Moral Dilemmas: When All Options Seem Wrong

You promised to meet a friend for an important conversation. On the way, you witness a serious car accident with people trapped and injured. Staying to help means breaking your promise. Leaving to keep your promise means abandoning people who desperately need assistance. Either choice seems wrong—you violate an obligation regardless of what you do. This is a moral dilemma: a situation where moral requirements conflict such that any action appears to involve wrongdoing.

Moral dilemmas confront us with uncomfortable truths about ethics. They reveal that morality sometimes demands incompatible things, that we cannot always act rightly because circumstances force choices between competing moral claims, and that some situations involve tragic dimensions where even the best action carries moral cost. These insights challenge the comforting assumption that morality provides clear guidance—that there's always a right answer if we think carefully enough.

The philosophical debates about dilemmas touch fundamental questions: Can genuine moral dilemmas exist, or does morality always determine a uniquely correct action? If dilemmas are genuine, what does this mean for moral theory? How should we think about choices where all options violate moral requirements? What explains the guilt and regret people feel after making difficult moral choices, even when they chose as well as possible?

Beyond philosophical interest, moral dilemmas have practical importance. Healthcare workers during resource scarcity face impossible choices about patient prioritization. Leaders during crises must choose between options involving harm to different groups. Parents navigate conflicts between children's competing needs. Understanding dilemmas—their structure, resolution strategies, and psychological aftermath—helps people navigate these painful situations with clearer thinking and appropriate moral response.

This article examines moral dilemmas' nature and significance, exploring classic examples, philosophical debates about their possibility, approaches to resolution, and the concept of moral remainders that linger even after dilemmas are resolved.

Defining Moral Dilemmas: Structure and Characteristics

A moral dilemma exists when circumstances create conflicting moral requirements such that satisfying one requires violating another, with no option that fulfills all moral obligations. The key features distinguish genuine dilemmas from merely difficult decisions.

Conflicting moral requirements form dilemmas' core. You face two or more moral obligations, duties, or values pulling in incompatible directions. A promise to keep conflicts with a duty to help. Honesty conflicts with preventing harm. Fairness to one person conflicts with fairness to another. These aren't conflicts between moral and non-moral considerations (duty versus desire) but between competing moral claims.

Unavoidable violation means any action breaks some moral requirement. This distinguishes dilemmas from situations with one clear right answer that happens to be difficult. If helping the accident victim is clearly more important than keeping your appointment, you face a hard choice but not a genuine dilemma—you know what you should do even if doing it is costly.

Genuine dilemmas involve situations where either choice seems wrong. You save five people by killing one, or let five die to avoid killing. You lie to save innocent people, or tell truth that leads to their deaths. Every available action violates moral prohibitions that seem equally binding.

Incommensurability characterizes many dilemmas. The conflicting values or obligations resist comparison on a common scale. How do you weigh honesty against preventing harm? Promise-keeping against helping strangers? One child's welfare against another's? Some philosophers argue these values are incommensurable—not reducible to a single metric enabling straightforward comparison.

This incommensurability partly explains dilemmas' difficulty. If you could convert all moral considerations to comparable units (pleasure, welfare, moral points), dilemmas would dissolve into calculations, however complex. The fact that values resist this reduction means some dilemmas may be irresolvable in principle.

Moral remainders persist after resolution. Even after choosing what seems the best available option, something remains morally problematic about the situation. You feel guilt, regret, or a sense that moral repair is needed. This lingering moral residue suggests you didn't simply make the right choice that happens to feel bad—you chose an option that genuinely involved wrongdoing, even if it was the least wrong available.

Compare this to difficult but non-dilemmatic choices. If you skip a party to study for an important exam, you might feel disappointed but not guilty—you made the right choice. Dilemmas generate a different phenomenology: you chose as well as possible yet feel you did something wrong. This emotional response may track a moral reality: genuine dilemmas force wrongdoing regardless of choice.

Symmetry versus asymmetry distinguishes dilemma types. Symmetric dilemmas present equal moral claims on both sides—choosing which of two drowning people to save when you can only save one. Asymmetric dilemmas involve one option appearing somewhat better but still wrong—lying to save lives seems better than letting people die, but lying still violates moral prohibitions.

Symmetric dilemmas may be theoretically purer but practically rarer. Most real dilemmas involve asymmetry—one option seems better than alternatives, but that "better" option still involves genuine moral violation rather than being simply "right" with unfortunate side effects.

Classic Philosophical Examples and Thought Experiments

Certain examples have become canonical in philosophical discussions of moral dilemmas, each illuminating different aspects of the problem.

The Trolley Problem, introduced by Philippa Foot and elaborated by Judith Jarvis Thomson, presents starkly: A runaway trolley will kill five people on the tracks. You can pull a lever diverting it to a side track where it will kill one person. Should you pull the lever?

Most people's intuition says yes—saving five by sacrificing one produces better outcomes. But variations complicate this. In the "footbridge" version, you must push a large man off a bridge to stop the trolley, killing him to save five. The outcomes are identical (one dies, five saved), yet most people refuse to push. This suggests something besides consequences matters—perhaps using someone as mere means, or causing harm through direct action versus redirection.

The trolley problem tests whether all dilemmas reduce to consequentialist calculation (count up outcomes, choose better one) or whether deontological constraints (don't kill, don't use people as mere means) create genuine dilemmas even when consequences favor one option.

Sophie's Choice, from William Styron's novel, presents horrific asymmetric dilemma: A Nazi officer forces Sophie to choose which of her two children will be killed—if she doesn't choose, both will be killed. She must actively condemn one child to death or passively allow both to die.

This exemplifies moral dilemmas at their most tragic. Sophie faces impossible situation not of her making, where any action involves profound moral violation. Choosing one child means betraying the other; refusing to choose means both children die. The "best" option (choosing one to save one) still involves unbearable moral cost and participation in evil.

Sophie's Choice illustrates that some dilemmas admit no morally clean solutions. You're forced to choose, but the fact that one option is "better" doesn't make it "right"—it remains deeply wrong even while being the least wrong available.

The Lying to Nazis scenario tests whether absolute moral rules can have exceptions: Nazis seek Jews you're hiding. They ask if you're hiding anyone. Do you lie to save lives or tell truth enabling murder?

This pits truth-telling duty against preventing grave harm. Strict Kantians argue you must never lie—lying violates categorical imperative. But this seems morally absurd—truth-telling that aids murder appears worse than lying to prevent it. Yet if lying is permissible here, is truth-telling really a moral duty, or just a guideline with consequentialist exceptions?

The scenario forces confrontation with whether morality contains absolute prohibitions or whether consequences can override any rule. If no absolutes exist, are there any genuine dilemmas (just calculate consequences)? If absolutes exist, do they bind even when horrific?

Sartre's Student from Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist philosophy: During WWII, a student must choose between staying to care for his mother (his only remaining family, depending entirely on him) or joining the Free French forces to fight the Nazis. Each choice sacrifices the other—staying means abandoning the fight against evil; leaving means abandoning his mother.

This exemplifies incommensurability. How do you compare filial duty to one person against duty to fight injustice? Personal obligation versus political commitment? There's no common metric. Consequentialist calculation fails because you can't meaningfully aggregate his mother's welfare against abstract contributions to war effort.

Sartre used this to illustrate existentialist thesis that existence precedes essence—you must choose without guidance from universal moral laws, creating meaning through choice. Whether you agree with existentialism, the dilemma reveals that some choices resist resolution through moral theory or principle.

The Drowning Children scenario: You can save only one of two drowning children—your own child or a stranger's child. Saving your child seems like obvious choice (special obligations to family), but impartial morality suggests all children's lives count equally. Do you violate impartial morality by favoring your child, or violate parental duty by treating your child as no more important than others?

This tests whether partiality is morally permissible. If morality is fundamentally impartial (utilitarianism, Kantian universality), favoring your child is wrong—you should save whichever child you can reach first or has better chance of survival. But if partiality toward family is morally legitimate, impartial morality itself seems mistaken.

Different people's intuitions diverge sharply here, suggesting deep disagreement about whether partiality is morally acceptable or corrupts moral judgment. This disagreement itself indicates values incommensurability—perhaps there's no fact of the matter about whether parental love should override impartial benevolence.

Philosophical Debates: Are Genuine Dilemmas Possible?

Philosophers disagree fundamentally about whether genuine moral dilemmas—situations with no right answer—can exist, or whether apparent dilemmas reflect incomplete moral thinking.

The Coherentist Denial argues genuine dilemmas are impossible because morality must be coherent. If moral requirements genuinely conflicted with no resolution, morality would be incoherent—demanding incompatible things. Since morality must provide action guidance, it cannot simultaneously require and forbid the same action. Therefore, apparent dilemmas must have resolutions, even if we struggle to identify them.

Kantian ethics exemplifies this view. Kant argued that duties, properly understood, never genuinely conflict. Apparent conflicts result from mistaken duty formulation or from confusing genuine duties with inclinations or non-moral desires. Perfect duties (don't lie, don't kill innocents) are absolute, but they don't conflict when correctly specified. Imperfect duties (help others, develop talents) allow discretion, so conflicts are apparent not real.

This position maintains morality's systematic character. If genuine dilemmas existed, moral principles would be fundamentally flawed—unable to guide action in all situations. Better to conclude that dilemmas are epistemological (we don't know the right answer) rather than metaphysical (no right answer exists).

The Realist Acceptance holds that genuine dilemmas exist and reveal morality's tragic dimension. Some situations offer no morally clean options. You must choose, but any choice involves genuine wrongdoing. This doesn't make morality incoherent—it makes morality acknowledge reality's complexity and tragedy.

Bernard Williams advocated this view, arguing that moral remainders—guilt and need for repair persisting after "right" choice—indicate genuine dilemmas. If you simply did the right thing, why guilt? The fact that people feel they did something wrong even after optimal choice suggests they did do something wrong—both options involved wrongdoing, and they chose the lesser.

This position takes phenomenology seriously. How we experience difficult moral choices—the lingering guilt, sense of moral loss, need for atonement—suggests dilemmas are genuine rather than merely apparent. Dismissing this as confused emotions overlooks the possibility that emotions track moral reality.

The Pluralist Account by W.D. Ross's prima facie duties framework accommodates dilemmas while maintaining moral coherence. Multiple independent duties exist (promise-keeping, helping others, avoiding harm, gratitude, justice). These are genuinely binding but defeasible—they can be overridden by weightier competing duties.

When duties conflict, you must judge which takes priority in the situation. The overridden duty doesn't disappear—it still makes moral claims, creating moral remainder. You should keep promises, but helping someone in emergency overrides it. You're right to help, but breaking the promise leaves moral residue requiring apology or reparation.

This preserves both coherence (there's a right answer: follow the weightier duty) and dilemma's tragic dimension (the overridden duty still binds you, creating lingering obligation). It's a middle position between denying dilemmas entirely and accepting tragic conflicts with no right answers.

The Consequentialist Dissolution argues apparent dilemmas dissolve when you properly calculate consequences. Every situation has outcomes—tally welfare effects of each option, choose the one producing best results. Difficult, yes; dilemma, no. There's a right answer even if finding it is hard.

This view faces objections. First, values incommensurability: if promise-keeping and preventing harm can't be reduced to common measure, how do you calculate? Second, moral remainder: why does guilt persist after choosing best consequences? Third, intuitive resistance: consequentialist answers sometimes violate strong moral intuitions (organ transplant case), suggesting consequences alone don't determine rightness.

The Existentialist Radical Position by Sartre argues that moral dilemmas reveal the absence of universal moral truths. You face choices without predetermined right answers. You must choose, and in choosing, you create values rather than discovering them. Moral theories can't resolve dilemmas because no objective moral facts exist to discover.

Most moral philosophers reject this radical subjectivism, maintaining that some moral truths are objective. But existentialist emphasis on choice's weightiness and moral theories' insufficiency for resolving all dilemmas resonates even for those who reject full subjectivism.

Moral Remainders and the Ethics of Regret

Even when people make what seems the best available choice in a dilemma, they often experience guilt, regret, and sense of moral wrongdoing. This phenomenon of "moral remainders" reveals important features of moral experience and possibly of moral reality.

The concept of moral remainders refers to moral obligations, debts, or wrongs that persist after dilemma resolution. You broke a promise to help an accident victim. Even though helping was right, the broken promise creates remainder—you owe your friend apology, explanation, perhaps reparation. The moral claim the promise made doesn't simply vanish because a stronger duty overrode it.

Williams argued that moral remainders indicate genuine dilemmas. If you simply did the right thing with no wrongdoing involved, why would moral residue remain? The fact that something lingers—guilt, need for repair, acknowledgment of wrong—suggests you couldn't fully satisfy all moral requirements, confirming the dilemma's genuineness.

Agent-regret differs from regular regret. Regular regret wishes events had gone differently: you regret rain ruining the picnic, but you don't feel responsible. Agent-regret involves feeling you did something wrong even when you chose as well as possible given circumstances. You killed one to save five; you're grateful five survived but feel guilt about killing one.

This agent-regret isn't irrational. It reflects recognition that your action, even if best available, involved genuine wrongdoing or moral loss. Eliminating such regret would suggest moral callousness—failure to recognize the gravity of what you did. Appropriate moral sensitivity includes feeling the weight of dilemmatic choices.

Dirty hands in politics exemplifies moral remainders in public life. Political leaders sometimes must authorize actions (deception, coercion, violence) that would be clearly wrong in personal morality but seem necessary for protecting citizens or achieving public goods. They acquire "dirty hands"—moral taint that doesn't wash off even if their choices were justified.

This contrasts with the view that political necessity fully excuses such actions. Dirty hands theorists argue that even justified wrongs remain wrongs. A president authorizing torture to prevent terrorist attack, even if that was the right call given circumstances, still bears moral burden for ordering torture. They did what they should but also did something wrong.

The question of guilt appropriateness generates disagreement. Some argue that feeling guilt after making optimal choice reflects moral confusion—you did nothing wrong, so guilt is inappropriate. Others maintain that guilt appropriately tracks moral remainder. You violated legitimate moral claim (broke promise, killed person), even though violation was justified by competing claim. Guilt acknowledges the victim of your choice.

This connects to debates about moral emotions' cognitive content. Do emotions like guilt track moral reality, or do they reflect evolved psychology sometimes misaligned with rational ethics? If guilt after optimal choice is inappropriate, we should train ourselves not to feel it. If appropriate, we should maintain emotional sensitivity to moral remainder even in dilemmatic contexts.

Reparation and moral repair often follow dilemmatic choices. You broke a promise to help someone; later you apologize, explain, make amends. This reparative behavior makes sense if moral remainder exists—you're repairing moral damage from broken promise. It seems odd if you simply did the right thing with no wrongdoing.

Many moral traditions emphasize repair after necessary wrongs. Religious confession and atonement, restorative justice practices, personal apology and amends—these institutions acknowledge that even justified wrongs create moral debts requiring acknowledgment and repair.

The Moral Luck Connection by Williams and Thomas Nagel: Circumstances can make you do wrong through no fault of your own. You're thrown into Sophie's Choice through Nazi evil, not your choices, yet you must choose and thereby do wrong. This constitutes moral bad luck—being put in position where you cannot avoid wrongdoing.

This challenges the view that you're only responsible for what you control. Dilemmas show that circumstances beyond your control can make you complicit in wrongdoing. You did what you should given the dilemma, but you also participated in evil or violated obligations. Moral assessment must grapple with this tragic dimension.

Resolution Strategies and Practical Approaches

While some dilemmas may be irresolvable in principle, practical approaches help navigate dilemmatic situations, making choices more thoughtfully and acknowledging moral complexity.

Value Prioritization involves clarifying your value hierarchy. When honesty conflicts with preventing harm, which matters more to you? When promise-keeping conflicts with helping strangers, what's your priority? Clear value hierarchies don't eliminate dilemmas but provide framework for consistent choice.

However, this strategy has limits. Some people's value hierarchies are genuinely flat—they don't consistently prioritize family over fairness or rights over welfare. Contexts matter—you might prioritize honesty in some situations but preventing harm in others. And some values may be incommensurable, resisting hierarchical ordering.

Consequentialist Calculation attempts to quantify outcomes and choose the option producing best results. How much welfare does each option generate? How many people benefit? How severely? This provides systematic decision procedure, even if implementing it is difficult.

The limits include measurement problems (how do you quantify dignity, autonomy, justice?), incommensurability (values that don't reduce to common metric), and the possibility that consequences don't capture everything morally relevant (rights, fairness, virtue may matter independently).

Deontological Priority holds that certain duties or rights take absolute priority regardless of consequences. Don't kill innocents, don't lie, don't violate rights—even if consequences would be better. This provides clear guidance when deontological rules apply, avoiding slide into consequentialist weighing that might justify terrible actions.

The limits emerge when deontological rules conflict (promise-keeping versus preventing harm, truth-telling versus protecting innocents) or when following rules produces catastrophic results. Absolute deontology may demand morally absurd conclusions like truth-telling to enable murder.

Creative Integration seeks solutions satisfying multiple values rather than simply choosing between them. Can you help the accident victim while minimizing promise-breaking cost (call friend, reschedule immediately)? Can you protect people without lying (mislead, refuse to answer, give partial truth)?

This approach works when clever solutions exist but fails in genuine dilemmas where circumstances force zero-sum choices. You must choose which child lives; no creative solution saves both. Integration works for many conflicts but not all.

Seeking Advice and Multiple Perspectives helps when you're uncertain. Others may see solutions you missed, identify which considerations carry most weight, or at least provide perspective on reasonable resolution. Moral consultation—talking through dilemmas with wise friends, mentors, or ethical boards—improves decision quality.

However, final choice responsibility remains yours. Others can inform but not decide for you. And disagreement among advisors may simply reflect the dilemma's genuine difficulty rather than revealing a clear answer.

Accepting Tragic Dimension means acknowledging that some situations offer no morally clean solutions. You must choose despite impossibility of right choice. This acceptance isn't resignation but realistic recognition of morality's limits. Not all conflicts resolve neatly; sometimes you face genuine tragedy requiring choice but not permitting innocence.

This acceptance changes how you approach choice—less about finding the "right" answer and more about choosing as thoughtfully as possible while acknowledging moral remainder. It also shapes post-choice response: guilt and repair may be appropriate rather than signs of confused thinking.

The Role of Virtue and Character suggests that while rules and calculations often fail in dilemmas, virtuous character provides guidance. A person of practical wisdom (phronesis) develops judgment to navigate complexity, discerning which values take priority in specific contexts. Courage, compassion, and integrity help you face tragic choices and their aftermath.

Virtue ethics doesn't eliminate dilemmas but suggests that character rather than rules or calculations guides through them. The virtuous person doesn't follow algorithm but exercises judgment shaped by experience, value commitments, and moral sensitivity.

Real-World Applications and Examples

Moral dilemmas aren't merely philosophical abstractions—they appear throughout real life, especially in professional contexts requiring difficult decisions.

Medical Triage during emergencies or pandemics creates heartbreaking dilemmas. Who receives the last ventilator—the younger patient with higher survival probability or the older patient who arrived first? The patient with dependents or the solitary person? Utilitarian calculations (maximize survival) conflict with fairness (first-come-first-served), respect for persons (don't value some lives over others), and special considerations (healthcare workers, parents).

COVID-19 forced these dilemmas into stark reality. Hospitals developed allocation protocols, but any protocol involves tragic choices. Save the most life-years? That discriminates against elderly. Use lottery? That wastes resources on patients unlikely to survive. No protocol avoids wronging someone.

Whistleblowing Decisions pit loyalty against honesty, self-interest against public good. You discover serious wrongdoing in your organization. Reporting means betraying colleagues, likely losing your job, facing retaliation. Staying silent means complicity in harm. Both options involve genuine moral violation—loyalty, employment security, and family welfare against truth-telling and preventing harm.

Real whistleblowers often describe feeling they had no choice (moral obligation was overwhelming) while simultaneously experiencing guilt over consequences to former colleagues and personal relationships. The moral remainder manifests as ongoing conflict about whether they chose correctly despite certainty they had to act.

Parenting Conflicts between children's competing needs create emotionally wrenching dilemmas. You can afford college for one child or partial support for both. You can attend one child's important event or the other's. Severely disabled child requires enormous resources that could improve other children's lives if distributed differently.

These situations involve special obligations (parental duties to each child), incommensurable values (one child's education versus another's), and profound consequences for loved ones. Neither fairness nor utilitarianism provides clean answers—fair treatment may harm one child's prospects; outcome maximization feels wrong when treating children unequally.

Conflicting Professional Duties plague professionals from lawyers to journalists to social workers. Defense attorney knows client is guilty but must provide zealous defense. Journalist can publish important truth but will harm innocent people. Social worker can help one client but violating confidentiality of another.

Professional ethics provide guidance (client confidentiality, journalistic integrity, client advocacy), but these principles sometimes conflict or lead to troubling results. The professional must choose while recognizing both the duty to follow professional principles and the moral cost of doing so in this instance.

Environmental Versus Economic Tradeoffs create policy dilemmas at societal level. Strict environmental protection preserves ecosystems but costs jobs and economic welfare. Development improves human lives but destroys natural habitats. Future generations' welfare versus present needs. Global welfare versus national interests.

These aren't simply technical questions about optimal policy but genuine dilemmas involving incommensurable values. How do you weight species preservation against human employment? Distant future people against present populations? The choices are genuinely dilemmatic—any path involves significant moral loss.

Comparing Approaches to Moral Dilemmas

Different ethical frameworks approach dilemmas differently, each with strengths and limitations when facing impossible choices.

Framework	Approach to Dilemmas	Strengths	Limitations
Consequentialism	Calculate outcomes, choose better one	Provides clear decision procedure	May violate rights; struggles with incommensurability
Kantian Deontology	Follow categorical imperative; genuine dilemmas impossible	Maintains moral coherence	May give counterintuitive results (truth-telling to murderers)
Ross's Pluralism	Weigh prima facie duties using judgment	Acknowledges moral remainders	No algorithm for resolution
Rights-Based	Respect absolute rights; don't violate even for good outcomes	Protects individuals from sacrifice	Struggles when rights conflict
Virtue Ethics	Exercise practical wisdom (phronesis)	Values character and judgment	Doesn't eliminate dilemmas
Care Ethics	Attend to relationships and particular needs	Context-sensitive	May struggle with impartiality requirements
Existentialism	Choose authentically; no predetermined answer	Acknowledges choice's weight	Risks subjectivism

This comparison reveals that no framework perfectly resolves all dilemmas. Each provides tools for thinking through conflicts but also faces cases where its approach seems inadequate or counterintuitive.

Psychological Research on Moral Dilemmas

Empirical research examines how people actually reason about dilemmas, revealing patterns in moral cognition that inform philosophical discussions.

Trolley Problem Studies conducted by psychologists and neuroscientists reveal consistent patterns. Most people (about 90%) approve pulling the lever in standard trolley case but reject (about 70%) pushing the large man in footbridge variant, despite identical outcomes. This suggests that factors beyond consequences drive moral judgment—perhaps distinction between doing versus allowing, direct versus indirect causation, or using someone as mere means.

Joshua Greene's neuroscience research found different brain regions activate for these scenarios. Personal dilemmas (pushing someone) engage emotional brain regions more strongly than impersonal dilemmas (pulling lever). This suggests moral judgment involves both emotional and rational processes, with their relative contribution depending on dilemma type.

Cultural Variation research by Jonathan Haidt and colleagues shows some cross-cultural consistency (most cultures distinguish doing from allowing harm) alongside significant variation. Individualist Western cultures emphasize autonomy and rights; collectivist Asian cultures weight family obligations and social harmony more heavily. These different emphases create different dilemmatic structures.

A dilemma pitting individual freedom against family duty hits differently across cultures. Western respondents more often prioritize individual choice; Asian respondents more often prioritize family obligation. This suggests dilemmas aren't purely abstract logical structures but reflect culturally-shaped value hierarchies.

Moral Development Research following Lawrence Kohlberg shows how dilemma reasoning changes across lifespan. Young children often can't recognize genuine dilemmas, seeing only one salient consideration. Adolescents begin acknowledging competing values but struggle to integrate them. Adults develop more sophisticated frameworks for weighing conflicting values, though approaches vary.

However, Gilligan's critique showed Kohlberg's framework favored justice reasoning over care reasoning, potentially mislabeling different moral orientations as developmental stages. This reminds us that how we structure dilemmas and evaluate responses reflects theoretical commitments, not just empirical observation.

Emotional Responses to Dilemmas show that people experience significant distress when facing genuine dilemmas. Physiological measures (heart rate, skin conductance) increase. Self-reported anxiety and difficulty rise. Decisions take longer. These responses suggest people experience dilemmas as genuinely difficult, not merely requiring more calculation.

The distress persists after decision—people continue thinking about dilemmatic choices, experiencing regret and doubt. This ongoing emotional processing aligns with moral remainder concept: something about the choice continues to generate moral concern even after resolution.

The Role of Emotional Versus Rational Processing creates internal conflict in dilemmatic reasoning. When emotions pull one direction (don't push the man) but rational calculation suggests another (one death better than five), people experience cognitive dissonance. Some resolve this by following emotion; others override emotion with reasoning; still others experience paralysis.

Greene argues that emotional responses evolved for small-scale social interactions where harming identifiable individuals threatens social cooperation, while rational calculation handles large-scale impersonal decisions better. Dilemmas create conflict between these systems because they involve personal harm (activating emotions) with impersonal stakes (better analyzed rationally).

Framing Effects demonstrate that how dilemmas are presented affects choices. Describing outcomes in terms of lives saved versus lives lost influences preferences, even when information is logically equivalent. This suggests moral judgment isn't purely rational but susceptible to cognitive biases and heuristics.

These findings complicate philosophical discussions. If moral intuitions vary with framing, brain state, or cultural background, should we trust them as guides to moral truth? Or do they simply reveal psychology rather than ethics? The relationship between moral psychology and moral philosophy remains complex and contested.

The Problem of Moral Monsters and Extreme Cases

Some dilemmas involve such extreme circumstances that normal moral reasoning seems to break down, raising questions about morality's limits.

Nazi Concentration Camp Dilemmas presented impossible choices: kapos (prisoner functionaries) who cooperated with guards could sometimes reduce fellow prisoners' suffering but also became complicit in camp operations. Jewish council members forced to select people for deportation might save some by cooperating but participated in selecting others for death.

These situations raise the question: Can morality provide guidance when circumstances are so extreme that all options involve profound evil? Some argue that moral categories collapse under such extremity—you can't judge someone facing impossible choices created by radical evil. Others maintain that even in extremity, some choices remain better (cooperating to reduce suffering) versus worse (enthusiastic collaboration).

Lifeboat Ethics presents resource scarcity dilemmas: Too many people in lifeboat will sink it, killing everyone. Throwing some overboard saves the rest. Who should be sacrificed? Random lottery? Those weakest and least likely to survive anyway? Those without dependents? The person who created the overcrowding problem?

Any selection criterion seems arbitrary or objectionable. Yet failing to choose means everyone dies. This exemplifies genuine tragic dilemma—any choice involves wrongdoing (killing innocents or letting everyone die), with no clearly superior option.

Real historical cases (lifeboat disasters, mountaineering accidents where cutting rope saves some climbers) demonstrate these aren't merely hypothetical. How should we judge those who made such choices? Criminal law generally excuses acts done under duress or necessity, but moral assessment remains complex.

Torture for Information scenarios pit absolute prohibition against catastrophe prevention: Terrorist knows where bomb is planted. Torture might extract location, saving thousands. Is torture justified?

Deontologists typically maintain torture is absolutely wrong regardless of consequences. Consequentialists argue saving thousands justifies harming one guilty person. Threshold deontologists might allow torture in such extreme cases while maintaining it's generally prohibited.

The ticking bomb scenario, however, may be unrealistic—real intelligence rarely involves such certainty about information possession, reliability, or time pressure. Using unrealistic extreme cases risks warping moral intuitions to justify policies (torture) that fail in realistic circumstances.

Forced Participation in Evil creates dilemmas where refusing to participate leads to worse outcomes but participating means complicity: Doctor forced to select which patients will be killed—refusing means someone else makes worse selections, but selecting means direct participation in murder.

Some argue that participating, even to reduce harm, corrupts you morally and enables evil. Better to refuse and remain clean, accepting that consequences may be worse. Others argue that refusing to reduce harm when you can is itself morally problematic—purity purchased at others' expense.

This connects to dirty hands problem in politics: Leaders who refuse to authorize necessary evils maintain personal purity but fail leadership responsibilities. Those who authorize evils to protect citizens carry moral burden but fulfill duties. Perhaps some roles require accepting moral compromise rather than insisting on personal innocence.

Dilemmas and Moral Progress

Examining how societies and individuals navigate dilemmas over time reveals evolution in moral thinking and the possibility that some dilemmas become resolvable through moral and social progress.

Historical Dilemmas That Resolved include conflicts that once seemed irresolvable but no longer do: Absolute monarchy versus democracy created genuine dilemma when divine right and political order seemed to require monarchy. Democratic movements resolved this not through philosophical argument alone but through demonstrating democracy's viability.

Slavery presented dilemma for those who recognized its evil but believed economy depended on it or that immediate abolition would cause disaster. This "resolved" through moral progress recognizing that slavery couldn't be justified and through economic/social changes making abolition feasible.

Such cases suggest some apparent dilemmas reflect incomplete moral understanding or limited imagination about alternatives. What seems like forced choice between evils may actually be solvable through moral and social innovation.

Persistent Dilemmas include conflicts that remain unresolved despite moral progress: Free speech versus preventing harm; privacy versus security; individual liberty versus collective welfare; present needs versus future generations; human development versus environmental preservation.

These persist not necessarily from moral failure but because they involve genuine value conflicts. Free societies value both open discourse and protecting vulnerable people from harm. These goods genuinely conflict—there's no arrangement perfectly satisfying both. Societies must navigate ongoing tension rather than permanently resolving it.

Emerging New Dilemmas from technological and social change include: Genetic enhancement creating dilemmas about fairness, parental duties, and human nature; AI decision-making presenting dilemmas about algorithmic bias, responsibility, and human autonomy; Climate change forcing dilemmas about present versus future welfare, national versus global interests, economic development versus environmental protection.

These new dilemmas may require developing new moral concepts and frameworks. Traditional ethics emerged for contexts quite different from genetic engineering or artificial intelligence. While basic principles apply, novel situations may reveal limitations in existing frameworks and require moral innovation.

Individual Moral Development through dilemma navigation shapes character and judgment. Facing difficult choices, making them thoughtfully, living with moral remainders—these experiences develop moral maturity. Learning from mistakes, revising value hierarchies based on experience, cultivating practical wisdom: all involve working through dilemmas over time.

This suggests dilemmas aren't merely problems to solve but opportunities for moral growth. The process of grappling with impossible choices, accepting their tragic dimensions, and acting with appropriate humility and regret constitutes important moral education unavailable through easier choices.

Living With Dilemmas: Psychological and Spiritual Dimensions

Beyond philosophical analysis and decision-making strategies, navigating moral dilemmas involves psychological and sometimes spiritual challenges requiring attention.

The Burden of Choice weighs heavily on those facing dilemmas. Unlike situations with clear right answers, dilemmatic choices mean accepting responsibility for genuinely problematic actions. You chose to break the promise, lie, harm someone—even if justified by circumstances, you did these things and must live with that reality.

Some people experience paralysis when facing genuine dilemmas, unable to choose because any choice involves wrongdoing. Others make choices quickly to avoid dwelling on impossibility. Neither response seems ideal—dilemmas require thoughtful choice while accepting that perfect choice isn't possible.

Moral Injury in psychology describes lasting psychological damage from participating in or witnessing events violating deeply held moral beliefs. Veterans experiencing moral injury often faced dilemmatic situations—killing in war, following orders causing civilian harm, choosing which soldiers to risk in dangerous missions.

The concept extends beyond military contexts. Healthcare workers forced to ration care, whistleblowers betraying colleagues for public good, parents making impossible choices between children's needs—all may experience moral injury. This isn't simple PTSD but specifically moral: the psyche wounds from moral violation, even when that violation was necessary or justified.

Community Support and Shared Burden helps navigate dilemmatic aftermath. Traditions of confession, talking through difficult choices with wise mentors, group processing of collective decisions—these practices acknowledge that individuals facing dilemmas need support bearing moral weight.

Medical ethics committees, military after-action reviews, organizational debriefing after crises—these institutional practices serve similar function. They distribute moral burden across group rather than leaving individuals isolated with impossible choices they made.

Forgiveness and Self-Compassion matter for those bearing moral remainders. If you genuinely faced dilemma and chose as well as possible, perhaps self-forgiveness is appropriate while still acknowledging moral loss. This differs from denying wrongdoing ("I did nothing wrong") or wallowing in guilt—it's accepting you did something wrong because circumstances forced it while extending compassion to yourself for impossible situation.

Religious and spiritual traditions offer resources here: concepts of grace, redemption, atonement. For secular individuals, therapy, philosophical reflection, and community support may serve similar functions—helping people live with moral complexity and continue engaging ethically despite past dilemmas.

Maintaining Moral Agency despite dilemmas means not becoming cynical or morally callous. Facing repeated impossible choices might lead to concluding morality is meaningless or that ends always justify means. Resisting this corruption while accepting moral complexity requires ongoing commitment to moral seriousness.

This connects to virtues like integrity, courage, and wisdom. Integrity: remaining committed to values despite recognizing their conflicts. Courage: facing dilemmas and choosing despite difficulty. Wisdom: developing judgment to navigate complexity while maintaining moral sensitivity.

References and Further Reading

1. "Ethical dilemma," Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethical_dilemma

2. "Trolley problem," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/doing-allowing/

3. Williams, Bernard. "Moral Luck," Cambridge University Press, https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/moral-luck/

4. "Moral Dilemmas," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-dilemmas/

5. Sartre, Jean-Paul. "Existentialism is a Humanism," Yale University Press, https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300115468/existentialism-humanism/

6. Nagel, Thomas. "Mortal Questions," Cambridge University Press, https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/mortal-questions/