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Generally, ethical disputes are complex and difficult to settle. Therefore, a clear account of how to handle ethical problems successfully and an understanding of what the crucial points are, where conflicts evolve and where misunderstandings arise, would be helpful. In this paper a structuring pathway to tackling ethical problems will be presented. It is designed to support the process of ethical opinion formation and to prepare well-informed ethical judgements. In particular, it aims at alleviating the problems that severely hamper successful ethical debates, as there are: unstructured discussion, intransparent conflict situation, fuzzy facts, disorganised interdisciplinary co-operation, and unclear use of arguments. For this purpose, the pathway provides an analytical matrix and a framework to structure the ethical debate in five consecutive steps:
1. Identification and analysis of the problem.
2. Clarification of the empirical data.
3. Re-analysis of the problem in light of the findings of step 2.
4. Analysis of the ethical valuations.
5. Final ethical judgement.