As we live together with others, from time to time situations emerge in which we do not agree with the moral stance of others. This is why we have long debates on questions like abortion, or welfare, or drug laws, or sex education in schools, or prayer in school, or animal rights, or the death penalty, or homosexuality, or cloning, or euthanasia, or universal health care… the list goes on.

In fact, one can even see that the list of areas were there can be disagreement actually increases with time. Why?

1. Increased travel, trade, and communication means that we can be placed in contact with more people and cultures than ever before in the past. This is especially true in the United States, which has a long history of immigration and which is probably now the premier world power economically.
2. Science and technology have given us many, many more choices now than were available in the past. In the past things like human cloning, or even organ transplants, were the stuff of science fiction. Abortion is relatively safe and available, at least compared to the past. The same can be said of contraceptives. War has changed, so that an enemy can be attacked far away without ever seeing them. On the other hand, weapons—nuclear and biological—have become so powerful that nobody really wants to use them.
3. With the technology has come still other problems, such as pollution. In the past it usually took a long time to really change or damage to environment, even in a fairly small region. Now a toxic waste dump or a malfunctioning reactor can affect the lives of thousands of people in short order.
4. At least in the U.S., we celebrate variety and freedom of choice on many issues. However, this freedom can raise a new question of how, exactly, do we trust as a finally arbiter of "right" and "wrong"?

So what we’re going to do now is try to define a framework with which to examine tough social questions. Hopefully, this will allow us to understand the various dimensions of moral arguments, and also help us to figure out where we can tolerate moral disagreement and where we cannot or should not.

Mr. Hinman suggests that there are five basic questions that we need to ask when we examine most any particular moral problem. These are:

1. What is the present state?
2. What would be the ideal state?
3. What would be the minimally acceptable state?
4. How can we get from the present state to the minimally acceptable state?
5. How can we get from the minimum state the ideal state?

The goal here is to order our thoughts, so that we don’t just end up in a free-for-all, with people or groups simply accusing each other of stupidity and malice. We would also like to avoid trying to inflict poorly-thought out, half-baked rules and laws on society.

In regard to the "present state," we need to ask:

How prevalent is the problem in actuality?

What factors of the problem are morally significant?

How many people recognize that there even is a problem at all?

Next, we ask: what is the minimum acceptable situation?

What minimal condition would we need to reach a minimally tolerable state?

What would be the best general way to reach this situation (laws, punishment, etc.)?

Then: What ideal conditions would be needed to totally solve the problem?

Would we use laws, or non-coercive means to try to bring about compliance?

Then we can ask: How exactly should we get from the actual state to the minimal state? What specific measures can be taken? (Local laws? State laws? National laws? Taxes? Protests? Civil disobedience?)

Then we ask: how do we get from the current state to the ideal state? Do we use P.R. campaigns, education? Tax incentives? Laws?

Here we need to recognized that there may be much more toleration of the problem in the minimal state than when the problem was acute. Also, we need to realize that poor implementation of the "minimal" state can cause problems in moving toward the ideal state.