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Ethical dilemmas are central to the study of moral philosophy and decision-making. Before exploring structured reasoning approaches or examining specific case studies, we’ll explore what constitutes an ethical dilemma and why such situations challenge both people and institutions. In this tutorial, you'll learn to recognize dilemmas, understand their typical forms, and appreciate the importance of careful moral reasoning.
An ethical dilemma occurs when a person faces a decision involving conflicting moral principles, and choosing one option means compromising another. Unlike simple right-or-wrong scenarios, ethical dilemmas require deeper analysis because each option may involve potential harm, value compromise, or a conflict of duties. a conflict between moral imperatives, and choosing one may result in compromising another.
At the core of an ethical dilemma is the question, "What should I do?" when no option seems completely right or wrong. Ethical dilemmas are different from everyday problems because they challenge our moral frameworks, not just our preferences or practical goals. An ethical dilemma typically includes the following characteristics:
When you are the midst of making a decision about what action is ethically right, dilemmas can seem to be something to avoid. After all, it is difficult to decide if it is better to break a promise to one friend or lie to another friend when asked to reveal a secret. Life would be much easier if you could avoid these tough situations. But using dilemmas while evaluating theory can help us understand something about the nature of ethics itself; this would be engaging in metaethics.
Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg made use of a series of moral dilemmas in order to understand how individuals develop their moral judgement. He, and his graduate students, would conduct interviews with individuals asking them to consider what to do in specific situations that were purposefully described to highlight a choice between different ethical principles. The most famous of the scenarios that he used is commonly referred to as the “Heinz dilemma.”
IN CONTEXT
There are several different versions of the Heinz dilemma, but Kohlberg provided the following script for it in his 1981 Essays in Moral Development:
A woman was on her deathbed. There was one drug that the doctors said would save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to produce. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $1,000 which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: “No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from it.” So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man's laboratory to steal the drug for his wife. Should Heinz have broken into the laboratory to steal the drug for his wife? Why or why not?Kohlberg used the answers that the study participants provided to this scenario (and follow questions to clarify them) to test if the participants were more likely to use rule-based reasoning or rely upon the outcomes of actions. Carol Gilligan later criticized Kohlberg’s model as privileging only certain types of moral reasoning and excluding others that didn’t rely upon the same tensions. Regardless of whether Gilligan’s critique was correct or not, you can see that working through a theoretical dilemma can provide us with some clarity on our moral values.
When the dilemma one faces is actual, not theoretical, there are several options to determining what the right thing to do is. These approaches borrow from a framework that logicians and other philosophers use when discussing dilemmas. You compare the dilemma to the options that you have if you are being charged by an angry bull.
When being charged by a bull, you have a few options. You can pick one the horns to be stabbed by. You call this grasping the horn of the dilemma. If the dilemma is to decide between breaking a promise (and thereby saving a life) or keeping the promise (and thereby allowing someone to die), you would be grasping a horn of the dilemma when you decide that one value or option is more important than the other. If you determine that life is more important, you accept that doing do involves accepting the harms from breaking a promise. The reverse is also true.
Another method is to go between the horns. When you do this, you take one of the actions provided as options, but argue that the outcomes had not been accurately described. If you are considering reporting illegal behavior by our employer, you might say that you are in the horns of a dilemma deciding between reporting and thereby risking our job or staying silent and thereby not acting honestly. But perhaps you could go between the horns by doing something like reporting anonymously – thus telling the truth but not risking retaliation. When you go between the horns, you find a way to reframe the situation so the outcomes are not as bad.
Finally, you can refute the dilemma by showing that there are more than two options. The difference between this and going between the horns is that when you are refuting, you provide new options. For example, suppose one nation has invaded another and taken over control of the area. You might see a dilemma between going to war (and thereby risking and losing lives) or accepting that the land has been taken over (thereby saving lives but allowing the aggressor to continue to invade further.) The dilemma puts forward that the only options are retaliating with force or doing nothing. However, there are other options, like the use of economic sanctions, cyber-attacks on the computer infrastructure of the aggressor, or mobilizing global public opinion to isolate the aggressor. These are options beyond what was considered and refute that it is an either/or choice.
Once a decision is made using a moral framework, it is essential to evaluate the reasoning and the consequences. This ensures ethical accountability and allows for improvement in future decision-making.
Ethical decisions often have both immediate and future consequences. A decision that solves a short-term issue may lead to long-term harm, or vice versa.
EXAMPLE
Whistleblowing may cause short-term disruption but lead to long-term integrity within an organization. Someone who approaches ethics as a consequentialist would want to think through both the long- and short-term consequences. On the other hand, a deontologist would continue to think about what actions are morally right because of the type of action that it is.Reflecting back on the decision-making process can help us understand what to do in the future. You can also learn that there are aspects that you need to pay more attention to when thinking about an ethical choice. You may find that you were wrong about one value being more important than another value. Or you may determine that you were wrong about what ethical theory was correct. There are many aspects of our reasoning process that could be evaluated after the fact. Someone who is interested in acting ethically right would make it a standard practice to see what she has learned from her experiences making decisions.
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