Have you ever been faced with a situation where every choice you must make has its terrible consequences, where choosing one option doesn't change the awful outcome? Let’s simulate a situation where you are the head of a household. Then, someone asks you, if a situation arose that threatened the lives of your family, would you, as the head of the family, be willing to die to ensure everyone's safety? Without a moment's hesitation, you would almost certainly say yes.
However, what if the question continued: to maintain your family's safety, you must kill one person as a necessary sacrifice? In this scenario, you are no longer just holding onto the clear and absolute duty of a family head; there is another form of immoral action that simultaneously demands a much more thorough ethical consideration. Moreover, this is a matter of killing someone; your mind will sink even deeper, searching for a way to solve such an enigma. What is the basis for this? Why must someone be killed for the safety of your loved ones? How do you form a fair trade-off? Before digging deeper into this complicated moral conflict, it's important to first break it down into three subclasses.
First, a person knows what must be done and does it because they know it is their duty. In this scheme, it is clear that the situation is based on a social relationship that forms the primary foundation of the individual's hierarchical structure within a group. "I do this because it is required of me." This value determines whether a person is considered guilty or not. This judgment shapes an individual's identity and, from there, can influence the perceptions and culture of a society.
The second condition is this: we may know what we must do, or ought to do, or are obliged to do, yet in various ways and certain situations, we are tempted not to do it. As a result, we may end up doing or not doing what we should, whether by conscious decision or not. This class includes the subclass of cases commonly called akrasia, where we know what we ought to do but, for various reasons and in various ways, fail to do it. A simple example: you are on a diet today. By chance, while walking downtown, you see a cake that is on a one-day-only promotion. After much deliberation, you finally buy the cake, even though you know it will render your diet rather useless.
Examples that fall into this second classification of moral situations present a dilemma. A person, in common phrasing, feels an internal conflict between what is a duty and what brings pleasure, or between their moral commitments (obligations) and their interests, or between the principles they hold and their desires. However, I object to classifying this condition as a true moral dilemma because, fundamentally, in all such cases, the moral position that should be taken is unambiguous.
But this gets interesting. A person knows what they ought to do, then fails to do it for various reasons, and then pretends to themselves that they have done it. More commonly, in its negative form: a person knows they should not do something, yet does it anyway, and then pretends to themselves that they have not done it. As in the cake example, the person can pretend to be unaware of the "betrayal" they have committed, as if acting against the moral principle they had set from the beginning. This phenomenon is sometimes known as cognitive dissonance, a psychological state where a person experiences mental discomfort from holding two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values simultaneously, or when their behavior is inconsistent with their core beliefs (Nafis et al., 2022). In this context, cognitive dissonance can manifest as an effort to rationalize behavior that contradicts one's ethical norms to achieve a state of self-justification (Sinantia, 2018).
This third case will be an interesting instrument for our entire discussion. I will borrow a narrative from Plato: the dilemma of the entrusted weapon. One day, your good friend comes to you as promised, though he doesn't state his reason for the visit. After a brief exchange, it becomes clear he intends to entrust his weapon to you. He says he will return for it in the evening, and you agree. Night falls, and your friend arrives as agreed, but this time the situation has changed drastically. He arrives with a pale face, his eyes betraying a sign of desperation, and he demands his weapon while announcing his terrible intention: to shoot his wife for being unfaithful (he caught them in the act).
Instantly, the situation turns into a nightmare. On one hand, the promise you made echoes in your mind: you ought to return the weapon as proof of your trustworthiness and loyalty to your word. But on the other hand, a deeper, more urgent moral awareness surfaces: you ought not to return the weapon, because by doing so, you would become an accessory to a tragedy, an act that contradicts the most basic moral principle of not harming others. You stand frozen, still stunned, holding the deadly object.
Perhaps, intuitively, we feel that there is something odd about this dilemma's framework. How can our logic permit a statement that someone both "ought to" and "ought not to" do the same thing? This would create a contradiction that could collapse rational reasoning. Upon simple observation, we can focus on the linguistic aspect of this causality, specifically the profound difference between the words must and ought.
The word "must" implies necessity and certainty. If you declare in the middle of a party, "I must go," that statement is a declaration of imminent action. If you don't leave, then the claim of "must" becomes void and untrue. Conversely, the word "ought" operates within the mind. It doesn't state a certainty but rather acknowledges a strong moral or rational reason. When you say, "I ought to go," you are voicing a judgment, an awareness of what is right to do, but it still leaves room for the possibility of not doing it, whether due to intuition, feelings, or some other restraining impulse.
From this series of complex dilemmas, we can be certain that this is not a manifestation of a flawed model of logic. Rather, this condition is produced through a process of abstraction from a sea of complex experiences. It is not surprising that individuals can face these situations, driven by moral impulses generated from culture, because cultural norms often form the initial framework for individuals to interpret and respond to ethical dilemmas, even though these interpretations can vary significantly among individuals (Huda, 2010).
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