Save your drowning wife because you love her, not because ethics allowed it

Bernard Williams imagined a man who can save only one of two drowning people, one a stranger and one his wife. If he pauses to check that impartial morality permits preferring his own wife, Williams says he's had "one thought too many." The thought experiment challenges any ethical theory that demands you justify loving particular people from a neutral, anyone's-eye view.

— Bernard Williams, Persons, Character and Morality, in Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973-1980 — Cambridge University Press, 1981 (essay first published 1976)
Go deeper: get the book →