>The trouble is that answering all of those questions still doesn't tell you whether it's right or wrong.
If you answer all the subquestions, then whether it's right or wrong doesn't matter. Let's take a much simpler, analogous question to illustrate the process:
"If a tree falls in a forest, and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"
The controversial part of this is what people mean by "makes a sound". It's easier to break down here because there are only two senses of the it - vibrations in the air versus the qualitative experience of hearing. Once you've answered that it makes vibrations in the air but doesn't cause a hearing experience, whether or not it "makes a sound" doesn't tell you anything about what to expect.
Similarly, if you figure out what people mean by something being "right" or "wrong", you can use those pieces to cause the things that "rightness" and "wrongness" cause without caring about the overall judgement.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. If I have a troubling ethical decision to make, I might very well answer all of your questions and still be unsure whether the action I was going to take was right or wrong.
If you answer all the subquestions, then whether it's right or wrong doesn't matter. Let's take a much simpler, analogous question to illustrate the process:
"If a tree falls in a forest, and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"
The controversial part of this is what people mean by "makes a sound". It's easier to break down here because there are only two senses of the it - vibrations in the air versus the qualitative experience of hearing. Once you've answered that it makes vibrations in the air but doesn't cause a hearing experience, whether or not it "makes a sound" doesn't tell you anything about what to expect.
Similarly, if you figure out what people mean by something being "right" or "wrong", you can use those pieces to cause the things that "rightness" and "wrongness" cause without caring about the overall judgement.