Do we define a moral dilemma as something where you are not punished for making the wrong choice? As if you are it is more of a calculation for your own profit.
In my personal life I encounter almost none, since there would be almost always some kind of a punishment, at least people thinking I am an asshole and be less willing to help me in the future and this makes them not a purely moral dilemma.
I have a hunch that moral dilemmas are "meant" to be more political. Like should we allow factory farming of animals.
Also they are for people with more interesting jobs such as docs.
I think the legal system of the first world is pretty much tied down so much that a normal mundane citizen rarely encounters purely moral dilemmas. Usually, if it is dubious it is not allowed.
Therefore, moral dilemmas are handled at law-making, hence at voting. They are political.
For example Climate Change / AGW is a huge moral dilemma for me. I tend to lean towards the skeptics being more right, because the alarmists are talking taking action in the last dramatic minute for 20 years now. The alarmists look a lot like the usual suspects of anti-industrialist hippies. But do I really dare to gamble with this politically? It would be safer to act as if the alarmists are right. My feelings about a bunch of kumbaya hippies are less important than not making the planet almost inhabitable and if there is only 1% chance the whole alarmist case is right, despite their many problems, we should be working more on cutting CO2...
because the alarmists are talking taking action in the last dramatic minute for 20 years now.
I'm not understanding your argument here.
[CW: This post talks about personal experience of moral dilemmas. I can see how some people might be distressed by thinking about this.]
Have you ever had to decide between pushing a fat person onto some train tracks or letting five other people get hit by a train? Maybe you have a more exciting commute than I do, but for me it's just never come up.
In spite of this, I'm unusually prepared for a trolley problem, in a way I'm not prepared for, say, being offered a high-paying job at an unquantifiably-evil company. Similarly, if a friend asked me to lie to another friend about something important to them, I probably wouldn't carry out a utilitarian cost-benefit analysis. It seems that I'm happy to adopt consequentialist policy, but when it comes to personal quandaries where I have to decide for myself, I start asking myself about what sort of person this decision makes me. What's more, I'm not sure this is necessarily a bad heuristic in a social context.
It's also noteworthy (to me, at least) that I rarely experience moral dilemmas. They just don't happen all that often. I like to think I have a reasonably coherent moral framework, but do I really need one? Do I just lead a very morally-inert life? Or have abstruse thought experiments in moral philosophy equipped me with broader principles under which would-be moral dilemmas are resolved before they reach my conscious deliberation?
To make sure I'm not giving too much weight to my own experiences, I thought I'd put a few questions to a wider audience:
- What kind of moral dilemmas do you actually encounter?
- Do you have any thoughts on how much moral judgement you have to exercise in your daily life? Do you think this is a typical amount?
- Do you have any examples of pedestrian moral dilemmas to which you've applied abstract moral reasoning? How did that work out?
- Do you have any examples of personal moral dilemmas on a Trolley Problem scale that nonetheless happened?
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