The Unwanted Wife's Return (Ex-Husband Wants Me Back) novel Chapter 296

The Line Between Us (2) 

ANDREW’S POV: 

“Good,” she said. “I was hoping for that answer.” 

We agreed to not discuss our arguments with each other until the debate itself, which was in two weeks. This was Amelia’s suggestion and it was a good one. If we compared notes we would spend the whole time arguing at home instead of building our real cases, and our parents would have to live through both the preparation and the competition, which was already going to be a lot for them. 

I approached the preparation the way I approached everything. 

First I read everything I could find about the debate between rule-based ethics and emotion-based ethics, which led me into a body of philosophy I had not properly encountered before and which was significantly more interesting than I had expected. There was a philosopher named Kant who argued that rules were the only reliable basis for moral action because they could be applied universally without depending on individual circumstance. 

was another philosopher named Hume who argued that reason alone could not motivate action and that all motivation ultimately came from feeling. There were entire centuries of argument between these two ns and their various descendants. 

And this very exciting. 

I made notes. I organized the notes into a structure. I built a case that moved from the most fundamental argument to the most concrete, practical examples. I thought about what Amelia was likely to say and I built responses to those arguments into the case itself, so that when she made her points I would already have the answers ready. 

I did all of this for a week before I realized I had a problem. 

The problem was that the more I researched, the more I found things that Amelia’s side of the argument could use. Real examples from history where rigid rules had produced terrible outcomes because they were applied without regard for the feelings and circumstances of the people they were applied to. Real examples where people’s feelings had led them to act against rules in ways that were clearly right in retrospect. The suffragettes had broken laws because they felt that those laws were unjust. The people who hid Jewish families during the Second World War had broken rules because they felt those rules were evil. 

My rules are what 

stairs. 

People's argument was running into its own counterexamples. 

ne one evening thinking about this. 

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