Can moral dilemmas be resolved in an amoral way?

Question

By a moral dilemma I mean a situation in which there are multiple possible courses of action (or inaction) each of which leads to different outcomes and the agent has to choose which one to take. The choice is the solution to the dilemma.

Consider the following response to Heinz dilemma:

It's easier for me to relate to a man whose wive he loves is dying and he is willing to do anything to save her. That, of course, does not mean that the druggist is wrong in being greedy, there is just a conflict of interests. But I support the position that, considering risks and stakes, on average benefits me and the majority of the humanity more.

In this case one views the druggist not as an immoral actor but akin to an opponent in a competitive game.

Is this still a moral judgement? Assuming the person views everything through this lens, do they have a morality?

Answer 1

I make the case that solving apparently lose-lose dilemmas in a creative way, involves the skill we call wisdom: Wisdom and John Vervaeke's awakening from the meaning crises?

There are other options. The man could set up a health insurance system. Campaign for political change. Undertake activities to get publicity for his fundraising. We don't have to accept the apparent binary choices we are presented with. There's also every chance the man won't get the drug, and will be in prison for burglary while his wife dies..

You could idealise the case as a trolley problem, to remove the alternatives. You are stood at a switching lever, the trolley is heading towards your wife, but if you pull the lever it will divert to a track with the pharmacists window on it which being hit will cause the pharmacist to pay a slightly higher theft insurance premium. An overwhelming majority I think would consider it immoral to allow your wife to die out of concern for the pharmacists property.

We have hierarchies of moral values, so most moral systems approve of lying to a murderer to save someone who would otherwise become a victim (Kant famously didn't accept this). So it is considered moral by most people, to violate a rule they normally hold, in service of a higher moral duty. For example, we generally accept murdering people in war, to protect people from being murdered unjustly (wars generally begin with a conflict in views about what is just).

Generally in practical ethics a life is given a large financial value (see 'Quality-adjusted life year'), not unlimited because a given use of money might save more lives spent one way than another. Most of the world and nearly every developed country except the USA, makes provision for people to recieve life-saving when they need it, with how it is paid for worked out afterwards. There is arguably a moral contradiction in claiming lives have a high value, and allowing people to die because they could not afford health insurance, and can't pay upfront for care. In the USA this is widely considered a moral failing of the person who is poor, rather than a practical issue to be solved in the interests of the community as a whole. This highlights how culture can be at odds with the claimed morality of individuals in it.

Answer 2

Firstly, a moral dilemma is not simply a choice- it is a choice between equally unsatisfactory options. Then, what you might consider to be a judgement that does not rest on any moral principles might still be viewed as a moral judgement by others, since the boundary between moral and other judgements is fuzzy. Finally, yes, you could decide between morally unacceptable options by tossing a coin, say, but you would not be resolving the dilemma, merely sidestepping it.

Answer 3

A woman was on her deathbed. There was one drug that the doctors said would save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to produce. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $1,000 which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: “No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from it.” So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man's laboratory to steal the drug for his wife. Should Heinz have broken into the laboratory to steal the drug for his wife? Why or why not?

This is a dilemma wording text from wiki. But it is totally senseless problem, because a conflict comes down to MONEY. MONEY have no moral value. Money is only equal price of something else(for example doctor have three little babies that need food). So we should to look chip drama "because of" 1000$. Oh really a man can't find 1000$? He have no car, mb, no home stuff, no house? He has no job, he can't get a credit? Simple analysis of the situation about the problem of 1000$ getting become to existing in a vacuum limbo space.

And why Heinz still has a wife? i always thought that to have a wife a man needs money.

Okey, but if drug is cost not 2000$ but 1000 000$ you can to ask - but this way there ll be better security in drug's store, and this doctor will be not a person, but an agent of BIGFARM without "self-moral" responsibilities. All "moral responsibility" ll take the firm as a legal entity.

And here we have only one question. Does the legal entity is still belong same moral kind as a single person? and more wide, is corp moral still moral or something else? But anyway the conflict of interest one and many is another moral plane. (I don't know Eng word that means this kind of conflict)