No matter how thoughtful or wise they are, people sometimes find themselves in situations where everything they can do has a high moral cost. Novelists and playwrights thrive on such situations. For example, in William Styron's novel Sophie's Choice (1976) a Nazi doctor tells Sophie to choose one of her two children to live, while the other will be sent to the gas chamber. Unless she chooses, both will be sent. 1 Other cases are familiar from wartime, politics, the professions, and medical ethics: A military commander or president may have to decide whether to order the bombing of a village in order to stop a terrorist campaign. A lawyer may have to decide whether to defend an accused rapist by portraying the alleged victim as promiscuous. A doctor may have to decide whether to give a blood transfusion to a child whose parents are Jehovah's Witnesses.
A person in such a situation might say: (1) "All of my options are (morally) wrong," (2) "I ought (morally) to do X and I ought (morally) to do Y, even though I can't do both," or (3) "I ought (morally) to do X and I ought not (morally) to do X." I will call a situation meeting any of these three descriptions a "moral conflict." (The term "moral dilemma," frequently used in these contexts, is misleading, since the same kinds of problems are raised by situations with more than two mutually exclusive requirements and situations with more than two jointly exhaustive prohibitions.) Possibly these situations can all be assimilated to a single description, but we should be wary about assuming that any such collapsing of descriptions is proper. 2
Philosophers have wondered how to take statements like these, and they * I am grateful to