The Search for Ethics in Leadership, Business, and Beyond by Joanne B. Ciulla

Author:Joanne B. Ciulla
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783030384630
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Moral Dilemmas

There are, however, a variety of moral conflicts that don’t seem to bring about the good. Moral dilemmas are situations in which two equally important obligations conflict. You morally ought to do A and morally ought to do B, but you can’t do both because B is just not doing A, or some contingent feature of the world prevents you from doing both. Tragedy and drama sometimes focus on such conflicts. Often cited is the conflict in Sophocles’ play Antigone . Antigone wants to bury her brother, but Creon won’t let her because her brother was a traitor and his burial could stir up unrest in the city. Her obligation to the State conflicts with her obligations to her family and the gods. Antigone is in a fix. She’s damned if she buries her brother and damned if she doesn’t. With real moral dilemmas we never feel quite happy with our decision. Some students mistakenly believe that all moral conflicts are unsolvable and draw the conclusion that there are no answers to ethical problems, only opinions.

Many philosophers have denied that bona fide ethical dilemmas exist (lest they be put out of business). Kant, Ross, and Hare offer levels of analysis and hierarchies of duties that serve as tiebreakers in what at first glance, appear to be moral conflicts but turn out to be sloppy or inadequate descriptions and analysis. Hare, for example, approvingly quotes a message posted on a sign outside of a Yorkshire Church. It said, “If you have conflicting duties, one of them isn’t your duty.”10

Bernard Williams argues that moral conflicts are more like conflicts of desire than conflicts of belief about facts. If, for example, you believe that Camden is in Pennsylvania, and you believe that Camden is in New Jersey, unless there is something to explain how both of these beliefs can be true, you must give up one belief in favor of the other. So, by accepting belief B, it is logically necessary for you to reject belief A. Williams says that we respond much differently to conflicting desires. For example, the desire of a man to be a loyal husband may conflict with his desire to have an affair with another woman. When it comes to strong conflicting desires, we usually try to imagine ways to satisfy both. Often this isn’t possible. Yet, choosing to act on one desire does not logically eliminate the second desire in the same way that choosing one fact necessarily eliminates another. The husband may choose to act on his desire to remain loyal to his wife, but still desire to have an affair with the other woman. Williams says, in this kind of case, a person may believe that he “acted for the best” but the case is not closed as it is in a factual dispute. What is left, or the “remainder” of the conflict, Williams calls, “regret,” or the “What if?” question.11

While I wouldn’t draw a relativist conclusion from Williams’s argument, I think he has put his finger on an extremely important point of moral psychology.

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