Ethical dilemma

An ethical dilemma is a situation that often involves an apparent conflict between moral imperatives, in which to obey one would result in transgressing another.

This is also called an ethical paradox since in moral philosophy, paradox plays a central role in ethics debates. For instance, an ethical admonition to "love thy neighbour" is not always just in contrast with, but sometimes in contradiction to an armed neighbour actively trying to kill you: if he or she succeeds, you will not be able to love him or her. But to preemptively attack them or restrain them is not usually understood as loving. This is one of the classic examples of an ethical decisionclashing or conflicting with an organismic decision, one that would be made only from the perspective of animal survival: an animal is thought to act only in its immediate perceived bodily self-interests when faced with bodily harm, and to have limited ability to perceive alternatives - see fight or flight.

However, human beings have complex social relationships that can't be ignored: If one has an ethical relationshipwith the neighbour trying to kill you, then, usually, their desire to kill you would likely be the result of mental illnesson their part, stories told them by others, e.g. their daughter claims you raped her. Such conflicts might be settled by some other path that has strong social support. Societies formed criminal justicesystems (some argue also ethical traditionsand religions) to defuse just such deep conflicts. Such systems always impose trained judges who are presumed to have an ethical relationship and also a clear obligation to all who come before them.

Ethical dilemmas are often cited in an attempt to refute an ethicalsystem or moral code, as well as the worldview that encompasses or grows from it.

Refuting ethical dilemmas

These arguments can be refuted in various ways, for example by showing that the claimed ethical dilemma is only apparent and does not really exist (thus is not a paradoxlogically), or that the solution to the ethical dilemma involves choosing the greater good and lesser evil (as discussed in value theory), or that the whole framingof the problem is omitting creative alternatives (as in peacemaking), or (more recently) that situational ethicsor situated ethicsmust apply because the case can't be removed from context and still be understood. See also case-based reasoningon this process.

Perhaps the most commonly cited ethical conflict is that between an imperative or injunction not to steal and one to care for a family that you cannot afford to feed without stolen money. Debates on this often revolve around the availability of alternate means of income or support, e.g. a social safety net, charity, etc. The debate is in its starkest form when framed as stealing food. In Les Misérables Jean Valjean does this and is relentlessly pursued. Under an ethical system in which stealing is always wrong and letting one's family die from starvation is always wrong, a person in such a situation would be forced to commit one wrong to avoid committing another, and be in constant conflict with those whose view of the acts varied.

However, there are few legitimate ethical systems in which stealing is more wrong than letting one's family die. Ethical systems do in fact allow for, and sometimes outline, tradeoffs or priorities in decisions. Some ethicistshave suggested that international lawrequires this kind of mechanism to, for instance, resolve whether WTOor Kyoto Protocoltakes precedence in deciding whether a WTO notificationis valid. That is, whether nations may use trade mechanisms to complain about measures each other takes regarding climate change. As there are few economies that can operate smoothly in a chaotic climate, the dilemma would seem to be easy to resolve, but as at the family scale, it is possible to invent fallacious excuses to steal or put a restriction on trade, and these tend to cloud the actions of all who do so with legitimate desperation. Resolving ethical dilemmas is rarely simple or clearcut and very often involves revisiting similar dilemmas that recur within societies:

Recurring struggles

According to some philosophers and sociologists, e.g. Karl Marx, it is the different life experience of people and the different exposure of them and their families in these roles (the rich being constantly stolen from, the poor in a position of constant begging and subordination) that creates social classdifferences. In other words, ethical dilemmas can become political and economic factions that engage in long term recurring struggles. See conflict theoryand left-wing politicsversus right-wing politics.

A more trivial example is the troll-sysop struggleat Wikipedia:itself: A relatively small number of people have the ability to prevent others' work from being seen, or from participating at all, and these people experience the power as a positive, protective thing, that they wish to retain and increase. While another group, the Wikipedia:trolls, experiences only oppression and censorship and regards the sysop actions as official vandalism(or more specifically, sysop vandalism). This dilemma has yet to be resolved, and has led to bitter conflicts in the past. Some characterize trollsas anarchistsbut they tend to hold a very wide variety of views, perhaps too wide for most.

Design of a voting system, other electoral reform, a criminal justicesystem, or other high-stakes adversarial processfor dispute resolutionwill almost always reflect the deep persistent struggles involved. However, no amount of good intent and hard work can undo a bad role structure:

Roles within structures

Where a structural conflictis involved, dilemmas will very often recur. A trivial example is working with a bad operating systemwhose error messages do not match the problems the user perceives. Each such error presents the user with a dilemma: rebootthe machine and continue working at one's employment, or, spend time trying to reproduce the problem for the benefit of the developer of the operating system. Often such dilemmas are resolved by our economic commitments: While other users who will see the same message in future may want our feedback about errors, sad for them, they haven't paid us for it.

So role structure sabotages feedback and results in sub-optimal results since no provision has been made to actually reward people for reporting these errors and problems. See total quality managementfor more on addressing this kind of failure, and governanceon how many ethical and structural conflicts can be resolved with appropriate supervisory mechanisms.

Division by Zero

One of the simplest, and more ubiquitous reasons for system failure is division by zero, figuratively or literally. Zero is considered the product of a null set, whose division results in the value of infinity, a deviation from the real numbers. Because artifical intelligence cannot comprehend this value, often the system is plunged into an ad infinitumargument. Contemporary computers are designed to halt such an action, giving the useran opportunity to soft rebootthe machine without any drastic measures or acrobatics.

Division by zero is perhaps the simplest expression of such a dilemma, which itself has been responsible for causing dilemma.

External links

• The Generalized Structure of Ethical Dilemmas
• The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entrynl:Ethisch dilemma

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethical+dilemma Wikipedia article Ethical dilemma.