A more reflective ethics can help us correct biases and make better decisions in complex, high-stakes situations.

Doesn’t moral uncertainty make ethics useless for decision-making?

No. Moral uncertainty doesn’t mean we can’t act; it means we need better tools for acting under uncertainty. Just as we use expected value in everyday decisions, we can develop frameworks for making robust choices even when we’re unsure which moral theory is correct.

Are these questions only relevant to philosophers?

No. These questions matter to anyone who cares about making the world better. Policymakers, scientists, philanthropists, and ordinary citizens all face trade-offs that depend on how we answer them. Better ethical reasoning can improve decisions at every level of society.

What can I do to help make progress on these problems?

You can contribute by:

• Studying philosophy, economics, or related fields with an eye toward high-impact questions
• Supporting research and institutions working on global priorities, moral uncertainty, or longtermism
• Applying careful ethical reasoning to your career, donations, and civic engagement

How do these questions relate to real-world problems like climate change or AI?

They shape how we frame and prioritize those problems. For example, population ethics affects how much we care about future generations in climate policy; moral uncertainty affects whether we take worst-case AI scenarios seriously; and questions about the biggest problems in the world determine whether we focus on near-term suffering or long-term survival.

Written by

Sneha Tete

• Integrated M.A. in Applied Linguistics, University of Hyderabad
• 5+ years in editorial, instructional, SEO, and research-based writing

Sneha is a relationships and lifestyle writer with a strong foundation in applied linguistics and certified training in relationship coaching. She brings over five years of writing experience to theskillvault,  crafting thoughtful, research-driven content that empowers readers to build healthier relationships, boost emotional well-being, and embrace holistic living. Her writing and insights reflect the belief that beauty, happiness, and wellness…