Moral Dilemmas

Readings

Cases

• Body Dysmorphic Disorder
• Glad-Handing Below the Belt

Synopsis

We extended our roster of cases from those yesterday, Case: The Useful Sibling and Case: Students' Little Helper, to include the two above, spending about thirty minutes or so discussing them. Our purpose today was to try to better understand the nature of moral dilemmas and why they matter so much for a course like this.

Cases like these, we say, are moral dilemmas. But what are moral dilemmas?

While identifying precisely the features of a case that make it a moral dilemma can be challenging, I would like to suggest on a first run that our discussion of this case revealed that in a moral dilemma,

1. There are at least two and possibly more than two alternative courses of action;
2. The alternative courses of action are incompatible in the sense that one cannot take one of the courses of action by taking another--they are genuine forks in the road, as it were;
3. The alternative courses of action are consequential in the sense that lives, livelihoods, limbs, etc. are at stake;
4. The alternative courses of action are forced in the sense that one of them must be chosen--doing nothing is still a course of action;
5. There are seemingly equally good reasons for each of the alternative courses of action.

Thus we don't just find in a moral dilemma competing courses of action: we find competing reasons for them. The existence of such competing reasons makes us unsure how to proceed, particularly when the stakes are high. Competing reasons raises the difficult question of how we should go about adjudicating between them. The serious challenge of assessing competing reasons in an unbiased, principled way can even make us wonder whether there really is a morally right course of action in the first place!

Put another way, we are really good at rationalizing our preferred course of action in a moral dilemma. We can readily give reasons on its behalf and insist that these are good reasons.

But how do we know?

How do we know, in other words, whether the reasons we gave really are good reasons, or just seem to us to be good reasons? How do we reason about reasons themselves?

This is a perplexing and challenging elevation of the question at hand. If there are competing reasons, we have to have some way to establish what count as good reasons which should be considered and what count as bad reasons which should be discarded. Indeed, the thought that we can reasons about the competing reasons seems itself so abstract as to be unresolvable.

That is to say, the thought that we shall study ethics this session begs an important question:

Can ethics be taught?

This is a surprisingly difficult question.

On the one hand, people will say that ethics is about not hurting other people and doing good things; there's nothing especially puzzling or challenging about that, so we really shouldn't need to spend time talking about ethics.

These people are in the 'Ethics is Obvious' camp. According to the Ethics-is-Obvious camp, ethics cannot be taught in the same sense that the fact that grass is green cannot be taught; just looking is enough to know the truth, and if you don't know what it is to be green, no amount of explaining will help.

On the other hand, people will say that ethics is about whatever a person happens to believe she ought to do. There's no truth to ethics. It's just whatever you believe, or maybe it's just whatever you were raised to believe, or maybe it's just a matter of gut instinct (people frequently talk this way). There's no point in studying ethics since there's nothing to be decided; people believe what they believe, end of story.

These people are in the 'Ethics is Mysterious' camp. According to the Ethics-is-Mysterious camp, ethics cannot be taught in the same sense that one cannot be taught what one believes.

Either way, there seems to be little point in spending time talking about ethics.

But let's not be too hasty.

What if the two camps are mistaken? Suppose there is a middle camp. Suppose there are some situations where it really isn't obvious what we ought to do, but there is a fact of the matter and we are able to figure it out if we roll up our sleeves and get to work.

I'm in this middle camp.

• I don't think it's obvious that capital punishment is morally permissible, but I do think we can discover the truth if we work hard enough at it.
• I don't think it's obvious that colleges and universities shouldn't be allowed to use race as part of admission's standards, but I do think there are reasons for and against that we ought to study very carefully.
• I don't think it's obvious that conducting experiments on animals is morally permissible, but I do think the debate will, eventually, lead us to the truth.
• I don't think it's obvious that cloning a human being is morally wrong, but I do think there is a fact about whether it's right or wrong--a fact that is accessible to us if we endeavor to think long enough and hard enough about it.

Those of us in the middle camp have learned that answers aren't always easy when it comes to moral questions; yet we are confident that the answers exist and are accessible to us.

Consider Aristotle's definition of a human being as the rational animal. Whether his definition stands up to scrutiny at the end of the day, it does help illuminate the middle-camp.

You see, because we are rational animals, capable of logic and careful, sincere deliberation, we have the capacity to arrive at the truth of moral matters; yet because we are rational animals, rife with passions, desires, and biases we ourselves may not even recognize, the truth of moral matters sometimes escapes us.

To be sure, this is not yet an argument. The argument I plan on making to justify the view that even hard ethical cases can be resolved provided we are diligent, careful, and reflective will take most of the semester to make. It may be that you won't find the argument convincing, although I hope some will. Yet even if you reject the argument, I strongly suspect you will have gained a much deeper understanding of moral matters in the process. Sometimes just knowing the questions is the better half of the battle!

But I digress. Return if you will to the very idea of a moral dilemma. My point in the exercise today of giving arguments for and against, say, a surgeon's amputating a perfectly health limb by patient's request was to illustrate a very important point: In a moral dilemma, as we have said, we seem to have good reasons on both sides (or, in many cases, many sides!) How, then, do we correctly and in principled fashion weigh these reasons? Equivalently and how I've favored putting the point, how do we reason about reasons themselves? After all, we want to know what is the right thing to do. Presumably, the right thing to do is whatever course of action has the best reasons in its favor. What, though, determines 'best' when it comes to reasons, especially where those reasons bear on morality?

This is a deep and difficult puzzle. It is also why we begin next week with some of the most challenging material we will encounter this semester, logic, namely. Logic is where we will begin building a set of rational standards by which we may adjudicate moral reasons--reasons for reasons, if you will. Our goal next week will be to have these standards fully fleshed-out and, most importantly, justified as we begin discussing the kinds of reasons that should or should not be permitted in considering moral dilemmas.

So next time we begin with the very idea of reasons for reasons and, ultimately, how to reason about reasons.