Morality, Moral Dilemmas, and Moral Requirements

Abstract There are at least two issues that are central to determining whether genuine moral dilemmas exist. The first is whether moral considerations are bound to “run out” in certain situations, leaving an agent with conflicting moral requirements. The second is what notion of requirement it is that, if a person were faced with conflicting requirements, would be enough all by itself to place the person in a genuine moral dilemma. I shall not try to settle the first of these issues. Rather, I shall call attention to a question that needs to be answered to settle it, a question whose importance has not always been recognized. I shall, however, offer a suggestion as to how the second issue should be settled. As anyone who is familiar with the literature on moral dilemmas is aware, there are some who approach this topic with the intuition that there clearly are genuine moral dilemmas, and there are others who approach it with the intuition that there are no genuine moral dilemmas. In his contribution to this volume, Alan Donagan asks which traditional moral theories countenance genuine moral dilemmas.