Responsibilities and Principles: Reflections on the Sources of Moral Dilemmas

Abstract

Abstract Moral conflict has long been prominent in the attempts of philosophers to understand morality. It was recognized by Plato, celebrated by Hegel, and, more recently, taken as a commonplace by a variety of non-cognitivist moral theorists. Moral dilemmas are no more than a special case of moral conflict, but they are of particular interest because they exhibit the possibility of conflict within the moral consciousness of a single individual. It is one thing for a person to recognize that others might fundamentally disagree with his moral stands, quite another to experience apparently irresolvable conflicts in his own mind. In recent years, philosophers have given a good bit of attention to moral dilemmas. Taking dilemmas as standing in the way of a well-conceived and practically useful moral philosophy, they have wondered how a genuine dilemma could be possible. In this paper I will take another tack. Taking dilemmas as a fundamental fact of moral life, I will ask what their possibility can teach us about that form of life. I will give special attention to some of the varying circumstances in which they arise, and the form they take in those circumstances. I will in light of those reflections offer several general speculations about the concept of morality assumed in much of the controversy over the possibility of moral dilemmas.