Moral Dilemmas that Matter

Abstract

One question that has been at the center of a lively debate among moral philosophers in recent years is the issue of what constitutes a genuine moral dilemma. Informally, a moral dilemma is a situation in which an agent must decide between two (or more) competing courses of action open to her, each of which has compelling moral considerations in its favor. One problem that arises with this formula is that whether a given situation counts as genuinely dilemmatic depends not only on the particular moral principles that are undergirded by particular moral theories, but also on the way in which the ‘ought’ operator is to be understood. This paper focuses on the latter issue. In what follows, I examine several contemporary accounts of moral dilemmas, briefly delineating the main logical options regarding how the ‘ought’ operator is to be understood in the definition of a dilemma. After elaborating on these different readings of the deontic operator and comparing them, I argue that cases of moral conflict qualify as genuine dilemmas on only one particular reading. This finding has significant implications regarding how we should understand moral dilemmas and what kinds of cases, if any, should count as genuine dilemmas. Thus, the main contribution of this paper is to clarify the notion of a genuine moral dilemma by making explicit possible and plausible meanings of the deontic operator. Only when this is done can various arguments for or against the existence of moral dilemmas be properly evaluated.