"Doing the right thing" - that is, being ethical - is all fine and good. It's a noble ideal, one we have grown up with and absorbed from early childhood. We share, at least, a vague sense that things in the world would be a lot worse if people generally made immoral choices, and that, overall, it's better for most everyone to act ethically most of the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But it's the possibility of exceptions to our general rules that keeps ethicists awake in the wee small hours of the morning. Sure, I should tell the truth rather than lie - generally; but what if the Gestapo at my front door asks me where to find my Jewish neighbor (who just so happens to be hiding in my basement)? I have a pretty strong sense that, at least in this one particular case, it might actually be moral to lie. But "going with your gut" isn't a reliable method of choosing, and so I have to think long and hard about why lying here might be right, and try to come up with good reasons. (And this is a pretty straightforward situation - they get a lot trickier in real life.)
Anyway, that's the background for much of our ethical reasoning in philosophy. (Not all, though; there are plenty of other issues in ethics that don't rest on the question of exceptions.) This July 2009 article explains the "tragedy of the commons," a classic thought experiment in real-world ethical decision making - in particular, it shows how "doing the right thing" for yourself might, sometimes, contradict "doing the right thing" for the rest of the people around you.
Cows are involved.
A provocative quote from the article:
Rational individuals (and states) will always benefit by being free riders
in the short term. If you do the right thing, you lose; you’re a sucker. Doing
the wrong thing at least keeps you even.
Once the author lays out the classic thought experiment, he takes it and applies it to issues of global environmentalism, psychology, game theory... it's a long article, but very thought-provoking.
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